scholarly journals “Oh, Vladimir, King of Dioclea, Hard Headed, Heart Full of Pride!” Isaiah Berlin and Nineteenth Century Interpretations of the Live of Saint Vladimir of Dioclea

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 723
Author(s):  
Stefan Trajković Filipović
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Romantic Literature ◽  
Isaiah Berlin ◽  
God's Will ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Romantic Movement ◽  
Historical Dramas

Saint Vladimir of Dioclea (i.e. Zeta) (c. 990–1016) left very few traces in medieval sources, and yet, for centuries now, he is present throughout the Balkans, notably in the areas of modern Albania, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Macedonia and Serbia. Compared to other notable medieval holy kings (e.g. Saint Stefan of Dečani), Saint Vladimir is a “vague” character; he was never as popular and his representations were never fully standardized nor uniformed – he is often simultaneously addressed with few names (Vladimir/Jovan/Jovan Vladimir) and with more than one title (an emperor/Tsar, king or prince). However, this “vagueness“, and yet persistence of the story about this saint makes an interesting research topic. The first elaborated narrative about the saint, the Life of Saint Vladimir of Dioclea, was published in 1601 as part of the Annals of the Priest of Dioclea, a chronicle depicting the history of an imagined early medieval Slavic dynasty and used as an introductory chapter to the Kingdom of Slavs by Mauro Orbini. The Life represents a developed hagiographic narrative with two main lessons – the value of (Saint Vladimir’s) martyrdom (following the model of Christ’s Passion) and of divine punishment awaiting the sinners. Furthermore, as part of the Annals of the Priest of Diocela (and of the Kingdom of Slavs), the Life depicts Vladimir as a Slavic holy king. Since its first edition, the Life remains the main source of inspiration and a starting point for most of the later interpretations of the story of Saint Vladimir’s life and death. In the focus of the article is a specific transformation that occurred in the nineteenth century regarding the story, within Serbian romantic literature. The approach to the transformation is based on the interpretation of the Romantic Movement provided by Isaiah Berlin in his 1965 Mellon lectures delivered in Washington DC (The Roots of Romanticism). I observe the transformation through the analysis of three representative nineteenth century interpretations of the story of Saint Vladimir: the historical dramas Vladimir and Kosara (1829, by Lazar Lazarević) and Vladislav (1843, by Jovan Sterija Popović) and the short story Vladimir of Dioclea (1888, by Stevan Sremac). Comparison of the Life with these narratives reveals significant shifts in main motives and lessons one finds in the story. Thus, instead of focusing on the notions of a holy man who serves as a tool of God’s will and of a Slavic holy king, one finds in nineteenth century interpretations the notions of man’s will, desire and utter loyalty to his own principles and values, one of them being his (Serbian) nation, as key ideas and supreme virtues. In spite of keeping certain hagiographic traits, these romantic interpretations bring reversals of main lessons of the story of Saint Vladimir and thus contribute to Berlin’s observation about the process of conscious creation of new mythologies within Romantic Movement with long-term consequences.

Mean Streets: Tracking the Dispositives of Address(es) with China Miéville’s “Reports of Certain Events in London”

2020 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-171
Author(s):  
Nicola Glaubitz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
City Planning ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
First Person ◽  
Fantastic Literature ◽  
Internal Conflicts ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Story Elements

Abstract Miéville’s short story stands out for its perhaps experimental, perhaps old-fashioned form: the story’s first-person narrator adopts, in nineteenth-century fashion, the persona of an editor and presents both his own view on the ‘events’ in question and a number of mock documents he has allegedly been sent. Readers are encouraged to piece together the story elements – events and characters – from postcards, minutes of a meeting, memos, personal letters, and tables. Typographically distinct and juxtaposed rather than narratively linked, these text fragments suggest internal conflicts in a group of people who track rogue streets – streets that change their location spontaneously and wreak havoc on the geographical and the political order of cities. It is no coincidence that a mix-up of names and addresses is the starting point of the story; the story’s ending hints at the consequences of having or not having a fixed address. My contribution examines Miéville’s use of the short story form in the context of fantastic literature. Following suggestions of Miéville’s “The Conspiracy of Architecture” (1998), the foregrounding of formal and quasi-material aspects of organising and mediating knowledge is read as an engagement with the power/knowledge dispositives made up of discursive ordering principles as well as city planning and city geography.

scholarly journals Author, Author: A Short Story of the Rise, reign and ruine of the late Antinomians, Familists, and Libertines (1644) Reappraised

2021 ◽  
Vol 94 (3) ◽  
pp. 431-458
Author(s):  
David D. Hall
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Starting Point

Abstract When the great nineteenth-century antiquarian James Savage disputed the assumption that John Winthrop wrote A Short Story (London 1644), he was on to something, although the evidence he adduced was incorrect. Taking as a starting point two facts about the book-it is a compilation of documents and bears numerous marks of being an intentional text-this essay describes how the Short Story came into being and suggests who may be the "I" who mysteriously (and unidentified) speaks in the text.

scholarly journals Nitheroy, Revista Brasiliense (1836): A Political Bridge Between Rio de Janeiro, Paris, and Hispanic America

2015 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcelo Lotufo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Brazilian Literature ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Romantic Movement ◽  
Literary Movements ◽  
Brazilian Politics

Nitheroy: Revista Brasiliense de sciencias, lettras, e artes (Paris, 1836), is usually taken as the starting point of Brazil’s Romantic movement. The magazine, however, was primarily concerned not with literature but with the "modernization" of a recently independent Brazil. This essay focuses on the magazine in order to understand the role of literature in early nineteenth-century Brazilian politics. Approaching Brazilian Romanticism as inherently political serves to link nineteenth-century Brazilian literature to other Latin American literary movements of the period, and a re-examination of Nitheroy helps to bridge the gap that has historically separated Brazilian and other Latin American Romantic movements. 

scholarly journals Uncanny Styria

2019 ◽  
pp. 149-162
Author(s):  
Patrycjusz Pająk
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
The West ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu ◽  
Basic Ingredient ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Hybrid Character

The nineteenth century in the West was a period of intellectual and artistic fascination with the East, both distant and near: Asian and Eastern European. One of the regions that attracted the interest of Western Europeans was Styria, situated on the border separating Austria from Hungary and the Balkans, that is, the West from the East. Borderland cultural phenomena stimulate the imagination as much as exotic phenomena. Both disturb with their hybrid character, which results from the mixing of elements from familiar and alien cultures. With their duality and ambiguity, borderlands are the source of the uncanny, which in the Western literature of the nineteenth century became the basic ingredient of the Western image of the Styrian lands. Uncanny Styria was discovered by Basil Hall, a Scottish traveler who reported the impressions of his stay in this region in his 1830s travelogue Schloss Hainfeld; or, a Winter in Lower Styria. In the second half of the century, two Irishmen wrote about the uncanny Styrian borderland: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker. Both associated Styria with vampirism: the former in the 1870s novella Carmilla, the latter in the 1890s short story Dracula’s Guest. The central thread that runs through all three texts is the decline of Styrian nobility. From Hall, it prompts expression of melancholy regret, accompanied by a sense of strangeness. In his work, the erosion of the culture of the nobility results from Styria’s isolated location in the borderlands, as well as the destructive influences of modernity. Le Fanu balances the regret with horror, related to a different interpretation of decline as cultural regression. In Stoker’s story, the terror intensifies with the sense that the regression that affects the province of Styria could extend to Western Europe.

scholarly journals “Noite de Almirante”: Interracial Love in Machado de Assis’s Nineteenth Century

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 119-136
Author(s):  
Paulo Dutra
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
First Century ◽  
Machado De Assis ◽  
Racial Identification ◽  
Brazilian Society ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Twenty First Century

In the twenty-first century some scholars started revisiting the works of the mulatto Machado de Assis through discussions about his racial identification and posture with regard to race. As a consequence a new range of reading possibilities has been released. The racial identification of the characters, hence, their interpretations, customarily based on an ideal hegemonic white model of society, began to be revised and challenged. Having racial marks attributed to the characters as the starting point while approaching them reveals Machado’s keen eye on the tension involved in the negotiations of spaces in the not always harmonious relations developed in the extremely mixed-race nineteenth-century Brazilian society. This essay resorts to the short story “Noite de almirante,” hitherto excluded from this perspective, as a case study to demonstrate the potential of such a reading.

The Modernities of H. Lawrence Freeman

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
White Press ◽  
Grand Opera

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.

Liszt at the Piano: The Impact of Iconography on mid-Nineteenth Century Musicology

2014 ◽  
Vol 55 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 131-144
Author(s):  
Suzanne Marie Francis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Music History ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Maximum Benefit ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Iconic Status ◽  
The Impact

By the time of his death in 1827, the image of Beethoven as we recognise him today was firmly fixed in the minds of his contemporaries, and the career of Liszt was beginning to flower into that of the virtuosic performer he would be recognised as by the end of the 1830s. By analysing the seminal artwork Liszt at the Piano of 1840 by Josef Danhauser, we can see how a seemingly unremarkable head-and-shoulders bust of Beethoven in fact holds the key to unlocking the layers of commentary on both Liszt and Beethoven beneath the surface of the image. Taking the analysis by Alessandra Comini as a starting point, this paper will look deeper into the subtle connections discernible between the protagonists of the picture. These reveal how the collective identities of the artist and his painted assembly contribute directly to Beethoven’s already iconic status within music history around 1840 and reflect the reception of Liszt at this time. Set against the background of Romanticism predominant in the social and cultural contexts of the mid 1800s, it becomes apparent that it is no longer enough to look at a picture of a composer or performer in isolation to understand its impact on the construction of an overall identity. Each image must be viewed in relation to those that preceded and came after it to gain the maximum benefit from what it can tell us.

Berlioz and the Pathological Fantastic: Melancholy, Monomania, and Romantic Autobiography

2006 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 211-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Brittan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mental Disease ◽  
Medical Culture ◽  
Personal Writing ◽  
Romantic Literature ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Discourse ◽  
Literary Journals ◽  
Mental Pathology ◽  
Newspaper Articles

Both the literary program of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique and his personal letters dating from the year of the work's composition are suffused with the rhetoric of illness, detailing a maladie morale characterized by melancholy, nervous "exultation," black presentiments, and a malignant idee fixe.. Often mistakenly identified as a term new to the 1830s, the idee fixe has a considerably longer history, dating from the first decade of the nineteenth century when it appeared in the writings of French psychiatrists Etienne Esquirol and Jean-Etienne Georget. Both Esquirol's early writings on insanity and his seminal 1838 treatise identify mental "fixation" as the primary symptom of monomania, the most contentious and well-known mental disease of the period, and one with far-reaching implications not only for medicine but for Romantic literature, philosophy, and autobiography. Examination of the disease's early reception reveals that, well before Berlioz, the psychiatric terminology surrounding monomania had been absorbed into popular discourse. Malignant and humorous idee fixes appeared in cartoons, diaries, and newspaper articles from the 1810s onward, and in fictional works by Hoffmann, Duras, Scribe, Balzac, and others. Here, and in essays published in musical and literary journals of the period, monomania emerged as an increasingly aestheticized malady, and the idee fixe itself as a signal, not of mental debilitation, but of creative absorption and artistic inspiration. When Berlioz figured himself as a monomaniac, both in his personal writing and his symphonic program, he was responding to a discourse of "creative aberration" permeating Romantic literary and medical culture, and to a fashionable fascination with mental pathology. Berlioz was by no means the only artist of the period to diagnose himself with the symptoms of mental fixation. Musset, Janin, and Georges Sand also described themselves in monomaniacal terms in autobiographical "confessions" permeated with references to hallucination, fixation, and emotional pathology. Indeed, we can draw clear parallels between the veiled self-referentiality of the Fantastique and the autobiographical strategies of the Romantic Confession. Berlioz's "self-sounding" resonates with a host of other confessional autobiographies of the period and reflects the collapse between inspiration and insanity, between anatomy and aesthetics, underpinning early-nineteenth-century theories of genius.

Unity and Engagement in the Modern World

2021 ◽  
pp. 507-527
Author(s):  
John Halsey Wood
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Western World ◽  
Starting Point

In the midst of the roiling chaos of the nineteenth century, Abraham Kuyper’s Neo-Calvinism was a strategy to maintain a Calvinist unity and engagement with an increasingly disintegrated Western world. The unity Kuyper pursued was of two kinds: intellectual and social. As a thinker, Kuyper valued coherent, interrelated systems. He took as his starting point the systematic Calvinism of Protestant scholastics and the Reformed Confessions as well as Romanticism’s organic impulse which elevated the organic and natural over mechanical and artificial. In addition to a unified mind, Kuyper also pursued a unified Calvinist community, albeit a different kind than imagined by earlier Calvinists. Under the pressures of modernity, Kuyper didn’t pursue a repristinated Calvinist culture, but a renewed Calvinist subculture.

Post-Byzantine hermeneiai zographikes in the eighteenth century and their dissemination in the Balkans during the nineteenth century

2006 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-79
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Moutafov
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Balkan Peninsula ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

This article focuses on the significance of the Orthodox painters’ manuals, called hermeneiai zographikes, in the development of post-Byzantine iconography and painting technology and techniques in the Balkans during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Using a number of unpublished painters’ manuals (Greek and Slavonic) as primary sources for the study of Christian and Ottoman culture in the Balkan peninsula, it is possible to examine perceptions of Europe in the Balkans, in particular the principal routes for the transmission of ideas of the European Enlightenment, as well as the role of artists as mediators in the processes of ‘Europeanization'.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document