scholarly journals “That city, that self”:

Authorship ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ceilidh Hart
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Cultural Economy ◽  
Street Level ◽  
Authorial Identity ◽  
Authorial Persona ◽  
Historical Trajectory ◽  
Urban Writing ◽  
The City ◽  
Unique Context

This article traces a historical trajectory of the city poet in Canada—a writer whose “street-level perspective” defines their methods and shapes their authorial personae—from the nineteenth-century through to the twenty-first. It first provides a brief exploration of some of the literature published in the Toronto Evening Telegram newspaper in the 1880s and 1890s to consider the origins of a literary tradition and an authorial persona rooted in the city. This part of the article uses the example of Robert Kirkland Kernighan to show the way early writers exploited the opportunity provided by city newspapers and the city itself to map and define themselves in artistic and professional terms. The article goes on to consider the work of contemporary city writers like Bren Simmers, who continue mapping themselves onto the street in sometimes deeply personal and increasingly unsettled ways. At base, the article argues that by extending critical discussions of urban writing back to its nineteenth-century roots, we can better understand how the city works as a unique marketplace for literature and a unique cultural economy through which literature circulates, but also as a unique context for the creation of authorial identity.

Walking Margaret Harkness’s London

2019 ◽  
pp. 57-73
Author(s):  
Nadia Valman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Narrative Development ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Urban Writing ◽  
The Unemployed ◽  
The City

Margaret Harkness’s London is a city of mobility, both local and global. In her fiction, she utilises a familiar trope in late nineteenth-century urban writing, the figure of the peripatetic protagonist, in order to produce a complex urban panorama. This chapter considers perspectives on the city in Out of Work and In Darkest London from the viewpoints of two kinds of urban walkers: the slum saviour and the unemployed man. It explores the formal conventions wrought by this exploration of viewpoints, most notably, a shift from progressive to episodic narrative development.

‘Otherwise in London’ or, the ‘Essence of Things’: Modernity and Estrangement in the Nineteenth-Century Cityscape

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35
Author(s):  
Julian Wolfreys
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Thomas De Quincey ◽  
Urban Centre ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Representation ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

Writers of the early nineteenth century sought to find new ways of writing about the urban landscape when first confronted with the phenomena of London. The very nature of London's rapid growth, its unprecedented scale, and its mere difference from any other urban centre throughout the world marked it out as demanding a different register in prose and poetry. The condition of writing the city, of inventing a new writing for a new experience is explored by familiar texts of urban representation such as by Thomas De Quincey and William Wordsworth, as well as through less widely read authors such as Sarah Green, Pierce Egan, and Robert Southey, particularly his fictional Letters from England.

Emotional Cities

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Ben Prestel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Capital Flows ◽  
Urban History ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Loss Of Control ◽  
Global Capital ◽  
Dynamic Transformation ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

Between 1860 and 1910, Berlin and Cairo went through a period of dynamic transformation. During this period, a growing number of contemporaries in both places made corresponding arguments about how urban change affected city dwellers’ emotions. In newspaper articles, scientific treatises, and pamphlets, shifting practices, such as nighttime leisure, were depicted as affecting feelings like love and disgust. Looking at the ways in which different urban dwellers, from psychologists to revelers, framed recent changes in terms of emotions, this book reveals the striking parallels between the histories of Berlin and Cairo. In both cities, various authors associated changes in the city with such phenomena as a loss of control over feelings or the need for a reform of emotions. The parallels in these arguments belie the assumed dissimilarity between European and Middle Eastern cities during the nineteenth century. Drawing on similar debates about emotions in Berlin and Cairo, the book provides a new argument about the regional compartmentalization of urban history. It highlights how the circulation of scientific knowledge, the expansion of empires, and global capital flows led to similarities in the pasts of these two cities. By combining urban history and the history of emotions, this book proposes an innovative perspective on the emergence of different, yet comparable cities at the end of the nineteenth century.

Delhi in Transition, 1821 and Beyond

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
English Translation ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Multiple Sources ◽  
Original Manuscript ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
The Times ◽  
First Time ◽  
The City

Commissioned by the English East India Company to write about contemporary nineteenth-century Delhi, Mirza Sangin Beg walked around the city to capture its highly fascinating urban and suburban extravaganza. Laced with epigraphy and fascinating anecdotes, the city as ‘lived experience’ has an overwhelming presence in his work, Sair-ul Manazil. Sair-ul Manazil dominates the historiography of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century compositions on Delhi in Persian and Urdu, and remains unparalleled in its architecture and detailed content. It deals with the habitations of people, bazars, professions and professionals, places of worship and revelry, and issues of contestation. Over fifty typologies of structures and several institutions that find resonance in the Persian and Ottoman Empires can also be gleaned from Sair-ul Manazil. Interestingly, Beg made no attempt to ‘monumentalize’ buildings; instead, he explored them as spaces reflective of the sociocultural milieu of the times. Delhi in Transition is the first comprehensive English translation of Beg’s work, which was originally published in Persian. It is the only translation to compare the four known versions of Sair-ul Manazil, including the original manuscript located in Berlin, which is being consulted for the first time. It has an exhaustive introduction and extensive notes, along with the use of varied styles in the book to indicate the multiple sources of the text, contextualize Beg’s work for the reader and engage him with the debate concerning the different variants of this unique and eclectic work.

International Opera in Nineteenth-century New York

2020 ◽  
pp. 244-269
Author(s):  
Karen Ahlquist
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
World War I ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Considerable Extent ◽  
World War ◽  
Metropolitan Opera ◽  
The City

This chapter charts how canonic repertories evolved in very different forms in New York City during the nineteenth century. The unstable succession of entrepreneurial touring troupes that visited the city adapted both repertory and individual pieces to the audience’s taste, from which there emerged a major theater, the Metropolitan Opera, offering a mix of German, Italian, and French works. The stable repertory in place there by 1910 resembles to a considerable extent that performed in the same theater today. Indeed, all of the twenty-five operas most often performed between 1883 and 2015 at the Metropolitan Opera were written before World War I. The repertory may seem haphazard in its diversity, but that very condition proved to be its strength in the long term. This chapter is paired with Benjamin Walton’s “Canons of real and imagined opera: Buenos Aires and Montevideo, 1810–1860.”

Landscape and Ecology

2020 ◽  
pp. 342-368
Author(s):  
Daniel M. Grimley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Cultural Transformation ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Musical Thought ◽  
The Social ◽  
Representational Practice ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
The City ◽  
Privileged Site

Images of landscape lie at the heart of nineteenth-century musical thought. From frozen winter fields, mountain echoes, distant horn calls, and the sound of the wind moving among the pines, landscape was a vivid representational practice, a creative resource, and a privileged site for immersion, gothic horror, and the Romantic sublime. As Raymond Williams observed, however, the nineteenth century also witnessed an unforeseen transformation of artistic responses to landscape, which paralleled the social and cultural transformation of the country and the city under processes of intense industrialization and economic development. This chapter attends to several musical landscapes, from the Beethovenian “Pastoral” to Delius’s colonial-era evocation of an exoticized American idyll, as a means of mapping nineteenth-century music’s obsession with the idea of landscape and place. Distance recurs repeatedly as a form of subjective presence and through paradoxical connections with proximity and intimacy.

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