Eros and Empire in Russian Literature about Georgia

Slavic Review ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Layton

In recent years a growing body of studies has analyzed the discursive practices used by Europeans to constitute the Asian, African and American Indian as the less civilized other. A most influential contribution has been Edward Said'sOrientalism.Although Said deals essentially with western responses to the Islamic east, his work contains many insights germane to nineteenth century Russian literature stimulated by tsarist expansion into the Caucasus. The Russian case, however, presents interesting variations on Said's model. Russia itself was only semi-europeanized, so that it was more problematic to build constructs of Asiatic alterity. The sense that there was no absolute division between “us” and the “Asiatics” produced extraordinarily ambivalent representations of Caucasian Muslim tribesmen in Russian literature. In “Ammalat- Bek,” for example, Alexander Marlinskii defended the tsarist conquest of the tribes as a European civilizing mission and yet expressed intense self-identification with the freedom and machismo of the Caucasian wild man.

Author(s):  
Andrew Kahn ◽  
Mark Lipovetsky ◽  
Irina Reyfman ◽  
Stephanie Sandler

The chapter explores how works of literature in the nineteenth century increasingly mapped the complex social structure of imperial Russia. It explains why social class and group identity features so prominently in the representation of characters in nineteenth-century Russian literature. The chapter demonstrates that different types of space, such as the capitals (St. Petersburg and Moscow), the village, or the estate, have specific cultural associations in literature. It discusses the phenomenon of the Petersburg mythology and the genre of Petersburg fiction, examines the provincial spaces as presented by Gogol and Chekhov, and colonial spaces such as the Caucasus as portrayed by Tolstoy.


2014 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 142-162
Author(s):  
Mikail Mamedov

The Russian empire annexed Georgia and moved further into the Caucasus for reasons that were typical for the period; that is, the European idea of a civilizing mission. Later, toward the mid-1820s, Russia attempted to use the region as its colony. The Russian advance towards the borders of Iran and Turkey alarmed the British and aggravated Russia’s relations with the European powers. Meanwhile, Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War gave rise to the idea of the Caucasus as a bulwark against a hostile Europe. None of the previous ideas disappeared completely: they co-existed during almost all of the nineteenth century. Thus, the image of the Caucasus in the Russian imperial consciousness was dynamic and flexible, reflecting Russia’s changing history, the political situation in the empire, and threats to the country from outside.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Scott Travanion Connors

Abstract This article explores the emergence of reformist sentiment and political culture in Madras in the mid-nineteenth century. Moreover, it contributes to, and expands upon, the growing body of literature on colonial petitioning through a case-study of a mass petition demanding education reform. Signed in 1839 by 70,000 subjects from across the Madras presidency, the petition demanded the creation of a university that would qualify western-educated Indians to gain employment in the high public offices of the East India Company. Through an analysis of the lifecycle of this education petition, from its creation to its reception and the subsequent adoption of its demands by the Company government at Fort St George, this article charts the process by which an emergent, politicized public engaged with, and critiqued, the colonial state. Finally, it examines the transformative effect that the practice of mass petitioning had on established modes of political activism and communication between an authoritarian colonial state and the society it governed.


PMLA ◽  
1961 ◽  
Vol 76 (3) ◽  
pp. 227-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
John E. Englekirk

A number of chapters—some definitive, others suggestive—have already appeared to afford us a clearer picture of the reception of United States writers and writings in Latin America. Studies on Franklin, Poe, Longfellow, and Whitman provide reasonably good coverage on major representative figures of our earlier literary years. There are other nineteenth-century writers, however, who deserve more extended treatment than that given in the summary and bibliographical studies available to date. A growing body of data may soon make possible the addition of several significant chapters with which to round out this period in the history of inter-American literary relations. Bryant and Dickinson will be the only poets to call for any specific attention. Fiction writers will prove more numerous. Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, Hearn, Hart, Melville, and Twain will figure in varying degrees of prominence. Of these, some like Irving and Cooper early captured the Latin American imagination; others like Hawthorne, and particularly Melville, were to remain virtually unknown until our day. Paine and Prescott and Mann will represent yet other facets of American letters and thought.


2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-48
Author(s):  
Catherine DiFelice Box

AbstractFor decades, scholars across disciplines have lauded educational settings in which students have the interactional space to take initiative (e.g. Dyson 1987; Manke 1997; Renne 1996; Shah et al. 2002). As such, initiatives of this kind are considered an important part of student-centered activities, which in turn lead to greater learning opportunities (Waring 2011). While much research has been devoted to examining contexts in which learner’s voices may be heard, scant attention has been paid to the particular kinds of talk that encourage them to initiate contribution or the ways in which such initiatives, when they do occur, serve to shape the pedagogical trajectory. By utilizing conversation analysis (CA) to study interactions in one-on-one mathematics tutoring sessions between an experienced teacher and preschool-aged children, this study extends the small but growing body of microanalytic work on learner initiatives. It aims to further specify the discursive practices that foster rich environments for learner-led contributions. It also considers how the contributions shape the ensuing lesson, and what such contributions relay to teachers about the learner’s understanding of a concept.


Author(s):  
Michael Silverstein

Analyzing Franz Boas's critically new insights under the lens of philology, this chapter redefines Boasian linguistics as a globalizing mode of mutual enlightenment through the exchange of grammatical concepts between selves across borders of sound and sense—a process he calls “comparative calibrationism,” the asymptotic pursuit of the always-inaccessible yet ever-closer universal truth. It focuses on the Handbook of American Indian Languages, where Boas dismantled every plank in the language-focused platform on which inferences of evolutionary primitivism stand. Boas also went after the very applicability to American languages of the comparative method of historical linguistics, from which inferences of so-called linguistic families descended from single proto-languages emerged in the nineteenth century.


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