Romola and Milton: A Cultural History of Rewriting

1998 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 328-363
Author(s):  
Anna K. Nardo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Harold Bloom ◽  
Renaissance Humanism ◽  
History Of

George Eliot's novel of fifteenth-century Florence, Romola, represents her struggles with both the history of Western culture and her real and literary fathers by reimagining Milton's life and thought. As heir to both Renaissance humanism and Reformation zeal, as a central historical link between fifteenth-century Florence and Victorian England, as the patriarch of English letters, and as the father of rebellious daughters, Milton is the unacknowledged father in Romola, and the stories of his family are woven into the fabric of the novel. Recovering the cultural history of these stories-retold by biographers for two centuries and fictionalized throughout the nineteenth century-allows us to historicize and expand Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's insight that Milton is present in Romola, but also to confute their widely accepted conclusion (quoting Harold Bloom) that Milton was for Eliot, as for other women writers, "the great Inhibitor, the Sphinx who strangles even strong imaginations in their cradles."

The Will of Cardinal Giordano Orsini (ob. 1438)

Traditio ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 257-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher S. Celenza
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
Renaissance Humanism ◽  
The Third ◽  
Textual History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Will ◽  
First Time

There are many still unstudied aspects of the cultural history of early Quattrocento Rome, especially if we consider the years before 1443, the date of the more or less permanent re-entry into the civitas aeterna of Pope Eugenius IV. The nexus between the still ephemeral papacy and the emerging intellectual movement of Italian Renaissance humanism is one of these aspects. It is hoped that this study will shed some light on this problem by presenting a document that has hitherto not been completely edited: the original will of Cardinal Giordano Orsini. As we shall see, this important witness to the fifteenth century provides valuable information on many fronts, even on the structure of the old basilica of Saint Peter. The short introduction is in three parts. The first has a discussion of the cardinal's cultural milieu with a focus on the only contemporary treatise specifically about curial culture, Lapo da Castiglionchio's De curiae commodis. The second part addresses the textual history of the will as well as some misconceptions which have surrounded it. The third part contains a discussion of the will itself, along with some preliminary observations about what can be learned from the critical edition of the text here presented for the first time.

The quiet novel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Sykes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Marcel Proust ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of

This chapter maps the neglected history of quiet fictions and speculates about the potentiality of quiet as a literary aesthetic. It argues that the introvert was a disruptive presence in many nineteenth-century American texts, including those by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville where quiet is associated with a failure to speak or an absence of mind. In the early twentieth century, quiet protagonists were integral to the ‘novel of consciousness’ favoured by many writers including Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust who equated quietness of character with a rich and dramatic internal life. Yet, as the century developed, quiet became marginalised within a Western culture that seemed increasingly defined by its noise and sources of overstimulation. This chapter therefore concludes with a discussion of quiet’s potentiality as both an aesthetic and as a mode of engagement with contemporary fiction.

Police Records

2019 ◽  
pp. 797-819
Author(s):  
Cristina Vatulescu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Media History ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Police Records ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter approaches police records as a genre that gains from being considered in its relationships with other genres of writing. In particular, we will follow its long-standing relationship to detective fiction, the novel, and biography. Going further, the chapter emphasizes the intermedia character of police records not just in our time but also throughout their existence, indeed from their very origins. This approach opens to a more inclusive media history of police files. We will start with an analysis of the seminal late nineteenth-century French manuals prescribing the writing of a police file, the famous Bertillon-method manuals. We will then track their influence following their adoption nationally and internationally, with particular attention to the politics of their adoption in the colonies. We will also touch briefly on the relationship of early policing to other disciplines, such as anthropology and statistics, before moving to a closer look at its intersections with photography and literature.

The revolution of Fās in 869/1465 and the death of Sultan ‘Abd al-ḥaqq al-Marīnī

1978 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mercedes García-Arenal
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Partial Information ◽  
Present Knowledge ◽  
Original Stories ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Writings ◽  
The Revolution

If our present knowledge of the history of the Muslim Maghrib is in general unsatisfactory, few periods remain as obscure as the fifteenth century.The extant sources are very scarce. Contemporary Maghribī historical writings are practically non-existent and, with few exceptions, this is still an epoch for which Christian chronicles are not yet really relevant. Only fragmentary and partial information can be extracted from the contemporary Spanish and Portuguese documents. Therefore, we have to rely for our knowledge on the so-called manāqib literature or hagiographic dictionaries which proliferated in Morocco during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These volumes—many of which were lithographed in Fās during the nineteenth century—cannot be considered a first-rate source. They are posterior to the period dealt with and appear as versions of a traditional history composed over the years by agglomeration, repetition, and revision from a series of original stories which may be doubtful, even though they are hallowed by time and usage, and fortified by the weight of respectability. Committed to writing, they have acquired the seal of authority and have seldom been challenged.

The Fonte Gaia from Renaissance to Modern Times

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chiara E. Scappini ◽  
David Boffa
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Art And Politics ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
History Of

The Fonte Gaia from Renaissance to Modern Times examines the history of Siena's famous public fountain, from its fifteenth-century origins to its eventual replacement by a copy in the nineteenth century (and the modern fate of both). The book explores how both the Risorgimento and the Symbolist movements have shaped our perceptions of the Italian Renaissance, as the Quattrocento was filtered through the lens of contemporary art and politics.

Women, Writing and the Iraqi Ba'thist State

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hawraa Al-Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
The State ◽  
Woman Question ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Resistance ◽  
Cultural Revival ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Site ◽  
Material Form

The book examines the trajectory of the state sponsored novel in Iraq and considers the ways in which explicitly political and/or ideological texts functioned as resistive counter narratives. It argues that both the novel and ‘progressive’ discourses on women were used as markers of Iraq’s cultural revival under the Ba‘th and were a key element in the state’s propaganda campaign within Iraq and abroad. In an effort to expand its readership and increase support for its pan-Arab project, the Iraqi Ba‘th almost completely eradicated illiteracy among women. As Iraq was metaphorically transformed into a ‘female’, through its nationalist trope, women writers simultaneously found opportunities and faced obstacles from the state, as the ‘Woman Question’ became a site of contention between those who would advocate the progressiveness of the Ba‘th and those who would stress its repressiveness and immorality. By exploring discourses on gender in both propaganda and high art fictional writings by Iraqis, this book offers an alternative narrative of the literary and cultural history of Iraq. It ultimately expands the idea of cultural resistance beyond the modern/traditional, progressive/backward paradigms that characterise discourses on Arab women and the state, and argues that resistance is embedded in the material form of texts as much as their content or ideological message.

The Ta'līf akhbār al-qurūn min umarā' bilad Ilūrin: A Critique

1984 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 57-67
Author(s):  
H.O. Danmole
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Northern Nigeria ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Unpublished Work ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University ◽  
University Of Ibadan ◽  
Local Languages

Before the advent of colonialism, Arabic was widely used in northern Nigeria where Islam had penetrated before the fifteenth century. The jihād of the early nineteenth century in Hausaland led to the establishment of the Sokoto Caliphate, the revitalization of Islamic learning, and scholars who kept records in Arabic. Indeed, some local languages such as Hausa and Fulfulde were reduced to writing in Arabic scripts. Consequently, knowledge of Arabic is a crucial tool for the historian working on the history of the caliphate.For Ilorin, a frontier emirate between Hausa and Yorubaland, a few Arabic materials are available as well for the reconstruction of the history of the emirate. One such document is the Ta'līf akhbār al-qurūn min umarā' bilad Ilūrin (“The History of the Emirs of Ilorin”). In 1965 Martin translated, edited, and published the Ta'līf in the Research Bulletin of the Centre for Arabic Documentation at the University of Ibadan as a “New Arabic History of Ilorin.” Since then many scholars have used the Ta'līf in their studies of Ilorin and Yoruba history. Recently Smith has affirmed that the Ta'līf has been relatively neglected. He attempts successfully to reconstruct the chronology of events in Yorubaland, using the Ta'līf along with the Ta'nis al-ahibba' fi dhikr unara' Gwandu mawa al-asfiya', an unpublished work of Dr. Junaid al-Bukhari, Wazīr of Sokoto, and works in English. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the information in the Ta'līf by comparing its evidence with that of other primary sources which deal with the history of Ilorin and Yorubaland.

Urban Formalism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Faflik
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
The West ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
Street Protest ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Form ◽  
The City

Urban Formalism radically reimagines what it meant to “read” a brave new urban world during the transformative middle decades of the nineteenth century. At a time when contemporaries in the twin capitals of modernity in the West, New York and Paris, were learning to make sense of unfamiliar surroundings, city peoples increasingly looked to the experiential patterns, or forms, from their everyday lives in an attempt to translate urban experience into something they could more easily comprehend. Urban Formalism interrogates both the risks and rewards of an interpretive practice that depended on the mutual relation between urbanism and formalism, at a moment when the subjective experience of the city had reached unprecedented levels of complexity. What did it mean to read a city sidewalk as if it were a literary form, like a poem? On what basis might the material form of a burning block of buildings be received as a pleasurable spectacle? How closely aligned were the ideology and choreography of the political form of a revolutionary street protest? And what were the implications of conceiving of the city’s exciting dynamism in the static visual form of a photographic composition? These are the questions that Urban Formalism asks and begins to answer, with the aim of proposing a revisionist semantics of the city. This book not only provides an original cultural history of forms. It posits a new form of urban history, comprised of the representative rituals of interpretation that have helped give meaningful shape to metropolitan life.

Gustav Klemm, Cultural History, and Kulturwissenschaft

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter N. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
German Culture ◽  
High Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Material ◽  
Cultural Science ◽  
History Of Culture

This chapter examines a new material-based history of German culture and looks at how a study of material culture had since evolved into “cultural history.” It traces the history of culture in nineteenth-century Germany, at the same time puzzling out the ambiguity of such a category as it was applied during the period. Encompassing both high culture and low, the popular and the elite, cultural history has often seemed borderless and indefinite—leading even its admirers to “search” for it or to see it as a “problem.” The chapter then turns to a study of Gustav Friedrich Klemm (1802–1867), the most important of the cultural historians of the 1840s and 1850s. His General Cultural History (1843–1852) and General Cultural-Science (1855) are both significant works in the field.

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