The Origins of Russian Scenery: Volga River Tourism and Russian Landscape Aesthetics

Slavic Review ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 666-682 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Ely
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Volga River ◽  
Aesthetic Object ◽  
Essential Idea ◽  
Unique Approach ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The essential idea of landscape, that a section of terrain can be appreciated as a visual or aesthetic object, is largely a phenomenon of modern history, tied to processes such as urbanization and the development of tourism. Although the appreciation of landscape in Russia was influenced by European aesthetics, Russia developed a unique approach to its own natural environment, and the Volga River played an important role in that process. When steamship tourism appeared on the Volga in the late nineteenth century, the river became a crucial location for the articulation of a new, scenic aesthetic. But this aesthetic competed with earlier views of Russian landscape, which held that the simple and unspectacular character of the native countryside contrasted favorably with the overly picturesque and inauthentic landscapes of western Europe. Images of the Volga that emerged in guidebooks, travelogues, and visual media took shape in attempts to negotiate between the touristic impulse to appreciate beautiful scenery and more established conceptions of Russian nature as appealing precisely in its lack of picturesqueness.

The Shift toward Secular Ideology

2021 ◽  
pp. 273-298
Author(s):  
Jon D. Wisman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
The State ◽  
Invisible Hand ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Science ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Following the rise of the state, religion served to legitimate societies’ institutions, practices, and unequal distributions of income, wealth, and privilege. However, emerging capitalism and its expanding bourgeoisie in Western Europe challenged the Catholic Church’s monopoly on truth and meaning, opening space for secular legitimation. The science of political economy increasingly evolved as a principal body of social thought legitimating inequality. This transfer from religion to political economy begins with the mercantilists and is mostly complete by the end of the nineteenth century. Political economy’s principal inequality-legitimating doctrines include the utility of poverty, the justice of the invisible hand, the Malthusian population doctrine, the wages-fund doctrine, and the trickle-down thesis. Most of these doctrines take on more of a patina of “natural” science in the late nineteenth century when the neoclassical revolution in economics attempted to sever economic science from morality and politics and express itself technically with calculus.

scholarly journals Ferdinand Boberg och statistikmaskineriet. Om statistik som medium, attraktion och utställning, ca 1800-1930

1970 ◽  
pp. 21
Author(s):  
Anders Ekström
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
Visual Language ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Graphic Representations ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Visual Realism

Different types of statistical representations were among the most prolific visual media in late nineteenth century museums and temporary exhibitions. From the 1890s to the 1930s, several ”social” or ”statistical museums” were founded in Europe and North America, the most famously of which were established by the sociologist Patric Geddes in Glasgow, and by the philosopher Otto Neurath in Vienna. The first part of this paper gives a survey of the development of graphic representations in the nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on the visual pedagogics involved in statistical display. The second part of the paper is dedicated to two statistical displays developed by the Swedish architect Ferdinand Boberg at exhibitions in Helsingborg in 1903 and Stockholm in 1909. In particular, the analysis is focused on the ways in which Boberg’s ”machinery of statistics” – a series of moving, figurative and three-dimensional representations of statistics – related to other media presented at the exhibitions, and to the ways in which the audience was invited to interact with the displays. In the conclusion, the development and use of statistical media in early twentieth century museums are discussed in relation to an intermedial discourse on visual realism and the utopian idea of a universal visual language. 

Escaping from Hunger Before WW1: Nutrition and Living Standards in Western Europe and USA in the Late Nineteenth Century

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Gazeley ◽  
Rose Holmes ◽  
Andrew T. Newell ◽  
Kevin P Reynolds ◽  
Hector Gutierrez Rufrancos
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Living Standards ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth

scholarly journals Environmental Writing for Children

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence Buell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Physical Environment ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Environmental Concern ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Environmental Writing ◽  
Children's Writing ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article analyzes representative topoi or traditions emanating from the so-called golden age of children’s writing in the late Victorian era that feature encounters with the physical environment. It traces the emergence of modern (Western) environmentally oriented children’s literature and examines the permutations of two overlapping topoi that have served as carriers of environmental concern since the late nineteenth century. It reviews works that purport to imagine nonhuman life-worlds from the standpoint of the creatures themselves and those that deal with the discovery or construction of special, often hidden outdoor places by children that are shown to have catalytic significance in bonding them to the natural environment.

scholarly journals Arthur Cowper Ranyard, Knowledge and the reproduction of astronomical photographs in the late nineteenth-century periodical press

2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-380 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAMES MUSSELL
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Milky Way ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
High Quality ◽  
The Press ◽  
Photographic Reproduction ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Astronomical Images

AbstractThe development of photographic reproduction in the late nineteenth century permitted images in a range of visual media to be published in the press. Focusing on the popular scientific monthly Knowledge, this paper explores the evidentiary status of reproductions of astronomical photographs. After succeeding its founder Richard Anthony Proctor in 1889, the new editor of Knowledge, Arthur Cowper Ranyard, introduced high-quality collotype reproductions into each number of the magazine. One of Ranyard's main interests was the structure of the Milky Way, evidence for which was only available through astronomical photographs. As Ranyard reproduced photographs in support of his arguments, he blurred the boundaries between the published collotype, the source negative and the astronomical phenomena themselves. Since each of these carried different evidentiary value, the confusion as to what, exactly, was under discussion did not go unremarked. While eminent astronomers disputed both Ranyard's arguments and the way in which they were presented, Knowledge disseminated both striking astronomical images and also a broader debate over how they should be interpreted.

Transnational Romance, Terror, and Heroism: Russia in American Popular Fiction, 1860–1917

2008 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 753-777 ◽  
Author(s):  
Choi Chatterjee
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
Russian State ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Scholars of Russian-American relations in the late nineteenth century have long been concerned with the personalities and writings of university-based experts, journalists, diplomats, and political activists. We are well acquainted with the observations of various American commentators on the backward state of Russian state, society, economy, and politics. While the activities of prominent men such as George Kennan have effortlessly dominated the historical agenda, the negative discourses that they produced about Russia have subsumed other important American representations of the country. Since the period of early modern history, European travelers had seen Russia as a barbarous land of slave-like people, responsive only to the persuasions of the whip and the knout wielded by an autocratic tsar. Subsequently, Larry Wolff has shown that Voltaire and other Enlightenment philosophers created images of a despotic and backward Eastern Europe in order to validate the idea of a progressive, enlightened, and civilized Western Europe.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document