Cooper's Last Novels, 1847–1850

PMLA ◽  
1960 ◽  
Vol 75 (5) ◽  
pp. 583-590
Author(s):  
Donald A. Ringe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Memorial Address ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
The Individual ◽  
William Cullen

Until the appearance of James Grossman's biography in 1949, James Fenimore Cooper's last five novels had received little critical attention. The nineteenth century practically ignored them. Even William Cullen Bryant in his judicious memorial address delivered in 1852 passed over them with hardly a word, while thirty years later, Thomas R. Lounsbury flatly stated that “not one of them has the slightest pretension to be termed a work of art.” In the twentieth century, the first critics to concern themselves with the rehabilitation of Cooper's reputation—Vernon L. Parrington, Robert E. Spiller, and Yvor Winters—concerned as they were with the broader aspects of Cooper's thought, devoted little space to the discussion of tales that were not especially pertinent to their immediate purposes. During the last dozen years, however, the novels have begun to attract more attention, with Harold H. Scudder and W. B. Gates in particular pointing out various sources that Cooper used in composing two of the tales. Among the critics, Grossman has written the fullest analyses of the individual books, and, most recently, Howard Mumford Jones and Charles A. Brady have each treated the late novels at some length. All three have pointed out the strong religious emphasis apparent in several of them.

scholarly journals Zemskii Sobor: Historiographies and Mythologies of a Russian “Parliament”

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Sablin ◽  
Kuzma Kukushkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Russian Civil War ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Constituent Assembly ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Modern Russian

Focusing on the term zemskii sobor, this study explored the historiographies of the early modern Russian assemblies, which the term denoted, as well as the autocratic and democratic mythologies connected to it. Historians have discussed whether the individual assemblies in the sixteenth and seventeenth century could be seen as a consistent institution, what constituencies were represented there, what role they played in the relations of the Tsar with his subjects, and if they were similar to the early modern assemblies elsewhere. The growing historiographic consensus does not see the early modern Russian assemblies as an institution. In the nineteenth–early twentieth century, history writing and myth-making integrated the zemskii sobor into the argumentations of both the opponents and the proponents of parliamentarism in Russia. The autocratic mythology, perpetuated by the Slavophiles in the second half of the nineteenth century, proved more coherent yet did not achieve the recognition from the Tsars. The democratic mythology was more heterogeneous and, despite occasionally fading to the background of the debates, lasted for some hundred years between the 1820s and the 1920s. Initially, the autocratic approach to the zemskii sobor was idealistic, but it became more practical at the summit of its popularity during the Revolution of 1905–1907, when the zemskii sobor was discussed by the government as a way to avoid bigger concessions. Regionalist approaches to Russia’s past and future became formative for the democratic mythology of the zemskii sobor, which persisted as part of the romantic nationalist imagery well into the Russian Civil War of 1918–1922. The zemskii sobor came to represent a Russian constituent assembly, destined to mend the post-imperial crisis. The two mythologies converged in the Priamur Zemskii Sobor, which assembled in Vladivostok in 1922 and became the first assembly to include the term into its official name.

{ Epilogue }

2021 ◽  
pp. 211-220
Author(s):  
John Evelev
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
The West ◽  
Regional Dialects ◽  
Reconstruction Era ◽  
Entire Nation ◽  
William Cullen ◽  
Fictional Story

The discourse of the picturesque reshaped how Americans understood their landscape, but it largely ended in the mid-1870s. The decline of the picturesque can be illustrated in two emblematic works: Constance Fenimore Woolson’s 1872 short story “In Search of the Picturesque” and William Cullen Bryant’s enormous 1874 scenery book Picturesque America. Woolson’s fictional story is a satire of travel in which a young urban woman accompanies her grandfather to the countryside “in search of the picturesque” and instead only finds development. This story signals the shift in literary interest in rural subjects toward regionalism. Regionalism disavowed the earlier focus on picturesque landscapes, instead featuring distinctive regional dialects and cultural practices that reflected the newly created social sciences. Bryant’s Picturesque America was a Reconstruction-era project aimed at reconnecting the divided nation through a nonhierarchical unification under the sign of “picturesque.” Adding not only the West but also the South to the compendium of American scenery, Picturesque America imagined the entire nation as picturesque. In this formulation, the picturesque became synonymous with landscape in general. Although the picturesque lost its appeal as an authoritative discourse for shaping the American landscape in the latter third of the nineteenth century, this book demonstrates that the spaces that dominated American life in the twentieth century and beyond are owed almost entirely to the transformative project of the mid-nineteenth-century picturesque.

Military Morality Transformed: Weapons and Soldiers on the Nineteenth-Century Battlefield

2011 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 565-590 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gervase Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Moral Agent ◽  
The Political ◽  
Central Theme ◽  
Mass Violence ◽  
Human Aggression ◽  
Close Supervision ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Way

The increased lethality of nineteenth-century “arms of precision” caused military formations to disperse in combat, transforming the ordinary soldier from a near automaton, drilled to deliver random fire under close supervision, into a moral agent who exercised a degree of choice about where, when, and how to fire his weapon. The emerging autonomy of the soldier became a central theme in contemporary tactical debates, which struggled to reconcile the desire for discipline with the individual initiative necessary on the battlefield. This tactical conundrum offers revealing insights about human aggression and mass violence. Its dark legacy was the propagation of military values into civilian society, thus paving the way for the political soldiers of the twentieth century.

Visions and Revisions: Chapter Lxxxi of Middlemarch

PMLA ◽  
1957 ◽  
Vol 72 (4-Part-1) ◽  
pp. 662-679
Author(s):  
Jerome Beaty
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Internal Force ◽  
Literary Creation ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship

Literary genius in the nineteenth century was associated with “inspiration,” “spontaneity,” “emotion,” “imagination,” “the unconscious,” and other such indications of the nonratiocinative. Not all critics and writers of the century stressed all aspects of the nonratiocinative: some spoke of effect, using this cluster of words to denote the appearance of spontaneity, the freedom from classical or mechanical rules, the superiority of the mysterious, the individual, the unanalyzable in a work of art; others, especially those in that growing group whose concern was with the relationship between the writer and his work, stressed the irrational elements in the creation of literature. Among the latter there were differences in emphasis too: some stressed the whim of inspiration, its independence of the will; others stressed the frenzy, the ecstasy, the total unconsciousness of the act of literary creation. Among the latter there were those who further claimed that a passage created under the “spell” is never revised; for if this external or internal force is irrational because superior to reason, its results cannot then be submitted to the lesser pronouncements of rational judgment. Some even went so far as to combine all of the above into a single antiratiocinative aesthetic: the writer of true genius composes only when the whim of the muse dictates; he does not prepare himself for these moments of vision by planning or “calculating” his subject or approach; he is seized and illuminated, writing swiftly and effortlessly; he does not revise; the result gives the reader a comparable spontaneous, ecstatic, undefinable emotion.

The Case of Literature

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arne Höcker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Legal Responsibility ◽  
Case Based Reasoning ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
The Past ◽  
Psychological Knowledge ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Scientific Narratives

This book offers a radical reassessment of the modern European literary canon. The book's reinterpretations of Goethe, Schiller, Büchner, Döblin, Musil, and Kafka show how literary and scientific narratives have determined each other over the past three centuries, and it argues that modern literature not only contributed to the development of the human sciences but also established itself as the privileged medium for a modern style of case-based reasoning. The book traces the role of narrative fiction in relation to the scientific knowledge of the individual from eighteenth-century psychology and pedagogy to nineteenth-century sexology and criminology to twentieth-century psychoanalysis. The book demonstrates how modern authors consciously engaged casuistic forms of writing to arrive at new understandings of literary discourse that correspond to major historical transformations in the function of fiction. It argues for the centrality of literature to changes in the conceptions of psychological knowledge production around 1800; legal responsibility and institutionalized forms of decision-making throughout the nineteenth century; and literature's own realist demands in the early twentieth century.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Espen Hammer
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Mass Society ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Quest Narrative

Franz Kafka’s The Trial stands as one of the most influential and emblematic novels of the twentieth century. Yet, as the overused adjective “Kafkaesque” suggests, rather than as a work of art in its full complexity, it has all too often been received as an expression of some vaguely felt cultural or psychological malaise—a symbol, perhaps, of all that we do not seem to comprehend, but that nevertheless is felt to haunt and influence us in inexplicable ways. Its plot, however, is both complex and completely unforgettable. A man stands accused of a crime he appears not to have any recollection of having committed and whose nature is never revealed to him. In what may ultimately be described as a tragic quest-narrative, the protagonist’s search for truth and clarity (about himself, his alleged guilt, and the system he is facing) progressively leads to increasing confusion before ending with his execution in an abandoned quarry. Josef K., its famous anti-hero, is an everyman faced with an anonymous, inscrutable yet seemingly omnipotent power. For all its fundamental strangeness, the novel seems to address defining concerns of the modern era: a sense of radical estrangement, the belittling of the individual in a bureaucratically controlled mass society, the rise perhaps of totalitarianism, as well as the fearful nihilism of a world apparently abandoned by God....

scholarly journals Sound Objects and Sound Products: Standardizing a New Culture of Listening in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 599-616 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Hui
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Common Denominator ◽  
Single Individual ◽  
Recording Technology ◽  
Sound Objects ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Individual

In this chapter I develop the psychological underpinnings of environmental music towards an understanding of how the goals of cognitive and behavioral psychologists contributed to a new kind of listening at the beginning of the twentieth century. I begin with an examination of nineteenth-century concerns about both the physical and psychological effects of music and fraught debate among experimental psychologists of the role of musical expertise in the laboratory. These concerns were, I argue, rooted in the assumption of a direct, corporeal connection between the generation and reception of music, usually bound within a single, individual body. In the twentieth century, new technology liberated the listener from a temporally- and geographically-bound experience of music. The Tone Tests, Re-Creation Recitals, and Mood Change “parties” of Thomas Edison and the psychologist Walter Bingham show that recording technology allowed for a normalization and standardization of listening not previously possible in the music halls and laboratories of the nineteenth century. Rather paradoxically, since it also made music more accessible to the individual listener, recorded music, mobilized by industrial psychologists and record companies alike, created a new sound experience actively designed for the lowest common denominator of mass listening. It also contributed to the cultivation of a new practice of mass listening. The new mass listening practice presents broader questions about the definition of music and its functional role – If the function of music is to be ignored, is it still music?

In Quest of the Thinker of Science

2021 ◽  
pp. 178-193
Author(s):  
Steven L. Goldman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Nervous System ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Social Environment ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Conscious Thought ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Brain

The relationships among mind, self, conscious thought, discursive reasoning, and social context became central issues in nineteenth- and twentieth-century psychology, linguistics, sociology, and epistemology, with direct implications for the nature of scientific knowledge. Minds and selves can be conceptualized as expressions of interactions between an individual’s nervous system and their physical and social environment. Is conscious thought, and in particular discursive reasoning, under the control of the individual thinker, or does it reflect societal influences? Nineteenth-century experimental neurophysiology and psychology began to reveal the role that systemic features of the nervous system and the brain play in producing consciousness. Concurrently, sociologists, psychologists, and linguists were proposing roles for the unconscious, language, society, and innate gestalten in shaping and limiting conscious thought. These ideas converged in the theories of individual scientists.

scholarly journals ENSAIO: 1929: Reexistência em Barcelona

Revista Prumo ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (7) ◽  
pp. 74-86
Author(s):  
André Caetano
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Bodily Experience ◽  
New Meanings ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Mies Van Der Rohe ◽  
The City

This present article is a case study that seeks to understand the multiplicity of the concept of Reexistence through the Barcelona Pavillion, by Mies van der Rohe. Through an analysis of the context in which the work was thought, of its structure and its design, it seeks to make clear the unique legacy the work has in the twentieth century and it is capable to give new meanings to the idea of Reexistence. In this sense, this notion is both applicable to the bodily experience of the individual in the city, as a work of art, and to notion had about Germany in the international artistic community in a delicate moment for the country, as a symbol of philosophical and constructive thought. Keywords: Barcelona Pavillion, Mies van der Rohe, Reexistence

‘The well-known, old, but still unbeaten track’: Women Poets and Irish Periodical Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century

2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Mulhall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Double Bind ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Substantial Body ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Irish Women ◽  
Under Construction

While neglected Irish male poets of the mid century have seen some recuperation in recent decades, the work of Irish women poets still languishes in obscurity. A growing body of scholarship has identified the need to bring critical attention to bear on this substantial body of work. In this essay I explore the positioning of Irish women poets in mid-century periodical culture, to flesh out the ways in which the terms of this ‘forgetting’ are already established within the overwhelmingly masculinist homosocial suppositions and idioms that characterized contemporary debates about the proper lineage and aesthetic norms for the national literary culture that was then under construction. Within the terms set by those debates, the woman writer was caught in the double bind that afflicted any woman wishing to engage in a public, politicized forum in post-revolutionary Ireland. While women poets engage in sporadic or oblique terms with such literary and cultural debates, more often their voices are absent from these dominant discourses – the logic of this absence has continued in the occlusion of these women poets from the national poetic canon.

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