Poe and Tennyson

PMLA ◽  
1973 ◽  
Vol 88 (3) ◽  
pp. 418-428 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerhard J. Joseph
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
The Self ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Idylls Of The King ◽  
The Way

Considering the way Poe and Tennyson admired each other's work, it is strange that the tonal and thematic convergence of two such major nineteenth-century writers has scarcely been sensed in Anglo-American (as contrasted to French) literary criticism. The quality that most obviously tempts the reader to link them, their extraordinary delight in sound for its own sake, became a comparable strategy in the service of an undogmatic philosophical idealism, the attempt of the spirit to escape the gross materiality and cloying passions of the world's body. The symbolic situations in Tennyson's early poetry and in Poe's stories and poems suggest the dream-shrouded entrapment of the poetic soul within the world's “deserted” (Tennyson) or “haunted” (Poe) houses. Even when Tennyson rejects, ambiguously enough, the self-entombments of Poe-like hyperesthetic souls, he hardly suppresses what Poe called his unequaled “etherisity” and “ideality.” Tennyson's resultant treatment of angelism (to apply to his protagonists Allen Tate's term for the hypertrophied state of Poe's heroes) and the concomitant evolution of a Poe-like Fatal Woman are most clearly evident in such Classical monologues as “Lucretius” and in the conception of Lancelot and Guinevere in the Idylls of the King.

The Well-Mannered Auditor

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Deaville
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
The Self ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Social Events ◽  
Drawing Room ◽  
The Way

The chapter explores the way English-language etiquette books from the nineteenth century prescribe accepted behavior for upwardly mobile members of the bourgeoisie. This advice extended to social events known today as “salons” that were conducted in the domestic drawing room or parlor, where guests would perform musical selections for the enjoyment of other guests. The audience for such informal music making was expected to listen attentively, in keeping with the (self-) disciplining of the bourgeois body that such regulations represented in the nineteenth century. Yet even as the modern world became noisier and aurally more confusing, so, too, did contemporary social events, which led authors to become stricter in their disciplining of the audience at these drawing room performances. Nevertheless, hosts and guests could not avoid the growing “crisis of attention” pervading this mode of entertainment, which would lead to the modern habit of inattentive listening.

David Brown's Divine Humanity

2015 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-113
Author(s):  
Kathryn Tanner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mutual Influence ◽  
The Self ◽  
Primary Indication ◽  
The World ◽  
The Trinity ◽  
The Way

The contributions of this fine book are many but I will concentrate on three, before turning to several more critical remarks.First, and most obviously, the book does the invaluable service of surveying developments in kenotic christology in the nineteenth century while situating them nicely in their different contexts of origin and with reference to lines of mutual influence: continental, Scottish and British trends are all canvassed rather masterfully. Some attention, in lesser detail, is also given to the way these christological trends are extended in the twentieth century to accounts of the Trinity and God's relation to the world generally: kenosis, the self-emptying or self-limiting action of God, in the incarnation, is now viewed as a primary indication of who God is and how God works, from creation to salvation.

scholarly journals Exporting ‘The Cotter's Saturday Night’: Robert Burns, Scottish Romantic Nationalism and Colonial Settler Identity

Romanticism ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-89
Author(s):  
Sarah Sharp
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
The Self ◽  
The South ◽  
Saturday Night ◽  
Cultural Baggage ◽  
The Way ◽  
At Home

A Scottish literary icon of the nineteenth century, Burns's ‘The Cotter's Saturday Night’ was a key component of the cultural baggage carried by emigrant Scots seeking a new life abroad. The myth of the thrifty, humble and pious Scottish cottager is a recurrent figure in Scottish colonial writing whether that cottage is situated in the South African veld or the Otago bush. This article examines the way in which Burns's cotter informed the myth of the self-sufficient Scottish peasant in the poetry of John Barr and Thomas Pringle. It will argue that, just as ‘The Cotter’ could be used to reinforce a particular set of ideas about Scottish identity at home, Scottish settlers used Burns's poem to respond to and cement new identities abroad.

Literary Prizes and Literary Criticism in Antiquity

2009 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 138-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Wright
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural Sociology ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Old Comedy ◽  
Literary Prizes ◽  
Integral Feature ◽  
The Way

This article explores the role of Athenian literary prizes in the development of ancient literary criticism. It examines the views of a range of critics (including Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, historians, biographers, lexicographers, commentators, and the self-critical poets of Old Comedy), and identifies several recurrent themes. The discussion reveals that ideas about what was good or bad in literature were not directly affected by the award of prizes; in fact the ancient critics display what is called an ““anti-prize”” mentality. The article argues that this ““anti-prize”” mentality is not, as is often thought, a product of intellectual developments in the fourth century BC. It is suggested that the devaluation of prizes is actually a contemporary, integral feature of prize-awarding culture in general. This article draws on recent approaches from cultural sociology to offer some conclusions about the way in which prizes function in popular and critical discourse.

scholarly journals Disciplinary Power and the Role of the Subject at a Nineteenth-Century Danish Asylum

PhaenEx ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
BJØRN HAMRE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Psychiatric Practice ◽  
Disciplinary Power ◽  
Pastoral Power ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
The Way

This article reports on the ways in which psychiatric practice and power were constituted in a Danish asylum at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The point of departure will be a complaint by a former patient questioning the practice at the asylum in 1829. In an analysis of this narrative the study draws upon Foucauldian concepts like disciplinary power, confession, pastoral power and subjectivation. I will argue that the critique of the patient provides us with an example of the way that disciplinary power works in the case of an informal indictment of the methods and practice at an asylum. A key issue is whether the critique is not itself a part of the self-legitimation of disciplinary power.

Henry Burden and the Question of Anglo-American Technological Transfer in the Nineteenth Century

1970 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 312-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul J. Uselding
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American History ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Manufacturing Technology ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Technological Transfer ◽  
Considerable Distortion ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
The Way

My object in this article is to use the historical evidence of one man's life to raise questions concerning the way we have come to understand our technological history. Inventors and mechanicians have long occupied a prominent place in American history. However, the bases for selecting and certifying these national heroes have resulted in a curious record of achievement and considerable distortion in our understanding of the development of American manufacturing technology. The principal historical perspective that enshrined the names of Evans, Whitney, Perkins, etc. has been first, the emphasis on originality of invention or “dramatic newness,” and, secondly, the attempt by historians to confine mechanical genius or creativity within national boundaries—Slater and DuPont, of course, being the exceptions to this generalization. Thus we speak quite naturally of American inventors, British inventors, and so on.

Reading laïcité

2014 ◽  
Vol 25 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 330-339
Author(s):  
Leon Sachs
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
The Self ◽  
Transitional Space ◽  
Literary Reading ◽  
Cultural Space ◽  
Literary Education ◽  
Cultural Experiences ◽  
Literary Experience ◽  
The Way

Beginning with the observation that in recent years laïcité has taken on connotations that its nineteenth-century republican proponents would not have foreseen, this article reflects on the way laïcité’s evolving meaning bears on questions of literary experience and literary education. It argues that there are important structural similarities between recent theories of laïcité and theories of literary reading, both of which rely on similar conceptions of intellectual and cultural space and the kinds of identity formation that occur there. The first half of the article builds on arguments by political philosophers Marcel Gauchet and Catherine Kintzler, who assert that aesthetic and cultural experiences enact the psychic phenomena of self-distancing inherent in laïcité. From there, the article goes on to suggest linkages between this view of laical distanciation and the process of individuation outlined in D. W. Winnicott’s concept of transitional space, an influential concept for reader-oriented critics seeking to explain literary experience as an act of ‘getting out of the self’.

scholarly journals “Why Should i not State my opinion, right or Wrong?” Considerations for Literary Criticism in the Letters of Pliny the Younger

2021 ◽  
Vol 60 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 105-119
Author(s):  
Ágnes Darab
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
The Self ◽  
First Century ◽  
Essential Component ◽  
Pliny The Younger ◽  
Literary Techniques ◽  
The Way

SummaryLiterary self is an essential component of Pliny’s self-representation. Pliny’s literary self-portrait is shaped the way he wants it to be by a diverse set of literary techniques utilized in the letters. My paper explores the questions formulated in the letters that thematize the selection and composition of text, and the answers given to them (not necessarily in the form of assertive sentences). This interpretation is not independent from the self-representative character of the letters, yet, it exceeds it on the premise that another dimension may be opened to the understanding of the letters, which points towards the development of the literary and artistic taste of the first century, and its directions.

scholarly journals Ironía y distanciamiento: el monólogo dramático en Jaime Gil de Biedma y Wystan Hugh Auden

2015 ◽  
pp. 299
Author(s):  
María Gracia Rodríguez Fernández
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Dramatic Monologue ◽  
Dramatic Monologues ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
American Author ◽  
The Way

Este artículo estudia el modo en que Wystan Hugh Auden y Jaime Gil de Biedma conciben la técnica del monólogo dramático. Para el autor angloamericano, los monólogos dramáticos consisten en la adopción de la personalidad de algún personaje, a través del cual expresa todos aquellos asuntos que le preocupan, mientras que el poeta catalán se inventa un personaje, al que llama Jaime Gil de Biedma, cuya identidad le sirve para tratar con todos los otros que habitan en el “yo” del poeta. Asimismo, existe similitud entre los dos autores, a pesar de las diferencias, porque el planteamiento del monólogo dramático en los ejemplos mostrados es distinto, pero la intención de los autores es la misma: distanciarse de ellos mismos para adquirir una perspectiva lo suficientemente crítica que les proporcione la ajenidad que buscan. This article studies the way in which Wystan Hugh Auden and Jaime Gil de Biedma conceive the technique of the dramatic monologue. For the Anglo-American author, the dramatic monologues consist of taking the personality of some character, by means of that he expresses the matters that he worries, whereas the Catalan poet invents a character called Jaime Gil de Biedma, whose identity is used for addressing all the others who live in the “self” of the poet. Likewise, there is a similarity between these two authors, in spite of their differences, because the proposal of the dramatic monologues in the examples given is different, but the intention of the author is the same: to distance from themselves to acquire a critical enough perspective which provide them the otherness they are looking for.

The Puritans as Founders: The Quest for Identity in Early Whig Rhetoric*

1996 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-194
Author(s):  
Dean C. Hammer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Whig Party ◽  
Capitalist Economy ◽  
Political Drama ◽  
Scholarly Attention ◽  
The Way

In looking at the politics of the opening decades of the nineteenth Century, scholarly attention has been drawn to the self-destruction of the Federalists, the ascendancy of the Jeffersonian Republicans, or the emergence of the Jacksonian Democrats. What gets lost in the way scholars view this political drama is the coalescence of an American Whig identity, forged in the decade of the 1820's. At least part of this inattention can be explained by scholarly appraisals of the Whig party as intellectually incoherent, politically cynical, and, ultimately, unsuccessful.The Whig position was, indeed, a curious one: the Whigs heralded the growth of the modern capitalist market that would unleash the forces of entrepreneurial individualism, yet they decried the loss of the precommercial values of deference, virtue, and hierarchical Community; they embraced the prosperity brought about by commerce, yet they feared the corruption of virtue that resulted from the pursuit of interest; and they looked forward to a capitalist economy while glancing back at an antidemocratic Federalism and Puritan moralism.

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