“But One Expects That”: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper” and the Shifting Light of Scholarship

PMLA ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 111 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Bates Dock ◽  
Daphne Ryan Allen ◽  
Jennifer Palais ◽  
Kristen Tracy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sexual Politics ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Ghost Story ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Yellow Wallpaper

When feminist critics of the 1970s rediscovered “The Yellow Wallpaper,” they constructed an interpretation of the story and the history of its publication and reception. Subsequent critics lent authority to an emerging set of accepted “facts”: nineteenth-century audiences read the tale as a ghost story rather than as a critique of the sexual politics of marriage; Gilman fought valiantly against hostility from the entrenched hierarchy of male editors who refused to publish her work; and irate male physicians censured the story once it appeared. By reexamining the documentary evidence on which those “facts” are based, we examine the role that ideology plays in gathering and interpreting evidence. Gilman's story serves as a fine but certainly not a unique example of how scholarship is as grounded in historical biases as the literature it seeks to illuminate.

Architectural Innovation in Early Byzantine Cyprus

2014 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Charles Anthony Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Byzantine Empire ◽  
Archaeological Research ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Medieval Architecture ◽  
Textual Evidence ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
Architectural Innovation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Pointed Arch

The monuments of the Byzantine Empire stand as a testimony to architectural ingenuity. The history and development of such ingenuity, however, may often be difficult to trace, since this requires investigating ruins, peeling away centuries of renovations, and searching for new documentary evidence. Nevertheless, identifying the origins of specific innovations can be crucial to an understanding of how they later came to be used. In fact, ‘creative “firsts” are often used to explain important steps in the history of art’, as Edson Armi noted, adding that ‘in the history of medieval architecture, the pointed arch [and] the flying buttress have receive this kind of landmark status’.Since the nineteenth century, scholars have observed both flying buttresses and pointed arches on Byzantine monuments. Such features were difficult to date without textual evidence, and so they were often assumed to reflect the influence of the subsequent Gothic period. Archaeological research in Cyprus carried out between 1950 and 1974, however, had the potential to overturn this assumption.

scholarly journals Georgian Society in the Nineteenth Century: Features of Integration into the Space of the Russian Empire

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Amiran Urushadze ◽  
Vyacheslav Shcherbakov
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
Political Conflicts ◽  
Russian State ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
German Historian

This review examines a monograph by Philipp Ammon that considers the history of the entry and integration of the territories of historical Georgia into the space of the Russian Empire. In his book, the German historian focuses on finding the roots and forerunners of modern Russian – Georgian political conflicts. The author consistently describes the events of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ammon shows the circumstances of the conclusion of the Treaty of Georgievsk in 1783 and the proclamation of the manifesto on the accession of East Georgia on 12 September 1801. At the same time, he refers to the entry of Eastern Georgia into the administrative and political space of the Russian Empire as an occupation and considers the Russian authorities’ subsequent policies to be Russification. These provisions are substantiated by well-known scholarly literature, but, according to the reviewers, the author does not use archival and published documentary evidence systematically. According to Ammon, the repressive policy of the Russian state is proved by armed protests and political conspiracies that took place on the southern periphery of the empire in the first half of the nineteenth century. The historian briefly notes the other side of imperial policy, such as the establishment of an educational system, cultural initiatives, and social transformations. However, according to Ammon, all these are also integral elements of Russification. The review criticises some of the book’s provisions.

A history of some fruit models in wax and other materials: scientific teaching aids and courtly table decorations

2003 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans-JüRgen Lechtreck
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fruit Trees ◽  
Visual Aids ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Teaching Aids ◽  
Scientific Teaching ◽  
Glass Marble ◽  
History Of ◽  
By Products ◽  
Wax Models

Two early nineteenth century texts treating the production and use of wax models of fruit reveal the history of these objects in the context of courtly decoration. Both sources emphasise the models' decorative qualities and their suitability for display, properties which were not simply by-products of the realism that the use of wax allowed. Thus, such models were not regarded merely as visual aids for educational purposes. The artists who created them sought to entice collectors of art and natural history objects, as well as teachers and scientists. Wax models of fruits are known to have been collected and displayed as early as the seventeenth century, although only one such collection is extant. Before the early nineteenth century models of fruits made from wax or other materials (glass, marble, faience) were considered worthy of display because contemporaries attached great importance to mastery of the cultivation and grafting of fruit trees. This skill could only be demonstrated by actually showing the fruits themselves. Therefore, wax models made before the early nineteenth century may also be regarded as attempts to preserve natural products beyond the point of decay.

Adam Zalužanský’s “De sexu plantarum” (1592): an early pioneering chapter on plant sexuality

2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 244-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holger Funk
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Translation ◽  
History Of Botany ◽  
Main Work ◽  
Botanical History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University ◽  
First Time

In the history of botany, Adam Zalužanský (d. 1613), a Bohemian physician, apothecary, botanist and professor at the University of Prague, is a little-known personality. Linnaeus's first biographers, for example, only knew Zalužanský from hearsay and suspected he was a native of Poland. This ignorance still pervades botanical history. Zalužanský is mentioned only peripherally or not at all. As late as the nineteenth century, a researcher would be unaware that Zalužanský’s main work Methodi herbariae libri tres actually existed in two editions from two different publishers (1592, Prague; 1604, Frankfurt). This paper introduces the life and work of Zalužanský. Special attention is paid to the chapter “De sexu plantarum” of Zalužanský’s Methodus, in which, more than one hundred years before the well-known De sexu plantarum epistola of R. J. Camerarius, the sexuality of plants is suggested. Additionally, for the first time, an English translation of Zalužanský’s chapter on plant sexuality is provided.

Correspondence between Adolphe Brongniart and Robert Schomburgk: trading natural history collections for honours

2002 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-336
Author(s):  
PIOTR DASZKIEWICZ ◽  
MICHEL JEGU
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Dominican Republic ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Herbarium Specimens ◽  
British Guiana ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
History Of ◽  
Source Of Information ◽  
German Naturalist

ABSTRACT: This paper discusses some correspondence between Robert Schomburgk (1804–1865) and Adolphe Brongniart (1801–1876). Four letters survive, containing information about the history of Schomburgk's collection of fishes and plants from British Guiana, and his herbarium specimens from Dominican Republic and southeast Asia. A study of these letters has enabled us to confirm that Schomburgk supplied the collection of fishes from Guiana now in the Laboratoire d'Ichtyologie, Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris. The letters of the German naturalist are an interesting source of information concerning the practice of sale and exchange of natural history collections in the nineteenth century in return for honours.

The Modernities of H. Lawrence Freeman

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
White Press ◽  
Grand Opera

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document