Discipline and Revolution: Classics in Victorian Culture

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Goldhill
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Reception Studies ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Major Revision ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Nineteenth Century Studies

This book explores the dynamics of Classics in the nineteenth-century, focusing on art, opera, and fiction and how artworks come to stand for a self-aware statement about modernity—through the classical past. It raises new questions and new understandings in three major areas of scholarship: nineteenth-century studies, Classics, and the so-called Reception Studies. It examines the discipline of Classics and its place in Victorian culture, as well as some very strong challenges to the Classics as a story, which constitute a need for a major revision of the account. In particular, it considers the relationship between Classics and sexuality. It also discusses the most important revolution of the nineteenth century, and how this affects our understanding of a discipline as a discipline: the loss of the dominant place of Christianity in Victorian Britain.

Illustrating ‘savagery’: Sir John Lubbock and Ernest Griset

Antiquity ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 83 (320) ◽  
pp. 488-499 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Murray
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Reception Studies ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Scientific Naturalism ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Impact

Much has been written about the extraordinary impact of Darwinism during the mid- to late nineteenth century, expressed in the scholarship of 'reception studies' (see for example Ellegård 1958; Glick 1988; Numbers & Stenhouse 1999). A significant focus has been on developing an understanding of the impact of Darwinian thinking on just about every aspect of Victorian society, particularly on literature, science, politics and social relations (see for example Beer 1983; Frayter 1997; Lorimer 1997; Moore 1997; Paradis 1997; Browne 2001). A great deal of attention has also been paid (by historians and philosophers of science) into the specifics of how the Darwinian message was disseminated so quickly and so broadly. Here the interest lies in the links between the rhetoric of scientific naturalism and the politics of the day, be it Whig-Liberal or Tory (see for example Clark 1997; Barton 1998, 2004; Cliffordet al.2006). A consequent interest lies in the ways in which science was popularised in Victorian Britain (see especially Lightman 1997, 2007).

A HISTORY OF “RATIONALISM” IN VICTORIAN BRITAIN

2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOSHUA BENNETT
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Sources Of Knowledge ◽  
Specific Term ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Intense Debate

“Rationalism” became the subject of intense debate in nineteenth-century Britain. This article asks why this was so, by focusing on the usage and implications of the term in contemporary argument. Rationalism was successively defined and redefined in ways that reached to the heart of Victorian epistemological and religious discussion. By treating rationalism as a contextually specific term, and examining how its implications changed between the 1820s and the early twentieth century, the article brings new perspectives to bear on the development of nineteenth-century freethought and countervailing religious apologetic. It underlines the importance of history, and constructions of intellectual lineage, as ways of establishing the relationship between rationality and religion in a progressively wider-ranging Victorian debate about the sources of knowledge and value.

God and Progress

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Bennett
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
Religious Diversity ◽  
Religious Revival ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Counter Culture ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Different Parts

This book offers an original account of intellectual change in nineteenth-century Britain, by exploring the rich relationship between historical thought and religious debate in Victorian culture. It recovers the twofold process by which the growth of progressive ideas of history transformed religious traditions across British Protestantism, and by which religious debate profoundly shaped Victorian ideas of history. Adopting a remarkably wide contextual perspective which embraces believers and unbelievers, Anglicans and nonconformists, and writers from different parts of the British Isles, and situating British debates in relation to their European and especially German Idealist intellectual surroundings, the study reveals that contemporary conceptions of progress integrally relied upon competing understandings of religious history. It argues that, in the wake of religious revival, the Victorian intellectual mainstream came to terms with religious diversity, changing ethical sensibilities, and new kinds of knowledge by locating these phenomena within providential, spiritualised, and developmental understandings of human time. A secular counter-culture, however, disturbed this internally-differentiated consensus by grounding progress in the advance of the scientific method and the retreat of metaphysics. The book thus explores the ways in which divisions within British liberalism were fundamentally related to divisions over the nature of the religious past. It also demonstrates that religious debate drove the process by which different kinds of historicism acquired cultural authority in Victorian Britain – and began to lose it.

scholarly journals Negotiating a ‘Tangled Web of Pride and Shame’: A Crimean Case-Study

2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 503-521
Author(s):  
Rachel Bates
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Military History ◽  
Community Stability ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Cultural Turn

This article complements an identified ‘cultural turn’ in military history, which emphasizes the potency of perception and the extent to which successes, failures, opportunities and threats are culturally conditioned (Black 2004: 233-35). It will deal with issues surrounding ‘collective remembrance’, a concept which Joanna Bourke identifies as problematic. For Bourke, ‘collectivememory’ has been characterized by a ‘museal sensibility’ in which mass narratives ‘wallow’ in a nostalgic world of community, stability and certainty (Bourke 2004: 473). She argues that collective memory is an exclusive script, which imposes unity on individual experiences and overlooks conscious acts of cultural selection (Bourke 2004: 473). Whilst scholarship on the relationship of present with past rightly takes issue with collective, or public, memory, precluding individual, or private, memories, Bourke usefully draws attention to the mythical qualities of collective remembrance. Military history, integral as it is to national identity yet harbouring inherently difficult histories, is particularly susceptible to cultural, social and political mediation. This article traces nineteenth-century treatments of two Crimean failures and the legacy ofthese attitudes today in museums, which to a large extent echo some of the dominant myths and silences of Victorian Britain.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-47
Author(s):  
Tamara S. Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Child Care ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
New Work ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Modern Family ◽  
Victorian Popular Culture

The Introduction surveys the divergent representations of babyhood in the nineteenth century. It situates the present study at the intersection of new work on the modern family and changing parenting realities, as well as historical childhood and child care. After a detailed discussion of the most influential or mainstream portrayals of infancy in Victorian popular culture, such as the sentimentalized baby, the baby as victim in social reform writing, and the commodified baby, the Introduction addresses the importance of unusual, yet culturally significant depictions, including comical or sensationalized babies in fiction. How did these portrayals transform cultural fantasies and genre developments? How did iconic depictions of babyhood reflect, distort, or endeavour to change the lived realities of young children in Victorian Britain? The texts selected for close reading in the subsequent chapters include material that reveals unexpected sides to Victorian infancy, as well as works that have had a catalysing function for changing representational strategies. Critical attention to the diverse and at times ambiguous depiction of infancy in Victorian culture thus also produces new readings of canonical works that have hitherto not been considered from this angle.

Free Market Capitalism: Fundamentally Philistine?

1991 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-274
Author(s):  
James A. Schmiechen
Keyword(s):  
Free Market ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
General Sense ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Free Market Capitalism ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Market Capitalism ◽  
Society Today

The Scottish capitalist Samuel Laing, who found great comfort in the belief that in Britain “there is no feeling for the fine arts, no foundation for them, no esteem for them” (Porter, p. 265), raises some important questions with regard the relationship between capitalism and the arts, particularly for Victorian Britain between 1840 and 1880, and, as well, in a more general sense for society today. Is free market capitalism antithetical to culture? Was Britain, in her golden age of capitalism a cultural desert? Was Victorian culture essentially a culture of “rank escapism?” (Porter, p. 254) Did the industrial capitalists regard art and learning as harmful, time wasting, and detrimental to civic virtue? Bernard Porter, in reflecting on Laing's work, suggests yes to all of these questions, and further suggests that Laing just may be the guide to lead us to some important revelations about the historic relationship between capitalism and the arts.

Disease and Civilization: A Scottish Atlantic Network of Physicians in the Enlightenment

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-216
Author(s):  
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
Practice Of Medicine ◽  
Benjamin Rush ◽  
American Physician ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
A Current

Through an examination of the extensive papers, manuscripts and correspondence of American physician Benjamin Rush and his friends, this article argues that it is possible to map a network of Scottish-trained physicians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These physicians, whose members included Benjamin Rush, John Redman, John Morgan, Adam Kuhn, and others, not only brought the Edinburgh model for medical pedagogy across the Atlantic, but also disseminated Scottish stadial theories of development, which they applied to their study of the natural history and medical practices of Native Americans and slaves. In doing so, these physicians developed theories about the relationship between civilization, historical progress and the practice of medicine. Exploring this network deepens our understanding of the transnational intellectual geography of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century British World. This article develops, in relation to Scotland, a current strand of scholarship that maps the colonial and global contexts of Enlightenment thought.

The Romantics in Alternate History from Hawthorne to Clarke: Generic Edges and the Counterfactual Turn

Romanticism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-215
Author(s):  
Alex Broadhead
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Alternate History ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Critical Interest

In 2009, Damian Walford Davies called for a counterfactual turn in Romantic studies, a move reflective of a wider growth of critical interest in the relationship between Romanticism and counterfactual historiography. In contrast to these more recent developments, the lives of the Romantics have provided a consistent source of speculation for authors of popular alternate history since the nineteenth century. Yet the aims of alternate history as a genre differ markedly from those of its more scholarly cousin, counterfactual historiography. How, then, might such works fit in to the proposed counterfactual turn? This article makes a case for the critical as well as the creative value of alternate histories featuring the Romantics. By exploring how these narratives differ from works of counterfactual historiography, it seeks to explain why the Romantics continue to inspire authors of alternate history and to illuminate the forking paths that Davies's counterfactual turn might take.

Pater's Parerga: Framing the Imaginary Portraits

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-135
Author(s):  
Giles Whiteley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Formal Structure ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Liminal Space ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Similar Operation ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Relationship

Walter Pater's late-nineteenth-century literary genre of the imaginary portrait has received relatively little critical attention. Conceived of as something of a continuum between his role as an art critic and his fictional pursuits, this essay probes the liminal space of the imaginary portraits, focusing on the role of the parergon, or frame, in his portraits. Guided by Pater's reading of Kant, who distinguishes between the work (ergon) and that which lies outside of the work (the parergon), between inside and outside, and contextualised alongside the analysis of Derrida, who shows how such distinctions have always already deconstructed themselves, I demonstrate a similar operation at work in the portraits. By closely analysing the parerga of two of Pater's portraits, ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ (1887) and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893), focusing on his partial quotation of Goethe in the former, and his playful autocitation and impersonation of Heine in the latter, I argue that Pater's parerga seek to destabilise the relationship between text and context so that the parerga do not lie outside the text but are implicated throughout in their reading, changing the portraits constitutively. As such, the formal structure of the parergon in Pater's portraits is also a theoretical fulcrum in his aesthetic criticism and marks that space where the limits of, and distinctions between, art and life become blurred.

Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Goldhill
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Victorian Art ◽  
Victorian Science ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels

How did the Victorians engage with the ancient world? This book is an exploration of how ancient Greece and Rome influenced Victorian culture. Through Victorian art, opera, and novels, the book examines how sexuality and desire, the politics of culture, and the role of religion in society were considered and debated through the Victorian obsession with antiquity. Looking at Victorian art, it demonstrates how desire and sexuality, particularly anxieties about male desire, were represented and communicated through classical imagery. Probing into operas of the period, the book addresses ideas of citizenship, nationalism, and cultural politics. And through fiction—specifically nineteenth-century novels about the Roman Empire—it discusses religion and the fierce battles over the church as Christianity began to lose dominance over the progressive stance of Victorian science and investigation. Rediscovering some great forgotten works and reframing some more familiar ones, the book offers extraordinary insights into how the Victorian sense of antiquity and our sense of the Victorians came into being. With a wide range of examples and stories, it demonstrates how interest in the classical past shaped nineteenth-century self-expression, giving antiquity a unique place in Victorian culture.

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