Theatre Photography in Nineteenth Century France: Document, Archive or Pure Fiction?

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 47-72
Author(s):  
Arnaud Rykner

"Indoor performance photography, which was born in France on the occasion of the Paris World Exhibition in 1889, remains a problematic theatrical and media object to this day. But at the Belle Epoque and until the Second World War at least, it requires to be approached with all the more caution because it is always the fruit of multiple manipulations, either at the time of the making of the shots (mandatory posing of actors, specific lighting, etc.), or at the time of their “post-production” (printing, but especially edition in review or volume). A complex and particularly rich object that must be studied in its context (publications or archives), stage photography is then offered as much as a document to be deciphered as a fiction to be deconstructed. Keywords: theatre photography, France, Belle Epoque, document, photographic archives. "

2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-34
Author(s):  
Ştefania Maria Custură

Abstract Ion Valjan is the literary pseudonym of Ion Al. Vasilescu (1881-1960), famous lawyer, playwright, writer of memoirs, publicist and politician. Dramatic author in the line of Caragiale, he was the manager of The National Theatre in Bucharest between 1923 and 1924, and general manager of theatres between 1923 and 1926. He wrote drama, he collaborated with Sburătorul, Vremea, Rampa, being appreciated by the exigent literary critique of the inter-war period. After the war, in 1950, he was involved in a political trial, accused of high treason, espionage for Great Britain, and got sentenced to 15 years imprisonment, where he died. Valjan is the author of the only theatrical show, played in a communist prison, Revista Piteşti 59. Ion Valjan’s memoirs, With the Voice of Time. Memories, written during the Second World War, represent a turn back in time, into the age of the author’s childhood and adolescence, giving the contemporary reader the chance to travel in time and space, the end of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the past century projecting an authentic image, in the Romanian version of a Belle Epoque, interesting and extremely prolific for the Romanian cultural life. Also, evoking his childhood years spent in cities by the Danube (Călăraşi, Brăila, Turnu-Severin), Valjan unveils the harmonious meeting of different peoples and their mentalities, which transform the Danube Plain into an interethnic space of unique value.


2011 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 641-660 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER M. R. STIRK

AbstractAlthough the Westphalian model takes many forms the association of Westphalian and sovereign equality is a prominent one. This article argues firstly that sovereign equality was not present as a normative principle at Westphalia. It argues further that while arguments for sovereign equality were present in the eighteenth century they did not rely on, or even suggest, a Westphalian provenance. It was, for good reasons, not until the late nineteenth century that the linkages of Westphalia and sovereign equality became commonplace, and even then sovereign equality and its linkage with Westphalia were disputed. It was not until after the Second World War, notably through the influential work of Leo Gross that the linkage of Westphalia and sovereign equality became not only widely accepted, but almost undisputed until quite recently. The article concludes by suggesting that not only did Gross bequeath a dubious historiography but that this historiography is an impediment to contemporary International Relations.


Author(s):  
Cairns Craig

Muriel Spark has regularly been described as a Catholic novelist, given that her conversion to Catholicism was followed closely by the publication of her first novel, The Comforters, about the struggles of a Catholic convert. However, the intellectual context in which she came to maturity in the years after the Second World War was pervaded by the issues raised by existentialism, issues which surface directly in her novel The Mandelbaum Gate. Existentialism is now associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir as an atheistic philosophy, but it began as a Christian philosophy inspired by nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. It was Kierkegaard’s Christian existentialism which shaped Spark’s own ‘leap to faith’ and his ironic style which shaped her own approach to the novel form.


Author(s):  
Jerzy Tomaszewski

This chapter considers a series of books, A to Polska właśnie (This is Indeed Poland). These books introduce their readers to various issues of interest to anyone studying Polish society. The chapter focuses on the volume Żydzi (The Jews), in particular, as it is the first to discuss an important group among Poland's population. The volume covers the period up to the second half of the eighteenth century, political and social problems from the second half of the eighteenth century until the end of the nineteenth, Jewish culture and religion in the nineteenth century, the period from the First World War until 1939, the Holocaust, and Jews in Poland after the Second World War. The chapter contends that this book should be regarded not as just one more study about Polish Jews, but as making a singular contribution to the promotion of knowledge about Jewish traditions, culture, and history in Poland.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1123-1160
Author(s):  
Daniel Hedinger ◽  
Moritz von Brescius

This chapter provides an analytical overview of the German and Japanese imperial projects from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of World War II. It shows how Germany and Japan—two imperial latecomers in the late nineteenth century—redefined imperialism and colonialism in the first half of the twentieth century. In order to realize their dreams of a new imperial world order, both countries broke with what had come before, and their violent imperial projects turned out to be radically new and different. While Europe had never seen an empire like Hitler’s, the same is true of East Asia and the so-called Co-Prosperity Sphere during the Second World War. In the end, it was their wars for empire and brutal legacies that not only profoundly shaped their respective national histories, but also undermined the legitimacy of imperialism after 1945. The chapter, which focuses on a series of important moments from a trans-imperial perspective, highlights two points. First, it stresses that the German and Japanese empires had a shared history. Second, it shows that by their emergence as colonial powers, Japan and Germany first fundamentally challenged and later changed the very rules of the “imperial game” and the existing global order. Their histories are central to understand great power competition in the first half of the 20th century as well as the imperial nature of the World Wars.


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