scholarly journals Dangers, Delights, Development: Female Travel in The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Turkish Embassy Letters

Spectrum ◽  
2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Stanski
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Psychological Effects ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Ann Radcliffe ◽  
Women Readers ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mysteries Of Udolpho

This paper examines the portrayal of travel for women in two eighteenth-century literary texts by women writers: The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe and The Turkish Embassy Letters by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. With a focus on the mental, emotional, and psychological effects of female travel that each author depicts, it analyzes both the dramatic dangers and pleasures faced by Radcliffe’s Gothic heroine and the more mild, cerebral ones experienced by the historical Montagu. Drawing on the work of Marianna D’Ezio, Adam Watkins, and Mary Jo Kietzman, it argues that both Radcliffe and Montagu ultimately endorsed the idea of travel for women through their work, portraying the pleasure, experience, and self-cultivation it afforded as outweighing its dangers. Finally, it posits that this position resisted both Enlightenment and Romantic ideas of appropriate female behaviours and desires by encouraging women readers to experience the world outside of the domestic sphere.

‘The Redundancy of Copious Nothings’

2020 ◽  
pp. 153-172
Author(s):  
Mary Beth Tegan
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Women Readers ◽  
Sentimental Fiction ◽  
Women Novelists ◽  
Women's Novels ◽  
The Temple

Eighteenth-century critics commonly used birth topoi to ridicule writing they believed to be uninspired or imitative, but their attacks on the bad form and excesses of women’s novels were particularly pointed. Novels were not so much authored as begotten—through suspect feminized spaces like the circulating library and the automatic reproduction of formulaic fiction. Such judgments were felt keenly by women writers, as evidenced by Frances Burney’s anxiety about the fate of her second offspring, Cecilia, and her prefatory allegory of authorial corruption at the Temple of Vanity. Vanity, it was suggested, was not only the motivating force behind women novelists’ endeavors, it might also be fostered through the reading of sentimental fiction. This essay explores the transmission of affect between women readers and writers, reframing the creative and destabilizing powers of vanity to argue that copious nothings divert readers and writers’ attention from domestic cares, disrupting the projections of masculine prerogative.

Does Literature Matter Today? Thoughts of the Outside

CounterText ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-113
Author(s):  
Shaobo Xie
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Education ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Values ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
Western Tradition ◽  
The World

The paper celebrates the publication of Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller's Thinking Literature across Continents as a significant event in the age of neoliberalism. It argues that, in spite of the different premises and the resulting interpretative procedures respectively championed by the two co-authors, both of them anchor their readings of literary texts in a concept of literature that is diametrically opposed to neoliberal rationality, and both impassionedly safeguard human values and experiences that resist the technologisation and marketisation of the humanities and aesthetic education. While Ghosh's readings of literature offer lightning flashes of thought from the outside of the Western tradition, signalling a new culture of reading as well as a new manner of appreciation of the other, Miller dedicatedly speaks and thinks against the hegemony of neoliberal reason, opening our eyes to the kind of change our teaching or reading of literature can trigger in the world, and the role aesthetic education should and can play at a time when the humanities are considered ‘a lost cause’.

Boatmen, Wastrels, and Demons: Figures of Literature

CounterText ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simona Sawhney
Keyword(s):  
Social Studies ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Sanskrit Text ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
The World ◽  
National Literatures

Engaging some of the questions opened by Ranjan Ghosh's and J. Hillis Miller's book Thinking Literature Across Continents (2016), this essay begins by returning to Aijaz Ahmad's earlier invocation of World Literature as a project that, like the proletariat itself, must stand in an antithetical relation to the capitalism that produced it. It asks: is there an essential link between a certain idea of literature and a figure of the world? If we try to broach this link through Derrida's enigmatic and repeated reflections on the secret – a secret ‘shared’ by both literature and democracy – how would we grasp Derrida's insistence on the ‘Latinity’ of literature? The groundlessness of reading that we confront most vividly in our encounter with fictional texts is both intensified, and in a way, clarified, by new readings and questions posed by the emergence of new reading publics. The essay contends that rather than being taught as representatives of national literatures, literary texts in ‘World Literature’ courses should be read as sites where serious historical and political debates are staged – debates which, while being local, are the bearers of universal significance. Such readings can only take place if World Literature strengthens its connections with the disciplines Miller calls, in the book, Social Studies. Paying particular attention to the Hindi writer Premchand's last story ‘Kafan’, and a brief section from the Sanskrit text the Natyashastra, it argues that struggles over representation, over the staging of minoritised figures, are integral to fiction and precede the thinking of modern democracy.

Text Prophetism

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 40
Author(s):  
Elvira Lumi ◽  
Lediona Lumi
Keyword(s):  
Key Words ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Greek Mythology ◽  
Divine Inspiration ◽  
Religious Doctrine ◽  
The World ◽  
Poetic Text ◽  
Poetic Diction ◽  
Life On Earth

"Utterance universalism" as a phrase is unclear, but it is enough to include the term "prophetism". As a metaphysical concept, it refers to a text written with inspiration which confirms visions of a "divine inspiration", "poetic" - "legal", that contains trace, revelation or interpretation of the origin of the creation of the world and life on earth but it warns and prospects their future in the form of a projection, literary paradigm, religious doctrine and law. Prophetic texts reformulate "toll-telling" with messages, ideas, which put forth (lat. "Utters Forth" gr. "Forthteller") hidden facts from fiction and imagination. Prometheus, gr. Prometheus (/ prəmiθprə-mee-mo means "forethought") is a Titan in Greek mythology, best known as the deity in Greek mythology who was the creator of humanity and charity of its largest, who stole fire from the mount Olympus and gave it to the mankind. Prophetic texts derive from a range of artifacts and prophetic elements, as the creative magic or the miracle of literary texts, symbolism, musicality, rhythm, images, poetic rhetoric, valence of meaning of the text, code of poetic diction that refers to either a singer in a trance or a person inspired in delirium, who believes he is sent by his God with a message to tell about events and figures that have existed, or the imaginary ancient and modern world. Text Prophetism is a combination of artifacts and platonic idealism. Key words: text Prophetism, holy text, poetic text, law text, vision, image, figure

Ancestral Piles

2018 ◽  
pp. 519-541
Author(s):  
Sean Moreland
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Mary Shelley ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
Charles Brockden Brown ◽  
William Godwin ◽  
Ann Radcliffe ◽  
Horace Walpole ◽  
Architectural Model ◽  
Walter Scott

This essay examines Poe’s conception and use of the Gothic via his engagements with the work of earlier writers from Horace Walpole through Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin, Charles Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley, and E. T. A. Hoffmann. Poe’s uses of the Gothic, and his relationship with the work of these writers, was informed by his philosophical materialism and framed by his dialogue with the writings of Sir Walter Scott. Tracing these associations reveals Poe’s transformation of the idea of “Gothic structure” from an architectural model, the ancestral pile of the eighteenth-century Gothic, to one of energetic transformation, the electric pile featured in many of Poe’s tales.

The Wasteland of William Blake

1947 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-204
Author(s):  
Frank O'Malley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
William Blake ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Mind ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future

The question is: how can you put a prophet in his place when, by the very character of prophecy, he is eternally slipping out of place? William Blake was not an eighteenth century or nineteenth century mind or a typically modern mind at all. What I mean to say, right at the start, is that, although well aware of his time and of time altogether, he was not in tune with the main tendencies of his or our own time. Indeed time was a barrier he was forever crashing against. Blake's talent raved through the world into the fastnesses of die past and dramatically confronted the abysses of the future. His age did not confine him. As a poet he does not seem finally to have had real spiritual or artistic rinship with any of the rationalist or romantic writers of England. As a thinker he came to despise the inadequacy of the limited revolutionary effort of the political rebels of the Romantic Revolution. Blake's name is not to be seen mounted first with that of Paine or Godwin, of Rousseau or Voltaire, of Wordsworth or Shelley or Byron or Keats. With these he has, ultimately, little or nothing in common. At any rate, his voice and mood and impact are thoroughly different from the more publicly successful voices of the period of his life, older and younger generations alike.

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