scholarly journals Ostend through the Eyes of British Writers (1830-50)

Author(s):  
Pieter Francois

This article analyzes how the British writers Frances Trollope (1779–1863) and William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) described the Belgian coastal resort Ostend in the 1830s and 1840s. A special focus is placed on both the British travelers passing through Ostend and the British resident communities at Ostend. The article will highlight how the assessments of Frances Trollope and William Makepeace Thackeray of Ostend as a coastal resort frequented by the British can be unpacked fruitfully within two overarching themes: the theme of “genteel poverty” and “respectability” on the one hand, and the theme of “national identity” and “religious identity” on the other. These assessments by Frances Trollope and William Makepeace Thackeray are contextualized against the background of contemporary British guidebooks and travel accounts on Ostend, and against some statistics on the British traveller and resident communities in mid-nineteenth century Belgium. (PF)

2010 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 413-436 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Esparza

National identity is constructed through successive identifications with significant Others. This article discusses the phenomenon of change and continuity in Czech identity. It is focused here on the identification towards the EU, which has become the most significant Other of today in two ways: (a) (change) contributing to overcoming the identity crisis provoked by the drastic changes that occurred between 1989 and 1993 (change of regime, disappearance of the USSR and the break-up of Czechoslovakia), and therefore the subsequent drastic changes in relations with past significant Others: communism, the USSR, and the Slovaks; and (b) (continuity) reaffirming one of the fundamental elements during the national revival in the nineteenth century, democracy, upon which the various identifications towards the EU have been aligned. According to the differing interpretations of what democracy means, and three other criteria of the “levels of Othering,” the EU has been “imagined,” on the one hand, as an entity where Czechs can flourish in their identity and ensure their freedom and democratic values (positive Other), and, on the other, as an “oppressor” entity which portrays democratic deficit, restricts freedom, and threatens Czech national identity (negative Other).


Zutot ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-17
Author(s):  
Yael Shenker

This article addresses Israeli novelist Haim Beʾer’s relation to national-religious identity and the rifts and the pain it causes him, as can be discerned from his fiction and journalism, and certainly from interviews with him. His relation to national-religious identity also reflects a sort of mirror image, at times inverted, of the relationship between religious and national identities. Beʾer’s movement between religious community and nation criticizes on the one hand prevalent conceptions of secularization and national identity in Zionist discourse, and, on the other hand, conceptions of redemption in religious discourse.


Literator ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-172
Author(s):  
L. Nas

This article deals with three recent South African travelogues, to wit Sihle Khumalo’s “Dark continent: my black arse” (2007) and “Heart of Africa: centre of my gravity” (2009), and Steven Otter’s “Khayelitsha: umlungu in a township” (2007). It argues that the authors are engaged in a postcolonial quest to find out what makes them African: the one, a black corporate employee, by following the footsteps of white nineteenth century explorers; the other, a white journalism student, by living in one of South Africa’s largest black townships.


2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 247-260
Author(s):  
Arne Merilai ◽  
Katre Talviste

The idea of Estonia’s cultural and national self-sufficiency emerged in the nineteenth century. The contribution of writers and poets was essential to this development. Literature anticipated not only cultural, linguistic, and artistic, but also the economic and political emancipation of Estonians. Cultural practices leading to this emancipation were largely based on Baltic German models; many key elements to the independent Estonian national identity are of foreign origin. On the one hand, the nineteenth-century nationbuilding could therefore be described as self-colonization. On the other hand, it rather created a new nation than transformed a preexisting one, since the very concept of national identity was introduced by this process. Through various political and cultural upheavals, the most influential authors from this seminal period of the Estonian modern culture have remained iconic to this day. The traditional identification with them is so strong that the tentative origins of the nation and the identitary struggles of the national poets themselves may often be forgotten and the personal and individual nature of their contribution downplayed.


Author(s):  
James Meffan

This chapter discusses the history of multicultural and transnational novels in New Zealand. A novel set in New Zealand will have to deal with questions about cultural access rights on the one hand and cultural coverage on the other. The term ‘transnational novel’ gains its relevance from questions about cultural and national identity, questions that have particularly exercised nations formed from colonial history. The chapter considers novels that demonstrate and respond to perceived deficiencies in wider discourses of cultural and national identity by way of comparison between New Zealand and somewhere else. These include Amelia Batistich's Another Mountain, Another Song (1981), Albert Wendt's Sons for the Return Home (1973) and Black Rainbow (1992), James McNeish's Penelope's Island (1990), Stephanie Johnson's The Heart's Wild Surf (2003), and Lloyd Jones's Mister Pip (2006).


2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-130
Author(s):  
SHINJINI DAS

AbstractThis article explores the locally specific (re)construction of a biblical figure, the Apostle St Paul, in India, to unravel the entanglement of religion with British imperial ideology on the one hand, and to understand the dynamics of colonial conversion on the other. Over the nineteenth century, evangelical pamphlets and periodicals heralded St Paul as the ideal missionary, who championed conversion to Christianity but within an imperial context: that of the first-century Roman Mediterranean. Through an examination of missionary discourses, along with a study of Indian (Hindu and Islamic) intellectual engagement with Christianity including Bengali convert narratives, this article studies St Paul as a reference point for understanding the contours of ‘vernacular Christianity’ in nineteenth-century India. Drawing upon colonial Christian publications mainly from Bengal, the article focuses on the multiple reconfigurations of Paul: as a crucial mascot of Anglican Protestantism, as a justification of British imperialism, as an ideological resource for anti-imperial sentiments, and as a theological inspiration for Hindu reform and revivalist organization.


2016 ◽  
Vol 61 (S24) ◽  
pp. 93-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rossana Barragán Romano

AbstractLabour relations in the silver mines of Potosí are almost synonymous with the mita, a system of unfree work that lasted from the end of the sixteenth century until the beginning of the nineteenth century. However, behind this continuity there were important changes, but also other forms of work, both free and self-employed. The analysis here is focused on how the “polity” contributed to shape labour relations, especially from the end of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century. This article scrutinizes the labour policies of the Spanish monarchy on the one hand, which favoured certain economic sectors and regions to ensure revenue, and on the other the initiatives both of mine entrepreneurs and workers – unfree, free, and self-employed – who all contributed to changing the system of labour.


Author(s):  
Julia Riegel

This chapter discusses the treatment of the Jewish identity of various composers by the Yiddish folklorist and music critic, Menachem Kipnis. It describes Kipnis as a small, energetic man with a soft but beautiful singing voice and considered one of the most popular Jewish folklorists of interwar Poland. It also looks into Kipnis' book World-Famous Jewish Musicians, a collection of biographies of nineteenth-century composers with a Jewish background. The chapter examines the contradictions and idiosyncrasies of World-Famous Jewish Musicians compared with Kipnis's other works. It seeks to understand the balance Kipnis struck between praise for Jewish composers and quasi-nationalist emphasis on their Jewishness on the one hand, and his work as a folklorist in Poland, collecting songs from traditional, Yiddish-speaking Jews on the other.


Transfers ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 81-96
Author(s):  
Frederike Felcht

In the nineteenth century, a significant change in the modern infrastructures of travel and communications took place. Hans Christian Andersen's (1805-1875) literary career reflected these developments. Social and geographical mobility influenced Andersen's aesthetic strategies and autobiographical concepts of identity. This article traces Andersen's movements toward success and investigates how concepts of identity are related to changes in the material world. The movements of the author and his texts set in motion processes of appropriation: on the one hand, Andersen's texts are evidence of the appropriation of ideas and the way they change by transgressing social spheres. On the other hand, his autobiographies and travelogues reflect how Andersen developed foreign markets by traveling and selling the story of a mobile life. Capturing foreign markets brought about translation and different appropriations of his texts, which the last part of this essay investigates.


2006 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
RUI SANTOS

Theoretical debates about the efficiency of sharecropping discuss risk-sharing in relation to farmers' wealth and credit, as one explanatory factor. This perspective is explored here in the southern Portuguese province of Alentejo, from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Three points are made: (1) leasing and sharecropping coexisted on the same land; (2) there was no unequivocal relationship between risk sharing, on the one hand, and the contractual mode of tenancy (fixed-rent or sharecropping), on the other; and (3) relating risk-sharing, defined as a continuous variable, with social differentiation of demand for tenancies provides a rationale for a hypothetical long-term shift in contracts, from medieval sharecropping to fixed-rent tenancies with sharecrop subletting in the nineteenth century.


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