scholarly journals Procesos da historiografía literaria galega Para un debate crítico

Author(s):  
Arturo Casas

Galician literary historiography shows links and ruptures that refer to the cultural history of Galicia itself and to the sequence of historical events that have delineated the social, economic and political development of the country since the 19th century. These coordinates comprise a series of processes, including the elaboration and propagation of ideologies aimed at achieving a way out of political subalternity and oriented towards the horizon of national emancipation. Those events and these processes also marked the connection of Galicia with modernity and the dynamics of historical change. As a result of the above, this book analyses critically the institutionalization processes of the history of Galician literature – with special emphasis on historiographic models such as that of Said Armesto, Carvalho Calero, Méndez Ferrín and others – and indicates the need to undertake a productive methodological innovation of the discipline in heuristic, organic and discursive terms. It further argues that this update should pay attention to substantive theoretical debates, not exclusively of specific cultural coordinates, such as Galician ones or any others that could be considered. Among these, the cooperation between history and sociology, the intellection of literary facts as historical facts, the review of the link between literary history and nation, the public uses of literary history, and the inquiry of discursive choices that promote a less self-indulgent and predictable historiography. This essentially involved a challenge, that of permanent dialogue with some of the most powerful critical reinterpretations of the Galician historiographic tradition and with alternative models constituted from feminist thought, postcolonial theories, the sociology of the literary field or the systemic theories of culture, as well as with the contributions made from a post-national understanding of the literary phenomenon.

Author(s):  
Stefan Collini

This unusual book explores the historical assumptions at work in the style of literary criticism that came to dominate English studies in the twentieth century. Stefan Collini shows how the work of critics renowned for their close attention to ‘the words on the page’ was in practice bound up with claims about the nature and direction of historical change, the interpretation of the national past, and the scholarship of earlier historians. Among the major figures examined in detail are T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, William Empson, and Raymond Williams, while there are also original discussions of such figures as Basil Willey, L. C. Knights, Q. D. Leavis, and Richard Hoggart. In the period between Eliot’s The Sacred Wood and Williams’s The Long Revolution, the writings of such critics came to occupy the cultural space left by academic history’s retreat into specialized, archive-bound monographs. Their work challenged the assumptions of the Whig interpretation of English history and entailed a revision of the traditional relations between ‘literary history’ and ‘general history’. Combining close textual analysis with wide-ranging intellectual history, this book both revises the standard story of the history of literary criticism and illuminates a central feature of the cultural history of twentieth-century Britain.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-15
Author(s):  
Vandana

In order to retrieve literary history in India, teleology operates on three levels: ancient, medieval and modern. As per the longue duree approach to the study of history, history is not an event or an object, but like the concept of time, is a configuration and a process. The history of the longue duree gives priority to long-term monumental historic patterns, moments and shifts in society, that is, the slow-paced structural processes which tend to have strong historical consequences. Similarly, languages and literatures, too, marked by historical catastrophes, undergo a process of sedimentation. For this reason, instead of a single literary history of South Asia, Sheldon Pollock proposes the concept of ‘literary cultures’ which allows room for ‘historical individuation’ of each culture rather than homogenising them merely for the sake of historical analysis. The basic questions that I have tried to look into through this study include: Why is it problematic to retrieve literary history in India? Why is it essential to have an alternative literary historiography of Dalit literature? How does Dalit subalternity differ from colonial subalternity? How the Dalit voice is disintegrated from within because of the prevalence of graded inequality? What constitutes the politics of history writing and canon formation in the third world countries like India where retrieving subaltern literary trends remain a problematic discourse?


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher S. van den Berg

Cicero's Brutus (46 BCE), a tour-de-force of intellectual and political history, was written amidst political crisis: Caesar's defeat of the republican resistance at the battle of Thapsus. This magisterial example of the dialogue genre capaciously documents the intellectual vibrancy of the Roman Republic and its Greco-Roman traditions. This book is the first study of the work from several distinct yet interrelated perspectives: Cicero's account of oratorical history, the confrontation with Caesar, and the exploration of what it means to write a history of an artistic practice. Close readings of this dialogue-including its apparent contradictions and tendentious fabrications-reveal a crucial and crucially productive moment in Greco-Roman thought. Cicero, this book argues, created the first nuanced, sophisticated, and ultimately 'modern' literary history, crafting both a compelling justification of Rome's oratorical traditions and also laying a foundation for literary historiography that abides to this day.


Author(s):  
Paul Johnston

The terms “Fireside Poets” or “Schoolroom Poets” are used to designate a group of five poets—William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell—who were popular in America in the latter half of the 19th century. Their poetry was read both around household firesides, often aloud by a mother or father to the gathered family, and in schoolrooms, where they inculcated wisdom and morals and patriotic feeling in America’s young. While they continued to be taught in K-12 classrooms well into the 20th century, they lost their standing first with critics and then with college and university professors with the coming of modernism in the early decades of the 20th century. Despite scattered attempts to restore both their critical reputations and their place in the curriculum, they continue to have only a marginal place in the minds of those most familiar with poetry. The Postmodern/New Historicist challenges to modernism find little of interest in them—Belknap’s A New Literary History of America (2009), for instance barely mentions them—while the neo-Victorian turn toward socially conscious literature, which might be expected to retrieve them, has so far paid them little mind, though some attention has recently been given to their environmental and Native American themes. But this marginalization may more reflect the marginalization of poetry as a whole in American society at large than a true estimate of their worth to common readers. While young students no longer read Longfellow’s Evangeline or Bryant’s “The Chambered Nautilus,” these poets may yet form the vanguard of a restoration of the enjoyment of poetry in America.


Author(s):  
Thibaut d'Hubert

The literary history of Bengal is characterized by a multilingual ecology that nurtured the development of Middle Bengali literature. It is around the turn of the second millennium, during the Pāla period (c. 8th–12th century), that eastern South Asia became a major region for the production of literary texts in Sanskrit and Apabhramsha. Early on, Bengal developed a distinct literary identity within the Sanskrit tradition and, despite abrupt political transitions and the fragmentation of the landscape of literary patronage, fundamental aspects of the literary culture of Pāla Bengal were transmitted during later periods. It was during the Sultanate period, from the 14th century onward that courtly milieus began to cultivate Middle Bengali. This patronage was mostly provided by upper-caste Hindu dignitaries and (in the case of lyric poetry at least) by the Sultans themselves. During the period ranging from the 15th to the early 19th centuries, vernacular literature can be divided into two broad categories: short narrative forms called padas or gītas (songs), which were often composed in an idiom derived from songs by the Old Maithili poet Vidyāpati (c. 1370–1460); and long narrative forms in Middle Bengali called pā̃cālīs, which are characterized by the alternation of the prosodic forms called paẏār and tripadī and the occasional insertion of songs. These poetic forms are the principal markers of the literary identity of Bengal and eastern South Asia (including Assam, Orissa, and Arakan). The Ḥusayn Shāhī period (1433–1486) contributed to the consolidation and expansion eastward of vernacular literary practices. Then, the political landscape became fragmented, and the multiplication of centers of literary production occurred. This fragmentation fostered the formation of new, locally grounded literary trends. These could involve the cultivation of specific genres, the propounding of various religious doctrines and ritual practices, the fashioning of new idioms fostered by either dialectal resources, classical idioms such as Sanskrit or Persian, and other vernacular poetic traditions (Maithili, Avadhi, Hindustani). The late Mughal and early colonial periods witnessed the making of new trends, characterized by a radical modification of the lexical component of the Middle Bengali idiom (i.e., Dobhāṣī), or the recourse to scripts other than Bengali (e.g., Sylhet Nagari/Kaithi, Arabic). The making of such new trends often implied changes in the way that authors interacted with Sanskrit, Persian, and other vernacular traditions. For instance, Persian played as crucial a role as Sanskrit in the various trajectories that Middle Bengali poetry took. On the one hand, Persian in Bengal had a history distinct from that of Bengali; on the other hand, it constituted a major traditional model for Bengali authors and, at times, Persianate education replaced the one based on Sanskrit as the default way to access literacy. Even if Middle Bengali poetic forms continued to be used in the context of various traditional performances, the making of a new literary language in the 19th century, the adoption of Western genres, and the development of prose and Western prosodic forms occasioned a radical break with premodern literary practices. From the second half of the 19th century, with the notable exception of some ritual and sectarian texts, access to the ancient literature of Bengal began to be mediated by philological analysis and textual criticism.


2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 449-482 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Blackburn

This [the Valluvar legend] is one of the traditions which are so repugnant to inveterate popular prejudice that they appear too strange for fiction, and are probably founded on fact. (Robert Caldwell 1875:132).If we now recognize that literary history is more than a history of literature, it is perhaps less widely accepted that the writing of literary history is an important subject for literary historiography. Yet literary histories are a rich source for understanding local conceptions of both history and literature. More accessible than archaeology, more tangible than ethnology, literary histories are culturally constructed narratives in which the past is reimagined in the light of contemporary concerns. Certainly in nineteenth-century India, the focus of this essay, literary history was seized upon as evidence to be advanced in the major debates of the time; cultural identities, language ideologies, civilization hierarchies and nationalism were all asserted and challenged through literary histories in colonial India. Asserted and challenged by Europeans, as well as Indians.


2021 ◽  
pp. 26
Author(s):  
Vasily A. Kuznetsov

On April 23, 2021, an outstanding Russian Arabist, Doctor of History, Principal Fellow of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences Bagrat Garegionovich Seyranyan celebrated his 90th birthday. His works on the recent history of Egypt and Yemen and the general problems of the socio-political development of the Arab countries in the 20th century have long become classic. Many of them were translated into Arabic and received well-deserved recognition abroad, and such books as “Egypt in the Struggle for Independence, 1945–1952” (Moscow, 1970) and “Evolution of the Social Structure of the Countries of the Arab East. Land Aristocracy in the 19th Century – the 60s of the 20th Century” (Moscow, 1991) entered the golden fund of world academy. The contribution of Bagrat Seyranyan to the training of new generations of orientalists is colossal. Under his leadership there were prepared more than 40 Ph.D. theses, he participated in authoring of numerous textbooks and teaching materials on the history of the Arab world. In this paper friends, colleagues and students address the hero of the day with words of recognition and gratitude.


Author(s):  
Jesse Swan

Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland, was born in 1585 or 1586 to Elizabeth (née Symondes) and Lawrence Tanfield in Burford close to Woodstock, where the Lady Tanfield’s relations were prominent, notably Queen Elizabeth’s Champion, Sir Henry Lee. The Lord Tanfield was an upwardly mobile lawyer of the Inner Temple, eventually becoming Lord Chief Justice of the Exchequer and extensive landlord in and around Burford, including famously, because of his grandson, Lucius Cary, the second Viscount Falkland, owning the estate known as Great Tew. Cary was an only child and was married into the Cary family, notable for its close kinship relations to Queen Elizabeth. Eventually having eleven children, with one dying in infancy, Cary is remarkable in Catholic history as a powerful and effective champion of Catholicism in the Caroline court and for bringing six of her children into the Catholic Church, while she is remarkable in English literary history for authoring the first original play in English by a woman to be published in print (the play is The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry) and being the first woman to author a modern-style history in English (that of the reign of Edward II). Exactly who and what kind of person Elizabeth Tanfield Cary, Viscountess Falkland, could be or should be has been and continues to be the most characteristic feature of the contemplations of Cary, from the time of her life to the present. Cary herself wondered who she could and should be as did many of the people of her life, including the daughter who was her first biographer, and the speculations and consideration of various possibilities continued, through the 19th century, when Cary was made into a champion of Anglo-Catholics, both masculine and feminine, and the 20th century, when Cary drew the interest of literary historians concerned with the development of modern biography and drama and then feminists concerned to correct masculinist literary history by reviving knowledge of the many quelled women writers. She should be gaining further interest as the centrality of translation in the early modern period is better integrated into emergent literary historiography. Some interest more recently has been expressed in departing from thinking about Cary as an individual and in various biographical ways in favor of using her works as touchstones for other matter, especially social and cultural, yet there continues to be interest in Cary as a woman and in her works as the expressions of a woman when modernity was still inchoate.


Author(s):  
Alys Moody

This book has traced a history of modernism’s decline and of its doubters. In post-Vichy France, the US circa 1968, and late apartheid South Africa, modernism’s fate was precarious, its reputation tarnished, and its politics reviled. The inescapability of the political in these contexts compromised the structural conditions of the autonomous literary field on which modernism had been built. In turn, it threw into crisis the philosophical defense of autonomy and the literary legacies of modernism, which grew out of and were guaranteed by this autonomous literary field. The stories we tell about late twentieth-century literary history reflect this dilemma. According to received wisdom, the period between 1945 and 1990 saw postmodernism replace modernism in both literature and scholarship, and new waves of postcolonial literature and theory discredited the Eurocentric specter of modernism. ...


Author(s):  
Elena A. Kalinina

Libraries are the integral part of cultural history of Russia. Widespread opening of school libraries in the Russian Empire began in the early 19th century. They began opening school libraries across Russia in the beginning of the 19th century. The paper aims to show the formation and development of libraries in educational institutions of Russia in the first half of the 19th century. The research is based on legislative documents regulating the functions of activity of school libraries and archival materials on the Russian history of the 19th century.


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