scholarly journals Wordsworth’s Lucy poems as the Reflections of the French Revolution: A New Historicist Study

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (45) ◽  
pp. 513-546
Author(s):  
Mohammed Atta Salman
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Power Structure ◽  
New Historicism ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Political Discourses ◽  
Dominant Discourses ◽  
Do So ◽  
The French Revolution

Abstract  The current study takes a New Historic outlook toward William Wordsworth’s the “Lucy Poems” and believes that by a minute scrutiny of these poems we can expose the power structure and the dominant discourses that according to New Historicism have shaped the poet’s character, society and world. Accordingly, the paper suggests that the poet through symbolic and non-symbolic ways has embedded historical and political facts in these poems. To do so, the research will reveal some controversial correspondences among these poems, William Wordsworth’s life and historical facts of the French Revolution. To support this idea, the study will bring quotations not only from modern conspicuous literary critics but also from the poets and Romantic contemporaries to show how the historical and political discourses of the period have greatly influenced both William Wordsworth and even the literature of the whole era, i.e., Romanticism. As a matter of fact, this research intends to connect the “Lucy Poems” to the contemporary historical context and the poet’s ideals of the Revolution in France. The findings, however, reveal that William Wordsworth has been submissive to the historical events of his time.

PROTESTANTISM AND PROGRESS IN THE YEAR XII: CHARLES VILLERS'SESSAY ON THE SPIRIT AND INFLUENCE OF LUTHER'S REFORMATION(1804)

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 303-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL PRINTY
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Social Struggle ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Broad Interest ◽  
The French Revolution

This article examines Charles Villers'sEssay on the Spirit and Influence of Luther's Reformation(1804) in its intellectual and historical context. Exiled from France after 1792, Villers intervened in important French and German debates about the relationship of religion, history, and philosophy. The article shows how he took up a German Protestant discussion on the meaning of the Reformation that had been underway from the 1770s through the end of the century, including efforts by Kantians to seize the mantle of Protestantism for themselves. Villers's essay capitalized on a broad interest in the question of Protestantism and its meaning for modern freedom around 1800. Revisiting the formation of the narrative of Protestantism and progress reveals that it was not a logical progression from Protestant theology or religion but rather part of a specific ideological and social struggle in the wake of the French Revolution and the collapse of the Old Regime.

scholarly journals History as a discourse in Jeanette Winterson's "The passion" : the politics of alterity

2000 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
María del Mar Asensio Aróstegui
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Political Choice ◽  
Historiographic Metafiction ◽  
Historical Material ◽  
The Fantastic ◽  
The French Revolution

Set in the historical context of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, Jeanette Winterson's The Passion is an outstanding example of the kind of fiction that Elizabeth Wesseling (1991: vii) calls postmodernist historical novels, that is, "novelistic adaptations of historical material". Besides, being profoundly self-reflexive, the novel also falls under Linda Hutcheon's (1988) category of historiographic metafiction. The present paper focuses on Winterson's political choice of two representatives of historically silenced groups, a soldier and a woman, who use two apparently opposed narrative modes, the historical and the fantastic, to tell a story that both exposes history as a discursive construct and provides an alternative fantastic discourse for the representation of feminine desire.

Spectacular History and the Politics of Theater: Sympathetic Arts in the Shadow of the Bastille

PMLA ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 118 (5) ◽  
pp. 1305-1319 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth D. Samet
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Marie Antoinette ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Rational Inquiry

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's meditations on artificial society's perversions of natural sentiment, specifically on the theater's contribution to societal degeneration, provide a historical context for the dialogue between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine about the nature of the French Revolution. Much of the debate over the political rights of man consisted of an analysis of his affective rights. It was in many ways a controversy over what could be considered a moral method for attaching an individual's sympathies. The problem of affective liberation stands behind Paine's quarrel with Burke's Reflections and with the victim Burke offered for the world's consideration in that text: Marie Antoinette. For Burke the emotions aroused by theater and by the tragic representation of historical events could liberate the spectator into constructive action. Exposing Burke's own affective imprisonment by the spectacle of revolution, Paine demanded instead a liberation through rational inquiry.

scholarly journals National or people’s sovereignty?

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 257-263
Author(s):  
Fazil Zeynalov
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The People ◽  
Gradual Process ◽  
The French Revolution

In the article the author provides a comparative analysis of these two notions. He explains through the examples that owing to the historical context during the French Revolution, the gradual process of transforming the bearer of the sovereignty has started, and shift of power from the king to the collective unit has caused several disputes and discussions of theoretical nature. The collective unit, called the people or the nation, began to play the role of carrier of sovereignty, acting at the same time as the source of supreme power. Belonging of sovereignty to the people or the nation is manifested in the forms how the power presented to their representatives. Each of these forms has its own theoretical peculiarities. However, in the wake of historic developments the manifestation of one or another form of sovereignty practically loses its relevance. Regardless of the forms of expression of belonging of sovereignty to the people or the nation, sovereignty displays various and progressive elements of these concepts (renunciation of imperative mandate in favor of representative mandate, sovereignty is exercised through representatives rather than delegates)

Presidential Address

1915 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 1-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. H. Firth
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
Special Kind ◽  
The South ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Do So ◽  
The French Revolution

When I remembered that I had to address the Society to-day I thought at first of choosing some subject remote from the troubles of the moment, something analogous to my former addresses on the development of historical studies in England. But it was not possible to do so. The events which are in progress now have too absorbing an interest to permit us to abstract ourselves from them, for which of us is not in some way or other intimately affected by them? Besides that, these events have for any historian not merely the interest which all of us share, but an interest of a very special kind. The historian sees in action before his eyes the abstractions he has been reading about in books all his life: the struggle of races, the conflict of opposing ideas, the operation of economic laws, the development of historical tendencies, and perceives what these phrases really mean when they are translated into facts. There has been no such open conflict of ideals since the wars of the French Revolution. There has been no such huge conflict of races since the time when the Teutonic peoples moved westward to overthrow Roman civilisation and plant their own in its place. One of Milton's similes for the Satanic host pictures their coming:‘A multitude like which the populous North Poured never from her frozen loins to pass Rhene or the Danaw, when her barbarous sons Came like a deluge on the South, and spread Beneath Gibraltar to the Libyan sands.’

The Man Who Was Not Napoleon

Worldview ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 23 (9) ◽  
pp. 22-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
David V. Erdman
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Retrospective Account ◽  
New Republic ◽  
The French Revolution

William Wordsworth, born in 1770 and a "blissful" twentytwo when in Paris in the Year One of the new Republic, has given us The Prelude (1805), a very intelligible retrospective account of his enthusiasm and commitment during the heavenly dawn of the great Rebellion called the French Revolution. But he also hints, rather ambiguously, at involvement in some pathetic abortive rebellion during his "Residence in France," some murderous scheme of action in which, if he had continued in France, he might have "perished.... A poor mistaken and bewildered offering."

scholarly journals The Portrayal of the French Revolution in Charles Dickens’s

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (126) ◽  
pp. 57-72
Author(s):  
Isra Hasan Jassim
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
The Past ◽  
The French Revolution

Literature is the record by which human feelings, political incidents, geographical sites, and historical events are preserved. Thus, readers may resort to a book written by a historian as well as a historical novel in order to gain more knowledge about history. Despite the fact that many novels incorporate a sense of history, historical novels are read for their themes, settings, and historical events. Such novels represent societies in the past and make use of history to juxtapose factual and fictional characters in a historical situation.

scholarly journals Investing in a Third: Colonization, Religious Fundamentalism, and Adolescence

2014 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 36-45
Author(s):  
Elaine P. Miller
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
Religious Fundamentalism ◽  
Keynote Address ◽  
The Political ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
New Form ◽  
The Way ◽  
The French Revolution

In her keynote address to the Kristeva Circle 2014, Julia Kristeva argued that European Humanism dating from the French Revolution paradoxically paved the way for “those who use God for political ends” by promoting a completely and solely secular path to the political. As an unintended result of this movement this path has led, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, to the development of a new form of nihilism that masks itself as revolutionary but in fact is the opposite, in Kristeva’s view.  Kristeva analyzed the culture of religious fundamentalism as “adolescent” in the sense that the adolescent, in contrast to the child, is a believer rather than a questioner.  Although the psychoanalytic consideration of religious fundamentalism added a new dimension to attempts to explain the increase of this phenomenon in the late 20th and 21st centuries, Kristeva’s subsequent linkage of fundamentalism to the revolts in French suburbs in 2005 and beyond fell short of an insightful critique by neglecting the historical context of France’s colonial history.

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