Edward Lear

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 17-44
Author(s):  
Marco Graziosi

Edward Lear has secured a prominent position in the history of literature and travel writing thanks to his nonsense books and his journals; he is considered one of the most innovative zoological illustrators of the nineteenth century and is being rediscovered as a landscape painter in watercolour and oil. This article argues that he also deserves to be remembered among the precursors of modern comic art. His picture stories, though never published in his lifetime, represent an early instance of autobiographical graphic narrative, while his limericks, never out of print since 1861, introduced a radically innovative caricatural style and a conception of the relationship between pictures and text that strongly influenced modern comic artists.

Author(s):  
Hilary Kilpatrick

This chapter discusses modern Arabic literature as seen in the late nineteenth century by focusing on Jurji Ibrahim Murqus's contribution to Vseobshchaya Istoriya literatury (Universal History of Literature), edited by V. F. Korsh and A. I. Kirpichnikov. Murqus was a Syrian academic migrant who left Damascus in 1860. He studied at the Faculty of Oriental Languages of the University of St Petersburg and taught Arabic at the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages in Moscow. This chapter presents a slightly abridged rendering of Murqus's text, which concentrates on the evolution of the Arabic language, on prose writers and on translators. It also considers Murqus's position where prose genres are concerned, with particular emphasis on his recognition of the significance of travel writing, as well as his views on translation. Finally, it suggests that Mustafa Badawi would have disputed some of Murqus's statements on sound scholarly grounds.


Author(s):  
Cristina Vatulescu

This chapter approaches police records as a genre that gains from being considered in its relationships with other genres of writing. In particular, we will follow its long-standing relationship to detective fiction, the novel, and biography. Going further, the chapter emphasizes the intermedia character of police records not just in our time but also throughout their existence, indeed from their very origins. This approach opens to a more inclusive media history of police files. We will start with an analysis of the seminal late nineteenth-century French manuals prescribing the writing of a police file, the famous Bertillon-method manuals. We will then track their influence following their adoption nationally and internationally, with particular attention to the politics of their adoption in the colonies. We will also touch briefly on the relationship of early policing to other disciplines, such as anthropology and statistics, before moving to a closer look at its intersections with photography and literature.


Author(s):  
Samuel Asad Abijuwa Agbamu

AbstractIn his 1877 Storia della letteratura (History of Literature), Luigi Settembrini wrote that Petrarch’s fourteenth-century poem, the Africa, ‘is forgotten …; very few have read it, and it was judged—I don’t know when and by whom—a paltry thing’. Yet, just four decades later, the early Renaissance poet’s epic of the Second Punic War, written in Latin hexameters, was being promoted as the national poem of Italy by eminent classical scholar, Nicola Festa, who published the only critical edition of the epic in 1926. This article uncovers the hitherto untold story of the revival of Petrarch’s poetic retelling of Scipio’s defeat of Hannibal in Fascist Italy, and its role in promoting ideas of nation and empire during the Fascist period in Italy. After briefly outlining the Africa’s increasing popularity in the nineteenth century, I consider some key publications that contributed to the revival of the poem under Fascism. I proceed chronologically to show how the Africa was shaped into a poem of the Italian nation, and later, after Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, of Italy’s new Roman Empire. I suggest that the contestations over the significance of the Africa during the Fascist period, over whether it was a national poem of Roman revival or a poem of the universal ideal of empire, demonstrate more profound tensions in how Italian Fascism saw itself.


1979 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-390
Author(s):  
Frederick Sontag

For some time it seemed as if Christianity itself required us to say that ‘God is in history’. Of course, even to speak of ‘history’ is to reveal a bias for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forms of thought. But the justification for talking about the Christian God in this way is the doctrine of the incarnation. The centre of the Christian claim is that Jesus is God's representation in history, although we need not go all the way to a full trinitarian interpretation of the relationship between God and Jesus. Thus, the issue is not so much whether God can appear or has appeared within, or entered into, human life as it is a question of what categories we use to represent this. To what degree is God related to the sphere of human events? Whatever our answer, we need periodically to re-examine the way we speak about God to be sure the forms we use have not become misleading.


2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sydney J. Shep

Emoticons are usually associated with the digital age, but they have numerous precursors in both manuscript and print. This article examines the circulation of emotional icons in nineteenth-century typographical journals as a springboard to understanding the relationship between emotion, materiality, and anthropomorphism as well the pre-digital networks of the “typographical press system.” It draws on literature from textual and typographical analysis, including the history of punctuation. It also demonstrates the ubiquity of emoticons in contemporary society and culture outside the world of computers, text messaging, and chat rooms.


1990 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 767-771 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter Vandereycken ◽  
Ron Van Deth

SynopsisIt is common knowledge that puberty is characterized, among other phenomena, by a striking growth spurt. An exploration of the medical literature from previous centuries shows, however, that this feature of adolescence has attracted surprisingly little attention. Although the pubertal growth spurt was known to eighteenth-century physicians, it was neglected for about a century. The influential Belgian scientist Quetelet demonstrated a remarkable scotoma towards the phenomenon. It was only after his death in 1874 that the relationship between puberty and growth spurt became a scientifically established and recognized fact.


2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 605-628 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margery Masterson

AbstractThis article takes an unexplored popular debate from the 1860s over the role of dueling in regulating gentlemanly conduct as the starting point to examine the relationship between elite Victorian masculinities and interpersonal violence. In the absence of a meaningful replacement for dueling and other ritualized acts meant to defend personal honor, multiple modes of often conflicting masculinities became available to genteel men in the middle of the nineteenth century. Considering the security fears of the period––European and imperial, real and imagined––the article illustrates how pacific and martial masculine identities coexisted in a shifting and uneasy balance. The professional character of the enlarging gentlemanly classes and the increased importance of men's domestic identities––trends often aligned with hegemonic masculinity––played an ambivalent role in popular attitudes to interpersonal violence. The cultural history of dueling can thus inform a multifaceted approach toward gender, class, and violence in modern Britain.


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.


Author(s):  
Charissa J. Threat

This chapter traces the early evolution of nursing from the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth century, with particular emphasis on how nursing care became both gendered and racialized in civilian society. Focusing on the history of the Army Nurse Corps (ANC), it explores the relationship between the military and civilian populace to illuminate trends in nursing practices, debates about work, and concerns about war taking place in the larger civil society. It also examines how war and military nursing needs shaped the evolution of the modern nursing profession and how nursing became embroiled in the politics of intimate care, along with the implications for gender roles and race relations that permeated social relationships and interactions in civilian society. The chapter points to the Civil War as the transformative moment in the history of nursing in the United States, moving nursing from an unpaid obligation to a paid occupation. Finally, it discusses the impact of the introduction of formal nurse training during the last quarter of the nineteenth century on African American nurses.


1999 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 930-953
Author(s):  
Gillis J. Harp

Despite renewed scholarly interest in Evangelical Episcopalianism recently, important questions persist about the party's demise in the last third of the nineteenth century. Though church historians have advanced some plausible explanations for its disappearance, these interpretations need now to be tested by more narrowly focused studies of individuals, both committed party men and their less partisan allies. Concomitant questions also linger about the relationship between Evangelicals and the emergent Broad Church movement within the American church and within the Anglican communion generally. Exactly how did Low Church Evangelicals become Low Church liberals by the turn of the century? More importantly, this subject has a broader significance for the history of American Christianity at large. Pursuing the foregoing questions can shed considerable light on the parallel transformation of a moderately Reformed American evangelicalism into turn-of-the-century liberal Protestantism.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document