scholarly journals Female Voice in Urdu Poetry

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 758-767
Author(s):  
Zayana Nasir
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Female Voice ◽  
Feminist Movement ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Writing Style ◽  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
The Status

This essay aims at understanding the development and struggles of a ‘female voice’ within Urdu poetic tradition through the writings of women poets of the Nineteenth century in contrast to the women poets of the twentieth-century feminist movement. The women in traditional Urdu poetry have remained a silent cruel beloved, the image offered is that of a ‘feckless beloved, endowed with heavenly beauty, reigned: fair to face, doe-eyed, dark hair, tall and willowy, a woman who vacillated from indifference, shyness and modesty to wanton cruelty. The essay is an attempt to understand the level of autonomy of the female voice in the poems of women poets through the years. To portray the development of a feminine expression in Urdu poetry the paper will be ranging from the poems of tawaifs (courtesan) of the eighteenth century like Mah Laqa Chanda, their attempts to acquire a place within the patrilineal Urdu literary tradition; the rekhti tradition where men wrote poems in a female voice, to the twentieth century feminist poets like Kishwar Naheed and Fehmida Riaz. The paper is based on Hakim Fasihuddin Ranj’s anthology ‘Baharistan-i-Naz’ which provides a brief yet important introduction on the status of various tawaif poets within the Urdu literary circle; Rahat Azmi’s Halat-i-Mah Laqa, a biographical work on the life and works of Mah Laqa Bai Chanda; and Rukhsana Ahmad’s ‘We Sinful Women’, a compilation of the original and translated works of feminist women poets of twentieth-century Pakistan. Various secondary sources have been used to understand the dynamics behind the writing style of these poets and how similar terms came to be used for portraying completely distinct themes.

Heroic Aesthetics and Modernist Critique: Extrapolations from Bakhtin's Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity

Slavic Review ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 551-566 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilya Kliger
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
The Status ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Longue Durée ◽  
Modernist Discourse

Ilya Kliger addresses the question of Mikhail Bakhtin's intervention in modernist discourse by taking a step back from Bakhtin's views on modernist literature and outlining instead a more general Bakhtinian conception of the modernist condition as characterized by what Kliger calls “a crisis of authorship.” The article focuses on Bakhtin's early work in narratological aesthetics and situates it within the longue durée context of debates about the status of the subject of aesthetic experience and, more generally, of knowledge, debates that can provisionally be seen as originating at the end of the eighteenth century and coming to a head within the intellectual and creative milieu of twentieth-century modernism. Early Bakhtin helps us formulate a specifically modernist—by contrast with what will be called “transcendental” and “realist“—critique, a critique not limited to the field of literary analysis alone but applying to all forms of thinking that either presuppose abstract subject-object division or rely on modes of synthetic reconciliation.

The Sanctification of Yiddish among Hasidim

AJS Review ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-181
Author(s):  
Daniel Reiser
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Oral Culture ◽  
Early Stages ◽  
Vernacular Language ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

AbstractThe sanctification of Yiddish in hasidic society occurred primarily in the first half of the twentieth century and intensified in the wake of the Holocaust. The roots of this phenomenon, however, lie in the beginnings of Hasidism in the eighteenth century. The veneration of Yiddish is linked to the hasidic attitude towards vernacular language and the status of the ẓaddik “speaking Torah.” Hasidism represented—and represents—an oral culture in which the verbal transfer of its sacred content sanctifies the language spoken by its adherents, in this case, Yiddish. This article presents a theological and sociological examination of the various stages of the sanctification of Yiddish among Hasidim from the movement's early stages to the late twentieth century.

Furor Liturgicus: The Religious Concerns of Russian Poetry

2020 ◽  
pp. 395-411
Author(s):  
Martha M. F. Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
The Body ◽  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
The World ◽  
Russian Poetry ◽  
Modern Russian

In a now classic 1994 article Victor Zhivov counters the idea that the eighteenth-century quest to create a modern Russian literature represented a wholesale rejection of Russia’s previous literary tradition. He shows instead how poets appropriated elements of Orthodox liturgical tradition in a bid to adapt the classical notion of ‘furor poeticus’, marking it by the eruption of Church Slavonic norms into modern poetics. This chapter demonstrates how, as Zhivov contends, elements of Orthodox liturgical culture have continued to shape the modern Russian poetic tradition from the eighteenth century into the present. In particular, Russian poets have long presented poetry as uniquely able to transform the world by drawing on Orthodox imagery of theosis or divinization—the transfiguration of human life and thus the world, by the divine light and being. The liturgically inflected religious concerns of Russian poetry that sections address include prophecy, human co-creation with God, the problem of the body, and the role of silence.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Emily Sun
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Comparative Literature ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Republican China ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Disciplinary History ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of

The Introduction situates the book’s approach to comparative literature in relation to recent debates in the field over the status of “world literature.” It historicizes the notion of world literature in terms of the global disciplinary history of literary studies, contextualizing redefinitions of literature and efforts to write literary modernity in terms of connected yet heterogeneous epistemic shifts in eighteenth-century Europe and early twentieth-century China. It introduces the design of the book and offers chapter summaries. And it explains how efforts to write literary modernity in the asynchronous periods of Romantic England and Republican China constitute experiments also with new socio-political forms of life in different cultural contexts.

Emily Brontë and the Enthusiastic Tradition

2009 ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Emma Mason
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Emily Bronte ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Writing Style ◽  
Wuthering Heights ◽  
Edward Young ◽  
Religious Nature

Abstract This essay places Emily Brontë's poetry within a tradition of eighteenth-century discourses on enthusiasm of both a poetical and religious nature. The question of where Brontë's fervent writing style, most often associated with her fiery novel Wuthering Heights, originated has long been debated, and it is suggested here that one available answer is enthusiasm. Two sources of enthusiasm pertinent to Brontë are explored: Methodism, with its dislike of doctrine and pantheistic emphasis on nature; and eighteenth-century poetics, as defined through figures like John Dennis and Edward Young. Religious and poetical enthusiasm are necessarily merged for Brontë, both infused by a kind of spiritual sublimity and dependence on the idea of transport she employed within her verse. Recognizing this allows the reader to historicize this often cryptic poet and thus rescue her from more arguably tenuous claims which deem her a mystic, a Shelleyan heretic, a writer repressed by Christianity, a victim of a tragic romance or simply a very angry woman. By instead locating her within an enthusiastic literary tradition, Brontë may be seen not only as a woman writer aware of her religious environment, but as a Romantic whose poetry accords as much with the sentiment of Night Thoughts as Mont Blanc.

From 'Ā'esha to Nur Jahān: The Shaping of a Classical Persian Poetic Canon of Women

2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 148-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sunil Sharma
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Direct Effect ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
The Other ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Cultural Shift ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One ◽  
The Way

AbstractThe eighteenth century witnessed an interest in Persian women poets and attempts were made by writers of tazkeras to create a female canon of poets. The cultural shift in the Iranian-Indian interface at this time had a direct effect on the writing of Persian literary history that, on the one hand, resulted in the desire to maintain a universal vision regarding the Persianate literary past, exemplified by such writers as Vāleh Dāghestāni in Riāz al-sho' arā', and on the other hand, witnessed the increasingly popular move towards a more local and parochial version of the achievements of poets, as seen in Āzar Bēgdeli's Ātashkada and other writers of biographical dictionaries. The tri-furcation of the literary tradition (Iran, Turan [Transoxiana], India) complicated the way the memory of women poets would be accommodated and tazkera writers were often unencumbered by issues of nationalism and linguistic purity on this subject. However, ultimately the project of canonization of classical Persian women poets was a failure by becoming all inclusive.

Bunyan and America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel D.S. Rasmussen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Pilgrim's Progress ◽  
American Protestantism ◽  
Key Features

This chapter surveys the reception and appropriation of The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678; 1684) in American religious history and literary culture, arguing that, through a series of politically, theologically, and artistically motivated realignments, American adaptations of John Bunyan’s classic shaped key features of American Protestantism and of a distinctively American literary tradition. In the eighteenth century, The Pilgrim’s Progress was evoked to reconceive ‘progress’ along lines more commercial and technological than spiritual. In the nineteenth century, modernized spin-offs became important touchstones in the hotly contested debates over theological liberalism and conservatism. In the increasingly secular twentieth century, it was often either ‘emptied of religion’ and recast as ‘road literature’, or appropriated dialectically as a means for coming to terms with the perceived absurdity of the human condition. In sum, to quote Jean Bethke Elshtain, ‘the progress of Pilgrim’s Progress tells us a good bit about the American story’.

The Jesuit Rites Controversy

2018 ◽  
pp. 890-917
Author(s):  
Claudia von Collani
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Vatican Ii ◽  
China And India ◽  
The Status ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Global World ◽  
Ritual Practices ◽  
The Catholic Church

The rites controversies in China and India were part of a larger debate on the status of rites and customs in an already global world and within global Catholicism. To understand the deeper meanings of Chinese and Indian concepts and rites and assess their compatibility with Christianity, the Jesuits proposed a method based on dialogue with the local literati. First tolerated, the method of accommodation was finally forbidden by the Catholic Church in the early eighteenth century out of fear of religious syncretism, which led to the stigmatization of other cultures’ rites as “pagan” and “superstitious.” Therefore, Christianity remained a foreign and marginal religion in the East until the reform of the liturgy in the twentieth century, when the Indian ritual practices were accepted. After the decree “Ad Gentes” by Vatican II, the Catholic Church endeavored to bridge the gap between cultures and religions, partly created during the rites controversy.

Ottoman Madrasas: the Multiple Lives of Educational Institutions in Eighteenth-Century Syria1

2001 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Tamari
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Islamic Education ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
The Status ◽  
Multiple Lives

AbstractNineteenth- and twentieth-century students of educational institutions in Damascus have disparaged the Ottoman period as one of decline. This article challenges the assumptions and the conclusions of these historians by looking at the status of Islamic colleges, madrasas, during the eighteenth century. Though the construction of madrasas in the eighteenth century did not rival the "golden age" of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, all phases of Damascus' history as a center of Islamic education should be put in the context of alternating periods of ups and downs. Within such a context the Ottoman period in general and the eighteenth century in particular emerge as much more vibrant than historians once assumed.

‘The well-known, old, but still unbeaten track’: Women Poets and Irish Periodical Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century

2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Mulhall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Double Bind ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Substantial Body ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Irish Women ◽  
Under Construction

While neglected Irish male poets of the mid century have seen some recuperation in recent decades, the work of Irish women poets still languishes in obscurity. A growing body of scholarship has identified the need to bring critical attention to bear on this substantial body of work. In this essay I explore the positioning of Irish women poets in mid-century periodical culture, to flesh out the ways in which the terms of this ‘forgetting’ are already established within the overwhelmingly masculinist homosocial suppositions and idioms that characterized contemporary debates about the proper lineage and aesthetic norms for the national literary culture that was then under construction. Within the terms set by those debates, the woman writer was caught in the double bind that afflicted any woman wishing to engage in a public, politicized forum in post-revolutionary Ireland. While women poets engage in sporadic or oblique terms with such literary and cultural debates, more often their voices are absent from these dominant discourses – the logic of this absence has continued in the occlusion of these women poets from the national poetic canon.

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