Romantic Portraits and Contemporary Audiences: Report from an Exhibition on the History of Emotions

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-166
Author(s):  
Anna Schram Vejlby

This article combines two issues: the actual emotional landscape of Danish portraiture from the first half of the nineteenth century and twenty-first-century audiences' response to these portraits. My research is based on written sources, art historical methods of the interpretation of visual material, and surveys among the audiences of the Hirschsprung Collection in Copenhagen, where the exhibition Keeping up Appearances. Portraits and emotions in the Golden Age takes place in the autumn of 2017. The exhibition is based on previous research that I have conducted into emotion in Danish portraiture and will be an occasion to reevaluate earlier surveys in order to present new conclusions in this article. The article explores the psychological and emotional circumstances that surround examples of some of the finest Danish portraits of the 1800s and how the modern individual can attain a more profound understanding of these images and the range of emotions they embody. The portraits' historical public had no doubts as to the deep and complex emotion embedded in them, but today they often prove more difficult to interpret since a prior understanding of the given period is required in order to fully grasp the people depicted and the different things they may have felt. When audiences see a portrait in the twenty-first century they are often compelled to interpret it in the same way that they would interpret living people. This creates a set of challenges in our relation to and understanding of a person in a portrait through a given time and space. I will use Lisa Feldman Barrett's research on emotional communication in my analyses of the encounter between the portrait and the modern viewer.

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ankhi Mukherjee

AbstractIn this introduction to the special issue, “Postcolonial Reading Publics,” Mukherjee charts the history of reception of two texts, one a Bengali novel published in British India, the other a Shakespeare adaptation staged in twenty-first-century Kolkata, to examine the fortuitous ways in which reading publics baffle or exceed authorial intention and the given text’s addressable objects. Offering summaries of and continuities among the four essays that constitute the volume, the introduction ends with an analysis of the salience of this discursive context for postcolonial writing, theory, and critique in a world literary frame.


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-58
Author(s):  
D. V. Mukhetdinov

The given study is focused on the history of the tradition of translations of the Qur’an into Spanish during the period of XV–XX centuries in the context of the process of acknowledgement and construction of the inclusive pluri- religious and pluri- lingual identity of the Spanish people. The examination of the evolution of this phenomenon during this historical period has shown that it can be divided into four major stages. The early stage (XV–XVII centuries) is characterized by positive trends, while in the following period (XVII–XIX centuries) the tradition was interrupted by the expulsion of Spanish Muslims from the areas of their historical residency. The tradition of translations was reborn in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in the context of the renaissance of the Muslim community in Spain. As a result of these processes, today, in the twenty- first century, the tradition of translation of the Qur’an into Spanish constitutes an integral part of the spiritual life of Spain, strongly contributing to a successful and genuine inter- religious dialogue and cooperation.


Author(s):  
Jan Moje

This chapter gives an overview of the history of recording and publishing epigraphic sources in Demotic language and script from the Late Period to Greco-Roman Egypt (seventh century bce to third century ce), for example, on stelae, offering tables, coffins, or votive gifts. The history of editing such texts and objects spans over two hundred years. Here, the important steps and pioneering publications on Demotic epigraphy are examined. They start from the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt found the Rosetta stone, until the twenty-first century.


1999 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 712
Author(s):  
Clark G. Reynolds ◽  
James L. George

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 187-207
Author(s):  
Peter Arnds

This article focuses on the concept of randomness as the absence of goal-oriented movement in literary walks. The literature of walking displays the happenstance of adventure as one of the great antidotes to our inane, highly technologized, digitalized twenty-first-century lifestyle. In the end, however, such randomness may reveal itself as not so random after all, as the purpose of the journey, its inherent telos, discloses itself while travelling or in hindsight. This article provides brief glimpses into the history of literary walks to examine this tension between apparent randomness and the non-random. By drawing on a range of cultural theories and theorizations of travel and especially of walking, I look at literary foot travel in the nineteenth century, the Romantics and American Transcendentalists, some great adventure hikes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the urban and rural flâneur. In doing so the article does not lose sight of the question of how we can instrumentalize the literature of walking for life during the current pandemic.


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