Metre and Temporality: Between Hegel and Benjamin

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marion Thain
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Theoretical Basis ◽  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Verse Forms

Chapter 2 is the first of three chapters that make up ‘Part I’ of the book. This part focuses on issues of lyric temporality. As the first chapter in this part, Chapter 2 builds a conceptual and theoretical basis that will underpin the poetic case studies offered in the subsequent two chapters. It situates aestheticist lyric poetry, historically and conceptually, between Hegelian and Benjaminian ideas of lyric temporality; and argues for the need to read aestheticist poetry’s metrical structures as responsive to this frame. Drawing on a wide range of writings on poetic meter (from Romantic to modernist and beyond), it offers a new understanding of the significance of the strict verse forms revived in the 1870s and popular with aestheticist poets over the rest of the nineteenth century. Ultimately arguing that the revival of medieval verse forms in Parnassian poetry becomes (in certain ways) a response to the pressures of modernity, this chapter offers a new way of understanding the operation of those forms.

Form and Transaction: Lyric Touch

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marion Thain
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Theoretical Basis ◽  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Spatial Presence ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Verse Forms

Chapter 5 is the first of three chapters that make up ‘Part II‘ of the book. This part focuses on issues of lyric spatiality (both the spatial presence of the poem on the page, and the idea of lyric as a communication across space). As the first chapter in this part, Chapter 5 builds a conceptual and theoretical basis that will underpin the poetic case studies offered in the subsequent two chapters. It responds to two (related) central problematics in aestheticist lyric poetry: first the accusation that its strict verse forms killed the aural energy of lyric in a poetry primarily made for the eye not the ear; secondly the threat of solipsism in a lyric exchange that had been dubbed by John Stuart Mill, earlier in the century, a ‘soliloquy’. Framed between Mill’s discourse on lyric isolation and the new phenomenological modes that were entering into aesthetics from psychology in the late nineteenth century, this chapter finds a distinctive mode of lyric encounter and a new lyric somatics in aestheticist poetry.

The Sudanese Mahdī: Frontier Fundmentalist

1979 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Voll
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Third World ◽  
Charismatic Leader ◽  
The Third ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World ◽  
African Context ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Third World

The Sudanese Mahdī has been pictured as a villain, as a hero, as a reactionary, as an anti-imperialist revolutionary, and in many other ways. The romance and excitement of the nineteenth-century Mahdiyya has inspired novels and movies, while the many faceted reality of the movement has caught the attention of a wide range of scholars in search of case studies of specific phenomena. In recent years the Mahdī has been used as an example of a ‘charismatic’ leader,1 the founder of a religionpolitical party in the ‘third world,’2 the leader of a millenarian revolt,3 an African rebel against alien rule,4 and a Semitic messiah in an African context. Many of these analyses are the constructive products of the changing situation in the world of contemporary historical studies. Each tends to reflect a broader analytical concern aroused by modern developments.

Desire Lines: Subjectivity and Collectivity

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marion Thain
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Urban Geography ◽  
Theoretical Basis ◽  
Dramatic Monologues

Chapter 8 is the first of three chapters that make up ‘Part III’ of the book. This part focuses on issues of lyric subjectivity. As the first chapter in this part, Chapter 8 builds a conceptual and theoretical basis that will underpin the poetic case studies offered in the subsequent two chapters. This chapter sets up a frame that positions aestheticist lyric between the legacy of an introspective Hegelian lyric subjectivity that surfaced in British Romantic poetics, and the growing anxiety that prompted the discovery of more communal poetic forms within lyric. Complicating scholarly narratives that see mid-century dramatic monologues as the quintessential nineteenth-century response to such anxieties, this chapter proposes the model of ‘desire lines’ (taken from urban geography) to recognise the capacity of lyric poems of the period to invoke models of lyric chorus, rather than lyric solipsism.

Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Goldhill
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Victorian Art ◽  
Victorian Science ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels

How did the Victorians engage with the ancient world? This book is an exploration of how ancient Greece and Rome influenced Victorian culture. Through Victorian art, opera, and novels, the book examines how sexuality and desire, the politics of culture, and the role of religion in society were considered and debated through the Victorian obsession with antiquity. Looking at Victorian art, it demonstrates how desire and sexuality, particularly anxieties about male desire, were represented and communicated through classical imagery. Probing into operas of the period, the book addresses ideas of citizenship, nationalism, and cultural politics. And through fiction—specifically nineteenth-century novels about the Roman Empire—it discusses religion and the fierce battles over the church as Christianity began to lose dominance over the progressive stance of Victorian science and investigation. Rediscovering some great forgotten works and reframing some more familiar ones, the book offers extraordinary insights into how the Victorian sense of antiquity and our sense of the Victorians came into being. With a wide range of examples and stories, it demonstrates how interest in the classical past shaped nineteenth-century self-expression, giving antiquity a unique place in Victorian culture.

Myths of the Underworld in Contemporary Culture

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Fletcher
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
First Century ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Cinematic Adaptation ◽  
Narrative Tradition ◽  
Wide Range

Stories of a visit to the realm of the dead and a return to the upper world are among the oldest narratives in European literature, beginning with Homer’s Odyssey and extending to contemporary culture. This volume examines a series of fictional works by twentieth- and twenty-first century authors, such Toni Morrison and Elena Ferrante, which deal in various ways with the descent to Hades. Myths of the Underworld in Contemporary Culture surveys a wide range of genres, including novels, short stories, comics, a cinematic adaptation, poetry, and juvenile fiction. It examines not only those texts that feature a literal catabasis, such as Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, but also those where the descent to the underworld is evoked in more metaphorical ways as a kind of border crossing, for instance Salman Rushdie’s use of the Orpheus myth to signify the trauma of migration. The analyses examine how these retellings relate to earlier versions of the mythical theme, including their ancient precedents by Homer and Vergil, but also to post-classical receptions of underworld narratives by authors such as Dante, Ezra Pound, and Joseph Conrad. Arguing that the underworld has come to connote a cultural archive of narrative tradition, the book offers a series of case studies that examine the adaptation of underworld myths in contemporary culture in relation to the discourses of postmodernism, feminism, and postcolonialism.

Explanation Beyond Causation

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Philosophical Study ◽  
Accurate Information ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Causal Information ◽  
Causal Explanations ◽  
Turn On ◽  
Detailed Case ◽  
Wide Range

Explanations are very important to us in many contexts: in science, mathematics, philosophy, and also in everyday and juridical contexts. But what is an explanation? In the philosophical study of explanation, there is long-standing, influential tradition that links explanation intimately to causation: we often explain by providing accurate information about the causes of the phenomenon to be explained. Such causal accounts have been the received view of the nature of explanation, particularly in philosophy of science, since the 1980s. However, philosophers have recently begun to break with this causal tradition by shifting their focus to kinds of explanation that do not turn on causal information. The increasing recognition of the importance of such non-causal explanations in the sciences and elsewhere raises pressing questions for philosophers of explanation. What is the nature of non-causal explanations—and which theory best captures it? How do non-causal explanations relate to causal ones? How are non-causal explanations in the sciences related to those in mathematics and metaphysics? This volume of new essays explores answers to these and other questions at the heart of contemporary philosophy of explanation. The essays address these questions from a variety of perspectives, including general accounts of non-causal and causal explanations, as well as a wide range of detailed case studies of non-causal explanations from the sciences, mathematics and metaphysics.

Veiling Esther, Unveiling Her Story

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam J. Silverstein
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Religious Background ◽  
Literary Context ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Selection Of

This book examines the ways in which the biblical book of Esther was read, understood, and used in Muslim lands, from ancient to modern times. It zeroes-in on a selection of case studies, covering works from various periods and regions of the Muslim world, including the Qur’an, premodern historical chronicles and literary works, the writings of a nineteenth-century Shia feminist, a twentieth-century Iranian dictionary, and others. These case studies demonstrate that Muslim sources contain valuable materials on Esther, which shed light both on the Esther story itself and on the Muslim peoples and cultures that received it. The book argues that Muslim sources preserve important, pre-Islamic materials on Esther that have not survived elsewhere, some of which offer answers to ancient questions about Esther, such as the meaning of Haman’s epithet in the Greek versions of the story, the reason why Mordecai refused to prostrate himself before Haman, and the literary context of the “plot of the eunuchs” to kill the Persian king. Furthermore, throughout the book we will see how each author’s cultural and religious background influenced his or her understanding and retelling of the Esther story: In particular, it will be shown that Persian Muslims (and Jews) were often forced to reconcile or choose between the conflicting historical narratives provided by their religious and cultural heritages respectively.

Women and Slavery in the Nineteenth Century

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daina Ramey Berry ◽  
Nakia D. Parker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Enslaved Women ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Slave Traders ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
Kinship Bonds

This chapter analyzes the lives of enslaved women in the nineteenth-century United States and the Caribbean, an era characterized by the massive expansion of the institution of chattel slavery. Framing the discussion through the themes of labor, commodification, sexuality, and resistance, this chapter highlights the wide range of lived experiences of enslaved women in the Atlantic World. Enslaved women’s productive and reproductive labor fueled the global machinery of capitalism and the market economy. Although enslaved women endured the constant exploitation and commodification of their bodies, many actively resisted their enslavement and carved out supportive and sustaining familial, marital, and kinship bonds. In addition, this essay explains how white, native, and black women could be complicit in the perpetuation of chattel slavery as enslavers and slave traders. Considering women in their roles as the oppressed and the oppressors contributes and expands historical understandings of gender and sexuality in relation to slavery.

Bandstands and Modernity: Constructing Spanish Cities Musically

2021 ◽  
pp. 009614422097612
Author(s):  
Gloria Araceli Rodriguez-Lorenzo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Interaction ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Urban Modernity ◽  
Sonic Environment

This article analyses the interplay between sound and urban spaces in Spain, from the end of nineteenth century until 1936. Free outdoor concerts performed by bands in public urban spaces offered a new aural experience audience from across an increasing range of very diverse social groups, almost ritualizing both the practice of listening to music and the spaces in which that music was heard—all at a time when those very spaces were changing, in a way which mirrored the wider reconfiguration and modernization of Spanish cities. Case studies focusing on political, social, and cultural changes in urban spaces are analyzed, in order to understand how cities developed new spaces for social interaction, the modern sonic environment, and the ways in which those cities have appropriated culture for their citizens, as a symbol of urban modernity.

A Philippine ‘coolie trade’: Trade and exploitation of Chinese labour in Spanish colonial Philippines, 1850–98

2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 457-483
Author(s):  
Mònica Ginés-Blasi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
Commercial Activities ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Coolie Trade

Chinese immigration to the Philippines has traditionally been studied in relation to commercial activities. But between 1850 and 1898, there was an unparalleled influx of Chinese labourers, which raised the number of Chinese residents to 100,000. This influx was fuelled by the abundant profits obtained by Chinese brokers and foremen, Spanish institutions and authorities in Manila, consuls in China, and Spanish and British ship captains, all of whom extracted excessive fees and taxes from the labourers. The trade in and the exploitation of Chinese labourers in the Philippines have yet to be thoroughly researched. This article shows that the import and abuse of Chinese labourers in and to the Philippines continued throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, and that, despite some anti-Chinese Spanish colonial rhetoric, a wide range of actors and institutions, both in China and in the Philippines, took advantage of this unprecedented inflow of immigrants.

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