Electricity Comes to the Countryside: Visual Representations of a Connected Countryside in the Early Twentieth Century

2018 ◽  
pp. 50-66
Author(s):  
Rosemary Shirley

In this chapter, Rosemary Shirley analyses an extensive range of visual propaganda, diagrams and informational drawings from the British Electrical Development Agency (BEDA) published during the interwar years, advancing a reading of the English countryside as a place of networked inter-connection, rather than the more usual characterisation of remoteness and isolation. Materials focussing on rural electrificiation are particularly instructive for studies of rural modernity because they are relatively rare examples of material designed to communicate ideas about the countryside and modernity to the people who lived and worked in rural places. Through analysis of BEDA’s facinating contribution to the visual cultures of rural modernity, this chapter aims to complicate received ideas of the rural as a victim of modernity, building instead an understanding of the English countryside and its inhabitants as active agents in processes which continue to shape our understanding of what it means to be rural.

2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-97
Author(s):  
Mimasha Pandit

A new image was engendered in twentieth-century Bengal. The image clarified the direction of public opinion, whether it sanctified the actions of the colonizers or that of the colonized. In the process, those who chose to side with the colonized developed a close bond with the others who became a part of the camaraderie. The resultant image, envisioned by the people, did not come to them naturally; it was produced in their mind. The word of the age, printed and performed, helped produce this vision using the context as an index of reference. Words were transmitted and circulated among large number of people, who came to know, discuss and debate it. Despite the strict vigilance of the Raj that censured objectionable words, it nevertheless reached the public. Words found expression in ephemeral media that made the words disseminated untraceable. One such medium was the placard. This article analyses the placards circulated and posted, during the early twentieth century, and delves deep into the process of demonstration and persuasion adopted by the placards to invoke an image of nation among the Bengalis.


1997 ◽  
Vol 50 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 421-453 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Notley

Late nineteenth-century journalistic criticism in Vienna offers many precedents for Paul Bekker's interpretation of the symphony. Beethoven's symphonies provided the model for an aesthetics of the genre-couched in metaphors connecting it to "the people"-that motivated the reception of works by Brahms and Bruckner. Activists who wished to inaugurate symphonic Volksconcerte in the city took the figurative utopian function of the genre literally. Though their efforts were confounded not only by institutionalized elitism but also by the preferences of the Viennese Volk for other kinds of music, their work bore fruit in the early twentieth century with the founding of the Wiener Konzertverein and the Arbeiter-Symphonie-Konzerte.


2018 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-214
Author(s):  
Yu-jen Liu

Abstract This article explores how the category “Chinese art” was articulated and consolidated in the early twentieth century by focusing on Stephen Bushell's Chinese Art, the first book in English defined in terms of this category. Bushell's monograph highlights the intercultural character of the category, which was transformed in its content and cultural significance, when ostensibly the same authentic knowledge, articulated in verbal and visual representations, was moved from China to Europe and back again. The article starts by examining how Bushell's insider knowledge of Chinese art was transformed to fit the institutional setting of the Victoria and Albert Museum. It then explores how the authoritative knowledge of Chinese art communicated in Bushell's book was appropriated in China by the journal Guocui xuebao 國粹學報 (Journal of National Essence) in the context of attempts to revive national culture. Both cases involved hitherto unnoticed repetitions of text and images. By analyzing the mechanism informing these repetitions, this article reveals the entangled history behind the distinctive articulations of “Chinese art” in Britain and in China. Moreover, the analysis shows how the same elements, whether words or pictures, acquired a substantially different significance as they moved between cultures. This is exemplified by the formulation of the newly emergent classifying category Zhongguo meishupin 中國美術品 (“Chinese art objects”) in Guocui xuebao.


2018 ◽  
Vol 214 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-142
Author(s):  
Instructor Marwa Ghazi Mohammed

         Lillian Hellman was an American playwright whose name was associated with the moral values of the early twentieth century. Her plays were remarkable for the moral themes that dealt with the evil. They were distinguished, as well, for the depiction of characters who are still alive in the American drama for their vivid personalities, effective roles and realistic portrayal. This paper studies Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes as a criticism of the American society in the early twentieth-century. Though America was a country built on hopes and dreams of freedom and happiness. During the Great Depression, happiness was certainly not present in many people's lives. The presence of alternate political ideas, decay of love and values increased life's problems, and considered a stress inducing factor were popular themes to be explored during the Great Depression. America, the land of promises, became an empty world revolving around money and material well-being and which turned the people bereft of love, and human values. Hellman’s play presents the real fox, represented by the political and material world, as the one responsible for the raise of new kind of people, the little foxes, and the decline of human value.


2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tran Tung Ngoc ◽  
Nguyen Le Thu

East Asian literature in the early twentieth century witnessed the emergence of many great authors who gathered all personality of a patriot - writer - historian - revolutionary activist. They emphasized literature does not serve artistic purposes, but social purposes, which touch the heart. Literature at this time conveyed the stream of national consciousness, nationalism, independence and freedom to all of the people and promoted their patriotism and the spirit of fighting for the nation and the people. This paper focuses on analyzing the nationalist ideology in the works of Phan Boi Chau and Shin Chae-ho in the history of literature of Vietnam and Korea in the early twentieth century. Thereby, the research provides an overview of the common characteristics of the nationalist literature in East Asia. In the research content, this paper recognizes the nationalist ideology of Korean and Vietnamese intellectuals in the transformation of the historical, political and social situation in the early twentieth century. On that basis, this paper identifies the characteristics of nationalism in Shin Chae-ho’s and Phan Boi Chau's works.


Author(s):  
Benjamin A. Schupmann

The Introduction analyzes both how the popular appeal of the Nazi and Communist parties posed a dilemma for Weimar democracy and how Schmitt thought this dilemma illustrated the broader problem mass democracy posed for twentieth-century constitutional democratic states. The dilemma begged the question of whether the will of the people could be legitimately constrained. The Introduction contextualizes Schmitt’s analysis of this dilemma by reconstructing nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates in German jurisprudence about the nature of valid law, arguing that Schmitt’s thought emerged out of an anti-positivist movement. This Introduction also assesses some of the problems facing scholarship of Schmitt, including his occasionalism and anti-Semitism. While acknowledging how damning these charges are, it argues that Schmitt’s state and constitutional theory can be separated from his personal failures and that his thought provides a valuable and original solution to the problems modern mass democracy poses.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 211-226
Author(s):  
Gertjan Broek

MIGRANTS AROUND ANNE FRANK’S ACHTERHUIS The story of Anne Frank, her family and her companions, hiding from persecution by the Nazi regime, is a well-known and – at a first glance – very Dutch one. The main divide between those in hiding and their helpers was that between being Jewish and being non-Jewish, which in those precarious times was of course the essential ‘divide’ imposed on the people of occupied Europe. But a closer look at the group of people around Anne seen from the perspective of migration and (national) identity produces different dividing lines and insights. Their life stories, converging in that one Amsterdam warehouse, ref lect many aspects of early twentieth-century European history.


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