History/Genealogy/Gothic: Godwin, Scott and their Progeny

2019 ◽  
pp. 33-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Miles
Keyword(s):  
Herman Melville ◽  
Mary Shelley ◽  
Charles Brockden Brown ◽  
New Historicism ◽  
Historical Romance ◽  
The Past

This essay argues that William Godwin's theory of historical romance may be placed in productive dialogue with Michel Foucault's influential preference for Nietzschean 'genealogy' over conventional history. For both, a narrative capable of unfolding the motive forces of history will necessarily be dispersed, contingent and fragmentary. This line of genealogical Gothic is traceable from Godwin through Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley in England, and through Charles Brockden Brown and Herman Melville in America. In genealogical Gothic, history is expressed as trauma, as an originating event that leads to haunting and repetition experienced by the sufferer as (to use Melville's term) 'tranced grief'. These narratives may be contrasted with Walter Scott's versions of the historical romance, which look to narrate some kind of historical resolution to the conflicts of the past. In this respect, genealogical Gothic relates to Scott as New Historicism does to grand narratives.

Ancestral Piles

2018 ◽  
pp. 519-541
Author(s):  
Sean Moreland
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Mary Shelley ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
Charles Brockden Brown ◽  
William Godwin ◽  
Ann Radcliffe ◽  
Horace Walpole ◽  
Architectural Model ◽  
Walter Scott

This essay examines Poe’s conception and use of the Gothic via his engagements with the work of earlier writers from Horace Walpole through Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin, Charles Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley, and E. T. A. Hoffmann. Poe’s uses of the Gothic, and his relationship with the work of these writers, was informed by his philosophical materialism and framed by his dialogue with the writings of Sir Walter Scott. Tracing these associations reveals Poe’s transformation of the idea of “Gothic structure” from an architectural model, the ancestral pile of the eighteenth-century Gothic, to one of energetic transformation, the electric pile featured in many of Poe’s tales.

A sense of place: historicism, whither wilt?

2018 ◽  
pp. 95-112
Author(s):  
Christopher D’Addario
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Place ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
New Historicism ◽  
Cognitive Poetics ◽  
New Formalism ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Phenomenology ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Thomas Browne

In the last decade, the historicism that had become so familiar to us by the turn of the century has increasingly come under challenge, revised, reconsidered and often rejected from a number of different directions. This chapter explores recent innovations in and challenges to understanding the relationship between text and context, including the new formalism, historical phenomenology, and cognitive poetics. Of particular interest here are the innovations and difficulties that can come with attempting an historicism grounded in local affects and perceptions, with examples drawn from Thomas Browne and W. G. Sebald, among others. In the process, D’Addario considers the appeal of alternative literary histories, the difficulties of periodisation, and the legacies of New Historicism. The chapter ends with a gesture to embracing studies that admit their speculative nature, that embrace and accept their historicism as novel re-imaginings of the past.

Embodied Antiquity

2020 ◽  
pp. 191-226
Author(s):  
James Uden
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Mary Shelley ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Emotional Connection ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
The Past ◽  
Verse Drama ◽  
The Last Man

The final chapter of the book turns to the nexus between classical antiquity, Romanticism, and the Gothic, as it is reflected in the writings of Mary Shelley. “Reanimation” has been frequently identified as a consistent trope in Shelley’s work. This chapter argues, by contrast, that Shelley repeatedly creates fantastic scenarios in which ancient and modern times meet, and modernity is revealed to be weak or insufficient when faced with the strength and vitality of the ancient world. The chapter turns first to Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), in which Victor Frankenstein’s efforts at creation are implicitly compared to the ancient model announced in the subtitle, and judged a grotesque failure. Then, the chapter turns to a series of texts written while Shelley was living in Italy—the short story “Valerius, the Reanimated Roman,” her novella Mathilda, and her verse drama Proserpine—each of which dramatizes the unsatisfying and disappointed search for emotional connection with characters from antiquity. Finally, the chapter turns to Shelley’s end-of-days novel The Last Man (1826). This novel’s many allusions to Rome and antiquity reinforce the gulf that separates an idealized antiquity from a doomed, weakening present. Shelley’s writings vividly demonstrate the seductive pleasures of engaging with ideas from antiquity, but ultimately she expresses little hope that we can truly connect with the frightening giants of the past.

“Children of Liberty”: Idealist Historiography in Staël, Shelley, and Sand

PMLA ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 118 (3) ◽  
pp. 502-520 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kari Lokke
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Mary Shelley ◽  
George Sand ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Spirit World ◽  
Historical Agency ◽  
The French Revolution

This essay explores the contributions of a tradition of nineteenth-century Künstlerromane by Germaine de Staël, Mary Shelley, and George Sand to European idealist historiography as exemplified in Kant's writings on perfectibility. Corinne, Valperga, and Consuelo represent the historical agency of the intellectual and artist as communication with a spirit world inhabited by ghosts of the past so that their secrets and wisdom can be transmitted to the future. In canonical Romanticism, contact with these phantasms provokes crippling guilt over the failure of past projects of perfectibility like the French Revolution (doomed by violence and bloodshed), guilt that is figured in the interdependent tropes of the titanic hero and Romantic melancholy. The novels discussed here perform an explicit critique of masculinist individualism in the name of women and humanity as a whole, replacing melancholy with enthusiasm and deploying spirits aesthetically, as sublime signs of future historical potentiality.

Tom Stoppard, New Historicism, and Estrangement in Travesties

2005 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 230-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zekiye Er
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
New Historicism ◽  
Incomplete Knowledge ◽  
Tom Stoppard ◽  
The Past ◽  
Linear Approach ◽  
Language And Literature

New historicism rewrites history from different viewpoints in order to prove that the past is inaccessible, and all historians can do is to work on incomplete knowledge, aware of the fact that a teleological, linear approach to their subject is misleading. In this study, Zekiye Er aims not only to analyze Tom Stoppard's Travesties from a new historicist stance, but also to utilize a new historicist approach to an understanding of what Stoppard is doing in the play, in the light of the striking parallels between Stoppard's technique and the new historicist critics' methods of analyzing history and literary texts. She concludes that Stoppard himself plays the role of a new historicist while writing a brilliant comedy of ideas. Zekiye Er received her PhD for a dissertation on Stoppardian drama from Ankara University in 2004. She has been working as a lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature of Gaziantep University since 1993.

scholarly journals ARTIKULASI IDENTITAS LOKAL CEPU DALAM NOVEL PENANGSANG: TEMBANG RINDU DENDAM KARYA NASSIRUN PURWOKARTUN (TINJAUAN NEW HISTORICISM)

SUAR BETANG ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-78
Author(s):  
Sukarjo Waluyo
Keyword(s):  
Literary Theory ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
New Historicism ◽  
Main Concern ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Local Identity ◽  
Text Data ◽  
The Past ◽  
Literary Research

Literature of a cultural product always interacts with social problems, including issues of locality and local identity. The problem of local identity in the novel Penangsang: Tembang Rindu Dendam is the main concern in this study. The background of the local locality and identity of Cepu which became the center of the Duchy of Jipang in the past was the setting of a place, as well as a space where the final historical and cultural journey of the power of the Demak Sultanate took place. This novel was written in 2010 by Nassirun Purwokartun. This historical novel invites us to rethink Cepu's locality and local identity, which has been a legacy of past generations. Articulation of identity and locality issues seem to be the attention voiced in this novel as well as being an instrument or instrument of articulation. This study uses the New Historicism approach, one literary theory that views history, art, and other things in society has the same degree as the text data in literature. It is hoped that literary research will get the context of the problem in accordance with the situation of the community.

Poetics of Palliation

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Birttany Pladek
Keyword(s):  
Medical Ethics ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Mary Shelley ◽  
Literature And Medicine ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
John Gregory

In the past twenty years, health humanists and scholars of literature and medicine have drawn on Romantic ideas to argue that literature can cure spiritual ills by making sufferers feel whole again. But this model oversimplifies the relationship between literature and pain, perpetuating a distorted picture of how Romantic writers thought literature addressed suffering. The Poetics of Palliation documents how writers like William Wordsworth and Mary Shelley developed more complex, palliative forms of literary medicine: therapies that stressed literature’s manifold relationship to pain and its power to sustain, comfort, and challenge even when cure was not possible. The book charts how Romantic writers developed these palliative poetics in conversation with their medical milieu. British medical ethics was first codified during the Romantic period. Its major writers, John Gregory and Thomas Percival, endorsed a palliative mandate to compensate for doctors’ limited curative powers. Similarly, Romantic writers sought palliative approaches when their work failed to achieve starker curative goals. The startling diversity of their results illustrates how palliation offers a more comprehensive metric for literary therapy than the curative traditions we have inherited from Romanticism.

“THE BLOOD OF OUR POOR PEOPLE”: 1848, INCIPIENT NATIONAL IDENTITY, AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION IN ANTHONY TROLLOPE'SLA VENDÉE

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-76
Author(s):  
Patricia Cove
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Anthony Trollope ◽  
Poor People ◽  
Historical Romance ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Revolutionary Movements ◽  
First Time ◽  
Revolutionary Period

In the late 1840s, as revolutionswept across Europe, Anthony Trollope wrote a novel portraying the Vendean War, a French civil war fought during the revolutionary decade.La Vendée: An Historical Romance(1850) depicts the conflict between centralised, revolutionary France led by the National Convention in Paris and the insurgent, royalist population of western France from the perspective of the royalist rebels.La Vendéeis one of Trollope's least read novels; yet Trollope's turn to the history of the 1790s in the context of renewed revolutionary movements in the 1840s demonstrates that the political and cultural stakes of the revolutionary period remained present in the minds of Victorians who confronted the possibility of European revolution for the first time in their own lives. Trollope draws on the interrelated democratic and nationalist movements that produced the 1848 revolutions in order to represent the royalist Vendeans as a victimised incipient nation, akin to other minor European nations struggling for sovereignty against their more powerful neighbours. Significantly, throughout the 1840s Trollope lived in Ireland, one such minor nation, and witnessed the Famine years and the consequences of Ireland's governance from London throughout that crisis first-hand. Using the conventions of the generically related national tale – a typically Irish genre – and the historical novel, Trollope works to establish sympathy for a marginalised Vendean community while containing revolution in the past by casting the royalist Vendeans as the true patriots and insurrectionists. However, although Trollope attempted to contain revolution by re-aligning it with the conservative, Vendean position,La Vendéeis fragmented by anxieties about the possibility of revolution in the late 1840s that disrupt his efforts to establish an authoritative, distanced historical perspective.

scholarly journals Women, memory, and history: Autobiographics as a way of confronting the past and a means of creating the future

Sociologija ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 376-388
Author(s):  
Svetlana Tomic
Keyword(s):  
Literary Theory ◽  
Social Engagement ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
New Historicism ◽  
National Education ◽  
Academic Knowledge ◽  
The Past ◽  
Feminist Theories ◽  
Knowledge Memory ◽  
The 19Th Century

In this paper, I use interdisciplinary research methods of literary theory, feminist theories, new historicism, psychology, memory studies, and social engagement studies in order to point at two groups of problems: 1. Untruthful memory of history and unreliable academic knowledge which transferred into all levels of national education and spread internationally; 2. epistemicide, memoricide and matricide or systematic destruction of knowledge, memory and heritage of important women from the past (sometimes executed by women themselves). Autobiographics of important women from the second half of the 19th century create contra memory to official representations of the past. As a self representational discourse, it can be one of the main ways of futurizing a vital feminist connection with education and the society?s progress which happened at the time.

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