Scottish Gravestones in Ceylon in Comparative Perspective

2020 ◽  
pp. 108-126
Author(s):  
Angela McCarthy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sri Lanka ◽  
Cause Of Death ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Presence And Absence ◽  
Ethnic Origins

In the nineteenth century, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) was acclaimed as a ‘Scotch’ colony due especially to Scottish influence in the coffee and tea enterprises. Yet if Scottish ethnicity was hailed for economic prowess on the island, signs of origin were far less likely to feature on migrant headstones. Instead, noting occupation and cause of death were more prevalent ways of commemorating the deceased. What though, explains the general absence of Scottish ethnicity on Ceylon death markers and do they resemble the general disinterest in remembering the ethnic origins of the dead of various other national groups in Ceylon? How did such headstones compare with their compatriots in Australasia? This chapter draws on research emanating from several cemeteries in Ceylon to explore reasons for the presence and absence of ethnicity on the gravestones.

Donizetti's Gothic Resurrections

2009 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melina Esse
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Dead

Abstract The preponderance of gothic themes in Italian operas of the early nineteenth century is often cited as one of the few ways essentially conservative Italian composers flirted with the Romantic revolution sweeping the rest of Europe. By 1838, the very ubiquity of these tropes led the Venetian reviewer of Donizetti's gory Maria de Rudenz to plead ““exhaustion”” with the ever-present ““daggers, poisons, and tombs”” of the contemporary stage. Based on the French melodrama La Nonne sanglante, Donizetti's sensational opera is almost a litany of gothic tropes. The most disturbing of these is the female body that refuses to die: Maria herself, who rises from the dead to murder her innocent rival. This fleshy specter is musically rendered as a body that is too receptive to emotion, particularly to (imaginary) cries of longing or grief. Significantly, Donizetti's foray into the gothic was also distinguished by a spate of self-borrowing; his 1838 revision of the earlier Gabriella di Vergy borrows material from Maria de Rudenz. Exploring the connections between the trope of gothic resurrection and Donizetti's borrowings highlights how the two works represent a characteristic approach to the gothic, one that mingles a corporeal orientation with more familiar themes of ghostly immateriality.

The Melville Monument and the Shaping of the Scottish Metropolis

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 ◽  
pp. 105-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clarisse Godard Desmarest
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Grid Pattern ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Town ◽  
National Monument ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The City

AbstractThe Melville Monument, which stands at the centre of St Andrew's Square in Edinburgh, was erected between 1821 and 1823 in memory of the Tory statesman Henry Dundas, first Viscount Melville (1742–1811). The design for the monument, more than 150 ft tall, was provided by William Burn (1789–1870). The 15 ft statue of Dundas that stands on top, added in 1827, was carved by Robert Forrest (1789–1852), a Scottish sculptor from Lanarkshire, from a design by Francis Chantrey (1781–1841). The Melville Monument, imperial in character and context, is part of a series of highly visible monuments built in Edinburgh in the early nineteenth century to celebrate such figures as Horatio Nelson, Robert Burns, William Pitt, King George IV and the dead of the Napoleonic wars (National Monument). This article examines the commission and construction of the Melville Monument, and analyses the choice and significance of St Andrew's Square as a locus for commemoration. The monument is shown to be part of an emerging commitment to enhance the more picturesque qualities of the city, a reaction against the exaggerated formality of the first New Town and its grid pattern.

The Incomes of the Plutocrats in a Comparative Perspective

2021 ◽  
pp. 152-171
Author(s):  
Francis Teal
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Income Distribution ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
Average Wage ◽  
Male Character ◽  
Pride And Prejudice ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Uk

We now move to examine the top of the income distribution and begin by asking whether Mr Darcy, the central male character in Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice, would be regarded as a plutocrat today. If his income were converted to contemporary amounts it would be some £600,000. We show that Mr Darcy would need to earn some £8 million to be as rich as his nineteenth-century predecessor relative to the average wage. To understand how those super-high incomes arise, we introduce the Paretian distribution which we do first informally and then more formally. It is a distribution of this form which could produce what we see, a few very highly paid individuals whose incomes—up in the stratosphere of the super-rich—would still be very spread out. We use the Paretian distribution to estimate the number of plutocrats in the US, the UK, and China and show the incomes of the richest of the rich.

Fëdorov, Nikolai Fëdorovich (1829–1903)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
George M. Young
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Basic Question ◽  
Common Task ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Academic Philosopher ◽  
Life Work

Like many other major figures in the nineteenth-century Russian tradition of speculation, Fëdorov was not an academic philosopher, but an unsystematic religious thinker who sought working answers to the fundamental questions of life. Fëdorov’s basic question was: ‘Why do the living die?’ His answer, in short, was that we die because we neglect our God-given duty to regulate nature. Fëdorov’s life work was to formulate an activist approach to the problem of death, a ‘common task’ in which all people living on earth, all religions and all sciences would eventually be united in a universal project to resurrect all the dead.

scholarly journals Dysbiosis in the Dead: Human Postmortem Microbiome Beta-Dispersion as an Indicator of Manner and Cause of Death

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sierra F. Kaszubinski ◽  
Jennifer L. Pechal ◽  
Katelyn Smiles ◽  
Carl J. Schmidt ◽  
Heather R. Jordan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Cause Of Death ◽  
The Dead

Commentary: Necromance

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 829-839
Author(s):  
Irvin J Hunt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Romantic Novel ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Cooperative Economy ◽  
The Revolution

Abstract This article reconsiders the recent turn in political theory to love as a countercapital affect, helping us endure when hope has lost its salience. The article offers the concept of “necromance” to attend to the ways the popular configuration of love as life-giving often overlooks how in the history of slavery and liberal empire love operates as life-taking. Distinct from necromancy, necromance is not a process of reviving the dead but of bringing subjects in ever closer proximity to the dead. Grounded in a reading of W. E. B. Du Bois’s romantic novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), particularly its vision of a cooperative economy and its response to the evolving meaning of love in American culture at the end of the nineteenth century, necromance is both a structure of feeling and a form of writing. As a resource for activism indebted to the creative powers of melancholic attachments, necromance contests the common conception that in order for grievances to become social movements or collective insurgencies they must be framed to create feelings of outrage, not of grief. By working inside existing conditions of irrevocable loss, necromantic love registers the feeling that the revolution is already here.

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