The Poverty of Posthumanism: Evolution and Extinction in Eugene Field's ‘Extinct Monsters’

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 180-197
Author(s):  
Peter Doherty
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
First Century ◽  
Unpublished Manuscript ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Poetic Authority ◽  
The Face ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Natural Histories

This article interrogates constructions of posthumanism in twenty-first century children's literature criticism and ecocriticism. Focusing on an unpublished manuscript by Eugene Field, it argues that the concept of species extinction undermines the theoretical usefulness of posthumanism. The paper begins by discussing the uses and shortcomings of posthumanism as a critical tool in children's literature. In doing so, it establishes connections with the challenge to the human posed by technology in the twenty-first century and the new understanding of what constitutes the human at the end of the nineteenth century. This paper documents intersections between Field's illustrated poem and contemporary representations of evolution and extinction circulating in popular and scientific natural histories. It is suggested that Field's text is also mediated by the visual traditions which framed contemporary natural history writing. Further, situating Field's poetry for children in a broader tradition of nineteenth-century American poetics committed to authorising the voice of the poet, it asks how this voice is complicated by the new realities of evolution and extinction. Confronted with these new realities, Field's manuscript traces the waning of poetic authority and, it is argued, thereby calls for a new aesthetics of children's literature in the face of extinction.

“Affluence of the Heart”: Wastefulness and the Search for Meaning in Millennial Japan

2014 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 165-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eiko Maruko Siniawer
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Nongovernmental Organizations ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
First Century ◽  
Search For Meaning ◽  
Mass Market ◽  
Economic Stagnation ◽  
Twenty First Century

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Japan experienced a surge in the evocation of the word “mottainai,” most simply translated as “wasteful.” Children's literature, mass-market nonfiction, magazines, newspapers, songs, government ministries, corporations, and nongovernmental organizations deliberately used and defined the term as they took up the question of what was to be deemed wasteful. This essay examines how discourses that were ostensibly about wastefulness constituted an articulation of values, a search for meaning and identity, and a certain conception of affluence in millennial Japan. It suggests that this idea ofmottainaireflected wide-ranging principles and beliefs that were thought to define what it meant to be Japanese in the twenty-first century, at a time when there settled in an uneasy acceptance of economic stagnation and a desire to find meaning in an economically anemic, yet still affluent, Japan.

scholarly journals Veljka Ruzicka Kenfel (Ed). New Trends in Children’s Literature Research --Twenty-first Century Approaches –200-2012. (2014). Spain: Peter Lang Edition. 239 pages.

InterSedes ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (34) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marina Vásquez Carranza
Keyword(s):  
Young Adults ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
First Century ◽  
Literature Research ◽  
Children And Young Adults ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The University

This text incorporates various studies by researchers who belong to the group Anglo-German Children’s Literature and its Translation at the University of Vigo, first set up in 1992. The main focus is to describe new tendencies within literature for children and young adults, including translation, adaptation, comics, and palindrome.

Rethinking Mahler

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Structural Analysis ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Temporal Experience ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Literature History ◽  
Historical Past

Gustav Mahler’s anniversary years (2010–11) have provided an opportunity to rethink the composer’s position within the musical, cultural and multi-disciplinary landscapes of the twenty-first century, as well as to reassess his relationship with the historical traditions of his own time. Comprising a collection of essays by leading and emerging scholars in the field, Rethinking Mahler in part counterbalances common scholarly assumptions and preferences which predominantly configure Mahler as proto-modernist, with hitherto somewhat neglected consideration of his debt to, and his re-imagining of, the legacies of his own historical past. It reassesses his engagement both with the immediate creative and cultural present of the late nineteenth century, and with the weight of a creative and cultural past that was the inheritance of artists living and working at that time. From a variety of disciplinary perspectives the contributors pursue ideas of nostalgia, historicism and ‘pastness’ in relation to an emergent pluralist modernity and subsequent musical-cultural developments. Mahler’s relationship with music, media and ideas past, present, and future is explored in three themed sections, addressing among them issues in structural analysis; cultural contexts; aesthetics; reception; performance, genres of stage, screen and literature; history/historiography; and temporal experience.

History of Recording Demotic Epigraphy

2020 ◽  
pp. 491-507
Author(s):  
Jan Moje
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Late Period ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Rosetta Stone ◽  
Roman Egypt ◽  
History Of ◽  
Twenty First Century

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.

American Custom, Ritual, and Holidays

2018 ◽  
pp. 255-276
Author(s):  
Jack Santino
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life Course ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Public Events ◽  
Close Study ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Life Course ◽  
Comprehensive Study

Since the nineteenth century, attention in folklore and folklife studies has shifted from viewing certain customary symbolic actions such as “calendar customs” and rituals of the life course to a more inclusive performance-oriented perspective on holidays and customs. Folklorists recognize the multiplicity of events that people may consider ritual and festival, and the porous nature of these categories. The concept of the “sacred” has expanded to include realms other than the strictly religious, so as to include the political and other domains, both official and unofficial. A comprehensive study of ritual and festival incorporates a close study of folk and popular actions as well as institutional ceremony. In the twenty-first century, approaching events as both carnivalesque and ritualesque allows folklorists to describe purpose and intention in public events, and to account for political, commemorative, celebratory, and festive elements in any particular event.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document