Maeve Kelly: Women, Ireland, and the Aesthetics of Radical Writing

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 304-321
Author(s):  
Simon Workman

This article considers the work of Irish writer and feminist Maeve Kelly arguing that she has been not only a radical and, to some extent, seminal voice within modern Irish writing, but an author whose work self-consciously reflects upon the production and mediation of Irish women's writing within British and Irish culture. While Kelly is not unique in adopting a feminist approach in her writing, aspects of her fiction are somewhat discrete within modern Irish literature in terms of how they express, delineate, and resolve the challenges – material, psycho-cultural, aesthetic – attendant upon the representation of feminist political thought and occluded Irish female experience. Particularly within an Irish context, Kelly's writing provides a significant case study of the aesthetic problematics of politically radical fiction. Her oeuvre represents a vital contribution to Irish writing of the twentieth century as well as to the history of women in post-war Ireland.

2021 ◽  

This volume examines Arnold Gehlen’s theory of the state from his philosophy of the state in the 1920s via his political and cultural anthropology to his impressive critique of the post-war welfare state. The systematic analyses the book contains by leading scholars in the social sciences and the humanities examine the interplay between the theory and history of the state with reference to the broader context of the history of ideas. Students and researchers as well as other readers interested in this subject will find this book offers an informative overview of how one of the most wide-ranging and profound thinkers of the twentieth century understands the state. With contributions by Oliver Agard, Heike Delitz, Joachim Fischer, Andreas Höntsch, Tim Huyeng, Rastko Jovanov, Frank Kannetzky, Christine Magerski, Zeljko Radinkovic, Karl-Siegbert Rehberg and Christian Steuerwald.


Author(s):  
Vernon Bogdanor

This chapter examines the history of the civil service in Great Britain. It suggests that the revolution in Whitehall during the last two decades of the twentieth century transformed the civil service, and that many of the public utilities nationalised by the post-war Attlee government were privatised. Other major changes include the reduction in the size of the civil service and the application of market disciplines to it.


Author(s):  
P. J. Kelly

This chapter focuses on how the history of political ideas has been approached in the context of British political science. This has the consequence that the discussion ranges over commentators who are explicitly not historians. It claims that the current British approaches to the study of past political thought have domestic origins in the development of the study of politics in British Universities, especially Oxford, Cambridge, and LSE. The first section accounts for different approaches to the study of political ideas in British political science by examining conceptions of the history of political thought. It shows how institutional history is connected to the development of a genre, and how this history has not been dependent on the direct import of Continental or American intellectual fashions or personalities. The second section delineates the three main British approaches to the study of the history of political ideas in the post-war period.


2021 ◽  
pp. 31-50
Author(s):  
Richard Whatmore

‘The history of political thought and Marxism’ focuses on Marxism, which became the most global and scientific philosophy in the twentieth century. An important figure here is Karl Marx, the outcast from Prussian Trier that famously contributed to the science of historical materialism. Marx’s The Condition of the Working Class in England justified revolution through a philosophy that emerged from reading European history. Marx, along with Friedrich Engels, accepted that the progress of commerce by the end of the eighteenth century made European states more powerful than others in history. Marx’s contemporaries believed that the study of societies in every stage of history is vital in understanding the future.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 645-664
Author(s):  
Ann Elias

This article explores the case study of a coal mine that was first tunneled under Sydney Harbour in 1897 but closed in 1931. Specifically, it examines how the history of the mine intersects with aesthetics, race, colonialism, and Indigenous dispossession. Centered on the story of an English mining company that first sought a mine site in a pastoral area of the city, but under public pressure was forced to select instead a grimy working class suburb on the opposite harbor shore, the article argues that environmental aesthetics and tastes in beauty collaborated with extractivism. The argument emerges that economics, art, and aesthetics are inextricably linked in this history and further, that while the mine excited the industrial imagination through the aesthetic of the sublime, and associations with darkness and vastness, it conflicted with colonial settler tastes for the pastoral imagination defined by the aesthetics of the beautiful and its associations with light. The article discusses the context of a settler economy in lands stolen from Indigenous peoples, and how conceptualizations of the sublime and beautiful, as well as dark and light, were aligned with the racialization of the properties of coal and space above and below ground.


Author(s):  
Moritz Ege ◽  
Andrew Wright Hurley

In this first essay, we delve into significant moments in the history (and pre-history) of twentieth century Afro-Americanophilia in Germany. We establish a periodisation stretching from the nineteenth century until the mid-1960s (from which point our second essay will continue), and take in the pre-colonial, the colonial, the Weimar, the Nazi; and the post-war eras.  We draw out some of the particularly significant moments, ruptures, and continuities within that time frame. We also identify some of the salient ways scholars have interpreted ‘Afro-Americanophilia’ during the period.  Focusing on a variety of practices of appropriation, communicative media, actors and forms of agency, power differentials, and sociocultural contexts, we discuss positive images of and affirmative approaches to black people in German culture and in its imaginaries. We attend to who was active in Afro-Americanophilia, in what ways, and what the effects of that agency were. Our main focus is on white German Afro-Americanophiles, but—without attempting to write a history of African Americans, black people in Germany, or Black Germans— we also inquire into the ways that the latter reacted to, suffered under the expectations levied upon them, or were able to engage with the demand for ‘black cultural traffic.’  


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-24
Author(s):  
Leonardo Capezzone

Abstract The history of Khaldunian readings in the twentieth century reveals an analytical capacity of non-Orientalists definitely greater than that demonstrated by the Orientalists. The latter, at least until the 1950s, prove to be prisoners of that syndrome denounced by Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), which projected on Islamic historical development a specificity and an alterity, which make it an exception in world history. Orientalist scholarship has often wanted to see in Ibn Khaldūn’s critical attitude to the philosophy of al-Fārābī and Averroes only the confirmation of the primacy of the sharīʿa over Platonic nomos. This article seeks to highlight some aspects of Ibn Khaldūn’s critique of classical political thought of Islamic philosophy. His critique focuses on the importance given to the juridical dimension of social becoming, and to the role of the political body of the jurists in the making of the City. Those aspects witness Ibn Khaldūn’s effort to interpret change and fractures as factors which make sense of history and decadence.


2020 ◽  
Vol 135 (572) ◽  
pp. 127-156
Author(s):  
Jon Rosebank

Abstract W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman’s 1066 and All That is a satirical history of England, published in 1930. It has long been thought to be a parody of popular history textbooks, characteristic of a generation of post-war writers disillusioned with the tone of patriotic English exceptionalism of many books. This paper explores contemporary critiques of history textbooks in the first third of the twentieth century and finds, however, that 1066 And All That is unusual in its implied criticism. It suggests that the standpoint of its authors reflects more than simply the recoil of their generation of ex-servicemen. It proposes that the book reflects their own particular experience of reading history at Oxford in 1919–22, at a time when teaching in the Modern History School still included much that was literary and whiggish. G.N. Clark had been their tutor, a historian close to C.H. Firth, Regius Professor of Modern History, and sympathetic to Firth’s long and controversial campaign for reform. While Clark’s later reputation was as a cautious scholar, as a young man he was a witty iconoclast, active in left-wing politics. We trace his influence on Sellar and Yeatman through the lectures they attended, and discover that 1066 And All That bears clear references to Clark’s reformist views on history at Oxford.


2003 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
JEREMY NUTTALL

This article uses the broad concept of ‘improvement of minds’ to refer to the idea of improving people's sense of morality, their ability and willingness to reason, and the depth of their emotional experiences. Such an objective has been little explored in the context of the history of the British Labour party. Yet, discussion of it is worth integrating into histories of the party for two reasons. First, the goal of improving minds was a strand – though often unsystematically developed – in the agendas of many Labour party politicians, activists, and thinkers. Secondly, the very fact that it was an unsystematically developed strand, the very limits of the party's attention to, and success in achieving, ‘mental progress’ amongst the twentieth-century British population – that is to say, simply, the limits to the party's pursuit and achievement of the objective of making people more caring, rational, and sensitive – is one important explanation for many of Labour's failures. The article begins to explore the aims, processes, and outcomes of Labour's attempts to improve minds, as well as to explain and examine the consequences of the limits of the party's attention to this goal, through the case study of Tony Crosland.


2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 405-431
Author(s):  
JOSHUA S. WALDEN

AbstractJascha Heifetz (1901–87) promoted a modern brand of musical eclecticism, recording, performing, and editing adaptations of folk and popular songs while remaining dedicated to the standard violin repertoire and the compositions of his contemporaries. This essay examines the complex influences of his displacement from Eastern Europe and assimilation to the culture of the United States on both the hybridity of his repertoire and the critical reception he received in his new home. It takes as its case study Heifetz's composition of the virtuosic showpiece “Hora Staccato,” based on a Romany violin performance he heard in Bucharest, and his later adaptation of the music into an American swing hit he titled “Hora Swing-cato.” Finally, the essay turns to the field of popular song to consider how two of the works Heifetz performed most frequently were adapted for New York Yiddish radio as Tin Pan Alley–style songs whose lyrics narrate the early twentieth-century immigrant experience. The performance and arrangement history of many of Heifetz's miniatures reveals the multivalent ways in which works in his repertoire, and for some listeners Heifetz himself, were reinterpreted, adapted, and assimilated into American culture.


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