Painted Traces: Art and Ekphrasis in Elizabeth Kostova's The Swan Thieves

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 259-279
Author(s):  
Kate Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Mary Elizabeth Braddon ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past

Nineteenth-century writers like Jane Austen, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Oscar Wilde were fascinated with the power of art. In their novels, the portrait could reveal secrets and capture the essence, or truth, of its subject. But how might painting be understood as a trace not of character so much as history? What power does the artwork have to connect us to past lives and histories today, continuing their activity into the present? Elizabeth Kostova's The Swan Thieves (2010) explores these questions by depicting artwork as talismanic, providing (a fantasy of) access to a past that is at once irretrievably lost and, potentially, available to imaginative reconstruction. As vestigial remains, the novel suggests, paintings manifest a past that is at once absent and present. The artwork it depicts exists within a complex set of relationships, including the narrative in which the paintings are embedded and which can only tell, and not show, the painting's power; the artist who paints and the viewer who beholds it, for whom the line between enchantment and enthrallment is easily blurred; and the past, whose relationship to the present the artwork both manifests and constructs. This article explores the use of art in this novel to reflect on the availability of the past in the present, as well as on neo-Victorianism itself, with its power to critique and rework the past and also to fascinate in the present. Ultimately, the novel captures not the power of art to access past lives, but a disconcerting vision of ourselves, caught in the act of (obsessive) re-representation.

Nation and Generation in A Tale of Two Cities

PMLA ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 448-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert D. Hutter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Generational Conflict ◽  
The Past ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Critical Model ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Critical Methods ◽  
The French Revolution

A Tale of Two Cities, the French Revolution becomes a metaphor for the conflicts between generations and between classes that preoccupied Dickens throughout his career. Dickens uses a double plot and divided characters to express these conflicts; his exaggerated use of “splitting”—which the essay defines psychoanalytically—sometimes makes A Tale of Two Cities‘ language and structure appear strained and humorless. We need to locate A Tale of Two Cities within a framework of nineteenth-century attitudes toward revolution and generational conflict by using a combination of critical methods—literary, historical, psychoanalytic. This essay relates the reader's experience to the structure of the text; and it derives from Dickens’ language, characterization, and construction a critical model that describes the individual reader's experience while explaining some of the contradictory assessments of the novel over the past hundred years.

scholarly journals The Difficulty of Historical Work in the Nineteenth-Century Museum and the Thackeray Novel

2012 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dehn Gilmore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Costs And Benefits ◽  
The Past ◽  
Important Impact ◽  
Full Reconstruction ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Times

This essay suggests that conservation debates occasioned by the democratization of the nineteenth-century museum had an important impact on William Makepeace Thackeray’s reimagination of the historical novel. Both the museum and the historical novel had traditionally made it their mission to present the past to an ever-widening public, and thus necessarily to preserve it. But in the middle of the nineteenth century, the museum and the novel also shared the experience of seeming to endanger precisely what they sought to protect, and as they tried to choose how aggressive to be in their conserving measures, they had to deliberate about the costs and benefits of going after the full reconstruction (the novel) or restoration (the museum) of what once had been. The first part of this essay shows how people fretted about the relation of conservation, destruction, and national identity at the museum, in The Times and in special Parliamentary sessions alike; the second part of the essay traces how Thackeray drew on the resulting debates in novels including The Newcomes (1853–55) and The History of Henry Esmond (1852), as he looked for a way to revivify the historical novel after it had gone out of fashion. He invoked broken statues and badly restored pictures as he navigated his own worries that he might be doing history all wrong, and damaging its shape in the process.

Reading the Historical Novel: Reworking the Past and the Relation of Blackfeet History in James Welch's Fools Crow

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-100
Author(s):  
SARAH MARTIN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
The Novel ◽  
James Welch ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Impact

The article considers the political impact of the historical novel by examining an example of the genre by Native American novelist James Welch. It discusses how the novel Fools Crow represents nineteenth-century Blackfeet experience, emphasizing how (retelling) the past can act in the present. To do this it engages with psychoanalytic readings of historical novels and the work of Foucault and Benjamin on memory and history. The article concludes by using Bhabha's notion of the “projective past” to understand the political strength of the novel's retelling of the story of a massacre of Native Americans.

scholarly journals Introduction

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-94
Author(s):  
Daniel Hack
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Dynamic Interactions ◽  
Alternate History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Continuous Sequence ◽  
Antecedent Condition ◽  
British Culture

Catherine Gallagher's importance as a scholar of nineteenth-century British culture and a historian and theorist of the novel makes the appearance of a new monograph by her an event for Victorianists (among others). This is true even when few of the materials she discusses are, strictly speaking, Victorian, as is the case with her new book, Telling It Like It Wasn't: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction. In Telling It Like It Wasn't, Gallagher traces the emergence and development of analytic and narrative discourses premised on counterfactual-historical hypotheses. As the author explains, these hypotheses are past-tense, conditional conjectures “pursued when the antecedent condition is known to be contrary to fact,” such as, to take her two major examples, What if the South won the Civil War? and What if the Nazis had invaded Britain? Bringing together what Gallagher calls “counterfactual histories,” which are more analytical than narrative and typically consider multiple unrealized possibilities; works of “alternate history,” which describe one continuous sequence of departures from the historical record but draw their dramatis personae exclusively from that record; and “the alternate-history novel, [which] invents not only alternative-historical trajectories but also fictional characters,” Telling It Like It Wasn't explores the distinctive uses and dynamic interactions of these forms over the past two centuries and considers their implications for our understanding of more conventional fiction and historiography.

scholarly journals Editorial

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. v-viii
Author(s):  
Graham Holderness
Keyword(s):  
Jane Austen ◽  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
Samuel Richardson ◽  
Henry Fielding ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Conduct Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Novel

When I first studied the novel, the form was believed to have originated in the eighteenth century with the fiction of Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson, and was synonymous with literary realism. The novel emerged from the Age of Reason, was closely associated with journalism, satire and conduct literature, and marked a profound break with the supernatural, fantastic and romance narratives of the past. Its perfect embodiment was to be found in the work of Jane Austen, even today an immensely popular writer, and widely regarded as a defining practitioner of the novel form. This kind of novel was/is in every respect different from Shakespeare: new, ‘novel’, not old; prose, not poetry; narrative, not dramatic; realist, not magical; fictional, not metafictional; and could deal with Shakespeare only as an objective feature of the society and culture being represented.

scholarly journals AN ASSESSMENT OF GLOBALIZATION IMPACT OF THE INDIAN CAPITAL MARKET: A REVIEW

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (10) ◽  
pp. 107-110
Author(s):  
Mamta Panwar ◽  
L. N. Arya
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Capital Market ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Administrative Power ◽  
Major Market ◽  
Board Capital ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
Related Association

The forward and in reverse advancement of general capital since the nineteenth century exhibits the reiterating burdens, furthermore elective points of view from which policymakers have attempted to oppose them. This paper is centered around reporting these movements quantitatively and clarifying them. Cash related hypothesis and fiscal history together can give gainful experiences into occasions of the past and pass on associated lessons for the present. We battle that theories of how across the board capital flexibility has made must be comprehended inside the structure of the key method tritoma obliging an open economy's decision of money related association. Different stunning practices won in the major market to draw in retail cash related experts and the high cost of new issues. In spite of the fact that reliably, number of affiliations had developed, offering arranged sorts of associations as for the novel issues of capital, their exercises were not controlled by any administrative power. The issues were widely more exceptional in the optional market. The general working of the stock trade was not sufficient. The trades were controlled by their inner bye laws and managed by the addressing bodies, which were overwhelmed by picked part administrators. Exchanging individuals did not have enough progress.

scholarly journals First Lithuanian Museum – Baublys in Dionizas Poška’s Garden

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 117-130
Author(s):  
Deima Katinaitė
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Conceptual Metaphor ◽  
Mikhail Bakhtin ◽  
Research Question ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Personal Memory ◽  
The Past ◽  
Oak Tree ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Scholarly Attention

This article discusses Baublys – a nineteenth-century garden pavilion in Lithuania, Samogitia, established in the trunk of an oak tree by Lithuanian boyar and writer Dionizas Poška. Because of its ambiguity, Baublys has attracted considerable scholarly attention and, for the same reason, remains forgotten, generating a relatively small number of texts. Although interpretations vary, the place of Baublys in Lithuanian culture is still unclear. What is it? Is it a regional curiosity or a proto-museum? This article looks at Baublys through its function and aims at demonstrating that Baublys is not only a proto-museum, but also a prototype of today’s interactive museum, containing the analogues of modern practices of museology: interactivity, communicational features and performativity. My methodology is constructed invoking the conceptual metaphor of the mask and referring to the theories of Hans Belting and Mikhail Bakhtin. According to the Bakhtinian dialogic imagination and literary concepts of the epic and the novel, the analogy of the mask and the monument is used. The research question is what Baublys does as a mask during Poška’s lifetime and what it does as a monument today. How did its semantics and agency change after “becoming” a monument? The article shows that for Poška Baublys is a theatre of historical and personal memory, activated by structure, a set of finds, analogues (Sibile Temple, other garden pavilions) and performance. An empty Baublys is a monument – a reference to the past, which lacks the collection of the museum – Poška’s finds. Baublys is not only a museum, but might be perceived as a monument to museums, even a monument to the idea of a museum.

scholarly journals Conjuring Ghosts of the Past: Landscapes and Hauntings in Jane Urquhart’s The Stone Carvers

2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-21
Author(s):  
Agata Handley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
First World War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Personal Journey ◽  
German Immigrants ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
The Past ◽  
Stone Carvers ◽  
First World

Jane Urquhart’s novel The Stone Carvers (2001) portrays the struggles of a community of German immigrants in the nineteenth century, as they attempt to settle in Western Ontario; it also includes a fictionalized account of the construction of the Canadian National Vimy Memorial 1 (for First World War Canadian dead, and missing, presumed dead, in France). The article explores the issues of dealing with loss, and re-living the past, which are interwoven by Urquhart into a larger narrative, forming an ongoing meditation on the experience of ‘in-betweenness’— transgressing not only spatial, but also temporal boundaries— and incorporating individual and communal histories as they are passed on through generations. The lives of Urquhart’s characters are marked by the ambivalence of belonging— the experience of having more than one homeland, in more than one landscape. They are haunted by lost places, and by the memory of people who perished as a result of war, or who they left behind in the course of their own personal journey. The article explores the issue of ‘landscape biography’, and also examines Urquhart’s employment of the literary topoi of nekuia/katabasis (i.e., encounters with the dead). It demonstrates how the confrontation with the past becomes, in the novel, a prerequisite for regeneration of the present, and the establishment of the future.

Hydraulic Laboratory at University of Liège

2018 ◽  
pp. 80-89
Author(s):  
Willi H. Hager
Keyword(s):  
Basic Research ◽  
The Novel ◽  
University Campus ◽  
Current Position ◽  
Professional Background ◽  
The Past ◽  
Comprehensive Picture

The Hydraulic Laboratory of Liège University, Belgium, is historically considered from its foundation in 1937 to the mid-1960s. The technical facilities of the various Buildings are highlighted, along with canals and instrumentation available. It is noted that in its initial era, comparatively few basic research has been conducted, mainly due to the professional background of the professors leading the establishment. This state was improved in the past 50 years, however, particularly since the Laboratory was dislocated to its current position in the novel University Campus. Biographies of the leading persons associated with the Liège Hydraulic Laboratory are also presented, so that a comprehensive picture is given of one of the currently leading hydraulic Laboratories of Europe.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document