scholarly journals Keeping Count of the End of the World: A Statistical Analysis of the Historiography, Canonisation, and Historical Fluctuations of Anglophone Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Disaster Narratives

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-432 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerry Määttä
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Statistical Analysis ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
End Of The World ◽  
Disaster Narratives ◽  
Literature And Film

Over the past decade, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic disaster narratives seem to have become more popular than ever before. Since its inception in secular form in the first decades of the nineteenth century, however, the genre has experienced a number of fluctuations in popularity, especially in the twentieth century. Inspired by Franco Moretti’s influential Graphs, Maps, Trees (2005), the aim of this study is to analyse the historiography, canonisation, and historical fluctuations of Anglo-phone apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic disaster narratives in literature and film through an elementary statistical analysis of previous surveys of the field. While the small database on which the study is based essentially consists of a meta-study of historiography and canonisation within the genre, disclosing which works have been considered to be the most important, the data is also used to assess the periods in which the most influential, innovative, and/or popular works were published or released. As an attempt is also made to explain some of the fluctuations in the popularity of the genre - with an eye to historical, cultural, medial, social, and political contexts – perhaps the study might help us understand why it is that we as a society seem to need these stories ever so often.

scholarly journals Pinaceae in the Herbarium of the Institute of Botany at the Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland (KRA)

2019 ◽  
Vol 88 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Plewa ◽  
Piotr Köhler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Pinus Sylvestris ◽  
Scientific Activity ◽  
First Century ◽  
Numerous Species ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Family ◽  
The World

The Herbarium of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland (KRA) has extensive collections. The Pinaceae family in KRA embraces 1,057 herbarium sheets and contains representatives of eight out of 11 genera usually distinguished in the family. The collection of the family in KRA contains ca. 54–61% of the 220–250 species occurring in the world. The most numerous species (116 sheets) is <em>Pinus sylvestris</em>. There is one isoneotypus of <em>Larix decidua</em> Mill var. <em>carpatica</em> Domin (KRA 224704) and one syntypus of <em>Tsuga caroliniana</em> Engelm. (KRA 224989) in the collection. There are 706 sheets from Europe, 504 of them come from areas covered by the contemporary borders of Poland, 206 from North America, 98 from Asia, two from Africa, and one from Australia. The herbal material of the family deposited in KRA was collected in the past 200 years. The oldest specimen was collected in 1821. There are 65 sheets which date from the nineteenth century, 56 from the years 1900 to 1918, 173 from 1919 to 1939, 532 from 1944 to 2000, and 139 sheets from the twenty-first century. The most interesting collections include: the exsiccata from the nineteenth century, sheets from China (1925–1926), sheets collected by various Russian expeditions to Siberia, the collection of Professors Jan Kornaś and Anna Medwecka-Kornaś from North America, and collections documenting the scientific activity of the “Kraków geobotanical school” in the twentieth century.

Aftershocks

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seva Gunitsky
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Regime Change ◽  
International System ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Past Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Sudden Rise ◽  
The World ◽  
National Borders

Over the past century, democracy spread around the world in turbulent bursts of change, sweeping across national borders in dramatic cascades of revolution and reform. This book offers a new global-oriented explanation for this wavelike spread and retreat—not only of democracy but also of its twentieth-century rivals, fascism, and communism. The book argues that waves of regime change are driven by the aftermath of cataclysmic disruptions to the international system. These hegemonic shocks, marked by the sudden rise and fall of great powers, have been essential and often-neglected drivers of domestic transformations. Though rare and fleeting, they not only repeatedly alter the global hierarchy of powerful states but also create unique and powerful opportunities for sweeping national reforms—by triggering military impositions, swiftly changing the incentives of domestic actors, or transforming the basis of political legitimacy itself. As a result, the evolution of modern regimes cannot be fully understood without examining the consequences of clashes between great powers, which repeatedly—and often unsuccessfully—sought to cajole, inspire, and intimidate other states into joining their camps.

Battlefields from Event to Heritage

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Carman ◽  
Patricia Carman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Security Studies ◽  
New Developments ◽  
Critical Security Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The World ◽  
War And Conflict ◽  
Modern War

What is—or makes a place—a ‘historic battlefield’? From one perspective the answer is a simple one—it is a place where large numbers of people came together in an organized manner to fight one another at some point in the past. But from another perspective it is far more difficult to identify. Quite why any such location is a place of battle—rather than any other kind of event—and why it is especially historic is more difficult to identify. This book sets out an answer to the question of what a historic battlefield is in the modern imagination, drawing upon examples from prehistory to the twentieth century. Considering battlefields through a series of different lenses, treating battles as events in the past and battlefields as places in the present, the book exposes the complexity of the concept of historic battlefield and how it forms part of a Western understanding of the world. Taking its lead from new developments in battlefield study—especially archaeological approaches—the book establishes a link to and a means by which these new approaches can contribute to more radical thinking about war and conflict, especially to Critical Military and Critical Security Studies. The book goes beyond the study of battles as separate and unique events to consider what they mean to us and why we need them to have particular characteristics. It will be of interest to archaeologists, historians, and students of modern war in all its forms.

scholarly journals In search of America’s old covered bridges

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald G. Knapp
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
American Landscape

AbstractAmerica’s first documented wooden covered bridge was erected at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1805. Hundreds were constructed within two decades and at least 10,000 by the later 1800s. As settlers moved West, broad rivers were crossed with inventive structures incorporating timber trusses ingeniously developed by carpenters. Called covered bridges because of the roof and siding needed to protect the timber trusses, they became ubiquitous features on the American landscape. Over the past two centuries, most covered bridges were lost to flood, ice, arson, lightening, decay, as well as “progress,” replaced by “modern” iron, concrete, and steel spans. Of some 700 covered bridges remaining, many are mere replicas of their original forms no longer supported by timber trusses. Genuine historic bridges remain largely from the last half of the 1800s while civic boosterism has led to claims of earlier dates with often questionable authenticity. This essay presents three wooden covered bridges constructed in the 1820s along a 10-mile stretch of the Wallkill River in New Paltz, New York. Of the three, only Perrine’s Bridge, constructed first in 1821 and covered in 1822, is still standing with intact Burr timber trusses. Perrine’s is an iconic structure with exceptional heritage value because of authentic re-building and restoration in 1834, 1846, 1917, and 1968. Using documentary records, this essay establishes an accurate intertwined chronology for the three bridges, detailing nineteenth century building practices and contentious mid-twentieth century struggles pitting preservationists wanting authentic restoration against those wanting removal.

scholarly journals EXPECTATION AND FEAR: PHILOSOPHICAL AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL PRESAGES OF RUSSIAN TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanjana S. Zlotnikova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Artistic Creativity ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Face ◽  
Coming Crisis ◽  
Existential Issues

The article raises the question of foreseeing moral and intellectual, aesthetic and political collisions that could occur after the expected changes at the turn of the XIX–XX centuries. The philosophical and anthropological paradigm of the pre-revolutionary era is defined through metaphors and concepts that attracted the attention of Russian philosophers, representatives of the sphere of artistic creativity: «expectation» (of changes, new people and phenomena) and «fear» (of changes, the unknown). For the analysis, we selected the judgments of prominent philosophers who discovered existential issues and related existential problems of the transition era for their contemporaries: V. Solovyov, V. Rozanov and N. Berdyaev. In V. Solovyov, the problem of waiting is related to the loneliness of a person in the face of global discord. Attention is drawn to the concept of «symptom of the end», to the concepts of crisis and disaster. Loneliness is experienced by the intellectual in anticipation of changes, possibly destructive, so the expectation as a context of loneliness turns into horror. V. Rozanov emphasized the tendency to distance himself from the world, Europe, contemporaries and classics in Russia. In Rozanov's philosophical and journalistic works, the future is not discussed at all because it is impossible to construct it; the past, which might have been the refuge of ideas about the harmony and dignity of life, causes the philosopher's attitude is sometimes even more negative than the present. On the example of the great creators – A. Chekhov, V. Meyerhold, V. Komissarzhevskaya and other contemporaries of N. Berdyaev, the psychoemotional tension from the coming crisis, the horror in anticipation of the coming future is shown. Berdyaev organically raises the question of the border between longing and other conditions (boredom, horror, a sense of emptiness), and the border is existential.

scholarly journals The features of content and playwriting art in Ho Chi Minh City’s contemporary play

2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-109
Author(s):  
Thuy Trung Luu
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ho Chi Minh City ◽  
Dramatic Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Content Feature ◽  
Art Techniques

Since the last decade of the twentieth century, Ho Chi Minh City has become one of the Vietnamese lively dramatic literature and theater centers. During the past twenty years, together with dramatic theater, Ho Chi Minh City’s dramatic literature has built up a professional playwriter force, providing audiences plays which reflect the conflicts between human’s life in the time of Vietnam’s reformation and integration. Besides, these plays have contributed experiences in acquiring and applying the world modern playwriting techniques to suit Vietnamese’s drama reception habits. This paper generally provides content feature (focus on conflicts) and playwriting art feature (focus on plots, characteristics, dialogue language construction and the acquirement of new art techniques in Ho Chi Minh City’s contemporary literary scripts), contributing to the evaluation and summary of Ho Chi Minh City’s dramatic literature during the past.

Background and Foreground: Getting Things in Context

1987 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Knight
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Information Retrieval ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern Reader ◽  
The World ◽  
Exact Reproduction ◽  
The 1960S

Historians generally grumble at the liberties taken with letters and papers by editors and biographers in the past, while reviewers may complain at the professorial pomposities which interfere with the reader's interaction with the text. Certainly, reading is not a mere matter of information retrieval or of source-mining, but a meeting of minds, and any over-zealous editing which makes this more difficult will have failed. Editors, whether of journals or of documents, are midwives of ideas—self-effacingly bringing an author's meaning and style into the world. What reviewers praise is the unobtrusive, and what they damn is ‘a manner at once slapdash and intrusive’, making allowances perhaps for an ‘introduction which is as admirable as his footnotes are useless’. When in the 1960s new technology brought us a flood of facsimile reprints of scientific works, some avoided these problems by appearing naked and unashamed: but for a text on phrenology, or for Goethe's Theory of Colours, a fig leaf or two of commentary is really necessary to help the innocent reader to interact with the book. Facsimiles of nineteenth-century editions of Wilkins' papers, of some Newton correspondence, or of Henry More's poetry are even more problematic; the reader should know that these editors' assumptions cannot be taken for granted, and that their introductions are themselves historical documents. The exact reproduction of misprints and misbindings (giving pages out of order and misnumbered) is of dubious assistance to the modern reader.

All Societies Die

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Cohn
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Byzantine Empire ◽  
Common Features ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Drug Cartels ◽  
End Of The World ◽  
The French Revolution

The author of this book asks us to prepare for the inevitable. Our society is going to die. What are you going to do about it? But the author also wants us to know that there's still reason for hope. In an immersive and mesmerizing discussion, this book considers what makes societies (throughout history) collapse. It points us to the historical examples of the Byzantine empire, the collapse of Somalia, the rise of Middle Eastern terrorism, the rise of drug cartels in Latin America, and the French Revolution, to explain how societal decline has common features and themes. While unveiling the past, the message to us about the present is searing. Through an assessment of past and current societies, the book offers us a new way of looking at societal growth and decline. With a broad panorama of bloody stories, unexpected historical riches, crime waves, corruption, and disasters, the reader is shown that although our society will, inevitably, die at some point, there's still a lot we can do to make it better and live a little longer. This inventive approach to an “end-of-the-world” scenario should be a warning. We're not there yet. The book concludes with a strategy of preserving and rebuilding so that we don't have to give a eulogy anytime soon.

Killing God to Find Palestine ‘after the End of the World’ in Adania Shibli, Mahmoud Amer, and Maya Abu al-Hayyat

2021 ◽  
pp. 155-172
Author(s):  
Nora Parr
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Symbolic Order ◽  
New Words ◽  
Existing Structures ◽  
Oslo Accords ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
End Of The World ◽  
New Framework

While imagery and ideas from the past remain significant across much of Palestinian cultural production, there is an increasing push against a quagmire of language, where meaning is stuck in a past paradigm. Focusing on the work of Adania Shibli, Maya Abu al-Hayyat, and Mahmoud Amer, this chapter looks at contemporary writers who use their art to forge new words—a new language, a new framework for language—that better responds to life as they live it. In the process, existing structures of representation are forcefully discarded, though not entirely left behind. The chapter contends that the stories demand repudiation; a reckoning with the fact that somewhere between the Oslo Accords and the new millennium Palestine’s symbolic order and its lived world ceased to cohere.

Theorizing Adaptation in the Twentieth Century

2020 ◽  
pp. 89-138
Author(s):  
Kamilla Elliott
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Recording Device ◽  
Medium Specificity ◽  
The Past ◽  
Copyright Laws ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Cultural Forms ◽  
Literature And Film

Chapter 3 discusses how, just as new copyright laws were legitimizing intermedial adaptations, modernist theories drastically diminished the theoretical fortunes of adaptation with their rejection of the past and celebration of the new. Modernism shattered adaptation into allusions: studying allusions as adaptations would indubitably help to restore the theoretical fortunes of adaptation under modernism. Modernism’s hostility to mass culture was often aimed at adaptation: even theorists valorizing other popular cultural forms opposed it. Requiring film to dissociate from other art forms in order to emerge as an art in its own right, rather than as a craft or a recording device for other arts, medium specificity theory undermined adaptation in literature-and-film studies. Affecting all kinds of adaptation, the formalist turn diminished the theoretical fortunes of adaptation by rejecting the cultural theories that had valorized adaptation in prior centuries. Joined to medium specificity theories and structuralist semiotics, intermedial adaptation became not only aesthetically undesirable but also theoretically impossible under theories that content cannot separate from form to appear in another medium. With the advent of the theoretical turn in the humanities, adaptation became a battleground upon which theoretical wars were fought, battles that, paradoxically, foregrounded it. By the 1990s, adaptation was becoming an established, if divided, diasporic field, engaging a panoply of theories.

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