Staging the Other in Nineteenth-Century British Drama

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linford D. Fisher

Although racial lines eventually hardened on both sides, in the opening decades of colonization European and native ideas about differences between themselves and the other were fluid and dynamic, changing on the ground in response to local developments and experiences. Over time, perceived differences were understood to be rooted in more than just environment and culture. In the eighteenth century, bodily differences became the basis for a wider range of deeper, more innate distinctions that, by the nineteenth century, hardened into what we might now understand to be racialized differences in the modern sense. Despite several centuries of dispossession, disease, warfare, and enslavement at the hands of Europeans, native peoples in the Americans almost universally believed the opposite to be true. The more indigenous Americans were exposed to Europeans, the more they believed in the vitality and superiority of their own cultures.


2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-168
Author(s):  
James Donovan

Abstract In nineteenth-century France, liberals assumed that a conservative judiciary was frequently biased in favour of the prosecution, and socialists assumed that juries were dominated by the upper classes and too unrepresentative of the population to render justice equitably. Agitation by the left to combat these perceived biases led to the adoption of two key reforms of the fin de siècle. One was the abolition in 1881 of the résumé, or summing-up of the case by the chief justice of the cour d’assises (felony court). Liberals thought this reform was necessary because judges allegedly often used the résumé to persuade jurors in favour of conviction, a charge repeated by modern historians. The other reform, beginning at about the same time, was to make jury composition more democratic. By 1880, newly empowered liberals (at least in Paris) had begun to reduce the proportion of wealthy men on jury lists. This was followed in 1908 by the implementation of a circular issued by the Minister of Justice ordering the jury commissions to inscribe working-class men on the annual jury lists. However, a quantitative analysis of jury verdicts suggests that the reforms of the early 1880s and 1908 had only modest impacts on jury verdicts. Ideas and attitudes seem to have been more important. This has implications regarding two key controversies among modern jurists: the extent to which judges influence jurors and the extent to which the characteristics of jurors influence their verdicts.


PMLA ◽  
1961 ◽  
Vol 76 (3) ◽  
pp. 233-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monroe Z. Hafter

A recent article of Leon Livingstone rightly calls attention to the importance of Pérez Galdós' assimilation of Cervantine irony as a forerunner of the concern of modern Spanish novelists about the autonomy of their characters. The unreality of rationalism, which Livingstone holds to be the germ of El amigo Manso, the imagination's capacity to create reality at the heart of Misericordia, lead to the even bolder experiments in the artistic representation of reality undertaken by Unamuno, Azorín, Valle-Inclán, and Pérez de Ayala. Anomalous for his time yet so pervasive in his work is Galdós' employment of “interior duplication” that a separate study would contribute to our fuller understanding of his art as well as to our measure of the advances in the Spanish novel of the latter half of the nineteenth century. The present essay focuses on Galdós' developing skill with internal repetitions from La Fontana de Oro (publ. 1870), through the rich complexities of the novels written between 1886–89, to their almost stylized simplicity in El abuelo (1897). Always related to Cervantine irony, the variety of verbal echoes, the mirroring of one character in another, the unconscious illumination each may offer the other, underscore the increasingly intimate wedding of form and matter with which Galdós came to unfold his narratives.


PMLA ◽  
1964 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 266-282
Author(s):  
David H. Stewart

One of the most impressive features of Anna Karenina is the way in which Tolstoy draws the reader's imagination beyond the literal level of the narrative into generalizations that seem mythical in a manner difficult to articulate. With Dostoevsky or Melville, one sees immediately a propensity for exploiting the symbolic value of things. With Tolstoy, things try, as it were, to resist conversion: they strive to maintain their “thingness” as empirical entities. A character in Dostoevsky is usually only half man; the other half is Christ or Satan. Moby Dick is obviously only half whale; the other half is Evil or some principle of Nature. But Anna Karenina is emphatically Anna Karenina. Like almost all of Tolstoy's characters, she has a proficiency in the husbandry of identity; she jealously hoards her own unique reality, so that it becomes difficult to say of her that she is a “type” of nineteenth-century Russian lady or a “symbol” of modern woman or an “archetypical” Eve or Lilith.


1983 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maarten van Dijk

Stage speech, like the other techniques of acting, such as gesture, movement, and the interpretation of character, has always been subject to the theatrical conventions of an age. The conventions, while superficially based on current fads and fashions are on a more profound level the result of an underlying creative method reflecting commonly held views about the correct or ‘natural’ methods of imitating nature on the stage. Nothing demonstrates the enormous changes in stage speech over the last hundred years more vividly than the few existing recordings made by actors who had most of their training and their careers in the mid-to-late nineteenth century.


2009 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 115-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce E. Moon

Prospects for democracy in Iraq should be assessed in light of the historical precedents of nations with comparable political experiences. Saddam Hussein's Iraq was an unusually extreme autocracy, which lasted an unusually long time. Since the end of the nineteenth century, only thirty nations have experienced an autocracy as extreme as Iraq's for a period exceeding two decades. The subsequent political experience of those nations offers a pessimistic forecast for Iraq and similar nations. Only seven of the thirty are now democratic, and only two of them have become established democracies; the democratic experiments in the other five are still in progress. Among the seven, the average time required to transit the path from extreme autocracy to coherent, albeit precarious, democracy has been fifty years, and only two have managed this transition in fewer than twenty-five years. Even this sober assessment is probably too optimistic, because Iraq lacks the structural conditions that theory and evidence indicate have been necessary for successful democratic transitions in the past. Thus, the odds of Iraq achieving democracy in the next quarter century are close to zero, at best about two in thirty, but probably far less.


Author(s):  
Donald R. Kelley

Centuries of Roman jurisprudence were assembled in the great Byzantine collection, the Digest, by Tribonian and the other editors. Roman law became more formal when during the Renaissance of the twelfth century it came to be taught in the first universities, starting with Bologna and the teaching of Irnerius. The main channels of expansion were through the Glossators and post-Glossators, who commented on the main texts and on later legislation by the Holy Roman Emperors, which included “feudal law,” but also by notaries and other proto-lawyers. Christian doctrine also became part of the “Roman” tradition, and canon and civil law were taught together in the universities as “civil science.” According to the ancient Roman jurist Gaius, “all the law which we use pertains either to persons or to things or to actions,” three categories that exhaust the external human condition—personality, reality, and action. In the nineteenth century, the study of Roman law lost its ideological power and became part of philology and history, at least so concludes James Whitman.


2000 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger

The ArgumentIn this essay I will sketch a few instances of how, and a few forms in which, the “invisible” became an epistemic category in the development of the life sciences from the seventeenth century through the end of the nineteenth century. In contrast to most of the other papers in this issue, I do not so much focus on the visualization of various little entities, and the tools and contexts in which a visual representation of these things was realized. I will be more concerned with the basic problem of introducing entities or structures that cannot be seen, as elements of an explanatory strategy. I will try to review the ways in which the invisibility of such entities moved from the unproblematic status of just being too small to be accessible to the naked or even the armed eye, to the problematic status of being invisible in principle and yet being indispensable within a given explanatory framework. The epistemological concern of the paper is thus to sketch the historical process of how the “unseen” became a problem in the modern life sciences. The coming into being of the invisible as a space full of paradoxes is itself the product of a historical development that still awaits proper reconstruction.


2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 755-771 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Kaye

Much of the critical writingon Queer Theory and Sexuality Studies in a Victorian context over the last decade or so has been absorbing, exploring, complicating, and working under the burden of the influence of Michel Foucault's theoretical writings on erotic relations and identity. The first volume of Foucault'sThe History of Sexuality(1978), in fact, had begun with a gauntlet thrown down before Victorian Studies, a chapter-long critique of Steven Marcus'sThe Other Victorians(1966), a work that had offered an entirely new and at the time, quite bold avenue of exploring nineteenth-century culture – namely, through the pornographic imagination that Marcus taxonomized with precise, clinical flair as a “pornotopia” in which “all men . . . are always infinitely potent; all women fecundate with lust and flow inexhaustibly with sap or both. Everyone is always ready for everything” (276). In Foucault's telling, however, Marcus demonstrated a theoretically impoverished faith in Freudian models of “repression” in Marcus's examination of “underground” Victorian sexualities. It was Marcus's reliance on the “repressive fallacy,” his conviction that there existed a demarcated spatial and psychic Victorian counter-world thatThe History of Sexualityhad so forcefully undermined.


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