A ‘Northern Athens’? Cultural and intellectual life

2020 ◽  
pp. 92-139
Author(s):  
Alice Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Music Literature ◽  
Scientific Associations

In the Victorian period, Belfast was known as the ‘Northern Athens’ – a title which referred to the city’s cultural and intellectual credentials. The term was still being used in the early twentieth century. Yet in the second half of the nineteenth century, as the city’s cultural societies struggled to survive, Belfast’s cultural claims were increasingly under question. By the end of the century it was felt that Belfast was now known more for its hard-headed business character than for its culture. This chapter assesses the cultural and intellectual life of Victorian Belfast and questions the validity of the ‘cultural centre to cultural desert’ narrative. It offers a nuanced discussion of the city’s cultural strengths and weaknesses and those of comparable provincial centres elsewhere. Cultural and scientific associations are examined in some detail; and theatre, music, literature and newspapers are all covered. In addition, the mental intellectual landscape of Belfast’s middle-class elite is discussed.

“An Appetite to Be Pretty”

Working Girls ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 127-155
Author(s):  
Patricia Tilburg
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Defining Moment ◽  
Lunch Break ◽  
Garment Worker ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Urban Consumption ◽  
Cultural Fantasy

This chapter considers a defining moment of the working Parisienne’s day to which early twentieth-century French observers returned again and again: midi. The noon lunch break afforded Parisian artists, writers, and tourists alike a daily glimpse of the “fairies” of the city’s luxury garment workshops as they took to the boulevards and parks for an hour in the sun—an hour imagined to consist of flirtation, window-shopping, laughter, and, I will establish, conspicuous under-eating. Indeed, crucial to the picturesque allure of the lunchtime seductions that filled popular midinette literature was the notion of the female garment worker as a frivolous under-eater cheerfully forfeiting food for fashion and pleasure. No longer the tragically starving workingwoman of nineteenth-century fiction and art, nor her virtuous, anorectic middle-class sister, whose physical wasting increased their moral fortitude, the under-eating midinette of the early twentieth century was envisioned doing so as a means of engaging more fully in the capitalist marketplace, making her body a more appealing advertisement for and object of urban consumption. This cultural fantasy of the midinette’s lunch hour, which fetishized the supposed moral precariousness of her lifestyle as well as the sparseness of her diet, was echoed by social reformers, who, in this same period, sought to carve out spaces for workingwomen’s lunches that kept them from the cafés and parks where they were believed to flirt much and eat little.

scholarly journals Eden Smith and the Canadian Domestic Revival

2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 104-115
Author(s):  
Annmarie Adams
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Domestic Architecture ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Upper Middle Class ◽  
Landed Gentry

The designer of more than 2500 detached houses in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Toronto, Eden Smith has been hailed as the author of a distinctly Canadian style of domestic architecture. Yet his self-promotion and the reception of his work in both the professional and popular presses of the time emphasize the Englishness of his houses. This paper considers the domestic architecture of Eden Smith as an index of attitudes held by Toronto's upper middle class toward Britain in the early twentieth century. What did the image of an "English house" represent in Edwardian Toronto? Why were these particular qualities attractive to Toronto's landed gentry? Eden Smith's architecture was both distinct and derivative. The language of the elevations was unmistakably British, while the plan of his houses was something completely new. Smith's popularity and his influence on subsequent generations of Canadian house-architects speak eloquently of the willingness of Toronto's middle class to try new things, but only clothed in the auspices of a British past.

Socialism and the Flow of  Time in Modernity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Wright
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Doctoral Thesis ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Flow Of Time

This chapter asks wider questions about the flow of time as it was explored in this historical writing. It focuses on Jaurès’ philosophy of history, initially through a brief discussion of his doctoral thesis and the essay entitled ‘Le bilan social du XIXème siècle’ that he provided at the end of the Histoire socialiste, then through the work of three of his collaborators, Gabriel Deville, Eugène Fournière, and Georges Renard. One of the most important challenges for socialists in the early twentieth century was to understand the damage and division caused by revolution, while not losing the transformative mission of their socialism. With these elements established, the chapter returns to Jaurès, and in particular the long study of nineteenth-century society in chapter 10 of L’Armée nouvelle. Jaurès advanced an original vision of the nineteenth century and its meaning for the socialist present.

Firearms and Princely Power in Ethiopia in the Nineteenth Century

1972 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 609-630 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. A. Caulk
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Imperial Authority ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
National Leadership ◽  
Local Leaders

Several centuries after firearms had been introduced, they were still of little importance in Ethiopia, where cavalry continued to dominate warfare until the second half of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, they were much sought after by local leaders ambitious to secure their autonomy or to grasp supreme authority. The first of these warlords to make himself emperor, Tēwodros (1855–68), owed nothing to firearms. However, his successors, Yohannis IV (1872–89) and Minīlik (d. 1913), did. Both excelled in their mastery of the new technology and acquired large quantities of quick-firing weapons. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, possession of firearms — principally the breech loading rifle — had become a precondition for successfully contending for national leadership. Yet the wider revolution associated (as in Egypt) with the establishment of a European-style army did not follow. Nor was rearmament restricted to the following of the emperor. Despite the revival of imperial authority effected by Yohannis and Minīlik, rifles and even machine-guns were widely enough spread at the turn of the century to reinforce the fragmentation of power long characteristic of the Ethiopian state. Into the early twentieth century, it remained uncertain if the peculiar advantages of the capital in the import of arms would be made to serve centralization.

Vitalistic Discourses of Violin Pedagogy in the Early Twentieth Century

2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-190
Author(s):  
Stefan Knapik
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Final Word ◽  
Collaborative Activity ◽  
Violin Pedagogy ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Scientific Approach ◽  
Joseph Joachim ◽  
Violin Playing

Abstract The pedagogical treatise is generally understood to be a manual of singing or instrumental techniques that is largely practical in approach, yet a critique of violin tutor books dating from the early twentieth century, especially those written by the renowned violinists Joseph Joachim (writing in conjunction with Andreas Moser), Leopold Auer, and Carl Flesch, reveals an extensive engagement with a range of wider ideologies. In a bid to trump the supposedly deadening effects of both a historicism resulting from the availability of earlier treatises, as well as the overly scientific approach taken by contemporaneous treatises, these violinist-authors embrace metaphysical ideals of mind or vitality, and the result is a model of violin playing founded on the concept of “singing tone,” an idea developed out of nineteenth-century notions of song/melody as embodying a vital essence. As did Wagner, in his 1869 essay Über das Dirigiren, writers play with the idea that theoretical and performative categories, such as tempo, phrasing, dynamics, vibrato, and types of bow stroke, both conflict with each other and find a deeper unity in a subjectivist ideal of tone. The approach of these texts is not explorative, however, so much as a rather defensive championing of the idea of mind or vitality: ideologies of self, health, and nationalism ultimately prevail over an engagement with historical evidence in Moser's discussion of ornaments, and Auer's intolerance of any mitigating influence that might qualify the artist's final word on aesthetic matters is reminiscent of a reductive, Nietzschean ideal of vitality. Nevertheless, writers struggle to reconcile it with the messier realities of performing, as an embodied and collaborative activity, and subsequently what speaks louder in their texts are anxieties over affronts to notions of self, expressed using pathological notions common to the era. Whereas at times writers encourage students of the violin to share in their lauding of vitalistic ideals, more often than not they try to impose disciplinary measures as a means of inculcating them.

American Legal Thought in Transatlantic Context, 1870-1914

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Rabban
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First Generation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Historical School ◽  
Legal Thought ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Sociological Jurisprudence

Most American legal scholars have described their nineteenth-century predecessors as deductive formalists. In my recent book, Law’s History : American Legal Thought and the Transatlantic Turn to History, I demonstrate instead that the first generation of professional legal scholars in the United States, who wrote during the last three decades of the nineteenth century, viewed law as a historically based inductive science. They constituted a distinctive historical school of American jurisprudence that was superseded by the development of sociological jurisprudence in the early twentieth century. This article focuses on the transatlantic context, involving connections between European and American scholars, in which the historical school of American jurisprudence emerged, flourished, and eventually declined.

Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-Century Post-Kantian Philosophy

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Franks
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Historical Inquiry ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
New Methods ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Kantian Philosophy

This article examines three moments of the post-Kantian philosophical tradition in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Kantianism, Post-Kantian Idealism, and Neo-Kantianism. It elucidates the distinctive methods of a tradition that has never entirely disappeared and is now acknowledged once again as the source of contemporary insights. It outlines two problematics—naturalist scepticism and historicist nihilism—threatening the possibility of metaphysics. The first concerns sceptical worries about reason, emerging from attempts to extend the methods of natural science to the study of human beings. Kant’s project of a critical and transcendental analysis of reason, with its distinctive methods, should be considered a response. The second arises from the development of new methods of historical inquiry, seeming to undermine the very possibility of individual agency. Also considered are Kant’s successors’ revisions of the critical and transcendental analysis of reason, undertaken to overcome challenges confronting the original versions of Kant’s methods.

scholarly journals Iphigénie à Paris: Positioning Gluck Historically in Early Twentieth-Century France

2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-15
Author(s):  
William Gibbons
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Music History ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
Unusual Event ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Vincent D'indy

In December 1907, Gluck's opera Iphigénie en Aulide was produced in Paris at the Opéra-Comique, the last of his major operas to be revived in France. The ensuing critical reception pitted Vincent d'Indy, who harshly criticized the production, against its director, Albert Carré; d'Indy further responded by conducting the overture to Iphigénie only a few weeks later as a musical corrective to the performance at the Opéra-Comique. This unusual event highlights the historiographie problem Gluck presented to early twentieth-century critics in France: did his music look backwards to the tragédies lyriques of Lully and Rameau, or did it prefigure the Wagnerian music-dramas of the nineteenth century? The 1907 Opéra-Comique production of Iphigénie and its aftermath encapsulate the struggle to incorporate Gluck into newly developing and often competing narratives of music history.

The Meaning[s] of "Without": An Exploration of Liszt's Bagatelle ohne Tonart

2004 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 230-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Berry
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Musical Thought ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Future ◽  
Piano Composition ◽  
Musical Evolution ◽  
Future Direction ◽  
Theoretical Issues ◽  
The Way

In this essay, I explore historical and theoretical issues germane to an understanding of an 1885 piano composition with an intriguing title: LisztÕs Bagatelle ohne Tonart--a bagatelle "without tonality" or "without a key." After briefly describing the workÕs history and musical associations with other compositions by Liszt, I survey two present-day approaches that reveal ways in which the work defies tonality: octatonic interpretations via set-class examinations, and Schenker-influenced prolongational models. I then turn to focus instead on how the Bagatelle fit within the framework of nineteenth-century musical thought; how its processes were supported by contemporaneously evolving theories of chromaticism. Partly through an analysis based on the practice of Gottfried Weber (1779-1839), I demonstrate that the Bagatelle is not a piece "without tonality" as much as it is one "without the fulfillment of the tonic." It maintains harmonic tension by avoiding anticipated resolutions, as well as by preserving a sense of ambiguity as to what the actual "missing" key is. Next, I consider why Liszt was prompted to write a piece in such a manner. We know that he was a proponent of musical progress--of Zukunftsmusik ("music of the future")--but for this fact to be relevant we must confirm, first, that Liszt had definite ideas about a Zukunftsharmoniesystem; and second, that such a system is reflected in the processes exhibited by the Bagatelle. I argue that the BagatelleÕs traits are indeed in accordance with theoretical views about musicÕs future direction, to which Liszt subscribed. Relevant theories of Karl Friedrich Weitzmann (1808-80) and Franois-Joseph FŽtis (1784-1871) are assessed. Lastly, in a "Schoenbergian epilogue" I explore connections between LisztÕs operations and SchoenbergÕs ideas, addressing historical associations that conjoin their views of composing "ohne Tonart."I conclude that the 1885 BagatelleÕs attenuation of tonality was part of a tradition that extended from the mid-nineteenth into the early twentieth century--one that stretched from Liszt and his contemporaries through Schoenberg and his pupils and beyond, embracing along the way the theoretical prescriptions of Weitzmann, FŽtis, and Schoenberg himself. The various threads of theory and analysis explored in this article contribute to an understanding of the same strand of musical evolution: the increasing circumvention of tonality to the point that a piece could be written "ohne Tonart."

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