Besant and Collaboration

Walter Besant ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 19-38
Author(s):  
Kirsty Bunting

At the heart of this chapter is the assertion that it is impossible to understand the full complexity of the nineteenth-century literary tradition without acknowledging that as the result of the expansion of the marketplace and the proliferation of collaborative modes of writing, the mid-to-late nineteenth century underwent a re-evaluation of the inherited Romantic constructs of authorship. It examines Walter Besant’s role as a central figure in this re-evaluation through his extended examinations of, and experiments with, collaborative authority, and the status of the author in general. This chapter discusses Walter Besant’s treatments of the topic of literary collaboration with close reference to his public commentary in the press and in his life-writing which expose and examine cultural—and some of Besant’s own—anxieties circulating at the fin de siècle about the perceived negative and disruptive effects of reading collaboratively written works. This chapter unpacks Besant’s ‘spousal’ collaborative model and situates Besant’s attitudes to literary collaboration against its marketplace contexts generally, examining how they compare with other contemporaneous literary and journalistic commentators’ treatments of shared writing across genres.

2012 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 463-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shinjini Das

AbstractThe historiography of medicine in South Asia often assumes the presence of preordained, homogenous, coherent and clearly-bound medical systems. They also tend to take the existence of a medical ‘mainstream’ for granted. This article argues that the idea of an ‘orthodox’, ‘mainstream’ named allopathy and one of its ‘alternatives’ homoeopathy were co-produced in Bengal. It emphasises the role of the supposed ‘fringe’, ie. homoeopathy, in identifying and organising the ‘orthodoxy’ of the time. The shared market for medicine and print provided a crucial platform where such binary identities such as ‘homoeopaths’ and ‘allopaths’ were constituted and reinforced. This article focuses on a range of polemical writings by physicians in the Bengali print market since the 1860s. Published mostly in late nineteenth-century popular medical journals, these concerned the nature, definition and scope of ‘scientific’ medicine. The article highlights these published disputes and critical correspondence among physicians as instrumental in simultaneously shaping the categories ‘allopathy’ and ‘homoeopathy’ in Bengali print. It unravels how contemporary understandings of race, culture and nationalism informed these medical discussions. It further explores the status of these medical contestations, often self-consciously termed ‘debates’, as an essential contemporary trope in discussing ‘science’ in the vernacular.


Author(s):  
Richa Dwor

This chapter looks at the role of Judaism in late nineteenth-century culture, focussing on the life of Lily Montagu, whose importance lies in her activism and the unique way that she brought her faith (liberal Jewish) and her politics (socialist) into productive relationship. Montagu’s unorthodox career-path is traced and her social work and theology mapped in relation to larger debates about the Sabbath and sweated industries, at a time of heightened anxiety that Jewry was riven by a socialism in its midst. The chapter shows how models for female independence were in practice more varied than those represented in the press.


2020 ◽  
Vol 135 (572) ◽  
pp. 94-126
Author(s):  
William Mulligan

Abstract The decision of Gladstone’s government to invade and occupy Egypt in 1882 remains one of the most contentious in late nineteenth-century British political and imperial history. This article examines the decision-making process in June and July 1882, revisiting Robinson and Gallagher’s influential study in the light of more recent historiographical research and previously unused sources. It looks at who made the critical decisions, what their preoccupations were, and how they were able to get Cabinet approval. Hartington and Northbrook were the two key figures, who co-operated to overturn Gladstone’s and Granville’s policy in June 1882. Yet their co-operation was momentary and they found themselves on different sides of the argument over the participation of Indian forces and international support. Although they shared a sense of Egypt’s importance to British imperial security, they each had a distinctive approach, so that the decision to occupy cannot be reduced to a conflict between Whig pragmatists and Radical idealists. The article also shows how the Alexandria riot on 11 June altered the context of decision-making by shifting the mood in the parliamentary Liberal party towards intervention. Parliament, not the press, was the crucial site of ‘public opinion’ in the Egyptian crisis in June and July 1882.


2006 ◽  
Vol 131 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grant Olwage

This article intervenes in debates on the status of ‘race’ in ethno/musicological writings. It does so through an examination of the compositional discourse of colonial black South African choral music, particularly detailed analyses of the work of John Knox Bokwe (1855–1922) and their metropolitan sources such as late nineteenth-century gospel hymnody, exploring both how Bokwe's compositional practice enacted a politics that became anticolonial and how early black choral music became ‘black’ in its receptions. The article concludes that ethno/musicological claims that colonial black choral music contains ‘African’ musical content conflate race and culture under a double imperative: in the names of a decolonizing politics and a postcolonial epistemology in which hybridity as resistance is racialized.


Author(s):  
Judith Vitale

Summary This article argues that the widespread use of opiate-compounded medicines in late-nineteenth-century Japan was partly a result of Meiji period (1868–1912) public health policies. An overview of the status of opiates in Japan from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries is intended to explain possible reasons: pharmaceutical reforms in the 1870s and 1880s were based on Edo-period (1603–1868) protostructures of regulated drug manufacture; in contrast, the Meiji government failed to introduce Western clinical practice within a short span of time. As a result opiates, marketed as Western ‘modern’ medicines, were smoothly integrated into pre-existing beliefs, according to which drugs and diets maintained bodily health.


1998 ◽  
Vol 82 (3) ◽  
pp. 1027-1043 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Brown ◽  
Onno van der Hart

Since the late nineteenth century explanations of sexual trauma have invoked unconscious mental mechanisms of forgetting. Memories have been seen as submerged only to be therapeutically recovered. Explanations and related therapies have tended to be either hotly advocated or decried, not the least were those of Janet and Freud. Once again there is a vigorous debate surrounding the status of recovered memories. This paper was undertaken to contribute to reasoned and balanced dialogue by exploring an historical dimension. There is a renaissance of interest in the oeuvre of Janet. In this article Janetian sources are examined in which he criticised Freud's views on sexual trauma and elaborated his own position, a position which is yet significant today.


1993 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 371-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic Aidan Bellenger

One of the soldiers asked him what religion he was of. He readily answered, ‘I am a Catholic’ ‘What!’ said the other, ‘a Roman Catholic?’ ‘How do you mean a Roman?’ said Father Bell, ‘I am an Englishman. There is but one Catholic Church, and of that I am a member.’These words of a Franciscan priest, Arthur Bell, executed at Tyburn in 1643, could have been taken as his own by Dom Bede Camm, the Benedictine martyrologist, who was one of the great propagandists of those English and Welsh Catholic martyrs who died in the period from the reign of Elizabeth to the Popish Plot. The lives of the martyrs were familiar to English Catholics through the writings of Richard Challoner (1691–1781), whose Memoirs of Missionary Priests had been available in various forms since its publication, as a kind of Catholic reply to Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, in two volumes in 1741–2, but in the late nineteenth century, as the English Catholics, reinforced by many converts from the Church of England, grew more combative in controversy following the relative calm of the Georgian period, the martyrs came more to the forefront. The church authorities sought recognition of the English martyrs’ heroic virtue. In 1874 Cardinal Manning had put under way an ‘ordinary process’, a preliminary judicial inquiry, to collect evidence to elevate the ‘venerable’ martyrs to the status of ‘beati’. In 1895, and again in 1929, large batches of English martyrs were declared blessed. In 1935 Thomas More and John Fisher were canonized. It was not until 1970 that forty of the later martyrs, a representative group, were officially declared saints.


boundary 2 ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 153-179
Author(s):  
Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

Since 1950, the Chinese government has determined the status and position of Tibetans, but it has not won the battle for Tibetans’ hearts and minds. Ongoing Tibetan resistance under Chinese rule points to serious fissures in the Chinese state’s ideological and cultural project of “liberating” Tibet. Wang Hui’s article “The ‘Tibetan Question’ East and West: Orientalism, Regional Ethnic Autonomy, and the Politics of Dignity” analyzes the March 2008 “riots” in and around Lhasa in order to understand the impediments to a real solution to the crisis in Tibet. This piece suggests that although Wang Hui offers productive ways of moving beyond the status quo, his analysis of Tibet is limited by multiple ideological contradictions that ultimately fail to lift Tibet out of the advanced/backward binary that typifies late nineteenth-century orientalism.


Afghanistan ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-236
Author(s):  
Robert D. Crews

This article explores Afghan Twelver Shiʿi commemoration of the martyrdom of Imam Husayn at the Battle of Karbala. It shows how the rites of remembrance and mourning celebrated on ʿAshura in Afghanistan has evolved in important ways from the late nineteenth century to the recent past. More than a pivotal event in the ritual calendar of Shiʿism, ʿAshura has served as an index of Afghan politics—and a field of contestation among state officials, clerical authorities, and the Shiʿi faithful. It has thus been at the center of struggles over the identity of the Afghan nation, the status of the Shia, and ritual practices in public life. Drawing on representations of ʿAshura produced by government authorities, state media, clerics, and lay people, this article examines how different actors have competed to give ʿAshura meaning and to develop distinctively Afghan forms of commemoration.


2015 ◽  
Vol 157 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denis Cryle

This article examines the role of telegraphy and newspapers in the provision of weather news during the late nineteenth century. In order to trace the transformation from data to news, the discussion begins by documenting the formation of both technical and professional meteorological networks, at a time when government observers across the colonies began to compile joint reports for an expanding reading public. In this respect, its focus will be primarily on the use of the inter-colonial telegraph, and upon two influential observers operating in different Australian colonies: Charles Todd in South Australia and Clement Wragge in Queensland. In order to explore the development of colonial weather networks in the age of the telegraph, the article examines the protracted press and professional controversy that arose between these two media personalities, and maps the transformation of weather telegrams into news by late colonial newspapers.


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