scholarly journals Considering eighteenth-century prophecy as transformative work

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Crome

This article explores premodern prophecy as a form of transformative work with connections to contemporary fan fiction. This link is established in three ways: through the archontic nature of prophecy, through the prophet's self-insertion into the biblical text, and by viewing prophetic groups as textual communities marked by affective links to characters. These links are examined through a case study of two prophets, Richard Brothers (1757–1824) and Joanna Southcott (1750–1814), with the conflict between them reconceptualized as an affectively driven dispute over claims to character ownership. The article suggests that approaches from fan studies can offer useful perspectives for historians (and vice versa) while cautioning against overly arbitrary ahistorical comparisons between modern fandom and premodern groups.

2020 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Flaherty

This discussion of the main practices of both legal research and fan studies research explores their key differences and similarities to demonstrate that there are important conclusions that can be drawn from the discourse between the two. The methodology of this research into copyright and fan fiction will be used as a case study to demonstrate how well these fields intersect. This research investigates whether transformative works of fan fiction should be covered by the new fair-dealing exception for pastiche within UK copyright law (Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988), similar to parody. To discuss this, my research investigates whether it can be said empirically and doctrinally that fan fiction could be classified as a special case that does not adversely affect the rights holders' interests, as required by Article 13 of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights and Article 9 of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works. By adding doctrinal and empirical research methods to fan studies, the argument can be made that fan fiction is not harmful to the underlying work and does not interfere with the copyright holders' normal exploitation of that work, and as such should be permitted as fair dealing.


2020 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Milena Popova

In this paper I investigate the methodological challenges posed by the intersection of two factors commonly found in some types of fan studies research: studying a community one is already a member of and that community existing in a digital setting. I propose an approach shaped by traditional ethnography, digital ethnography, and autoethnography that is theoretically grounded, takes into account both practical and theoretical issues, and seeks to leverage the strengths of the digital environment and the ethnographer's knowledge of the community they are researching. I pay particular attention to the role and positionality of the ethnographer in this environment, as well as the process of field site construction, which I conceptualize as a journey. To illustrate this follow-the-trope approach in action, I present a case study based on my research on sexual consent in fan fiction.


2005 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Kidd

Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre) made several iconoclastic interventions in the field of Scottish history. These earned him a notoriety in Scottish circles which, while not undeserved, has led to the reductive dismissal of Trevor-Roper's ideas, particularly his controversial interpretation of the Scottish Enlightenment, as the product of Scotophobia. In their indignation Scottish historians have missed the wider issues which prompted Trevor-Roper's investigation of the Scottish Enlightenment as a fascinating case study in European cultural history. Notably, Trevor-Roper used the example of Scotland to challenge Weberian-inspired notions of Puritan progressivism, arguing instead that the Arminian culture of north-east Scotland had played a disproportionate role in the rise of the Scottish Enlightenment. Indeed, working on the assumption that the essence of Enlightenment was its assault on clerical bigotry, Trevor-Roper sought the roots of the Scottish Enlightenment in Jacobitism, the counter-cultural alternative to post-1690 Scotland's Calvinist Kirk establishment. Though easily misconstrued as a dogmatic conservative, Trevor-Roper flirted with Marxisant sociology, not least in his account of the social underpinnings of the Scottish Enlightenment. Trevor-Roper argued that it was the rapidity of eighteenth-century Scotland's social and economic transformation which had produced in one generation a remarkable body of political economy conceptualising social change, and in the next a romantic movement whose powers of nostalgic enchantment were felt across the breadth of Europe.


Author(s):  
Isabel Rivers

This chapter analyses the editions, abridgements, and recommendations of texts by seventeenth-century nonconformists that were made by eighteenth-century dissenters, Methodists, and Church of England evangelicals. The nonconformist writers they chose include Joseph Alleine, Richard Baxter, John Flavel, John Owen, and John Bunyan. The editors and recommenders include Philip Doddridge, John Wesley, Edward Williams, Benjamin Fawcett, George Burder, John Newton, William Mason, and Thomas Scott. Detailed accounts are provided of the large number of Baxter’s works that were edited, notably A Call to the Unconverted and The Saints Everlasting Rest, and a case study is devoted to the many annotated editions of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and the ways in which they were used. The editors took into account length, intelligibility, religious attitudes, and cost, and sometimes criticized their rivals’ versions on theological grounds.


Author(s):  
Matthew H. Birkhold

How did authors control the literary fates of fictional characters before the existence of copyright? Could a second author do anything with another author’s character? Situated between the decline of the privilege system and the rise of copyright, literary borrowing in eighteenth-century Germany has long been considered unregulated. This book tells a different story. Characters before Copyright documents the surprisingly widespread eighteenth-century practice of writing fan fiction—literary works written by readers who appropriate preexisting characters invented by other authors—and reconstructs the contemporaneous debate about the literary phenomenon. Like fan fiction today, these texts took the form of sequels, prequels, and spinoffs. Analyzing the evolving reading, writing, and consumer habits of late-eighteenth-century Germany, Characters before Copyright identifies the social, economic, and aesthetic changes that fostered the rapid rise of fan fiction after 1750. Based on archival work and an ethnographic approach borrowed from legal anthropology, this book then uncovers the unwritten customary norms that governed the production of these works. Characters before Copyright thus reinterprets the eighteenth-century “literary commons,” arguing that what may appear to have been the free circulation of characters was actually circumscribed by an exacting set of rules and conditions. These norms translated into a unique type of literature that gave rise to remarkable forms of collaborative authorship and originality. Characters before Copyright provides a new perspective on the eighteenth-century book trade and the rise of intellectual property, reevaluating the concept of literary property, the history of moral rights, and the tradition of free culture.


Author(s):  
Andrew Kahn ◽  
Mark Lipovetsky ◽  
Irina Reyfman ◽  
Stephanie Sandler

In the context of Sentimentalism in the 1770s, literary culture opened up to representations of human subjectivity. The chapter considers genres of poetry devoted to the themes of pleasure, death, and posterity. It also considers the spaces of poetry and modes of exchange, whether through the album, the salon, and the verse epistle. Two case studies explore the use of different literary forms in the further development of identity, individual and also authorial. The first looks at Radishchev’s experiment in writing a fictional diary as a psychological exercise. The second examines the tradition of imitation of Horace’s Monument poem in Russian poetry in the eighteenth century as well as by later poets, such as Pushkin and Brodsky. The case study shows how these Russian versions express changing ideas about imitation and originality as well as poets’ concern with posterity.


Traditio ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 73 ◽  
pp. 83-116
Author(s):  
PETER O'HAGAN

Peter Lombard's influential commentary on the Pauline Epistles, theCollectanea in omnes divi Pauli epistolas,has received little extended analysis in scholarly literature, despite its recognized importance both in its own right and as key for the development of hisSentences.This article presents a new approach to studying theCollectaneaby analyzing how Lombard's commentary builds on theGlossa “Ordinaria”on the Pauline Epistles. The article argues for treating theCollectaneaas a “historical act,” focusing on how Lombard engages with the biblical text and with authoritative sources within which he encounters the same biblical text embedded. The article further argues for the necessity of turning to the manuscripts of both theCollectaneaand theGlossa,rather than continuing to rely on inadequate early modern printed editions or thePatrologia Latina.The article then uses Lombard's discussion of faith at Romans 1:17 as a case study, demonstrating the way in which Lombard begins from theGlossa,clarifies its ambiguities, and moves his analysis forward through his use of otherauctoritatesand theologicalquaestiones.A comparison with Lombard's treatment of faith in theSentenceshighlights the close links between Lombard's biblical lectures and this later work. The article concludes by arguing that scholastic biblical exegesis and theology should be treated as primarily a classroom activity, with the glossed Bible as the central focus. Discussion of Lombard's work should draw on much recent scholarship that has begun to uncover the layers of orality within the textual history of scholastic works.


2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-336
Author(s):  
Paul Michael Taylor

This paper presents one case study of state-sponsored cultural activities that occurred throughout 2014, Turkmenistan's Year of Magtymguly, the 290th anniversary of this Turkmen poet's birth. Such activities constitute examples of public culture; they can organize representations of a society's past and present to reaffirm for participants the values and power structure of their society and revalidate its philosophical underpinnings. After examining this Turkic poet's iconicity, this paper compiles 2014's celebratory events from disparate sources, complementing broader general literature on Central Asia's spectacles of public culture and their role in nation-building and identity-formation. Rather than merely resulting from any top-down decision specifying required activities nationwide, the year's events involved numerous synergies as artists, museum and theater administrators, composers, and other cultural-sector workers benefited by responding to the potential of aligning their work with a theme as broad, as widely appreciated, and as eligible for various forms of support as this one. In addition, Turkmenistan's strong central leadership benefited from this widely shared and highly visible celebration, especially emphasizing one element within Magtymguly's eighteenth-century vision, an end to his people's tribal conflicts within a unified Turkmenistan under one leader.


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