Symbolism Overview

Author(s):  
Emile Fromet de Rosnay ◽  
Dennis Ioffe ◽  
Samantha Rowe

Symbolism is a late-nineteenth-century literary movement centred mostly around the work of poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Philippe Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, and the later Maurice Maeterlinck, as well as novelists like Joris-Karl Huysmans and Edouard Dujardin. Although Tristan Corbière died in 1875, he is an important figure associated with the movement thanks to his image as a poète maudit (‘poet of the damned’) and to this poetic style. A broad term that occasionally extends to early twentieth-century modernists like T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound, Symbolism is traditionally dated from circa 1870 to 1900. (The term ‘Symbolist’ was coined by Jean Moréas in the review La Vogue in 1886.) The movement became more international in the 1890s with the emergence of European Symbolism such as Russian Symbolism, German Symbolism etc., and with poets such as Emile Nelligan in Canada. Of equal importance is its influence as an artistic movement. Symbolism reacted to broader cultural tendencies related to scientific and literary Positivism such as Realism and Naturalism, and the language of the popular press, particularly as it appeared in the form of best-sellers. Where popular language informs the public with moral narratives, Symbolist language tries to avoid such a reduction.


Author(s):  
Giorgio Pestelli

The meaning of the bicentenary that solemnizes Verdi and Wagner two hundred years after their birth essentially derives from the emotion of facing two personalities extraordinary for their creative energy and inventive continuity. In all fields of art and culture, the late Nineteenth century image is conditioned by their presence. Born the very same year, they both looked for and created by themselves the accomplishments that musicians of the previous generation already possessed when they were barely twenty years old. They reached almost at the same time both the revelation of their personality (Der fliegende Holländer 1841, Nabucco 1842), and the fullness of their artistic means (Rigoletto 1851, Der Rheingold 1853), before attaining the acme of their trajectory with the astonishing operosity of their final years.While the analogy of this parallel course is impressive, the individuality of their creative patrimony is no less strong. This dissimilarity – more than on aesthetic or dramaturgic reasons, such as the distinction between naif and sentimental, or between “melodrama” and “musical drama” – rests on the different environments where it took root, each of them with its own alternative ideas of bourgeois society, of relationship with the public, the contemporary theatre and literature: that’s why it is important today to engage to enlighten the cultural and social contexts in which the genius of the two masters developed.



Urban History ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-252
Author(s):  
MIKKEL THELLE

ABSTRACT:This article investigates the emergence of the Copenhagen slaughterhouse, called the Meat City, during the late nineteenth century. This slaughterhouse was a product of a number of heterogeneous components: industrialization and new infrastructures were important, but hygiene and the significance of Danish bacon exports also played a key role. In the Meat City, this created a distinction between rising production and consumption on the one hand, and the isolation and closure of the slaughtering facility on the other. This friction mirrored an ambivalent attitude towards meat in the urban space: one where consumers demanded more meat than ever before, while animals were being removed from the public eye. These contradictions, it is argued, illustrate and underline the change of the city towards a ‘post-domestic’ culture. The article employs a variety of sources, but primarily the Copenhagen Municipal Archives for regulation of meat provision.



2000 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 575-585 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen B. Braaten ◽  
Wayne Viney

A review of nineteenth century popular literature indicates a deep and sustained public interest in sex differences in emotional expression. The conclusions advanced by popular writers included a catalog of perceived sex differences, reinforced by an essentialist philosophy that provided justification for the separation of sexual spheres and restrictions on political, educational, and vocational opportunities for women. Current scientific research on sex differences appears in popular media and is often presented in the context of an essentialist philosophy comparable with that which was dominant in the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, the subtleties and complexities of sex differences are not always communicated to the public and there is thus a potential for misinterpretation or even misuse.



2003 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 247-278
Author(s):  
Cathleen M. Giustino

There was always much that was ordinary about the house numbered 207-V up to the time of its disappearance from Prague's built landscape in 1905. Like many other buildings sheltering some of the city's most underprivileged residents, this place had no artistic worth; no one had contemplated hanging a plaque on its exterior to commemorate a well-known person having slept inside its walls; no published material pointed out any history-altering event that took place behind or in front of its doors. The ordinariness of house 207-V becomes even greater when its final years are situated within the history of a common process taking place, with some exceptions, throughout nineteenth-century Central Europe. Many of the structure's last experiences were part of the growth of what German historians of Germany have called the “Leistungsverwaltung,” and what Austrian historians of Austria- Hungary have called “die aktive Stadt.”1 These two different lab ls are used to describe the fact that during the course of the nineteenth century, a great many Central European cities expanded tremendously, not only in terms of their territoriesś populations, but also in terms of the number and extent of public projects that their municipal governments managed. The public projects included, among others, gas and electric works, transportation lines, sewers, baths, parks, libraries, museums, market halls, slaughterhouses,



1992 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nigel Brailey

AbstractThis is an article highlighting the limitations of Lord Salisbury as foreign secretary in an age when foreign policy was for the first time taking on a truly global character, and yet its practitioners still possessed a rather parochial, almost exclusively European experience, and distrusted ‘experts’. It was of course the late nineteenth-century spread of European imperialism that first called for such global policy making, and thus most of this Europe-dominated world was still for the time being quite susceptible to a Eurocentric approach.But if any area was the exception it was eastern Asia, in due course to be mainly responsible for decline of Western imperial world hegemony. And in the vanguard of this counter-challenge was to be Japan, a country with which Salisbury personally was to find himself all at sea. By contrast, Ernest Satow, more than any other figure of his time, found the key to Japan, and it is a sign of how poorly general Western understanding of that country has progressed since then that his voluminous diaries and papers sit in the Public Record Office, still largely untouched by researchers.



2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-369
Author(s):  
Roger Freitas

By any measure, Adelina Patti (1843–1919) must be considered the leading singer, if not the leading musician, of the later nineteenth century. Her sizable body of recordings (twenty-eight) makes her a key witness to late nineteenth-century performance style. Her great celebrity also ensured lavish written documentation of her life, including what she did, what people said about her, and sometimes what she said about herself. In this article I bring together these two types of material to consider a central aspect of Patti's life and artistry: her relationship to contemporary notions of femininity. Like all women who entertained before the public, Patti contended with the taint of immorality. I argue that her response to that taint shaped both her overall conduct and her particular vocalism. For while in truth her way of life fundamentally contradicted the reigning ideals of womanhood, Patti projected in her dress, her makeup, her public statements, her published imagery, and, most importantly, her stage characterizations and vocal styling the most perfect manifestation of femininity available: the virginal ingénue. The consistency of this self-performance encourages the identification of a similar persona in her singing, and indeed through close readings of several recordings I expose what I call her “maidenly mode,” a vocal strategy analogous to her other ingenuous representations. If many, like Verdi, found in Patti a “perfect equilibrium between singer and actress,” her example can begin to suggest to us what it meant to sound like an ingénue in late nineteenth-century Europe.



2020 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Ethan Doyle White

Standing on Kent’s western border with Greater London, the Faesten Dic in Joyden’s Wood is one of Britain’s less-well known linear earthworks. There has been speculation as to its origins since the late nineteenth century, although as of yet no conclusive dating evidence has been revealed. This article reviews the archaeological and historical evidence for the site, before exploring the ways in which the heritage of this earthwork has been presented to the public by the Woodland Trust, a charity which own Joyden’s Wood, focusing on how both information boards and installed sculptures have foregrounded the narrative of the earthwork as a fifth-century defensive barrier between ‘Roman London’ and ‘Saxon Kent.’ This, in turn, has interesting connotations regarding the current administrative divisions between Greater London and Kent.





1994 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-45
Author(s):  
Alan Wolfe

From biology in the late nineteenth century to information theory in the late twentieth, the social sciences have turned to the natural sciences for inspiration. Yet the expectations have never fully been satisfied. After more than one hundred years of effort, the ability of social scientists to say anything with certainty about human behavior is not very impressive. We remain close to where we started, developing theories, trying to test them against data, arguing about methodology, and disputing conclusions. The social sciences have neither the public legitimacy nor the self-confidence that comes from the practice of "real" science.



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