scholarly journals Fantastic hesitation, phenomena and the male character in Marie NDiaye’s Three Strong Women

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 207-216
Author(s):  
Anna Swoboda

The aim of this article is to demonstrate that the male protagonist of the second story of Marie NDiaye’s Three Strong Women (Trois femmes puissantes) can be viewed as a fantastic character. The protagonist’s hesitation in the face of unsettling phenomena – both the external world and the traumatic events from his past – constitutes the central pivot of his construction. The fantastic characteristics of Rudy Descas, whose voice is predominant in the text, reveal the multidimensionality of the supernatural in NDiaye’s work, as the boundaries between the notion of the “character” and the “phenomenon” are not clearly defined. The analysis is based on literary theories concerning the nineteenth century fantastic, the new fantastic and the African fantastic.

Author(s):  
Patrick Sze-lok Leung ◽  
Bijun Xu

The First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) has been perceived as a sign of a new East Asian power order, but the legitimacy of the war has yet to be clarified. The Japanese foreign minister Mutsu’s Kenkenroku shows that the reasons claimed by Japan were only pretexts for its ambition to put Korea under its control. The 1885 Convention of Tianjin, which was used to justify the Japanese behaviour, needs to be reinterpreted. The Chinese reaction can be understood by exploration into Confucianism, which opposed wars between equal peers. Meanwhile, the Western powers which invented and developed international law were self-interested and did little to prevent the war. The incident shows that international law, empowered by the strong states, failed to maintain peace efficiently in the late nineteenth century.


2011 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Adrian J. Wallbank

Adrian J. Wallbank, "Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending 'Critical Attitudes' in the Face of Societal Ruination" (pp. 1–36) In the aftermath of the French "Revolution Controversy," middle-class evangelical writers made a concerted effort to rehabilitate the moral fabric of British society. Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts (1795–98) are recognized as pivotal within this program, but in this essay I question whether they were really as influential as has been supposed. I argue that autobiographical evidence from the period demonstrates an increasing skepticism toward overt didacticism, and that despite their significant and undeniable penetration within working-class culture, the Cheap Repository Tracts, if not all "received ideologies," were increasingly being rejected by their readers. This essay examines the important contribution that Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues (1801) made to this arena. Hill, like many of his contemporaries, felt that British society was facing ruination, but he also recognized that overt moralizing and didacticism was no longer palatable or effective. I argue that Hill thus experimented with an array of literary techniques—many of which closely intersect with developments occurring within the novel and sometimes appear to contradict or undermine the avowed seriousness of evangelicalism—that not only attempt to circumvent what Jonathan Rose has described as the "critical attitudes" of early-nineteenth-century readers, but also effectively map the "transitional" nature of the shifting literary and social terrains of the period. In so doing, Hill contributed signally to the evolution of the dialogue form (which is often synonymous with mentoring and didacticism), since his use of conversational mimesis and satire predated the colloquialism of John Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianae (1822–35) and Walter Savage Landor's Imaginary Conversations (1824–29).


Elements ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Danielle Nista

For a slave living under the system of chattel slavery in the American South during the nineteenth century, avenues of self-expression were extremely limited. One of the few ways slaves could exert control over their own lives was through singing and dancing. These arts gave slaves a chance to relieve stress and establish a culture through the creation of musical instruments, songs, and dances. All of these contained hints at the true nature of slaves’ feelings towards the system that oppressed them, feelings that they had to frequently repress. However, despite slaves’ efforts to make this culture entirely their own, masters tried to find ways to use it to their advantage instead of to the slaves’ benefit. The resulting covert power struggle sometimes ended in favor of the masters, taking the form of regulations on slaves’ dances, requirement of the performance of songs and dances for the masters’ entertainment, and even abuse of slaves by using their own arts. Ultimately, however, slaves emerged victorious because of the hidden messages in their songs and dances. Though this method of coping could not erase all the masters did, it was at least one glimmer of hope.


2019 ◽  
Vol 111 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-35
Author(s):  
Rick Fehr ◽  
Janet Macbeth ◽  
Summer Sands Macbeth

The narratives of European settlement in Canada have largely excluded the presence of Indigenous peoples on contested lands. This article offers an exploration of an Anishinaabeg community and a regional chief in early nineteenth century Upper Canada. The community known as the Chenail Ecarté land, and Chief Zhaawni-binesi, have become historically obscure. Through the use of primary documents the authors explore the community’s history, its relocation, and Chief Zhaawni-binesi’s role in the War of 1812 and in community life. Ultimately, the paper charts the relocation of the community in the face of mounting settler encroachment. The discussion attempts to increase knowledge and appreciation of Indigenous history in Southwestern Ontario.


2021 ◽  
pp. 173-184
Author(s):  
Sonia Gollance

The epilogue connects tropes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of Jews, dance, and modernization with late twentieth- and twenty-first-century representations. Popular works such as Fiddler on the Roof (1964), Dirty Dancing (1987), Rebecca Goldstein’s Mazel (1995), Kerry Greenwood’s Raisins and Almonds: A Phryne Fisher Mystery (1997), Helene Wecker’s The Golem and the Jinni (2013), and Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver (2018) reveal the continued efficacy of the mixed-sex dancing trope in fictional representations of Yiddish-speaking Jews. These works are often less didactic than nineteenth-century predecessors; they envision more opportunities for female agency and frequently end happily. Not only is the dance floor a flexible space, the dance trope is a flexible metaphor for the concerns of Jewish communities in the face of cultural transitions. In other words, the trope of Jewish mixed-sex dancing charts the particularities of the Jewish “dance” with modern culture.


2019 ◽  
pp. 146-170
Author(s):  
Tyler Carrington

Chapter 5 follows the sensational trial of Frieda Kliem’s murderer and the strategy of the defense, which was not so much a legal strategy as a way of turning the trial into a question of Frieda’s respectability as a middle-class woman. It interprets this trial—and the life of Frieda Kliem, more generally—as a microcosm of the large-scale confrontation between nineteenth-century society and the emerging twentieth-century world. It contends that identity, presented either authentically or as an illusion, became supremely relevant in the metropolis, where the ubiquity of strangers, new faces, and mysterious crimes shaped the way city people narrated the search for love and intimacy. And because enterprising outsiders like Frieda Kliem so flouted the established patterns of middle-class respectability, they remained on the outside looking in as German society clung to the nineteenth-century world that was crumbling in the face of a bewilderingly new twentieth-century one.


2021 ◽  
pp. 152-171
Author(s):  
Francis Teal

We now move to examine the top of the income distribution and begin by asking whether Mr Darcy, the central male character in Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice, would be regarded as a plutocrat today. If his income were converted to contemporary amounts it would be some £600,000. We show that Mr Darcy would need to earn some £8 million to be as rich as his nineteenth-century predecessor relative to the average wage. To understand how those super-high incomes arise, we introduce the Paretian distribution which we do first informally and then more formally. It is a distribution of this form which could produce what we see, a few very highly paid individuals whose incomes—up in the stratosphere of the super-rich—would still be very spread out. We use the Paretian distribution to estimate the number of plutocrats in the US, the UK, and China and show the incomes of the richest of the rich.


2020 ◽  
pp. 161189442094378
Author(s):  
Jared Manasek

In the nineteenth century, refugee generation and other forms of ethnic cleansing were a new and central feature in the dismantling of European empires and nationalists’ efforts to territorialize popular sovereignty based on demographic homogeneity. With the 1878 Treaty of Berlin, Europe’s Great Powers sanctioned the territorial principle, but included minority protection clauses intended to maintain mixed populations. This article argues that these protection clauses enabled states to make sovereign claims based not only on population distribution as such, but on the ability to control population movement itself. In its effort to win international sanction—and even Ottoman support—to occupy and administer the Ottoman provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Habsburg government based its arguments almost exclusively on its promised ability to repatriate refugees and manage long-term migration in the provinces. The article shows that states’ claims of power over refugee movement were an essential element of nineteenth-century European diplomacy and an indispensable tool of domestic policy. In the face of nation-state formation and an emerging ideal of demographic homogeneity, the ability to re-establish mixed populations asserted not only state power, but the legitimacy of an ‘imperial’ model of demographic heterogeneity.


1997 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha Vicinus

How and when did society first recognize women's homoerotic bonds? Were these romantic friendships fully accepted, or were they seen as problematic? Did the women involved see themselves as lesbians? These and other questions have been raised over the past twenty years by historians of lesbian sexuality. When Lillian Faderman in her pioneering survey of European and American lesbians declared the nineteenth century as the golden age of unproblematic romantic friendships, historians quickly responded with evidence to the contrary. Much of this debate has been focused on whether or not women could be considered “lesbian” before they claimed (or had forced on them) a publicly acknowledged identity. But the modern lesbian did not appear one day fully formed in the case studies of the fin-de-siècle sexologists; rather she was already a recognizable, if shadowy, subject for gossip among the sophisticated by at least the 1840s and 1850s. By examining closely a single divorce trial, I hope to show that literary and legal elites acknowledged lesbian sexuality in a variety of complex ways. Their uneasy disapproval encompassed both a self-conscious silence in the face of evidence and a desire to control information, lest it corrupt the innocent. Yet who can define the line between the ignorant and the informed? The very public discussion of the Codrington divorce, and most especially the role of the feminist, Emily Faithfull, in alienating Helen Codrington's affections from her husband, demonstrate the recognition of female homosexual behavior.


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