Historical Representations : Between the Short and Long Twentieth Centuries: Temporal Displacement in the Historical Fiction of the 1990s

2020 ◽  
pp. 259-276
Author(s):  
Anna Pakes

Chapter 12 explores the extent to which different practices of dance re-doing recuperate lost works, focusing on reconstruction, reworking, and reenactment. It explores what kind of relation obtains between such re-doings and the works they represent. None of these processes seems (simply or straightforwardly) to produce new performances of existing dance works and, in this, they disrupt what David Davies calls the “classical paradigm” of work-performance relations. This paradigm is explicated to highlight its limitations in the dance context. The chapter also explores whether and how reconstructions, reworkings, and reenactments can contribute to knowledge of the choreographic works they remake, and to dance history more generally, given that they are often not motivated by an objective of Werktreue. In this regard, the argument is developed that some reconstructions and reenactments are a species of historical fiction, allowing audiences to entertain while withholding belief about the dance historical representations they offer.


2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-121
Author(s):  
Margaret D. Stetz

The New Man was a crucial topic of discussion and a continual preoccupation in late-Victorian feminist writing, precisely because he was more often a wished-for presence than an actual one. Nevertheless, creators of neo-Victorian fiction and film repeatedly project him backwards onto the screen of literary history, representing him as having in fact existed in the Victorian age as a complement to the New Woman. What is at stake in retrospectively situating the New Man – or, as I will call him, the ‘Neo-Man’ – in the nineteenth century, through historical fiction? If one impulse behind fictional returns to the Victorian period is nostalgia, then what explains this nostalgia for The Man Who Never Was? This essay will suggest that neo-Victorian works have a didactic interest in transforming present-day readers, especially men, through depictions of the Neo-Man, which broaden the audience's feminist sympathies, queer its notions of gender relations, and alter its definition of masculinity.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (11-1) ◽  
pp. 132-147
Author(s):  
Dmitry Rakovsky

The main purpose of this article is to study the role of the Russian Museum in the formation of the historical consciousness of Russian society. In this context, the author examines the history of the creation of the Russian Museum of Emperor Alexander III and its pre-revolutionary collections that became the basis of this famous museum collection (in particular, the composition of the museum’s expositions for 1898 and 1915). Within the framework of the methodology proposed by the author, the works of art presented in the museum’s halls were selected and distributed according to the historical eras that they reflect, and a comparative analysis of changes in the composition of the expositions was also carried out. This approach made it possible to identify the most frequently encountered historical heroes, to consider the representation of their images in the museum’s expositions, and also to provide a systemic reconstruction of historical representations broadcast in its halls.


Author(s):  
Jürgen Schaflechner

Chapter 3 introduces the tradition of ritual journeys and sacred geographies in South Asia, then hones in on a detailed history of the grueling and elaborate pilgrimage attached to the shrine of Hinglaj. Before the construction of the Makran Coastal Highway the journey to the Goddess’s remote abode in the desert of Balochistan frequently presented a lethally dangerous undertaking for her devotees, the hardships of which have been described by many sources in Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Sindhi, and Urdu. This chapter draws heavily from original sources, including travelogues and novels, which are supplanted with local oral histories in order to weave a historical tapestry that displays the rich array of practices and beliefs surrounding the pilgrimage and how they have changed over time. The comparative analysis demonstrates how certain motifs, such as austerity (Skt. tapasyā), remain important themes within the whole Hinglaj genre even in modern times while others have been lost in the contemporary era.


Author(s):  
Roslyn Weaver

This chapter discusses the history of popular fiction in Australia. The question of place has always been central to Australian fiction, not only as a thematic element but also as a critical or political preoccupation. In part, this is because popular fiction writers, wanting to attract broad audiences, either exploited their Australian content to appeal to international readers or have excised the local to produce a generic and thus more readily accessible setting for outsiders. The chapter considers works by popular fiction writers who adopt a range of positions in relation to their focus on place, but often tackle many different aspects of Australian social and historical change. These novels cover various genres such as crime fiction, historical fiction and romance, science fiction and fantasy, and include Fergus Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), Nevil Shute's On the Beach (1957), Damien Broderick's The Dreaming Dragons (1980), and Cecilia Dart-Thornton's The Ill-Made Mute (2001).


Author(s):  
Sheila Murnaghan ◽  
Deborah H. Roberts

The book’s subject is the widespread and formative reception of classical culture that takes place in childhood, with a specific focus on children’s pleasure reading in Britain and America from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The production of literature designed to foster children’s connection to antiquity is identified as an adult project, which begins with the retelling of classical myths in the 1850s and which this study traces primarily in myth collections and works of historical fiction. Attention is also given to adults’ memories of their own childhood encounters with antiquity and the uses and meanings assigned to those encounters in memoirs and other works for adult readers.


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