scholarly journals Of Women and Decadence

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ewa Macura-Nnamdi

This paper reads Ella D’Arcy’s short story “The Pleasure-Pilgrim” as a text engaging with late-nineteenth century discourses of femininity and decadence as they are enacted in the realm of travelling, on one hand, and of decadent aestheticism, on the other. The particular narrative construction of the main heroine, Lulie, is seen here as problematising the gendering of the consumption/production dichotomy and as challenging the masculinist bias of the aesthetic transgressions of decadence. Given this, D’Arcy’s story emerges here as a text that reveals how and why certain assumptions of late-Victorian aestheticism only made room for women as objects but never as subjects of decadent aesthetics.

1983 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maarten van Dijk

Stage speech, like the other techniques of acting, such as gesture, movement, and the interpretation of character, has always been subject to the theatrical conventions of an age. The conventions, while superficially based on current fads and fashions are on a more profound level the result of an underlying creative method reflecting commonly held views about the correct or ‘natural’ methods of imitating nature on the stage. Nothing demonstrates the enormous changes in stage speech over the last hundred years more vividly than the few existing recordings made by actors who had most of their training and their careers in the mid-to-late nineteenth century.


Modern Italy ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 405-419
Author(s):  
Stephen C. Bruner

In 1886 the Abyssinian chief Debeb became a public figure in Italy as a rapacious colonial bandit. However, over the next five years he acquired additional public personas, even contradictory ones: as a condottiero ally, a ladies’ man, a traitor, a young Abyssinian aristocrat and pretender to an ancient throne, a chivalrous warrior, and a figure representing the frontier and an Africa mysterious and hidden to Europeans. Upon his 1891 death in combat, he was the subject of conflicting Italian press obituaries. For some commentators, Debeb exemplified treacherous and deceitful African character, an explanation for Italy's colonial disappointments and defeats. However, other commentators clothed him in a romanticised mystique and found in him martial and even chivalrous traits to admire and emulate. To this extent his persona blurred the line demarcating the African ‘other’. Although he first appeared to Italians as a bandit, the notion of the bandit as a folk hero (the ‘noble robber’ or ‘social bandit’, Hobsbawm) does not fit his case. A more fruitful approach is to consider his multi-faceted public persona as reflecting the ongoing Italian debate over ‘national character’ (Patriarca). In the figure of Debeb, public debates over colonialism and ‘national character’ merged, with each contributing to the other.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-39
Author(s):  
Ainur Elmgren

Visual stereotypes constitute a set of tropes through which the Other is described and depicted to anaudience, who perhaps never will encounter the individuals that those tropes purport to represent.Upon the arrival of Muslim Tatar traders in Finland in the late nineteenth century, newspapers andsatirical journals utilized visual stereotypes to identify the new arrivals and draw demarcation linesbetween them and what was considered “Finnish”. The Tatars arrived during a time of tension inthe relationship between the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland and the Russian Empire, withthe Finnish intelligentsia divided along political and language lines. Stereotypical images of Tatarpedlars were used as insults against political opponents within Finland and as covert criticism ofthe policies of the Russian Empire. Stereotypes about ethnic and religious minorities like the Tatarsfulfilled a political need for substitute enemy images; after Finland became independent in 1917,these visual stereotypes almost disappeared.


2014 ◽  
Vol 86 (3) ◽  
pp. 195-209
Author(s):  
Michael Strickland

This article deals with the trials of two evangelical scholars, one from the late nineteenth century, Alexander B. Bruce, and the other from the late twentieth, Robert Gundry. Both faced accusation and judgment from their peers because of their redaction-critical remarks about the synoptic gospels. Bruce was tried by the Free Church of Scotland, while Gundry’s membership in the Evangelical Theological Society was challenged. After considering the cases of both, consideration is given to potential lessons that evangelical scholars who use redactioncritical methods may learn from the experiences of both men.


Author(s):  
Leah Price

This chapter suggests that two phenomena that usually get explained in terms of the rise of electronic media in the late twentieth century—the dematerialization of the text and the disembodiment of the reader—have more to do with two much earlier developments. One is legal: the 1861 repeal of the taxes previously imposed on all paper except that used for printing bibles. The other is technological: the rise first of wood-pulp paper in the late nineteenth century and then of plastics in the twentieth. The chapter then looks at Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1861–62), the loose, baggy ethnography of the urban underclass that swelled out of a messy series of media. Mayhew's “cyclopaedia of the industry, the want, and the vice of the great Metropolis” so encyclopedically catalogs the uses to which used paper can be turned.


Author(s):  
Christina Petraglia

This chapter posits a psychoanalytic reading of Iginio Ugo Tarchetti’s short story ‘I fatali’ (‘The Fated Ones’) published posthumously in the collection Racconti fantastici (Fantastic Tales) (1869). It focuses on the mortal rivalry between the father and son figures, Count Sagrezwitch and Baron Saternez, who become known in late nineteenth-century Milanese society of the short story as true embodiments of fatal beings belonging to popular superstition, known as jinxes – bringers of bad fortune, illness, harm, and even death to others. Drawing from Otto Rank and Sigmund Freud’s conceptions of the Doppelgänger, it is argued that these protagonists emerge as complementary doubles for one another, as opposing incarnations of Death in the form of mysterious foreigners. This chapter also highlights the post-Unification, socio-cultural undertones of Tarchetti’s fantastic tale, affirms the existence of an Italian Gothic, and reveals the author’s portrayal of death’s spectacular nature.


PMLA ◽  
1956 ◽  
Vol 71 (5) ◽  
pp. 900-909
Author(s):  
Henry A. Grubbs

A critical cliché often heard today is that Proust was fundamentally a poet rather than a novelist. The historians of literature and the critics do not put it quite as crudely as that, but their remarks frequently permit such an assumption on the part of the reader. Thus the Castex and Surer manual, in its twentieth-century volume, finds in “toute l'œuvre [de Proust] un climat d'intense Poesie” (p. 82). And Georges Cattaui, in his recent survey of the present status of Proust, though he does not in so many words call Proust a poet or his novel a poem, does say that Proust is above all the heir “de Nerval, de Baudelaire, de Mallarmé,—de ces poètes qui lui ont enseigné l'art de transfigurer les choses, l'art de délivrer la beauté prisonnière … ” Now all this is true if it is merely taken as a vivifying figure of speech, if it merely means that Proust was not a realistic novelist, and that he shows the influence of the great French poets of the late nineteenth century, or that, to use a convenient term, he was a symbolist, like his contemporaries, Claudel, Gide, and Valéry. But it has so often been said in our time that the twentieth century has seen the breaking down of the distinctions between the novel and poetry, that it seems to me useful to demonstrate, by studying two treatments of the same subject, one that of a novelist, Proust, the other that of a poet, Valéry, that there remains a fundamental and profound difference between the intent and the method of prose fiction and of poetry, at least the type that is today called “pure” poetry.


2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-134
Author(s):  
Olga Bezantakou

This essay examines the metaphorical use of musical terms in Greek aesthetic discourse during the interwar period by illuminating a crucial yet neglected moment in the reception of anti-rationalistic philosophical and aesthetic tendencies that had greatly influenced European modernist literature since the late nineteenth century. In particular, it points out the ways the reception of Bergsonian theories in Greece co-determined the formation of a new concept of Modern Greek narrative fiction, clearing the ground for the first modernist attempts to ‘musicalize’ fiction. The essay thus proposes a broader perception of the term ‘musicalization’ than the mere imitation of musical techniques in narrative texts, since the aesthetic discourse features not only actual music but also ‘music’ as an aesthetic category synonymous with transcendence, ambiguity and fluidity.


2007 ◽  
Vol 144 (4) ◽  
pp. 633-642 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. BRIAN HARLAND

Brian Harland was for many years an editor of this journal. He was also a seminal figure in the origins of the current ‘snowball Earth’ debate, having recognized in 1964 the significance of coupling emerging palaeomagnetic data on palaeolatitude with his interpretations of diamictites. Harland worked extensively in the Arctic and knew well many of the workers involved in the arguments surrounding the origin of diamictites. He thus had a unique perspective on the evidence and the disputes surrounding it. This was his last paper but he was not able to complete it before he died. However, with the help of Professor Ian Fairchild to whom we are indebted, the editors have lightly revised this work which is presented as the personal view of one of the key figures with a very broad stratigraphic appreciation of the problems of ‘snowball Earth’.Records of Precambrian glaciation onwards from the late nineteenth century led to the concept of one or more major ice ages. This concept was becoming well advanced by the mid 1930s, particularly through the compilation of Kulling in 1934. Even so tillite stratigraphy shows that glaciation was exceptional rather than typical of Earth history. Some Proterozoic tillites, sandwiched between warm marine facies, indicate low, even equatorial palaeolatitudes as determined magnetically, and more recently led to ideas of a snow- and ice-covered ‘snowball Earth’. However, interbedded non-glacial facies as well as thick tillite successions requiring abundant snowfall both militate against the hypothesis of extreme prolonged freezing temperatures referred to here as an ‘iceball Earth’ in which all oceans and seas were sealed in continuous ice cover. On the other hand tropical environments were interrupted by glaciation several times in the Proterozoic, something that did not recur in the Phanerozoic. The term ‘snowball Earth’ is consistent with the established view of extremely widespread Proterozoic glaciation, but the ‘iceball Earth’ version of this is not compatible with the geological record.


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