Corporate Romanticism

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel M. Stout
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Modern Problem ◽  
Mansfield Park ◽  
Industrial Action ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Law ◽  
Individual Human

Corporate Romanticism offers an alternative history of the connections between modernity, individualism, and the rise of the novel. In early nineteenth-century England, two developments—the rise of corporate persons and the expanded scale of industrial action—undermined the basic assumption underpinning both liberalism and the law: that individual human persons can be meaningfully correlated with specific actions and particular effects. Reading a set of important Romantic novels—Caleb Williams, Mansfield Park, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Frankenstein, and A Tale of Two Cities—alongside a wide-ranging set of debates in nineteenth-century law and Romantic politics and aesthetics, this book argues that the novel, a literary form long understood as a reflection of individualism’s ideological ascent, in fact registered the fragile fictionality of accountable individuals in a period defined by corporate actors and expansively entangled fields of action. Examining how liberalism, the law, and the novel all wrestled with the moral implications of a highly collectivized and densely packed modernity, Corporate Romanticism reconfigures our sense of the nineteenth century and its novels, arguing that we see in them not simply the apotheosis of laissez-fair individualism but the first chapter of a crucial and distinctly modern problem about how to fit the individualist and humanist terms of justice onto a world in which the most consequential agents are no longer persons.

Emotional Cities

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Ben Prestel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Capital Flows ◽  
Urban History ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Loss Of Control ◽  
Global Capital ◽  
Dynamic Transformation ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

Between 1860 and 1910, Berlin and Cairo went through a period of dynamic transformation. During this period, a growing number of contemporaries in both places made corresponding arguments about how urban change affected city dwellers’ emotions. In newspaper articles, scientific treatises, and pamphlets, shifting practices, such as nighttime leisure, were depicted as affecting feelings like love and disgust. Looking at the ways in which different urban dwellers, from psychologists to revelers, framed recent changes in terms of emotions, this book reveals the striking parallels between the histories of Berlin and Cairo. In both cities, various authors associated changes in the city with such phenomena as a loss of control over feelings or the need for a reform of emotions. The parallels in these arguments belie the assumed dissimilarity between European and Middle Eastern cities during the nineteenth century. Drawing on similar debates about emotions in Berlin and Cairo, the book provides a new argument about the regional compartmentalization of urban history. It highlights how the circulation of scientific knowledge, the expansion of empires, and global capital flows led to similarities in the pasts of these two cities. By combining urban history and the history of emotions, this book proposes an innovative perspective on the emergence of different, yet comparable cities at the end of the nineteenth century.

Restoration Theatre and the Novel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Transition ◽  
Strong Affinity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Restoration Theatre ◽  
Restoration Comedy ◽  
London Stage

This chapter explores the broad cultural transition from drama to novel during the Restoration period, which triggered one of the most productive periods in the history of the London stage. However, when it comes to the eighteenth century proper, the novel is more likely to be identified as the century's most significant and appealing popular genre. The chapter considers why the novel has largely superseded drama as the literary form to which ambitious and imaginative literary types without a strong affinity for verse writing would by default have turned their attention and energies by the middle of the eighteenth century. Something important may have been lost in the broad cultural transition from drama to novel. This chapter, however, contends that many things were preserved: that the novel was able to absorb many of the functions and techniques not just of Restoration comedy but of the theatre more generally.

Police Records

2019 ◽  
pp. 797-819
Author(s):  
Cristina Vatulescu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Media History ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Police Records ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter approaches police records as a genre that gains from being considered in its relationships with other genres of writing. In particular, we will follow its long-standing relationship to detective fiction, the novel, and biography. Going further, the chapter emphasizes the intermedia character of police records not just in our time but also throughout their existence, indeed from their very origins. This approach opens to a more inclusive media history of police files. We will start with an analysis of the seminal late nineteenth-century French manuals prescribing the writing of a police file, the famous Bertillon-method manuals. We will then track their influence following their adoption nationally and internationally, with particular attention to the politics of their adoption in the colonies. We will also touch briefly on the relationship of early policing to other disciplines, such as anthropology and statistics, before moving to a closer look at its intersections with photography and literature.

How violent was eighteenth-century Ireland?

1997 ◽  
Vol 30 (119) ◽  
pp. 377-392 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neal Garnham
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Ethnic Conflicts ◽  
Popular Protest ◽  
Ancient Regime ◽  
History Of ◽  
Typical Part ◽  
The Law

In his recent book dealing with the history of duelling in Ireland, James Kelly comes to the conclusion that eighteenth-century Ireland was essentially ‘a violent society’, peopled at least in part ‘by wilful men who put their individual reputations above their lives, their families, their religion, and the law’. Such comments seem to continue a well-established tradition of interpretation that goes back to the nineteenth century. However, this image of a society in which violence was endemic, and conflict a feature of everyday life, has not gone unquestioned by historians. For example, Thomas Bartlett and Sean Connolly have instead noted the relatively controlled nature of popular protest, the early disappearance of banditry, and the reliance, until the very end of the century, on local enforcement of the law, as possible indications that Ireland may not have been as disorderly a society as has been suggested. These differing interpretations have, in turn, an obvious relevance to the wider debate on how eighteenth-century Ireland should be perceived: as a society irreconcilably and uniquely divided by religious and ethnic conflicts, or as a more or less typical part of the European ancient régime.

scholarly journals A Brief History of the New Constitutionalism, or “How We Changed Everything So That Everything Would Remain the Same”

1998 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 250-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Mandel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
History Of ◽  
Italian Unification

The Italians have a word for what I want to say about modern constitutionalism: “gattopardesco,” that is “leopardesque”, not as in the animal but as in the novelThe Leopardby Tomasi di Lampedusa. The novel is about a noble Sicilian family at the time of the unification of Italy in the mid-nineteenth century. Italian unification was mainly a matter of the northern Savoy monarchy of Piemonte conquering the peninsula and vanquishing the various other monarchs, princes, etc., including the Bourbon rulers of Sicily and Naples. But there were other elements about and stirring up trouble, anti-monarchist and even socialist elements. In a scene early in the novel, the Sicilian Prince of Salina, the main character, is shocked to learn that his favourite nephew, Tancredi Falconeri, is off to join the invading northerners. He remonstrates with the boy:You're crazy, my son. To go and put yourself with those people … a Falconeri must be with us, for the King.

Nation and Generation in A Tale of Two Cities

PMLA ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 448-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert D. Hutter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Generational Conflict ◽  
The Past ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Critical Model ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Critical Methods ◽  
The French Revolution

A Tale of Two Cities, the French Revolution becomes a metaphor for the conflicts between generations and between classes that preoccupied Dickens throughout his career. Dickens uses a double plot and divided characters to express these conflicts; his exaggerated use of “splitting”—which the essay defines psychoanalytically—sometimes makes A Tale of Two Cities‘ language and structure appear strained and humorless. We need to locate A Tale of Two Cities within a framework of nineteenth-century attitudes toward revolution and generational conflict by using a combination of critical methods—literary, historical, psychoanalytic. This essay relates the reader's experience to the structure of the text; and it derives from Dickens’ language, characterization, and construction a critical model that describes the individual reader's experience while explaining some of the contradictory assessments of the novel over the past hundred years.

History and Change

2018 ◽  
pp. 483-500
Author(s):  
David Paroissien
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
The Past ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

This chapter questions the view that Dickens took little interest in history and remained ignorant of the challenge of writing about the past. Following John Forster’s dismissal of A Child’s History of England as ‘that little book’, which ‘cannot be said to have quite hit the mark’, A Child’s History, Barnaby Rudge, and A Tale of Two Cities have received often unsympathetic treatment, particularly with respect to the way the past is used in his two historical novels. Read within the context of ideas about history advocated by Carlyle and Macaulay in the 1830s, this chapter contends that fresh light can be shed on Dickens’s awareness of historiography and on his familiarity with an invigorated approach to the discipline advocated by the two most prominent historians of the first half of the nineteenth century.

scholarly journals The Difficulty of Historical Work in the Nineteenth-Century Museum and the Thackeray Novel

2012 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dehn Gilmore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Costs And Benefits ◽  
The Past ◽  
Important Impact ◽  
Full Reconstruction ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Times

This essay suggests that conservation debates occasioned by the democratization of the nineteenth-century museum had an important impact on William Makepeace Thackeray’s reimagination of the historical novel. Both the museum and the historical novel had traditionally made it their mission to present the past to an ever-widening public, and thus necessarily to preserve it. But in the middle of the nineteenth century, the museum and the novel also shared the experience of seeming to endanger precisely what they sought to protect, and as they tried to choose how aggressive to be in their conserving measures, they had to deliberate about the costs and benefits of going after the full reconstruction (the novel) or restoration (the museum) of what once had been. The first part of this essay shows how people fretted about the relation of conservation, destruction, and national identity at the museum, in The Times and in special Parliamentary sessions alike; the second part of the essay traces how Thackeray drew on the resulting debates in novels including The Newcomes (1853–55) and The History of Henry Esmond (1852), as he looked for a way to revivify the historical novel after it had gone out of fashion. He invoked broken statues and badly restored pictures as he navigated his own worries that he might be doing history all wrong, and damaging its shape in the process.

INTERNATIONALISING THE SONNET: TORU DUTT'S “SONNET – BAUGMAREE”

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 595-608 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Chapman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Victorian Poetry ◽  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Boundaries

“When the history of theliterature of our country comes to be written, there is sure to be a page in it dedicated to this fragile exotic blossom of song” (Dutt xxvii). This sentence is Edmund Gosse's famous final flourish to his memoir of Toru Dutt, which introduced her posthumous volumeAncient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, published in 1882, five years after her death from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-one. But what would Dutt's page look like in the history of “our country,” by which Gosse means of course England? This question is a tricky one, because placing a late nineteenth-century Bengali who was a Europhile, a Christian convert, and an English-language woman poet within a British Victorian tradition is a simplistic, if not a problematic appropriation of a colonial subject into the centre of the British Empire. Where Dutt belongs has long preoccupied critics who try to recuperate her poetry for an Indian national poetic tradition, or for a transnational, cosmopolitan poetics. The issue of placing Dutt allows us also to press questions about the conception of Victorian poetry studies, its geographical, cultural, and national boundaries, not just in the nineteenth-century creation of a canon but in our current conception of the symbolic map of Victorian poetry. But, while recent critics have celebrated her poetry's embrace of global poetry as a challenge to the parochialism of national literary boundaries, Dutt's original English-language poetry also suggests an uneven, uncomfortable hybridity, and a wry, ironic interplay between distance and proximity that unfolds through her use of poetic form. This essay investigates what it means to “make something” of Toru Dutt, in the nineteenth century and in the twenty-first century, what is at stake for Victorian poetry studies in privileging Dutt and her multi-lingual writing, and whether her celebrated transnationalism might not also include a discomfort with hybridity that reveals itself through the relation between space and literary form in her poetry.

The Law of Commerce and Trade

2019 ◽  
pp. 241-262
Author(s):  
Lawrence M. Friedman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Marine Insurance ◽  
Commercial Law ◽  
History Of ◽  
Commercial Paper ◽  
International Body ◽  
The Law ◽  
Law Merchant

This chapter discusses the history of American commercial law covering the admiralty and general commerce, sale of goods, bankruptcy and insolvency, and contract. American commercial law was deeply and persistently in debt to England. Theoretically, even national sovereignty was no barrier. The laws of admiralty, marine insurance, commercial paper, and sale of goods were not, supposedly, parochial law, English law; they were part of an international body of rules. The law of sales of goods developed greatly in the first half of the nineteenth century. Many, if not most, of the leading cases were English and were adopted in the United States fairly rapidly. Two strains of law—contract and the law merchant—each with a somewhat different emphasis, were more or less godparents of the law of sales.

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