scholarly journals Alexander Smirnov and the Beginnings of Celtic Studies in Russia

2010 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 139-148
Author(s):  
Grigory Bondarenko ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Academic Career ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Founding Father ◽  
History Of ◽  
Celtic Studies ◽  
Romance Literatures ◽  
Welsh Literature

Celtic studies in Russia which have developed during the twentieth century into a recognised and respectable branch on the tree of humanities owe much to one person who undoubtedly has won a right to be called a patriarch of Celtic studies in Russia, namely Alexander Alexandrovich Smirnov. Mostly known for his pioneering translations of early Irish tales into Russian in the early days of his career he was also prominent scholar of Welsh and Breton covering many aspects of Celtic linguistics and literary studies. His biography, achievements and approach to Celtic studies in Russia deserve better attention both on the Russian side and in the view of the history of Celtic studies worldwide. We are aiming here to connect facts of his biography with his academic career in the field of Celtic studies and because of the specific aims and limits of the present conference we are not going to touch on his role as a scholar of Romance literatures and as a Shakespearean scholar. Alexander Smirnov [27.8(8.9).1883 – 16.9.1962] can be considered the first professional Celtic scholar in Russia. He was a prominent medievalist and philologist with a range of interests from early Irish and Welsh literature to Shakespearean studies. The paper is devoted to some little known facts from Smirnov’s biography especially to the early years of his academic career in Russia, France and Ireland. His earlier publications on Celtic literatures and ideas expressed therein will be brought to light and examined. Smirnov should be recognised as a ‘founding father’ of a school of Russian Celtic studies. His ideas and influence are still alive in the works of subsequent Russian scholars of Celtic.

Introduction: In Defence of Paraphrase

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-38
Author(s):  
Patrick Fessenbecker
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Reading Practice ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Art For Art's Sake ◽  
Aesthetic Structure

How did “reading for the message,” a mark of shame among literary critics, yet in many ways an ordinary reading practice, become so marginalized? The origins of this methodological commitment ultimately are intertwined with the birth of literary studies itself . The influential aestheticist notion of “art for art’s sake” has several implications crucial for understanding the intellectual history of literary criticism in the twentieth century: most important was the belief that to “extract” an idea from a text was to dismiss its aesthetic structure. This impulse culminated in the New Critical contention that to paraphrase a text was a “heresy.” Yet this dominant tradition has always co-existed with practical interpretation that was much less formalist in emphasis. A return to the world of American literary criticism in 1947, when Cleanth Brooks’s The Well-Wrought Urn was published, shows this clearly: many now-forgotten critics were already practicing a form of criticism that emphasized literary content, and often overly rejecting Brooks’s insistence that reading for the content or meaning of a poem betrayed its aesthetic nature.

The Long Space Age

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander MacDonald
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Space Exploration ◽  
Development Program ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Private Funding ◽  
Large Space ◽  
Human Spaceflight ◽  
Long Run ◽  
History Of

The early years of the twenty-first century have seen the rise to prominence of private-sector American spaceflight. The result is a new phase of space development—one where human spaceflight is no longer the exclusive domain of governments, but an activity increasingly driven by the interests and motivations of individuals and corporations. In order to understand this phenomenon, we need to examine the long-run economic history of American space exploration. This book examines three critical phases of that history. The first phase is the financing and construction of American astronomical observatories from Colonial America to the middle of the twentieth century. The second is the career of Robert Goddard, the American father of liquid-fuel rocketry, whose efforts constituted the world’s first spaceflight development program. The third is the American political history of the Cold War ‘Space Race’ and subsequent NASA human spaceflight initiatives in the twentieth century. Examining these episodes from an economic perspective results in a new view of American space exploration—one where personal initiative and private funding have been dominant long-run trends, where the demand for impressive public signals has funded large space exploration projects across two centuries, and where government leadership in the field is a relatively recent phenomenon.

The care of the royal tombs in english cathedrals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the case of the effigy of King John at Worcester

2009 ◽  
Vol 89 ◽  
pp. 365-387 ◽  
Author(s):  
S D Church
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Duty Of Care ◽  
Main Theme ◽  
Short Discussion ◽  
The Road ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Burden Of Caring ◽  
King John

AbstractThe medieval history of the celebrated tomb of King John at Worcester is now well known. The works of Charles Alfred Stothard at the beginning of the nineteenth century, of William St John Hope in the early years of the twentieth century, and that of Jane Martindale at the end of that century, are highlights along the road of our understanding of the royal effigy in its medieval context. But all the while this work of comprehension was going on, those who had a duty of care over the tomb were engaged in a battle to offload that responsibility. The authorities at Worcester were not alone in wondering who should carry the burden of caring for royal monuments in English cathedrals. As early as 1841, the question of the care of royal tombs in Westminster Abbey had come under Parliamentary scrutiny. The deans and chapters at Canterbury and at Gloucester also sought government subvention for the care of the royal tombs in their cathedrals. The history of this debate about the care of royal sepulchral monuments forms the wider framework for the main theme of this article, which is an examination in detail of the ways in which King John’s tomb at Worcester was treated between 1872 and 1930. It reveals a remarkable story in which a catalogue of disastrous decisions came to give us the tomb and effigy as we have them today. The article concludes with a short discussion of the introduction of the 1990 Care of Cathedrals Measure which established the structures that currently exist (with subsequent amendments) for the preservation of Anglican cathedral churches in use.

The Tragic and the Ordinary

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Moral Development ◽  
Psychological Health ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Moral Realism ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
History Of Psychoanalysis ◽  
History Of

Through a discussion of the moral realism of George Eliot in relation to British psychoanalysis of the twentieth century, and the work of D. W. Winnicott in particular, this chapter demonstrates that there develops within the history of psychoanalysis a framework by which healthy moral development within ordinary conditions is described and avowed. The general forms of psychoanalysis within literary studies to date have been oriented toward the structural, drive-based models of Freud and Klein, which promote an understanding of power and aggression as primary and ineluctable. Through a comparison of the development of the conceptions of the ordinary and traumatic in Winnicott, and the opposition between the tragic and the ordinary in Eliot, this chapter develops a conception of psychological health and moral aspiration amidst precarious conditions, including contingent environmental forces of aggression, rupture, and trauma.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Emily Sun
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Comparative Literature ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Republican China ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Disciplinary History ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of

The Introduction situates the book’s approach to comparative literature in relation to recent debates in the field over the status of “world literature.” It historicizes the notion of world literature in terms of the global disciplinary history of literary studies, contextualizing redefinitions of literature and efforts to write literary modernity in terms of connected yet heterogeneous epistemic shifts in eighteenth-century Europe and early twentieth-century China. It introduces the design of the book and offers chapter summaries. And it explains how efforts to write literary modernity in the asynchronous periods of Romantic England and Republican China constitute experiments also with new socio-political forms of life in different cultural contexts.

Reporting on the museum: the annual reports of the Edinburgh Museum of Science and Art

2002 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. N. SWINNEY
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Annual Reports ◽  
Science And Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government

The production, in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century, of the annual reports of the government-funded museum in Edinburgh in several different formats has led to problems in citing these documents in bibliographies. A brief history of the Edinburgh Museum of Science and Art and its method of accountability from its foundation in 1854 to 1905 (the period during which it was administered by the Department of Science and Art and the years immediately following the handover to the Committee of the Council on Education in Scotland) is presented along with a concordance table for the different forms of the reports.

Tito's Secret Empire

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Klinger ◽  
Denis Kuljis
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Party Leader ◽  
Winston Churchill ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
First Time

This groundbreaking biography of Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia presents many startling new revelations, among them his role as an international revolutionary leader and his relationship with Winston Churchill. It highlights his early years as a Comintern operative, the context for his later politics as a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). The authors argue that in the 1940s, between the dissolution of the Comintern and the rise of NAM, Tito's influence and ambition were far wider than has been understood, extending to Italy, France, Greece and Spain via the international communist networks established during the Spanish Civil War. The book discloses for the first time the connection between Tito's expulsion from the Cominform and the Rome assassination attempt on the Italian Communist Party leader, Palmiro Togliatti — the man who had plotted to overthrow Tito. The book offers a pivotal contribution to our understanding of Tito as a figure of real, rather than imagined, global significance. The book will reward those who are interested in the history of international Communism, the Cold War and the Non-Aligned Movement, or in Tito the man — one of the most significant leaders of the twentieth century.

The Middle East in World History: Spatial and Temporal Reorderings

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-148
Author(s):  
Carter Vaughn Findley
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Academic Career ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
World History ◽  
Basic Research ◽  
First Year ◽  
Ottoman History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ex Nihilo

In addition to my primary research specialty in Ottoman history, I prepared to teach the history of the Islamic Middle East from my first year in graduate school onward, and I did so throughout my academic career, including preparing graduate students to teach Ottoman and modern Middle Eastern history. My start in world history came later. Around the time I got tenure, my department decided, for comically bad reasons, to create a single world history course on the twentieth century. Having never witnessed creation ex nihilo in a department meeting before, I volunteered for the course. The department's reasons for creating the course were farcical, but I recognized it as a valuable intellectual property. In the existing state of the pedagogical literature, no one had paused to analyze the issues that made the twentieth century into more than the last chapter of a comprehensive world history book. A couple of years later, just as we finished teaching the course for the first time, an editor came along and asked if I had ever thought about writing a textbook. Yes, I had thought about it. Only I had assumed many years would pass before anyone would ask. Such were the origins of my coauthored Twentieth-Century World, having gone through seven editions from 1986 until 2010. It would be an understatement to say that radical revisions were required for each new edition, given not only the lengthening chronology but also the often radical revisions and improvements in the literature. If this presentation sounds more like a memoir than a research paper, the reason is that my dual lives in Middle Eastern and world history interacted in the pedagogical realm, raising issues that redirected my basic research and theoretical inquiries along the way.

Two Concepts of Un-Americanism

2013 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 925-942 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALEX GOODALL
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious Affiliation ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Extensive Literature ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Status Politics ◽  
Racial Ethnic

Using the Congressional record, press articles and the extensive literature on the theme of Americanism published in the early decades of the twentieth century, this article seeks to offer a new approach to the history of the idea of “un-Americanism” in the early years of the twentieth century, particularly in the period between the First World War and the Great Depression. It argues that a key distinction may be drawn between a procedural or “negative” concept of un-Americanism, in which the enemy is defined as the person who refuses to accept the liberal political order and therefore exempts themselves from the privileges of citizenship, and a “positive” definition of un-Americanism based on identity and status politics, in which the un-American is seen as the person who fails to meet the criteria for membership in the mythic community from which the modern nation is assumed to have been founded – usually defined in racial, ethnic and gendered terms; through religious affiliation; or by assertions of culture and character. The history of un-Americanism should therefore be understood principally in terms of the contestations that developed between these two concepts rather than as the evolution of a singular concept and shared understanding of its meaning.

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