scholarly journals ANTIQUARIAN AND RARE BOOKS IN LONDON AT THE BEGINNING OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

2004 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-36
Author(s):  
John Valdimir Price

“Booksellers are generous liberal-minded men.” According to Boswell, Dr. Johnson made this remark in 1756, though anyone remotely acquainted with Johnson will also know that he was equally capable of thinking—and saying—something quite the opposite; it would be imprudent to overlook the possibility of irony here. The London book trade in the eighteenth century was a busy one, and its history is the subject of some of the best research being done on London’s culture. There was also a prospering trade in second-hand or “previously owned” books, and a large number of books from previous centuries are often found in . . .

While the twenty-first century has brought a wealth of new digital resources for researching late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century serials, the subfield of Romantic periodical studies has remained largely inchoate. This collection sets out to begin tackling this problem, offering a basic groundwork for a branch of periodical studies that is distinctive to the concerns, contexts and media of Britain’s Romantic age. Featuring eleven chapters by leading experts on the subject, it showcases the range of methodological, conceptual and literary-historical insights to be drawn from just one of the era’s landmark literary periodicals, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Drawing in particular on the trove of newly digitised content, specific essays model how careful analyses of the incisive and often inflammatory commentary, criticism and original literature from Blackwood’s first two decades (1817–37) might inform and expand many of the most vibrant contemporary discussions surrounding British Romanticism.


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiina Mahlamäki ◽  
Tomas Mansikka

This article discusses the relationship between Western esotericism and literature. As an example of a secular author who uses and benefits from esoteric texts, ideas and thoughts as resources in creating a literary artwork, the article analyses Laura Lindstedt’s novel Oneiron. A Fantasy About the Seconds After Death (2015). It contextualises the novel within the frames of Western esotericism and literature, focusing on Emanuel Swedenborg’s impact on discourses of the afterlife in literature. Laura Lindstedt’s postmodern novel indicates various ways that esoteric ideas, themes, and texts can work as resources for authors of fiction in twenty-first century Finland. Since the late eighteenth century Swedenborg’s influence has been evident in literature and among artists, especially in providing resources for other-worldly imagery. Oneiron proves that the ideas of Swedenborg are still part of the memory of Western culture and literature.


Authorship ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Josephine Dougal

Robert Burns, the eighteenth-century Scottish poet and song writer, continues to maintain a substantial cultural ‘afterlife’ in the twenty first century, both within Scotland and beyond. Achieving cult status in the nineteenth century, the power of Burns as a popular cultural icon remains undiminished. Where the appropriation of Burns as national icon in the nineteenth century was made manifest in statuary, commemorative objects, and painted portraits, the twenty-first century has been marked by the proliferation of the image of Burns in new forms and  technologies, with Burns as product and brand logo, museum and heritage attraction, and tourism industry selling point. This recent flourishing of interest and engagement raises questions about why and how an eighteenth-century poet continues to be the object of such extensive cultural elaboration at this time. In approaching this question, some fruitful lines of enquiry are being suggested in recent discussions that have looked at the nineteenth-century Burns as a ‘mobilizing agent in collective memory production’ (Rigney 2011, 81). One such appraisal points to how the construction of Burns in the nineteenth century as an iconic figure of Scottish cultural memory has the potential to ‘be resignified as necessary in subsequent chronological and geographical sites’ (Davis 2010, 14). It is this potential for the resignification of Burns as a symbolic site for the nation’s memory that this paper explores. In pointing to Burns’ representation in a variety of popular forms and in public discourse, the paper examines how a writer comes to be invested and reinvested as the voice and persona of the nation.


2013 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 74-86
Author(s):  
Renie Choy

We live in an age wary of admitting that any institution has an essence, and this has posed a dilemma for the study of monasticism. Until relatively recently, historians of monasticism zealously sought out its timeless and immutable inner qualities rather than its many varieties. While acknowledging the changes in external form and circumstances, Adolf von Harnack’s Monasticism: Its Ideals and History (1881), Dom Morin’s L’Idéal monastique (1912), James Hannay’s The Spirit and Origin of Christian Monasticism (1903) and Herbert Workman’s The Evolution of the Monastic Ideal (1913) nevertheless pursued the stable qualities of monasticism which had survived the tides of time. Even in 1957 Jean Leclercq could still presume that monasticism had an ‘essence’, in a classic work translated into English under the title The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture. To our twenty-first-century ears, such a monolith of a title, suggestive of the existence of a metahistorical ‘monastic ideal’, seems out of date. This essay approaches the subject of monastic historiography via an examination of Carolingian reflection on the monastic past, arguing that the significance of the ninth-century monastic programme lies in its effort to distil the entire received monastic heritage into a coherent and precise statement about the fundamental purpose of the monastic life. So we ask the question: when Eigil described Boniface and Sturm as spending a day away in a ‘sweet discussion about the life and manners of monks’, what exactly did he think they were talking about?


Author(s):  
Jed Z. Buchwald ◽  
Mordechai Feingold

This introductory chapter discusses Isaac Newton’s immersion in ancient prophecies, Church history, and alchemy. These investigations raise several questions: what links his interest in such matters to his investigations in optics, mechanics, and mathematics? Was Newton in his alchemical laboratory the same Newton who analyzed the passage of light through a prism and who measured the behavior of bodies falling through fluid media? What did the Newton who interpreted the Book of Revelation have to do with the man who wrote the Principia Mathematica? And how does the Newton who pored over ancient texts square with the author of the Opticks? The Newton that is the subject of this book differs in striking ways from any scientist of the twenty-first century. But he differed as well from his contemporary natural philosophers, theologians, and chronologers. The book investigates the origin of this difference and then uses it to produce a new understanding of Newton’s worldview and its historical context.


Author(s):  
Meredith McNeill Hale

This concluding chapter focuses on the question of circulation and impact: to what extent did De Hooghe’s satires travel beyond The Netherlands in the seventeenth century and what influence did they have on English political satire of the eighteenth century? The appearance of motifs from De Hooghe’s satires in mezzotints of c.1690 and prints on the subject of the South Sea Bubble of 1720 will be discussed as will instances in which De Hooghe’s satires were reissued in the eighteenth century. However, a comparison of this handful of examples with the liberal use of De Hooghe’s triumphal allegories and battle scenes in such distant locations as Latin America and Russia reveals one of the qualities that epitomizes political satire—its dramatic circumscription by temporal and geographical boundaries. Satire’s embeddedness in a specific political, historical, and cultural moment and its dependence upon text that often channels the idiosyncrasies of spoken language, render it difficult—often impossible without intensive investigation—to understand beyond its immediate context. This is as true for twenty-first-century satires as it was for those produced in the late seventeenth century.


Humanities ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 70
Author(s):  
Christopher Breu

This essay begins by surveying our current moment in the humanities, diagnosing the language of crisis that frames much of the discourse about them. It argues that the crisis is a manufactured economic one not a symbolic one. The problems with many recent proposals—such as the new aestheticism, surface reading, and postcritique—is that they attempt to solve an economic crisis on the level of symbolic capital. They try to save the humanities by redisciplining them and making them mirror various forms amateur inquiry. I describe these approaches as the new enclosures, attempts at returning the humanities to disciplinarity with the hopes that administrative and neoliberal forces will find what we do more palatable. Instead of attempting to appease such forces by being pliant and apolitical, we need a new workerist militancy (daring to be “bad workers” from the point of view of neoliberal managerial rhetorics) to combat the economic crisis produced by neoliberalism. Meanwhile, on the level of knowledge production, the humanities need to resist the demand to shrink the scope of their inquiry to the disciplinary. The humanities, at their best, have been interdisciplinary. They have foregrounded both the subject of the human and all the complex forces that shape, limit, and exist in relationship and contradiction with the human. The essay concludes by arguing that the humanities, to resist neoliberal symbolic logics, need to embrace both a critical humanism, and the crucial challenges to this humanism that go by the name of antihumanism and posthumanism. It is only by putting these three discourses in negative dialectical tension with each other that we can begin to imagine a reinvigorated humanities that can address the challenges of the twenty-first century.


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