Making Moral Meanings

Author(s):  
Thomas Dixon

This chapter explains how ‘altruism’ made its way into the first published part of the greatest record of the English language, the Oxford English Dictionary. It uses this story of lexicographers, readers, definitions, and illustrative quotations as an initial vignette of the world of Victorian moral thought. It also discusses the relationship between words and concepts and the different assumptions and methods appropriate to writing the histories of each. In his History in English Words, Owen Barfield noted that the nineteenth century saw a proliferation of English words formed in combination with ‘self-’. Mentioning especially ‘self-help’ and a newly positive sense of ‘self-respect’, he saw this development as an aspect of the rise of Victorian ‘individualism’ and ‘humanism’.

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sydney J. Shep

Emoticons are usually associated with the digital age, but they have numerous precursors in both manuscript and print. This article examines the circulation of emotional icons in nineteenth-century typographical journals as a springboard to understanding the relationship between emotion, materiality, and anthropomorphism as well the pre-digital networks of the “typographical press system.” It draws on literature from textual and typographical analysis, including the history of punctuation. It also demonstrates the ubiquity of emoticons in contemporary society and culture outside the world of computers, text messaging, and chat rooms.


boundary 2 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-176
Author(s):  
Joe Cleary

Though canons and faculty have greatly diversified in recent decades, English departments around the world fundamentally prioritize English and American literatures. To this extent, they resemble the Anglo-American imperial commonwealths that some toward the end of the nineteenth century advocated for in order to stave off the decline of the British Empire and to shore up a permanent Anglo-American supremacy against all threats. Still, as the English language becomes “global,” English departments today founder for a variety of reasons and convey a persistent sense of crisis. Has the time come radically to decolonize the English department, not only at the level of curriculum but also in terms of its basic organizational structures to facilitate the study of anglophone literatures now planetary in reach? If so, how might this best be achieved in the British and American core countries and also in the more peripheral regions of Anglophonia?


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ernst A. Schmidt

What love actually is, why and how it is experienced, has moved the ancient world as well: poets and philosophers have asked these questions in great intensity. This book by the renowned Tübingen philologist presents the most beautiful testimonies from Homer to Apuleius in translations or lectures. In the course of a multitude of subtle interpretations, the author elaborates on the various texts and their insights into the essence of love, its causes and varieties of experience. Dominant topics are: Overpowered by a Godhead, the quest for happiness, unity and perfection; love and beauty; love as illness, wound and suffering; betrayal, adultery, murder and death; love as the origin of the world and its movement. As for non-erotic love: the nature of friendship, the cause of parental love, the sense of self-love, and the presupposition and consequence of the love of God for a human being. The comparison with post-antique literature or recent love discourses and the relationship with our own conception of love accompany the interpretations.


Author(s):  
Matthew Kelly

This introduction considers the ‘environmental turn’ taken in the humanities, and particularly in historical study, suggesting ways in which these developments might animate the future study of nineteenth-century Ireland. Question of agency and the relationship between human and non-human nature are addressed. Also considered is how current environmental concerns, and climate change in particular, should lead us to think anew about the past, rendering familiar subjects unfamiliar. Particular attention is paid to how Ireland’s past might be located within larger global processes, attracting the interest of scholars from throughout the world. It then introduces the individual contributions in the volume, tracing a narrative thread through them in order to demonstrate how a change in optic can significantly change how we think about Ireland’s recent past.


Author(s):  
Jie Yang

This chapter analyzes representations of “happy housewives” in popular psychological self-help media in order to examine the relationship between gender, psychology and privatization in China. Through analysis of media and ethnographic data, I demonstrate that while both gender and psychology are represented as sites of regulation and value extraction, the heart of the housewife is the true space of commodification, where emotions, value, and virtue are all generated. This felt space of possibility and potentiality, constructed by media in concert with state interests, intensifies women’s attachment to commodities and to the world, and enhances consumption and entrepreneurship. Happiness promotion, of which the figure of the happy housewife is a key part, not only objectifies women and renders invisible their complex subjectivities, but downplays the intensified gendered exploitation and class stratification since the mid-1990s when privatization began. In this context, I argue that unhappiness or anger can constitute a repoliticizing process that reinvigorates discussions of class as both an analytical and political category in China.


2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 167-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karyofyllis Zervoulis ◽  
Evanthia Lyons ◽  
Sokratis Dinos

Aims and methodThe relationship between homophobia (varying from actual and perceived to internalised) and measures of well-being is well documented. A study in Athens, Greece and London, UK attempted to examine this relationship in two cities with potentially different levels of homophobia. One-hundred and eighty-eight men who have sex with men (MSM) living in London and 173 MSM living in Athens completed a survey investigating their views on their sexuality, perceptions of local homophobia and their identity evaluation in terms of global self-esteem.ResultsThe results confirmed a negative association between homophobia and self-esteem within each city sample. However, Athens MSM, despite perceiving significantly higher levels of local homophobia than London MSM, did not differ on most indicators of internalised homophobia and scored higher on global self-esteem than London MSM. The city context had a significant impact on the relationship.Clinical implicationsThe findings are discussed in relation to the implications they pose for mental health professionals dealing with MSM from communities experiencing variable societal stigmatisation and its effect on a positive sense of self.


2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
pp. 1265-1271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiago Braga do Espírito Santo ◽  
Taka Oguisso ◽  
Rosa Maria Godoy Serpa da Fonseca

The object is the relationship between the professionalization of Brazilian nursing and women, in the broadcasting of news about the creation of the Professional School of Nurses, in the light of gender. Aims: to discuss the linkage of women to the beginning of the professionalization of Brazilian nursing following the circumstances and evidence of the creation of the Professional School of Nurses analyzed from the perspective of gender. The news articles were analyzed from the viewpoint of Cultural History, founded in the gender concept of Joan Scott and in the History of Women. The creation of the School and the priority given in the media to women consolidate the vocational ideal of the woman for nursing in a profession subjugated to the physician but also representing the conquest of a space in the world of education and work, reconfiguring the social position of nursing and of woman in Brazil.


Author(s):  
Peter D. McDonald

This chapter reflects on questions of language, culture, community, and the state via the history of Oxford University (1860 to 1939). After considering Matthew Arnold’s ambivalence about his alma mater, it turns to the quarrel over the identity of the English language between the historian E. A. Freeman and the lexicographer James Murray and its impact on the Oxford English Dictionary. The second section traces this quarrel through the disputes about the creation of the new School of English in Oxford in the 1890s, focusing on the relationship to the established School of Literae Humaniores and the idealist assumptions underpinning the debate. The third section shows what bearing this had on the creation of the International Committee for Intellectual Co-operation, the precursor to UNESCO, in the interwar years. It centres on Gilbert Murray, then Professor of Greek at Oxford, and concludes with his public exchange with Tagore in 1934.


2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 463-485
Author(s):  
Emily Cuming

This article explores the representation of British sailortown and merchant sailors onshore in the context of their representation in Victorian writing and contemporary journalism. It proposes that sailortown functioned as an urban setting which offered the traveling or returning sailor an important sense of homeliness—a homeliness that was paradoxically based on the promotion of a collective and worldly belonging. This sense of “worldliness” was articulated through aspects of ornamental material culture ranging from sailortown's visual display of nautical and transnational symbols, to the interior arrangements of places of hospitality such as Sailors’ Homes, to sailors’ own forms of portable property. By thinking more closely about the relationship between the domestic and the global in the context of maritime culture, the article proposes that the ornamental features of the seafarer's life, in all its diverse manifestations, serves to reveal the paradoxes and rich ambivalences that underscore the situation of the nineteenth-century sailor onshore.


2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-108
Author(s):  
Jane Hamlett

AbstractDuring the nineteenth century, British public schools became increasingly important, turning out thousands of elite young men. Historians have long recognized the centrality of these institutions to modern British history and to understandings of masculinity in this era. While studies of universities and clubs have revealed how fundamental the rituals and everyday life of institutions were to the creation of masculinity, public schools have not been subjected to the same scrutiny. Approaches to date have emphasized the schools’ roles in distancing boys from the world of the home, domesticity, femininity, and women. Focusing on three case-study schools, Winchester College, Charterhouse, and Lancing College, this article offers a reassessment of the relationship between home and school in the Victorian and Edwardian period and contributes to the growing literature on forms of masculine domesticity in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the reformed public schools, the ideal of the patriarchal household was often essential, and in producing it, the presence of significant women—the wives of headmasters and housemasters—could be vital. The schools also worked to create a specifically masculine form of domesticity through boys’ performance of mundane domestic tasks in the “fagging” system, which was often imagined in terms of the chivalric service ideal. Letters from the period show how the everyday worlds of school and home remained enmeshed, revealing the distinctive nature of family relationships forged by the routine of presence and absence that public schools created.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document