Effusive Elegies or Catty Critic: Letitia Elizabeth Landon On Felicia Hemans

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucy Morrison
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Image ◽  
Felicia Hemans ◽  
The Public ◽  
Letitia Elizabeth Landon ◽  
Literary Market ◽  
The Public Sphere

Abstract Rather than dutifully producing conventional elegies bemoaning the loss of the exemplary woman poet immediately after Felicia Hemans’s death in 1835, Letitia Elizabeth Landon daringly objects to the disjunction between Hemans’s life and her public image. Landon dissents from regarding Hemans’s poetry as unblemished in its depiction of women’s traditional domestic role and instead hints at the subversive, indirect discontent she detects in Hemans’s verse — long before twentieth-century critics. Women writers must surely have enjoyed witnessing their gender’s growing success in the literary market, but, since women were competing against one another directly in the public sphere, it was inevitable that some regarded each other as competitors and experienced envy of others’ achievements. After her sister’s death, Harriet Hughes might record that Hemans “would rejoice in [the gifted writers of her own sex’s] success with true sisterly disinterestedness,” but Landon does not appear to have adopted such a “generous” stance (121).

‘Roses blooming under glass; lips cut with a knife’: Hermeneutics of the Modern Female Face in Woolf and Mansfield

2018 ◽  
pp. 87-101
Author(s):  
Halyna Chumak
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Interdisciplinary Studies ◽  
Cultural Assumptions ◽  
The Public ◽  
Visual Identification ◽  
Female Presence ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Visual Technologies

Inspired by the interdisciplinary studies undertaken by Michael North and Rochelle Rives, this article examines conspicuous representations of the modern female face in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) and Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’ (1918), ‘Pictures’ (1920), and ‘The Garden Party’ (1922). If writers and artists of the early twentieth century dispelled facile assumptions about a mimetic relationship between face and character, why are two modernist women writers so invested in highlighting the female face? I approach this query and the lexical visages Mansfield and Woolf craft by situating their work within a cultural-historical framework that constellates nineteenth-century physiognomy, a growing female presence in the public sphere, and the rise of modern visual technologies. Physiognomy had lost its cultural traction by the fin de siècle, but it left an indelible influence on cultural assumptions about women who crossed domestic thresholds. I demonstrate that Woolf and Mansfield convey a salient interest in the inscrutable female visage that resists being read as what Rives calls a ‘text for analysis and interpretation’. Both writers reveal concerns about the modern woman’s visual identification, but of the two, it is Mansfield who fashions corrective images and extricates the modern woman from her physiognomic past.

scholarly journals Desiring the Secular: Capital, Cohesion, and the Fantasy of Secularization

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 410
Author(s):  
Ian A. Morrison
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Proper Place ◽  
The Public ◽  
Religious Difference ◽  
Religious Subject ◽  
Global North ◽  
The Public Sphere

Towards the end of the twentieth century, religion re-emerged as a topic of pressing concern in a number of the most self-consciously secularized states of the global north. From disputes over the wearing of headscarves in schools to debates over accommodations for religious practices in the public sphere, religion, particularly the ‘foreign’ religiosity of migrants and other minority religious subjects, appeared on the scene as a phenomenon whose proper place and role in society required both urgent and careful deliberation. This article argues that in order to account for the affective potency produced by the immanence of the figure of the ‘foreign’ religious subject, it is necessary to understand secularization as fantasy. It is within the fantasy of secularization that the secular emerges as an object of desire—as something that, if attained, appears as a solution to the problem of ‘foreign’ religiosity—and figures of inassimilable religiosity assume the role of scapegoats for the failure to resolve these concerns. In this sense, within this fantasy scene, the secular promises to provide ‘us’ with something that we are lacking. However, this promise has been undermined by the apparent persistence of religious difference. As such, as a result of their continued religiosity, ‘they’ appear to be taking something from ‘us’.

scholarly journals La recepción de Lucie Delarue-Mardrus en la Edad de Plata: tensiones en torno a autoría y feminidad

Çédille ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 103-128
Author(s):  
Isabel Clúa Gines ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Public Figure ◽  
The Public ◽  
Female Condition ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Enrique Gomez Carrillo ◽  
Edad De Plata ◽  
The Public Sphere

"The aim of this work is to reflect on the construction of the woman writer as a public figure based on the case of Lucie Delarue-Mardrus and her projection in Spain, placing her in the framework of the tensions that surround the female condition at the beginning of the twentieth century. Although her work is translated and reviewed, it is her public figure the element that focuses the attention of the critics, as confirmed by the various references by prominent chroniclers (Enrique Gómez Carrillo, Isabel Oyarzábal, María Luz Morales or Teresa de Escoriaza). This phenomenon allows us to see the key elements of the feminine authorial construction, as the incorporation of strategies of the emerging idea of celebrity and its use as an essential mechanism to deal with the difficulty of being a woman in the public sphere"

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Kim T. Gallon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Black Press ◽  
The Public ◽  
Introductory Section ◽  
African American Sexuality ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Public Sphere

This introductory section introduces the book’s major arguments and provides an overview of the history of the Black Press in the early twentieth century. The introduction also explores the theoretical conceptualization of the public sphere in relationship to African American life and the scholarship on pleasure and class in African American history. In laying out these terms, the introductory section of the book makes the case that they are useful categories of analysis for a deeper understanding of African American sexuality, pleasure, and the Black Press. Finally, the introduction features a discussion of the significance of the interwar period and its relationship to the history of African American sexuality in the Black Press.

Pages from a Yellow Press: Print Culture, Public Life and Political Genealogies in Modern Brazil

2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 353-379
Author(s):  
JAMES P. WOODARD
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Original Formulation ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Radical Republicanism

AbstractAn examination of the Brazilian newspaper O Combate, this article accomplishes four goals. First, it defines the politics of a periodical long cited but little understood by historians. Second, it documents O Combate's place, alongside other ‘yellow press’ outlets, in the making of a ‘public sphere’ in São Paulo. Third, it situates the same publications' role in the bringing into being of a more commercial, publicity-driven press, which would shed the yellow press's radicalism and abet the collapse of the public sphere of its heyday. Fourth, it suggests that O Combate's radical republicanism was one fount of the democratic radicalism of the late 1920s and early 1930s, as well as of the regionally chauvinist constitutionalism of 1932–7. In this rare application of the ‘public sphere’ idea to twentieth-century Brazil, readers may also detect an account closer to Jürgen Habermas’ original formulation than that found in the historiography of nineteenth-century Spanish America.

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