The collector as taste advisor and interior decorator: popular advice manuals and the orchestration of the private interior

Author(s):  
Anca I. Lasc

This chapter examines influential collecting and taste manuals from the second half of the nineteenth century dedicated to both a male, respectively a female, audience. After providing a brief history of collecting and its development in post-revolutionary France, the chapter explains how the visual and critical discourses about the proper appearance of the modern, private interior and about the arrangement of objects displayed therein informed the development of a new historicist, themed aesthetic. This new aesthetic required a mastermind to supervise the organization of each interior decorating ensemble within the upper as well as the middle-class private home - increasingly more decorated in the aftermath of the Industrial and Consumer Revolutions - paving the way to the work of the later interior decorators at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.

2019 ◽  
pp. 146-170
Author(s):  
Tyler Carrington

Chapter 5 follows the sensational trial of Frieda Kliem’s murderer and the strategy of the defense, which was not so much a legal strategy as a way of turning the trial into a question of Frieda’s respectability as a middle-class woman. It interprets this trial—and the life of Frieda Kliem, more generally—as a microcosm of the large-scale confrontation between nineteenth-century society and the emerging twentieth-century world. It contends that identity, presented either authentically or as an illusion, became supremely relevant in the metropolis, where the ubiquity of strangers, new faces, and mysterious crimes shaped the way city people narrated the search for love and intimacy. And because enterprising outsiders like Frieda Kliem so flouted the established patterns of middle-class respectability, they remained on the outside looking in as German society clung to the nineteenth-century world that was crumbling in the face of a bewilderingly new twentieth-century one.


2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (37) ◽  
pp. 171-190
Author(s):  
Anna Kowalcze-Pawlik

This paper provides a brief outline of the reception history of Othello in Poland, focusing on the way the character of the Moor of Venice is constructed on the page, in the first-published nineteenth-century translation by Józef Paszkowski, and on the stage, in two twentieth-century theatrical adaptations that provide contrasting images of Othello: 1981/1984 televised Othello, dir. Andrzej Chrzanowski and the 2011 production of African Tales Based on Shakespeare, in which Othello’s part is played by Adam Ferency (dir. Krzysztof Warlikowski). The paper details the political and social contexts of each of these stage adaptations, as both of them employ brownface and blackface to visualise Othello’s “political colour.” The function of blackface and brownface is radically different in these two productions: in the 1981/1984 Othello brownface works to underline Othello’s overall sense of alienation, while strengthening the existing stereotypes surrounding black as a skin colour, while the 2011 staging makes the use of blackface as an artificial trick of the actor’s trade, potentially unmasking the constructedness of racial prejudices, while confronting the audience with their own pernicious racial stereotypes.


2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-199
Author(s):  
Crescent Rainwater

Abstract Scholars have traditionally associated decadence with misogyny, and therefore it has typically been perceived as antithetical to feminism. Nobody’s Fault (1896), Netta Syrett’s first novel, complicates this perception through the way in which the self-assertive protagonist, Bridget Ruan, finds in the decadent music of Richard Wagner a liberating form of aesthetic experience. In this essay, I argue that encountering Wagner’s music marks Bridget’s immersion into a form of decadent culture that affirms her aesthetic longings and awakens her erotic desires. At the same time, the novel condemns an antifeminist form of decadence that is associated with elitist male artists who indulge in a superficial manipulation of language and treat women as art objects. The novel’s resistance to exclusionary forms of aesthetic experience is modelled in its straightforward narrative style and strategic engagement with familiar New Woman themes. This middlebrow narrative thus made Syrett’s intervention into debates about women and decadence accessible to a middle-class female audience. When we recognize that the history of decadence includes its appeal to feminist writers such as Syrett rather than an exclusively antifeminist legacy, we can begin to uncover a more nuanced history of feminism and decadence in England at the fin de siècle.


1976 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 349-381
Author(s):  
Ian F. A. Bell

To arrive at Pound's Canto XXIII from Poe's ‘ Sonnet to Science ’ is a problematic task for more and less obvious reasons. Part of the way in which we may make the approach is through the resonances of certain figures prominent in the history of ideas; in particular to Louis Agassiz, the Swiss-born geologist and natural historian who was a central personality in Cambridge circles from his arrival in America in 1846 until his death in 1873. Apart from Edward Lurie's excellent biography, Louis Agassiz, A Life in Science (Chicago, 1960), the twentieth century bears only scattered reference to him, whereas the latter half of the nineteenth century celebrated his work enthusiastically and prolifically. Part of the reason for his diminished presence after the turn of the century lies undoubtedly in his position outside the mainstream of contemporary biological thinking, particularly as a result of his quarrel with Asa Gray during the 1850s; Agassiz was the only scientist of influential standing to oppose himself to the doctrine of Evolution. Consequently, he occupies a far less prominent place in the history of biology than he did in his own era.


Author(s):  
Brenda Assael

The epilogue begins with consideration of the way the nineteenth-century London restaurant features in individual and collective memory. It insists that such memories were not exclusively characterized by notions of dispossession, melancholy, or regret, and the distance between eating out in the middle of the nineteenth century and the dawn of the twentieth century was often expressed through the sentiments of progress and improvement. It then moves on to a reflection on how returning the restaurant to a central role in our understanding of metropolitan history in the Victorian and Edwardian period has important connotations for how the history of Modern Britain, more broadly, might be researched and written. In particular, the restaurant requires more attention to be given to the more materially grounded aspects of the urban experience as much as it does to the more abstracted motifs of representation, performance, and subjectivity.


1982 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erwin H. Ackerknecht

SynopsisPsychosomatic medicine begins with the Greeks. It finds a place in Galen's system as diseases of passion, a concept current until the middle of the nineteenth century. The great French and German clinicians of the nineteenth century were all familiar with psychosomatic diseases. During the twentieth century the field was for a while monopolized by psychoanalysts. The psychosomatic specialist is essentially the doctor who listens to the patient.


1979 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-390
Author(s):  
Frederick Sontag

For some time it seemed as if Christianity itself required us to say that ‘God is in history’. Of course, even to speak of ‘history’ is to reveal a bias for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forms of thought. But the justification for talking about the Christian God in this way is the doctrine of the incarnation. The centre of the Christian claim is that Jesus is God's representation in history, although we need not go all the way to a full trinitarian interpretation of the relationship between God and Jesus. Thus, the issue is not so much whether God can appear or has appeared within, or entered into, human life as it is a question of what categories we use to represent this. To what degree is God related to the sphere of human events? Whatever our answer, we need periodically to re-examine the way we speak about God to be sure the forms we use have not become misleading.


Author(s):  
David LIGHTFOOT

This paper reviews the problems of the deterministic and predictive view of language change initiated by nineteenth century linguists and shows that such a view is still present in many analyses proposed by twentieth century linguists. As an alternative to such a view, the paper discusses an approach along the lines of Niyogi and Berwick (1997), which takes the explanation for long-term tendencies to be a function of the architecture of UG and the learning procedure and of the way in which populations of speakers behave.


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