scholarly journals “Self-sacrifice may be Quite Wrong”: Women’s Education and Finances in The Odd Women (1893) by George Gissing

Author(s):  
Samiya Alam ◽  
Aimillia Ramli

In late-nineteenth-century Britain, the surplus number of single women presented an internal crisis that accumulated in a number of debates on the subject in various fields, such as economy and education. While much have been written about these in relation to the social context of the time, little have been said specifically about the way single women and their educational and financial positions are presented in late-nineteenth-century English novels. This paper focusses on George Gissing’s (1857-1903) novel The Odd Women (1893) and its portrayal of single women and the parallel roles played by money and education in the women’s decision to remain unmarried. The method applied in this study is based on contextual as well as textual analyses and interpretation of the novel in light of feminist and Marxist literary theories. This study investigates the impact of socio-economic conditions on the lives of single women towards the end of the nineteenth century. The result of this study shows the novel makes a correlation between women’s level of education and financial situation with their choice to remain single.

Literator ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-136
Author(s):  
W. Van Zyl

An ecologist in De Nieuwe Gids, Frederik van Eeden’s De kleine Johannes and ecologismThe famous late nineteenth-century Dutch literary rebels, the Tachtigers, chose a part of Frederik van Eeden's De kleine Johannes as the opening text for the first edition of their literary mouthpiece, De Nieuwe Gids. Closer analysis in this article shows, however, that the novel contradicts precisely those literary ideals it was supposed to embody. Much more than being an illustration of the Romantic poetics favoured by the movement, it tends to be a rather didactic defence of ecological ideals and a literary preview of ideas Van Eeden would later advocate much more outspokenly. In his so-called Walden Experiment, inspired by the views of the American ecologist Henry David Thoreau, he would even try to put these ideals into practice. This experiment did not bring about the social success Van Eeden hoped for, but in an ironical way it did fulfil a prophecy in De kleine Johannes: “Among people you will experience endless sorrow…”.


1991 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 545-569 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas M. Peers

The ethnocentric and racialist overtones of the Victorian empire have long been acknowledged. Most work in this field has generally centred on the mid to late nineteenth century and, by emphasizing the intellectual and cultural currents in domestic society, has focused our attention on the metropole. This reveals only part of the equation; British attitudes towards the outside world arose from a complex matrix of ideas, assumptions and contacts that linked the metropole and colonial environments. In order to understand more fully British responses to non-European societies, and the impact these had on imperial developments, this paper will examine the Bengal army in the 1820s and demonstrate that it was during this period, and under this institution, that many of the assumptions were established under which the later Raj would operate. Of great importance were experiences in the Burma War (1824–26) and the simultaneous mutiny at Barrackpore which, by bringing to the surface doubts about the loyalty and reliability of the Bengal army, hastened a transition from an army modelled on caste lines to one that rested principally on race. This transformation from a caste-based army to an army of martial races was not fully completed, although the foundations were laid, in the years before the Indian Mutiny of 1857, largely because even those who rejected Bengal's dependence upon the highest castes could not bring themselves to argue for the recruitment of the lowest castes no matter what ‘race’ they were drawn from.


2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxwell Uphaus

The burgeoning subfield of literary oceanic studies has largely neglected modernist literature, maintaining that the end of the age of sail in the late nineteenth century also marks an end to maritime literature's substantive cultural role. This essay outlines a way of reading the maritime in modernism through an analysis of the engagement with history and temporality in Joseph Conrad's sea novel The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897). The novel depicts the sea as variously an anachronistic sphere left behind by history, an integral foundation to history, an element that eclipses history, and an archive of history's repressed violence. This article traces the interactions of these various views of the sea's relationship to history, highlighting how they are shaped and inflected by the novel's treatment of race. Based on this analysis, it proposes an approach to the sea in modernist literature that focuses on its historiographical rather than social import.


Author(s):  
Cristina Vatulescu

This chapter approaches police records as a genre that gains from being considered in its relationships with other genres of writing. In particular, we will follow its long-standing relationship to detective fiction, the novel, and biography. Going further, the chapter emphasizes the intermedia character of police records not just in our time but also throughout their existence, indeed from their very origins. This approach opens to a more inclusive media history of police files. We will start with an analysis of the seminal late nineteenth-century French manuals prescribing the writing of a police file, the famous Bertillon-method manuals. We will then track their influence following their adoption nationally and internationally, with particular attention to the politics of their adoption in the colonies. We will also touch briefly on the relationship of early policing to other disciplines, such as anthropology and statistics, before moving to a closer look at its intersections with photography and literature.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-41
Author(s):  
W. Walker Hanlon ◽  
Casper Worm Hansen ◽  
Jake Kantor

Using novel weekly mortality data for London spanning 1866-1965, we analyze the changing relationship between temperature and mortality as the city developed. Our main results show that warm weeks led to elevated mortality in the late nineteenth century, mainly due to infant deaths from digestive diseases. However, this pattern largely disappeared after WWI as infant digestive diseases became less prevalent. The resulting change in the temperature-mortality relationship meant that thousands of heat-related deaths—equal to 0.9-1.4 percent of all deaths— were averted. These findings show that improving the disease environment can dramatically alter the impact of high temperature on mortality.


2021 ◽  
pp. 009614422110252
Author(s):  
Ahmet Yusuf Yüksek

This study investigates the socio-spatial history of Sufism in Istanbul during 1880s. Drawing on a unique population registry, it reconstructs the locations of Sufi lodges and the social profiles of Sufis to question how visible Sufism was in the Ottoman capital, and what this visibility demonstrates the historical realities of Sufism. It claims that Sufism was an integral part of the Ottoman life since Sufi lodges were space of religion and spirituality, art, housing, and health. Despite their large presence in Istanbul, Sufi lodges were extensively missing in two main areas: the districts of Unkapanı-Bayezid and Galata-Pera. While the lack of lodgess in the latter area can be explained by the Western encroachment in the Ottoman capital, the explanation for the absence of Sufis in Unkapanı-Bayezid is more complex: natural disasters, two opposing views about Sufi sociability, and the locations of the central lodges.


2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 140
Author(s):  
LUDMYLLA MENDES LIMA

<p><strong>Resumo: </strong>O presente artigo trata de analisar o modo particular como Machado de Assis constrói a representação dos fatos históricos brasileiros no romance <em>Esaú e Jacó</em>. Este romance traz em seu enredo dois importantes fatos históricos ocorridos no final do século XIX: a Abolição da Escravatura, em 1888 e a Proclamação da República, em 1889. O tratamento literário dado pelo autor aos fatos, imprimindo irrelevância aos mesmos no contexto do enredo, revela que para ser Realista ‘à brasileira’, naquelas circunstâncias específicas, era necessário mostrar o curso da História tendo como base a ausência de transformação.</p><p><strong>Palavras-chave</strong>: Machado de Assis – <em>Esaú e Jacó</em> – História do Brasil.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Abstract: </strong>This paper intends to analyze the special way Machado de Assis builds the representation of Brazilian historical facts in the novel <em>Esaú e Jacó</em>. This novel brings in its plot two important historical events that happened in the late Nineteenth century: the Abolition of Slavery, in 1888; and the Proclamation of the Republic, in 1889. The literary treatment given by the author to the events, printing irrelevance to them, in the context of the plot, reveals that to build a Brazilian realism, in those circumstances, it was necessary to show the course of history based on the absence of transformation.</p><p><strong>Keywords</strong>: Machado de Assis – <em>Esaú e Jacó –</em> Brazilian History.</p>


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