Life Is Elsewhere

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Lounsbery
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
European Standard ◽  
European Model ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Symbolic Geography ◽  
Literary Regionalism ◽  
Western European ◽  
Enduring Power

This book shows how nineteenth-century Russian literature created an imaginary place called “the provinces”—a place at once homogeneous, static, anonymous, and symbolically opposed to Petersburg and Moscow. The book looks at a wide range of texts, both canonical and lesser-known, in order to explain why the trope has exercised such enduring power, and what role it plays in the larger symbolic geography that structures Russian literature's representation of the nation's space. The book brings to light fundamental questions that have long gone unasked: how to understand, for instance, the weakness of literary regionalism in a country as large as Russia? Why the insistence, from Herzen through Chekhov and beyond, that all Russian towns look the same? In a literary tradition that constantly compared itself to a western European standard, the book argues, the problem of provinciality always implied difficult questions about the symbolic geography of the nation as a whole. This constant awareness of a far-off European model helps explain why the provinces, in all their supposed drabness and predictability, are a topic of such fascination for Russian writers—why these anonymous places are in effect so important and meaningful, notwithstanding the culture's nearly unremitting emphasis on their nullity and meaninglessness.

Varia: The Enduring Power of the Classical World View

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
David Jenkins ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World View ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
Religious Philosophy ◽  
Classical World ◽  
Human Image ◽  
Ethical Stance ◽  
Enduring Power

For the poet, prophet, and politician, as for the lover, the king, and the anthropologist, the human is the measure of all things. Philosophers and psychologists define us as a perceiving consciousness, an object determined by the environment, a subject not only capable of heroic individualism but also of esoteric understanding. For some, our measure is beyond things and our true worth lies not only in the here and now but rather in our freedom to transcend the bounds of self and prevail beyond the limits of temporality. For the artist, whose creative consciousness aims to redeem the human image from the constraints of brute anonymity, the questions about our status must be asked if not finally answered. The article considers the role that the classical world view plays in the process of artistic redemption. It looks at the Judeo-Christian and Classical legacies and their interpretations. Nineteenth-century Russian literature and religious philosophy are then analysed. The article winds up with a reading of select poems by Osip Mandelstam as special attention is paid to the ethical stance of the poet when confronted with the dictates of totalitarian power.

scholarly journals The peculiarities of Zabolotsky’s poetic discourse

2018 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 04015
Author(s):  
Anna Butova ◽  
Angelina Dubskikh ◽  
Ekaterina Lomakina
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Literature ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
Creative Work ◽  
Specific Nature ◽  
Objective Reality ◽  
Xxth Century ◽  
Poetic Discourse ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Russian Literary

Although N. Zabolotsky’s creative work constantly attracted researchers, there are still problems that have not been reflected in the scientific literature. This article aims to define the features of Nikolai Zabolotsky’s poetic discourse in the Russian literary tradition. To achieve the aim, the authors deal with a wide range of challenges: the study of Zabolotsky’s worldviews in the context of the general mentality of the epoch; identifying the specific nature of figurative and semantic interactions in the poetic language and the objective reality in Zabolotsky’s and the Symbolists’ poetry; establishing the features in the poetic re-creation of artistic existence. Zabolotsky’s poetic heritage, considered from historical, literary and discoursive approaches is the material of the research. The material of this article can be used in teaching Russian literature of the XXth century and also promote the discovery of new facets in studies on poetics and culturology.

scholarly journals ’n Interpretasie van Karel Schoeman se roman, ’n Ander land binne die raamwerk van die laat negentiendeeeuse estetisistiese en dekadente literêre tradisie

Literator ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
M. Grobbelaar ◽  
H. Roos
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Narrative Style ◽  
Strong Resemblance ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Western European ◽  
French Words ◽  
Intense Heat

The first motivation for reading Karel Schoeman’s novel ’n Ander land within the framework of late nineteenth century Western European decadcnt literature is the strong resemblance between Schoeman's character Versluis and Des Esseintes, main character of the so-called Bible of Decadence, namely Joris- Karl Huysmans’ A Rebours (1884). Schoeman’s cultivated narrative style, his use of archaic Dutch and French words and the fact that this novel h as 'no story’, confirm the affinity of ’n Ander land with the decadent literary tradition as established by Huysmans’ plotless novel. The ultimate vision communicated in ’n Ander land is that death, like the landscape of Africa, is infinitely empty. The journey of the dying Versluis to Bloemfontein with its emphasis on intense heat and desolation and its affinities with Dante's Divina Commedia can be seen as a symbolic descent into hell, with the suggestion that Versluis will never reach paradise.

Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Goldhill
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Victorian Art ◽  
Victorian Science ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels

How did the Victorians engage with the ancient world? This book is an exploration of how ancient Greece and Rome influenced Victorian culture. Through Victorian art, opera, and novels, the book examines how sexuality and desire, the politics of culture, and the role of religion in society were considered and debated through the Victorian obsession with antiquity. Looking at Victorian art, it demonstrates how desire and sexuality, particularly anxieties about male desire, were represented and communicated through classical imagery. Probing into operas of the period, the book addresses ideas of citizenship, nationalism, and cultural politics. And through fiction—specifically nineteenth-century novels about the Roman Empire—it discusses religion and the fierce battles over the church as Christianity began to lose dominance over the progressive stance of Victorian science and investigation. Rediscovering some great forgotten works and reframing some more familiar ones, the book offers extraordinary insights into how the Victorian sense of antiquity and our sense of the Victorians came into being. With a wide range of examples and stories, it demonstrates how interest in the classical past shaped nineteenth-century self-expression, giving antiquity a unique place in Victorian culture.

The Art of Love Poetry

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Gray
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
Erotic Love ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Function ◽  
Meaning And Function ◽  
Comprehensive History

Love begets poetry; poetry begets love. These two propositions have seemed evident to thinkers and poets across the Western literary tradition. Plato writes that “anyone that love touches instantly becomes a poet.” And even today, when poetry has largely disappeared from the mainstream of popular culture, it retains its romantic associations. But why should this be so—what are the connections between poetry and erotic love that lead us to associate them so strongly with one another? An examination of different theories of both love and poetry across the centuries reveals that the connection between them is not merely an accident of cultural history—the result of our having grown up hearing, or hearing about, love poetry—but something more intrinsic. Even as definitions of them have changed, the two phenomena have consistently been described in parallel terms. Love is characterized by paradox. Above all, it is both necessarily public, because interpersonal, and intensely private; hence it both requires expression and resists it. In poetry, especially lyric poetry, which features its own characteristic paradoxes and silences, love finds a natural outlet. This study considers both the theories and the love poems themselves, bringing together a wide range of examples from different eras in order to examine the major structures that love and poetry share. It does not aim to be a comprehensive history of Western love poetry, but an investigation into the meaning and function of recurrent tropes, forms, and images employed by poets to express and describe erotic love.

Women and Slavery in the Nineteenth Century

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daina Ramey Berry ◽  
Nakia D. Parker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Enslaved Women ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Slave Traders ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
Kinship Bonds

This chapter analyzes the lives of enslaved women in the nineteenth-century United States and the Caribbean, an era characterized by the massive expansion of the institution of chattel slavery. Framing the discussion through the themes of labor, commodification, sexuality, and resistance, this chapter highlights the wide range of lived experiences of enslaved women in the Atlantic World. Enslaved women’s productive and reproductive labor fueled the global machinery of capitalism and the market economy. Although enslaved women endured the constant exploitation and commodification of their bodies, many actively resisted their enslavement and carved out supportive and sustaining familial, marital, and kinship bonds. In addition, this essay explains how white, native, and black women could be complicit in the perpetuation of chattel slavery as enslavers and slave traders. Considering women in their roles as the oppressed and the oppressors contributes and expands historical understandings of gender and sexuality in relation to slavery.

A Philippine ‘coolie trade’: Trade and exploitation of Chinese labour in Spanish colonial Philippines, 1850–98

2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 457-483
Author(s):  
Mònica Ginés-Blasi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
Commercial Activities ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Coolie Trade

Chinese immigration to the Philippines has traditionally been studied in relation to commercial activities. But between 1850 and 1898, there was an unparalleled influx of Chinese labourers, which raised the number of Chinese residents to 100,000. This influx was fuelled by the abundant profits obtained by Chinese brokers and foremen, Spanish institutions and authorities in Manila, consuls in China, and Spanish and British ship captains, all of whom extracted excessive fees and taxes from the labourers. The trade in and the exploitation of Chinese labourers in the Philippines have yet to be thoroughly researched. This article shows that the import and abuse of Chinese labourers in and to the Philippines continued throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, and that, despite some anti-Chinese Spanish colonial rhetoric, a wide range of actors and institutions, both in China and in the Philippines, took advantage of this unprecedented inflow of immigrants.

The Anatomy of Justice: Forensic Medicine and Criminal Law In Nineteenth-century Egypt

1999 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 224-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Khaled Fahmy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Forensic Medicine ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Reform Process ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Common ◽  
Arabic Speaking

AbstractThe reform of the Egyptian criminal justice system in the nineteenth century traditionally has been viewed as forming an important step in the establishment of a liberal and just rule of law. By studying how forensic medicine was introduced into nineteenth-century Egypt, I argue that the need to exercise better control over the population and to monitor crime lay behind the reform process as much as liberal ideas borrowed from Europe did. Drawing on a wide range of archival material, both legal and medical, I analyze the role played by autopsy in the criminal system and argue that the practice of autopsy was viewed differentially by 'ulamā', by Arabic-speaking, French-educated doctors and by the mostly illiterate masses. And contrary to the common wisdom, I conclude that the "modernization" of the Egyptian legal system was intended not to displace the sharīa but to support it.

Figures of Authority in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
First Century ◽  
Western World ◽  
Catholic Priests ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Emotional Politics ◽  
Print Cultures

This interdisciplinary collection investigates the forms that authority assumed in nineteenth-century Ireland, the relations they bore to international redefinitions of authority, and Irish contributions to the reshaping of authority in the modern age. At a time when age-old sources of social, political, spiritual and cultural authority were eroded in the Western world, Ireland witnessed both the restoration of older forms of authority and the rise of figures who defined new models of authority in a democratic age. Using new comparative perspectives as well as archival resources in a wide range of fields, eleven chapters show how new authorities were embodied in emerging types of politicians, clerics and professionals, and in material extensions of their power in visual, oral and print cultures. Their analyses often eerily echo twenty-first-century debates about populism, the suspicion towards scholarly and intellectual expertise, and the role of new technologies and forms of association in contesting and recreating authority. Several contributions highlight the role of emotion in the way authority was deployed by figures ranging from O’Connell to Catholic priests and W.B. Yeats, foreshadowing the perceived rise of emotional politics in our own age. This volume stresses that many contested forms of authority that now look ‘traditional’ emerged from 19th-century crises and developments, as did the challenges that undermine authority.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document