The Melodramatic State

2021 ◽  
pp. 170-203
Author(s):  
Rebecca C. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Women Readers ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Literary Marketplace ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
National Conversation ◽  
National Discourses ◽  
Literary Market ◽  
Do So

This chapter talks about what were considered bad books for bad readers. At the turn of the century, it was certainly not high-minded literary works that predominated in the Arabic literary marketplace. Rather, the market privileged thrilling and emotional works, the vast majority of which were in translation and which prioritized titillation and “scandal” over moral, civic, or religious progress. The new popular novels were accused of more than just portraying unrealistic foreign situations; more dangerously, they were seen as promoting unhealthy reading practices and cultivating excessive, nonrational emotions. Commentators worried about the prominent place of “bad books for bad readers” in the national literary market, and bad readers were above all figured as women readers. Bad books spoke to and — more frequently — about women. Translations redeployed excess popular emotion as political, and they do so in such a way as to test gendered national discourses, complicating some of the very New Woman ideas that elite writers were putting forth. The chapter reinserts these popular translated novels and their major figures — the oppressed wife, the bad female example, and the good criminal — into the national conversation and shows how they make social and political claims.

scholarly journals Online Life Writing

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-150
Author(s):  
Silvia Schultermandl
Keyword(s):  
Life Style ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
The Political ◽  
Online Media ◽  
The Past ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Literary Market ◽  
Do So

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of this contribution to this forum: The advent of Facebook in 2004, Twitter in 2006, Tumblr in 2007, Instagram and Pinterest in 2010, and Snapchat and Google+ in 2011 facilitated the emergence of “everyday” autobiographies out of keeping with memoir practices of the past.[1] These “quick media” enable constant, instantaneous, and seemingly organic expressions of everyday lives.[2] To read quick media as “autobiographical acts” allows us to analyze how people mobilize online media as representations of their lives and the lives of others.[3] They do so through a wide range of topics including YouTube testimonials posted by asylum seekers (Whitlock 2015) and the life-style oriented content on Pinterest.[4] To be sure, the political content of these different quick media life writing varies greatly. Nevertheless, in line with the feminist credo that the personal is political, these expressions of selfhood are indicative of specific societal and political contexts and thus contribute to the memoir boom long noticed on the literary market.[5]

Two-step, Nerve-tap, Tanglefoot: Tapdance Typologies in Cinema

2017 ◽  
pp. 211-227
Author(s):  
Steven Connor
Keyword(s):  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Tap Dance ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Elementary Form ◽  
Do So

Tap dance reminds cinema of its origins in the turn-of-the-century vernacular of vaudeville, circus, carnival and other diffuse kinds of attractions and spectacles. In fact one can make out, in the difference between the smooth aerial flights of a Fred Astaire and the earthier moves of a Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson, a rhythmic struggle between the technical sophistication of the cinema in its developed form, and its lowlier, more vulgarly corporeal origins and appetites. This chapter examines the contrast between the clog-dancing rustic (black or Irish) and the sophisticated man-about-town. To do so testifies to a class ambivalence that is never quite resolved in tap dance, which always retains the traces of its ostentatiously corporeal origins, a kind of comic awkwardness that resists being lifted up into the condition of high art. Cutting athwart its slick syncopations, tap dance always acts like a kind decomposition of cinema to its elements of sound and movement, most importantly in its play with the mechanization of human bodies. Tap dance therefore provides an elementary form of cinema’s transaction between body and image, gravity and light.

The ‘Freedom Machine’: The New Woman and the Bicycle

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Geographic Mobility ◽  
Social Effects ◽  
The Third ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Literary Market ◽  
Specific Technology

The third chapter examines the specific technology most commonly associated with the New Woman: the safety bicycle. When the safety bicycle first came into widespread use in the late 1880s it became connected with the New Woman and her ‘unsexing’ potential, with the loosening of social restrictions and with geographic mobility. Engaging first with medical as well as public debates around the perceived physical and social effects of the bicycle, along with guidebooks for female cyclists, the chapter moves on to consider how the bicycle through literature becomes a symbol of emancipation. Reading H. G. Wells Wheels of Chance (1897) and Grant Allen’s Miss Cayley’s Adventures (1899), the chapter complicates the notion of the bicycle as a democratising ‘freedom machine’, by insisting on the class specifics of the New Woman and the commercialism of the late-Victorian literary market.

‘The Magazine Short Story and the Real Short Story’: Consuming Fiction in the Feminist Weekly Time and Tide

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Clay
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
Basic Unit ◽  
Women Readers ◽  
Literary Marketplace ◽  
Periodical Studies ◽  
The Subject

This chapter examines the short fiction content of the feminist weekly Time and Tide alongside readers’ letters printed in the periodical’s correspondence columns. A basic unit of magazine production the short story is also ‘definitional to modernism’ (Armstrong 2005: 52), and during the interwar period its status as commodity or art became the subject of increasing scrutiny and debate. Drawing on examples from amateur writers and well-known figures such as E. M. Delafield, the chapter explores how Time and Tide negotiated readers’ expectations for short fiction amongst its core target audience of women readers. Building on Fionnuala Dillane’s application of affect theory to periodical studies (2016), the chapter uses her concept of ‘discursive disruption’ to consider moments of conflict between Time and Tide and its readers over the short stories it published as moments of opportunity for the periodical to expand its scope, readership and brow, and renegotiate its position in the literary marketplace.

On Islands and Deserts

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-236
Author(s):  
Tristan Leperlier
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Local Practices ◽  
Rachid Boudjedra ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Do So

Abstract This article argues for the necessity for world literature and postcolonial studies to examine both global hierarchies of literary legitimacy and those local practices which might challenge them, and give perspectives for other significant geographies. To do so, it focuses on the bilingual and transnational Algerian literary field; this requires different levels of interconnected analysis, namely of the two linguistic subfields, the intermediary level of national literary field and the two Francophone and Arabophone transnational literary fields. Trajectories and literary works of three very different yet linked writers, Rachid Boudjedra, Tahar Djaout and Tahar Ouettar, are examined in turn. The article traces both the global and linguistic inequalities to which they were subjected as well as their practices in order to argue that they reveal unexpected vectors of circulation between spaces and languages. Finally, this piece explores how and why each writer reinvents a world within their desert novels, that is, by narrating wanderings in the desert that are also explorations of national identity.

Der weibliche Aufbruch um 1900

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johanna Wybrands
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Female Authors ◽  
Self Image ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
New Beginnings ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Gabriele Reuter ◽  
Female Subjects

Around 1900 there was a generation of female authors who saw themselves as such, even without forming closer groups and combined this self-image with new beginnings and innovation. By analysing generationality as a characteristic of female narration Johanna Wybrands examines to what extent this constellation is also effective on a narrative level. Using well-founded, context-oriented text analyses, the author shows that much-read authors at the turn of the century such as Hedwig Dohm, Gabriele Reuter and Helene Böhlau, with their now often forgotten works, made an important contribution to the interplay between generation and gender, to narrative ways of becoming female subjects and to the prehistory of the New Woman of the 1920s.

scholarly journals Beth Caldwell's Reading Experience

Spectrum ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shelby Elizabeth Haber
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Feminist Movement ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Reading Habits ◽  
Reading Experience ◽  
Sarah Grand ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Physical Objects ◽  
Personal Engagement

Near the end of the nineteenth century, Sarah Grand coined the phrase "New Woman," which was influential throughout the first wave of the feminist movement. This paper examines how Sarah Grand's representation of Beth Caldwell's reading habits in her novel The Beth Book acts as a metaphor for the subversive femininity of the New Woman. My project explores the ways in which Grand's feminist ideals are reflected in The Beth Book through the scenes when Beth is reading. I suggest that Beth's atypical engagement with books as textual and physical objects can be equated to social dissent. However, Grand also portrays Beth reading within educational and marital institutions. These experiences lead Beth's engagement with the text to become similar to common nineteenth-century reading practices. I conclude with the argument that Grand represents any personal engagement with a book, even if it is not especially radical, as capable of re-evaluating systemically-enforced interpretations.

scholarly journals REPRESENTATION OF FEMALE SUBJECTIVITY IN THE NOVELS OF MELA HARTWIG

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-127
Author(s):  
Olga A. Dronova
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Identity Crisis ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Long Period ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Behavior Models

The work of the Austrian writer of the 1920s – early 1930s, Mela Hartwig, was rediscovered by the reader in the early 2000s after a long period of oblivion. Interest in Hartwig’s prose is caused by the connection of the problems of her work with contemporary discussions about the nature of female subjectivity. The article analyzes the novels of Mela Hartwig “The Woman is nothing” and “Am I a redundant human being?”, reflecting the identity crisis of her heroines. The reverse pole of the erasing of the personality in these novels is the multiplicity of “Self”, various behavior models that have a character of play or imitation. Reproducing traditional stereotypes about male and female nature, Hartwig at the same time demonstrates their exhaustion. In the context of the German and Austrian culture of the 1920s – the time when the image of an independent “new woman” dominated the mass media, cinema, and literature – Hartwig’s work acted as the antithesis of both the traditional and the new view of women, because both the “new woman” and the “femme fatale” of the turn of the century appear in her novels as masks that do not reflect the true identity of her heroine.

scholarly journals Membaca Perempuan Dalam Kumpulan Cerpen Perempuan yang Menunggu Karya Dorothea Rosa Herliany

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 101
Author(s):  
Laura Andri Retno M
Keyword(s):  
Literary Work ◽  
The Body ◽  
Women Readers ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Patriarchal System ◽  
Female Authors ◽  
Patriarchal Culture ◽  
Condition Of Women

Positioning yourself as a woman by feeling all her existence and helplessness will make us able to read the text in a literary work of women. Literary works which written by female authors usually present messages and ideas contrary to the patriarchal system. If the reader simply places himself as a "reader" then he will not be able to capture the message and the idea. Instead they only concerned with the public's understanding and perception in general which is still dominated by patriarchal culture. Through the feminist’s approach "read as a woman" in the essay collection Perempuan yang Menunggu (The Waiting Women) by Dorothea Rosa's, "women readers" will find concrete images of the condition of women in accordance with reality. They will read, interpret and understand the body of women as well as their own body and identity. Ultimately, women are able to free themselves from the frame constraints that limit their creativity and overhaul the existing patriarchal systems

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