Classicising ‘Pindar’: Quotation, Canonisation and Early Reception

This essay examines the earliest quotations of Pindar in order to shed light on the social and historical dynamics through which he first emerged as a classic author. Pindaric quotations from the classical period point to his stratified and multi-faceted reception: as a figure within popular memory, as an emblem of elite culture and as an intellectual ancestor. Indeed, a capacity to appeal to different audiences for different but interconnected reasons was integral to his canonisation. The earliest Pindaric quotations already bespeak his culturally privileged status, which was expressed and perpetuated in different ways over the centuries but which was established as a social fact from remarkably early on. A search for the deepest roots of the classicisation of Pindar, it is argued, has to go all the way back to his poetry.

Class and social differentiation in Oceania

The rise of cognitive anthropology has recently stimulated a growing interest in intercultural variation. Separate social groups and strata endowed with various ranks and statuses already appeared at the dawn of history when the socioeconomic classes were developing. Hence that was also the time when various distinct social subcultures were emerging. Some Soviet scholars conceptually divide culture in two related ways. The first is determined by the principle which claims that each cultural form includes both productive and reproductive activities (technic-technological aspects) and the objectivized results of such activities. The second one has to do with various real cultural forms: production culture, consumption culture, interaction culture (or etiquette), socionormative culture, physical culture, artistic culture and so on. It seems quite evident that the emerging social differentiation affected distinct forms of ethnic culture rather differently. In order to understand this process, an extensive survey of the ethnic cultures of New Guinea, Melanesia and Polynesia has been conducted. The implication of this analysis is that it is necessary to correct some points in the methodology of Melanesian and Polynesian ethnic culture studies, because evidence of ordinary folk culture is inappropriate for the description of elite culture, and vice versa. The marshalled data put the investigation of the social differentiation process in a new perspective, particularly concerning the interpretation of prehistoric cultural frontiers.

Folk dance as a tool of socialist propaganda based on Paweł Pawlikowski’s Cold War

The article addressed the issue of using folk dance as a tool of propaganda by the communist party. It is not uncommon to associate the activity of folk groups with the period of socialist realism and the years that followed in. Folk song and dance ensembles have always been a colorful showcase of the country outside of its borders and have often added splendor to distinguished national events with their performances. Nevertheless, their artistic activity was not motivated solely by the beauty of Polish folklore, for folk ensembles formed after World War II were often created to aid the goals of the communist party. Reaching for folk repertoire and transferring regional songs and dances to the stage was seen as opposition to the elite culture. Cultural reform made performances accessible to the working class, and folk song and dance expressed admiration for the work of people in the countryside. In addition to traditional songs from various regions of Poland, the repertoire of these ensembles also included many songs in honor of Stalin and about the Polish-Soviet friendship. Paweł Pawlikowski’s award-winning film, Cold War, which partially follows a song and dance ensemble (aptly named Mazurek), shows many of the dilemmas and controversies that the artists of this period had to face.

French Cultural Strategy and the Japanese Paradigm

France used to have one of the most powerful cultural diplomacy: it needs nowadays to modernize its strategy to hold on to its international position. France has a long history of foreign cultural policy and is one of the few countries that have placed great emphasis on fostering its culture abroad. However, the French position is currently being challenged by emerging international rivalries. Establishing a cultural strategy in the 21st century requires not only a consistent approach between the projection of an elite culture and of a pop culture, but also a joint action between public and private players. Japan could be a model, even a paradigm for France and its cultural action abroad, as well as an ally through a cultural alliance.

The Crown of Sacrifice

While a crescendo of bereavements later in life undoubtedly turned Victoria into a gloomy and retrospective person and sovereign, this chapter suggests that they also bolstered her spiritual credentials with her people. The chapter concentrates on the lavish way in which she buried and commemorated a series of male relatives—her son Leopold, the Duke of Albany; her grandsons Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence and Christian Victor; and her son-in-law Henry of Battenberg—suggesting that this made her the Empire’s mourner in chief. The martial flourishes of their funerals aligned a feminine monarchy with the increasingly militaristic and imperial character of male elite culture. Changes in Christian eschatology meant that concern with death in late Victorian culture focused on the feelings of the living rather than the postmortem fate of the dead, and as such there was much discussion of and identification with Victoria’s feelings. In this way, royal deaths secured Victoria’s position as the head of what historians have termed an ‘empire of sentiment’, whose Christian advocates claimed it was based on sacrifice rather than power.

2. Early warrior authority

This chapter describes the creation of warriors as an early status group. Minamoto Yoritomo won the Gempei War, an event that allowed him to create his own mini government in Kamakura, later referred to as the Kamakura shogunate. The chapter describes how some warriors gravitated to Kamakura, joined Yoritomo’s bureaucracy, and interacted with each other and the non-warrior nobles in Kyoto. It also highlights the important role of women in the formation of early warrior authority. Yoritomo died early on during this Kamakura Period (1185-1333) and several warrior families, along with their noble allies, struggled to dominate the warrior regime. The Hōjō emerged victorious and had to fight against the invading Mongols. In so doing, the Hōjō begin to dominate warriors throughout Japan. This chapter also introduces several sources of warrior “law” and conduct that show the influence of non-warrior elite culture on warrior culture and behaviour.

Joseph Addison and the Domestication of Paradise Lost

This chapter examines the profound impact the editorial interventions and elaborate textual notes that Patrick Hume contributed to Tonson’s sixth edition of Paradise Lost in 1695 had on Milton’s status as a popular and accessible writer. Hume’s Annotations on Milton’s Paradise Lost, the first significant editorial treatment of a vernacular poet, acknowledges that a new readership had emerged that needed the kinds of assistance that Milton’s educated Protestant contemporaries had not required when reading the lifetime editions of 1667–9 and 1674. The shift in Milton’s status, from that of an elite-culture writer embedded in a radical political and theological tradition to that of the cultural icon of a broadly conceived English Protestantism, both prompted and was advanced by Joseph Addison’s remarkable series of essays on Paradise Lost in The Spectator.

Elite culture: signs, features, examples

Elite culture (from the French elite - selective, best) can be defined as a subculture of privileged groups of society (sometimes their only privilege may be the right to cultural creativity or to preserve cultural heritage), which is characterized by value-semantic isolation, closeness; the elite culture asserts itself as the creativity of a narrow circle of "the highest professionals", the understanding of which is available to an equally narrow circle of highly educated connoisseurs

Introduction

The introduction to this edited collection on the historical novel Quo vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero explores the initial cultural context of the novel’s publication in 1896 and its reception in Poland as an astounding work of high literature. It also summarizes how the novel written by Henryk Sienkiewicz came to cross national boundaries, cultural categories, and media to gain a long and rich afterlife in the popular culture of Western Europe and the United States. The introduction considers the novel and its afterlife as an exceptional example of the reception of classical antiquity. The introduction explores how the historical novel provided a powerful discursive structure through which to explore Christian faith and resistance to tyranny. It also argues that analysis of Quo vadis and its multimedial transformations decentres the West and elite culture as sites of classical reception, reveals the particularities and the influence of the Polish classical tradition, and demonstrates how and why classics and popular culture converge.

The Discourse of Guohua in Wartime Shanghai

This article looks at artists’ engagement with artistic activities carried out in wartime Shanghai, with a particular focus on guohua (lit., ‘national painting’). Drawing on primary sources such as archival materials, diaries, paintings, magazines and newspapers, it explores the layered meanings attached to and social functions of guohua and the institutional structure of the Shanghai art world from the gudao (solitary island) period to the advent of full occupation from December 1941 onwards. As a symbol of Chinese elite culture, guohua continued to dominate the Shanghai art world with support from Wang Jingwei’s regime and the occupying Japanese, and was deemed the root of East Asian art and one of the crucial pillars of the East Asian renaissance in the discourse of the new order of East Asian art. Through closely examining the discourse of guohua in occupied Shanghai, this article advances our understanding of the production and consumption of art in wartime Shanghai by going beyond the paradigmatic binary of ‘collaboration’ and ‘resistance’.