fervent believer
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2019 ◽  
Vol 95 (2) ◽  
pp. 63-81
Author(s):  
Helen Pierce

An Impartial Collection of the Great Affairs of State was published in London, in two volumes, between 1682 and 1683. Its author John Nalson was a fervent believer in the twin pillars of the monarchy and the Anglican Church. In An Impartial Collection he holds up the internecine conflict of the 1640s as an example not to be followed during the 1680s, a period of further religious and political upheaval. Nalson’s text is anything but neutral, and its perspective is neatly summarised in the engraved frontispiece which prefaces the first volume. This article examines how this illustration, depicting a weeping Britannia accosted by a two-faced clergyman and a devil, adapts and revises an established visual vocabulary of ‘otherness’, implying disruption to English lives and liberties with origins both foreign and domestic. Such polemical imagery relies on shock value and provocation, but also contributes to a sophisticated conversation between a range of pictorial sources, reshaping old material to new concerns, and raising important questions regarding the visual literacy and acuity of its viewers.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Darin Alan Tuck

"The famed editor of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley, reportedly once said, "Go west, young man, and grow up with the country."[1] Probably apocryphal, the sentiment was quintessential Greeley by the 1850s. His newspaper had brought him to national prominence and made him one of the most powerful and influential Americans of the antebellum era. A fervent believer in the promises of manifest destiny, Greeley took his own advice on the eve of the American Civil War and left New York for California. He had spent the previous two decades pushing the government to open western land and encouraging the downtrodden to venture west for jobs, success, and opportunity. He stated, "If any young man is about to commence the world, we say to him, publicly and privately, Go to the West; there your capacities are sure to be appreciated, and your energy and industry rewarded."[2] He believed in the transcontinental railroad that ran to the Pacific coast and brought the American reader along for the ride as he published a series of essays on his journey. Traveling by rail, steamboat, and wagon, his dispatches were laced with excitement and knowledge of a man who had only read about the American West in the hundreds of books, travel guides, and letters that had been published for the previous three decades. Like many of the hundreds of thousands of pioneers that had come before him, his imagination danced with the possibility of what would certainly come if Americans embraced its manifest destiny." -- Introduction


2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Ewa Rychter

Abstract This paper focuses on the ways some recent British and Irish rewritings of the Bible estrange what has become the publicly accepted and dominant image of the biblical text. Recently, the Bible has been given the status of “home scripture” (Sherwood, Yvonne. 2012. Biblical Blaspheming: Trials of the Sacred for a Secular Age. Cambridge: CUP) and become a domesticated and conservative text, a rather placid cultural/literary monument, an important foundation of democracy, a venerable religious document judged more tolerant and liberal than other scriptures. Though the Bible used to be perceived as an explosive text, peppered with potentially offensive passages, today its enmity is neutralised either by linking the Bible with ancient times or by relating it to people’s religious beliefs and by entrenching its more scandalous parts within the discourse of tolerance. It is such an anodyne image of the Bible that the biblical rewritings of Roberts, Winterson, Barnes, Crace, Pullman, Tóibin, Alderman, Diski defamiliarize. By showing biblical events through the eyes of various non-standard focalizers, those novels disrupt the formulaic patterns of the contemporary perception of the Bible. It is through these strange perspectives that we observe the critical moment when the overall meaning and the role of the biblical text is established and the biblical story is actually written down. Importantly, it is also the moment when somebody moulds the scripture according to their ideas and glosses over all the complexities, violence and immorality related to the events the biblical text describes. Also, contemporary biblical rewritings defamiliarize the currently popular image of the Bible – that of a whitewashed text which inculcates morality, conserves social order and teaches love and tolerance, by employing images of disintegration, dirt and contagion as well as by constructing a figure of a fervent believer in the Bible and its ideas.


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