‘Isaiah's Call to England': Doubts about Prophecy in Nineteenth-Century Britain

2016 ◽  
Vol 52 ◽  
pp. 381-397
Author(s):  
Gareth Atkins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Final Section ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Maritime Empire

Prophetic thought in nineteenth-century Britain has often been presented as divided between those mostly evangelical constituencies who ‘believed' in its literal fulfilment in the past, present or future and those who ‘doubted' such interpretations. This essay seeks to question that division by tracking the uses of one set of prophetic passages, those concerning the ‘Ships of Tarshish’ mentioned in Isaiah 60: 9 and elsewhere. It examines their appropriation from the late eighteenth century onwards by those seeking prophetic-providential justification for the British maritime empire. Next it shows how such such ideas fuelled missionary expansion in the years after 1815, suggesting that by mid-century that there was a growing spectrum of ways in which such passages were used by religious commentators. The final section shows how biblical critics seeking to bolster the integrity of the Bible as a text reconstructed the geographical and economic settings for these passages, establishing their historical veracity as they did so but in the process undermining their supernaturally predictive status. Thus one way of bolstering ‘faith’ – the study of prophetic fulfilments – was rendered doubtful by another. By the end of our period Tyre and Tarshish retained much of their homiletic punch as metaphors for the sin brought by trade and luxury, but those who saw them as literal proxies for Britain were in the minority.

scholarly journals Héroes nacionales como vehículos emocionales de conceptos / National Heroes as Emotional Vehicles of Political Concepts

2017 ◽  
pp. 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Isabel González Manso
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Figures ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Siglo Xix ◽  
The Relationship

This article deals with the relationship between concepts, heroes and emotions. To that purpose it propounds an explicative mechanism through the comparative analysis of the use of heroes in Spanish politics in the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century. The spread of some political concepts was facilitated by their association with heroes of the past, which not only provide legitimacy but also a strong emotional burden in terms of the values they represented. The proposed methodology is applied to the examination of political uses of two historical figures: Padilla and Pelayo.Key WordsEmotions, national heroes, intellectual history, nineteenth centuryResumenEl presente artículo examina la relación entre conceptos, héroes y emociones. Para ello propone un mecanismo que se sirve del análisis comparado del uso de héroes en la política española de finales del siglo XVIII y de la primera mitad del XIX. La difusión de ciertos conceptos políticos se vio facilitada por su asociación con héroes del pasado que no solo aportaban legitimidad y prestigio sino también una fuerte carga emocional dado los valores que estos héroes representaban. Las consideraciones metodológicas se aplican al análisis de los usos políticos de dos personajes históricos: Padilla y Pelayo.Palabras claveEmociones, héroes nacionales, historia intelectual, siglo XIX

The Perception of Time and the Meaning of History among Spanish Intellectuals of the Nineteenth Century

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 64-84
Author(s):  
Ana Isabel González Manso
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Present Article ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Features ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Time Perceptions ◽  
Perception Of Time

This article investigates how the perception of living in novel times influenced Spanish intellectuals from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century when they wrote or thought about history. The perception of time would influence the way in which history was written, and in turn this would reflect the model of society that Spanish intellectuals aspired to when they turned to the past for the political and social features they wanted for their present and future. At that time, different time perceptions coexisted and combined in a very complex fashion; the present article, however, is focused on the perception of time mainly as an opportunity, with its advances and retreats, doubts and problems. The article will show how those intellectuals thought about history and the various solutions they put forward for society’s problems.

scholarly journals ‘Constitutions selection’: Darwin, race and medicine

BJHS Themes ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Suman Seth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Skin Colour ◽  
Race Science ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Race ◽  
Descent Of Man

Abstract In the course of his discussion of the origin of variations in skin colour among humans in the Descent of Man, Charles Darwin suggested that darker skin might be correlated with immunity to certain diseases. To make that suggestion, he drew upon a claim that seemed self-evidently correct in 1871, although it had seemed almost certainly incorrect in the late eighteenth century: that immunity to disease could be understood as a hereditary racial trait. This paper aims to show how fundamental was the idea of ‘constitutions selection’, as Darwin would call it, for his thinking about human races, tracking his (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to find proof of its operation over a period of more than thirty years. At the same time and more broadly, following Darwin's conceptual resources on this question helps explicate relationships between conceptions of disease and conceptions of race in the nineteenth century. That period saw the birth of a modern, fixist, biologically determinist racism, which increasingly manifested itself in medical writings. The reverse was also true: medicine was a crucial site in which race was forged. The history of what has been called ‘race-science’, it is argued, cannot and should not be written independent of the history of ‘race-medicine’.

Geopolitics of Comparison: World Literature Avant la Lettre

2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-269
Author(s):  
Waïl S. Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Comparative Literature ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of

Abstract According to a well-known narrative, the concept of Weltliteratur and its academic correlative, the discipline of comparative literature, originated in Germany and France in the early nineteenth century, influenced by the spread of scientism and nationalism. But there is another genesis story that begins in the late eighteenth century in Spain and Italy, countries with histories entangled with the Arab presence in Europe during the medieval period. Emphasizing the role of Arabic in the formation of European literatures, Juan Andrés wrote the first comparative history of “all literature,” before the concepts of Weltliteratur and comparative literature gained currency. The divergence of the two genesis stories is the result of competing geopolitical interests, which determine which literatures enter into the sphere of comparison, on what terms, within which paradigms, and under what ideological and discursive conditions.

The Opium Wars

Jazz in China ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 14-20
Author(s):  
Eugene Marlow
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Coast ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Unrestricted Access ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Many ◽  
Opium Wars

In the late 1910s, 1920s, and even into the 1930s, “jazz” was the music of the age in the Republic of China, especially and primarily in Shanghai on China's east coast. It was enjoyed equally by sophisticated Chinese gentry and upper-class people in the many dance halls dotting various parts of Shanghai, and by the many Europeans, Russians, and Americans living and working in the so-called “Paris of the East.” These same foreigners also owned pieces of Shanghai, literally. This chapter asks how several foreign nations came to own sections of Shanghai, and have unrestricted access to numerous key ports throughout China's eastern coast? The answer to these questions can be found in a conflict initially between the British (and ultimately the French, Russians, and Americans) and the Chinese in the mid-nineteenth century: the Opium Wars, two wars that had roots in late eighteenth-century China.

Late Novels

2018 ◽  
pp. 67-100
Author(s):  
Hugh Adlington
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Blue Flower ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Romantic Poet ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Ways Of Thinking

This chapter examines the four ‘late’ novels that are the peak of Penelope Fitzgerald’s achievement as a writer: Innocence, The Beginning of Spring, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower. Each novel is, at least superficially, a work of historical fiction in that it is set in the past: in 1950s Italy, in revolutionary Russia, in Edwardian England, and in late-eighteenth-century Germany respectively. But history is decidedly not the defining feature of these novels. Rather, as this chapter shows, all four works are characterized by their bold experimentation with narrative form and style, reflecting an intense concern with profound questions of body, mind and spirit that culminates in Fitzgerald’s haunting masterpiece, the story of the idealized yearning of the German Romantic poet Novalis both for Sophie von Kühn, his ‘heart’s heart’, and for revelation. Through close analysis of Fitzgerald’s methods of research, composition and editing, this chapter proposes fresh ways of thinking about the stylistic means by which these late novels create fictional worlds that expand to fill the reader’s imagination, and even appear to possess an existence independent of the novels themselves.

Dangerous Parents

2021 ◽  
pp. 19-39
Author(s):  
Peter Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Child Labour ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

While we know much about the cult of childhood, historians have spent less time analysing the ways in which certain parents became demonized from the late eighteenth century. This chapter traces growing criticisms across nations of parents who were felt to have endangered their offspring and to have deprived the nation of a future robust population. Industrialization and urbanization lent a growing shrillness to the debate. Doctors, opponents of child labour and slavery, and criminologists all began to denounce parents and especially those from the left who they identified as a threat to their offspring and society. As the nineteenth century progressed and competition between nations increased, the growth of eugenic thought gave extra virulence to these denunciations. This set the stage for demands for ‘dangerous’ parents to be stripped of their guardianship.

Wanostrocht’s Practical Grammar and the grammar-translation model

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Coffey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Translation Model ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intended Purpose ◽  
The Us ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Background Detail

Wanostrochts’s Practical Grammar was first published in London in 1780, then in the US from 1805.1 It was one of the most successful pedagogical grammars of its time, appearing in revised forms for almost a century. It was probably the first grammar to include ‘exercises’ in the same volume and represents a prototype of what would become known as the ‘grammar-translation’ manual that provided a template for most language schoolbooks throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. The analysis in this chapter considers the content of Wanostrocht’s primer as an example of late eighteenth-century language epistemology, and provides broader background detail to help better understand the context of the publication, its intended purpose, and the reasons for its enduring popularity.

Reading Henry Maundrell’s Sacred Geography in Eighteenth-Century England and Germany

2019 ◽  
pp. 210-226
Author(s):  
Simon Mills
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Sacred Geography ◽  
History Of

This chapter explains the remarkable popularity of Henry Maundrell’s A Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem at Easter AD 1697 (1703). It argues that Maundrell’s eye-witness reportage of his travels in the Holy Land provided the book’s readers with a storehouse of geographical observations and descriptions of eastern customs with which they could recreate imaginatively the world of the Scriptures. Tracing the book’s use by editors, commentators, translators, and paraphrasts, it argues that Maundrell was most often put to work in defence of the Bible against attacks on its claims to truth. Yet in the hands of Maundrell’s late eighteenth-century German translator, the naturalist and historicist tendencies inherent in his account were brought into sharper focus; ‘sacred geography’ was transformed into a history of biblical culture.

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