Upside down/Right Side up: A Revisionist History of Buddhist Funerals in China

This chapter reads James Hogg and Walter Scott within a new, revisionist history of short fiction that is particularly interested in the genre of the ‘tale’. Focusing on the half-decade between 1827 and 1831, the chapter highlights a selection of Hogg’s mature contributions to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine alongside Scott’s Chronicles of the Canongate (first series). These years were marked by literary experimentation, when a confident improving persuasion in Scottish culture was threatening to unravel. The formal logic of these short fictions, defined by a curiously focused spontaneity, exacerbates a pluralistic handling of the collision between improvement and tradition. Different models of time (progress, renewal, disruption) and belief (suspension, scepticism, credulity) serve to interrogate improvement in a wide range of contexts around commercial modernisation. The chapter unpacks two specific literary innovations in this context. The first looks to acts of transmission in the literary marketplace which by turns sustain, contain and defer the dialectics of improvement. The second sees the emergence of a fully fledged aesthetic vocabulary of culture in Scott’s writing.

Download Full-text

The creation of thermodynamics

Block by Block: The Historical and Theoretical Foundations of Thermodynamics ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198851547.003.0033 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 422-437

Author(s):

Robert T. Hanlon

Keyword(s):

The North ◽

Revisionist History ◽

History Of ◽

The Creation ◽

Written Word ◽

Definition Of ◽

John Tyndall

The North British group of scientists, including Thomson, Rankine, an adopted Joule, Tait, and Maxwell created in the written word the field of thermodynamics in which temperature plays a central role. Thomson experienced the first glimpse of dQ/T; however, a valid definition of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics remained absent. John Tyndall challenged the revisionist history of this group in which Joule was declared the first to discover heat–work equivalence and not the German Mayer. This led to the infamous Tait–Tyndall controversy.

Download Full-text

A revisionist history of microscopical sciences

Journal of Microscopy ◽

10.1111/j.1365-2818.1990.tb04770.x ◽

1990 ◽

Vol 159 (2) ◽

pp. 125-132 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Harry K. Phinney

Keyword(s):

Revisionist History ◽

History Of

Download Full-text

Law

World Authorship ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198819653.013.14 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 194-209

Author(s):

César Domínguez

Keyword(s):

Legal Protection ◽

Global Scale ◽

Roland Barthes ◽

Victor Hugo ◽

Nineteenth Century Literature ◽

Reverse Engineer ◽

The World ◽

Revisionist History ◽

History Of ◽

Century Literature

This chapter offers a reminder that ‘authorship’ is far from an abstract interest for actual literary producers. It is what allows authors to file a legal claim to their works, which for them are not only ‘texts’, or examples of ‘discourse’ in the manner discussed by Roland Barthes or Michel Foucault, but rather pieces of intellectual property. And intellectual goods—eminently portable, endlessly diverse, and difficult to reverse-engineer—were among the earliest to circulate widely throughout the world. They thus required legal protection on a global scale. Offering a revisionist history of the origins of transnational copyright regimes, this chapter thus draws attention to the role that authors—first and foremost that giant of nineteenth-century literature Victor Hugo—played in ensuring the protection of their names.

Download Full-text

Contingency in International Legal History

10.1093/oso/9780192898036.003.0003 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 44-59

Author(s):

Genevieve Renard Painter

Keyword(s):

International Law ◽

Legal History ◽

League Of Nations ◽

Revisionist History ◽

History Of ◽

Theory Of History ◽

Second International

Why are international legal scholars abandoning international law’s structuralism and searching for contingent pasts and plural futures? And why now? I use a revisionist history of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s claims at the League of Nations to explain the current preoccupation with the contingency-necessity debate. First, putting international law ‘in context’ yields more contexts and more contingency. This puts pressure on what counts as law, an issue of existential concern for international law. The controversy over contextualising and the contingency it exposes express anxiety about the differentiation of international law. Second, international law comes with its own theory of history. The debate shows scholars are repudiating international law’s own structuralist progress narrative. Third, the contingency-necessity debate is politics dressed as methodology. Necessity stories give international law a future to fight for, whereas contingency stories leave it rudderless. The controversy shows that we, scholars, do not know what to do about international law’s present or future. The heat shows we wish we did.

Download Full-text