scholarly journals Wars and heroes: the romantic representation of Spain in "Don Juan; or the Battle of Tolosa" (1816)

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 155
Author(s):  
Sara Medina Calzada

This paper examines “Don Juan; or the Battle of Tolosa”, an anonymous poem published inLondonin 1816. This metrical tale set in medievalIberiaat the time of the so-called “reconquista” recreates the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212), in which the Muslim forces were defeated by a Christian coalition near Sierra Morena. The poet clearly sides with the Christians, who are depicted as brave warriors struggling to recover their land and their freedom. The emphasis on their patriotic heroism against foreign usurpation creates an implicit analogy between the medieval battle and the recent events of the Peninsular War (1808-1814). The representation ofSpainas a land of war and romance echoes the Romantic figurations of this country appearing in British print culture in the early nineteenth century.

2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 14-24
Author(s):  
Julia Bauder

An intriguing new opportunity for research into the nineteenth-century history of print culture, libraries, and local communities is performing full-text analyses on the corpus of books held by a specific library or group of libraries. Creating corpora using books that are known to have been owned by a given library at a given point in time is potentially feasible because digitized records of the books in several hundred nineteenth-century library collections are available in the form of scanned book catalogs: a book or pamphlet listing all of the books available in a particular library. However, there are two potential problems with using those book catalogs to create corpora. First, it is not clear whether most or all of the books that were in these collections have been digitized. Second, the prospect of identifying the digital representations of the books listed in the catalogs is daunting, given the diversity of cataloging practices at the time. This article will report on progress towards developing an automated method to match entries in early nineteenth-century book catalogs with digitized versions of those books, and will also provide estimates of the fractions of the library holdings that have been digitized and made available in the Google Books/HathiTrust corpus.


2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 309-320
Author(s):  
Jonathan Israel

Whereas during the first half of the eighteenth century the expression ‘oświecony’ in Polish was nearly always a religious metaphor, between the 1760s and the early nineteenth century the noun ‘oświeconie’ became secularized, broadened and given a quite revolutionary new meaning, denoting an intellectually grounded, rational and true understanding of things in contrast to how traditional religious authority understood things. This is well known to scholars and students alike. But the question now arises, with the rise over the last 20 to 30 years of ‘Radical Enlightenment’ as a fundamental new category in the humanities, how much has this category applicability in the Central European context? Studying book history and print culture, I shall argue, helps us to determine that in fact it does.


1998 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Cowgill

When Luigi Bassi entered the stage of the Prague National Theatre in 1787 to create the title role of Mozart and Da Ponte's Don Giovanni, he could have drawn inspiration from a rich tradition of theatrical, pantomimic and marionette representations of the legendary Don Juan, to which this new opera was the latest contribution. Previous incarnations had been shaped by the likes of Tirso de Molina, Molière, Shadwell, Purcell and Gluck; yet it is Mozart and Da Ponte's version that has for us become the definitive: the Don as paradox; an uncomfortable blend of the despicable and the admirable, hero and anti-hero. Lecher, rapist, liar, cheat, murderer, he is the brutal epitome of macho striving for power and domination, yet clothed with a seductive panache, conviction and bravado — the reckless-heroic libertine phallocrat who would rather face the fires of eternal damnation than curb his appetites.


Author(s):  
Andrew C. Thompson

Dissenters experienced considerable change during the eighteenth century. The political and cultural environment in which they lived was in flux. Before 1689, public declarations of Dissenting faith were risky. By the early nineteenth century, Dissenters were increasingly influential and secure. Several different processes helped to make these changes possible. One was the revival of ‘vital religion’, associated with a period of awakening. Awakening spread far and wide within European and American Protestantism but Dissenters were strongly affected by it. The growth of ideas of enlightenment encouraged both an emphasis on personal faith and the ability of the individual to make choices about faith for him/herself and also helped increase the resources able to express faith through burgeoning print culture.


Author(s):  
Eryn White

Wales was once perceived as a ‘nation of Nonconformists’, but immediately after the Glorious Revolution, Dissenters represented a tiny minority of the Welsh population. One of the roots of later Dissenting success can be found in the disproportionate contribution that Welsh Dissenters made to Welsh-language print culture in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In addition, the growth of a ‘circulating’ school system helped spread literacy (and the Word) to the younger generation. Although begun by Griffith Jones, rector of Llanddowror, the episcopal hierarchy remained sceptical of movements that crossed parish boundaries. This was also true of Methodism. The impact of revival in Wales was considerable. Initially, much of the support was derived from Methodists, although Calvinistic Methodism was initially much stronger than Wesleyan Methodism in the country—it was only in the early nineteenth century that Wesleyan Methodism began to enjoy more success.


1998 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 91-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Eastwood

One does not have to be a card-carrying postmodernist to understand that historical periods do not possess inherent characteristics. ‘Eras of Reform’, ‘Ages of Revolution’, ‘Triumphs of Reform’, and ‘Centuries of Reformation’ exist only in, and as, texts. They represent, in the simplest of forms, readings of the past. The nomenclatures we employ to demarcate and characterise particular historical moments embody fundamental ideological assumptions, encapsulating an idée fixe, and exposing the crux of the creative—or, if you prefer, the scholarly—process. Traditionalists might already be crying foul, insisting that our titles, or period characterisations, reflect rather than impute salience. History, as Geoffrey Elton might have instructed us, reports rather than constructs the past. The writing of history, Elton suggested in 1967, ‘amounts to a dialogue between the historian and his materials. He supplies the intelligence and the organising ability, but he can interpret and organise only within the limits set by his materials. And those are the limits created by a true and independent past.’ Revealingly, though, our book titles generally describe or construct processes, rather than recall events; and processes are abstractions whose full meaning, as Vico told us long ago, is apparent only in retrospect. Of course the Reformation happened, but not in the same way as the Battle of Trafalgar happened. Thus describing the sixteenth century as ‘The Age of Reformation’ orders the experience of the European West in a very particular way. It was also, and some might say equally, an age of exploration, of empire, of inflation, of hunger, and of the explosion of print culture.


2021 ◽  
pp. 25-61
Author(s):  
Matilda Greig

This chapter provides an account of how Peninsular War memoir-writers depicted being a soldier in the early nineteenth century. It considers both positive and negative representations of the experience of war, covering themes such as daily life on campaign, comradeship, ideas of martial masculinity, the role of women, and descriptions of violence both on and off the battlefield. In doing so, it highlights the ways in which Napoleonic veterans innovated on previous war writing and contradicted broader, patriotic narratives of the conflict. In the last part of the chapter, the concept of the veteran as active, politicised author is introduced, with examples of soldiers who used their published memoirs to change or challenge national military policy.


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