scholarly journals The American and the Clan

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. p47
Author(s):  
Johan Lundberg
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
Modern State ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Liberal State ◽  
Negative Freedom ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Striking Contrast

The Henry James novel The American (1877) is analyzed on the basis of a conflict between the twoforms of liberty, which Isaiah Berlin in the end of the 1950s designated as negative and positive. Theconcept of negative freedom is in this interpretation of the novel connected to a contrast between thestate and the clan. With starting point in Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order (2011),and Mark S Weiner in The Rule of the Clan (2013), modern rule of law is in the analysis of the novelregarded as something radically different from clan society.Based on an understanding of the modern state as a guarantee for individual autonomy and liberty, inBerlin’s negative meaning, James depicts in The American, the problems of maintaining liberty, in thenegative sense, in a community organised around the clan.In the novel, the American protagonist Christopher Newman with his lack of prejudices represent forhis French fiancée Claire de Cintréa possible way to freedom. What Newman does, is to offer Claire theopportunity to move from the French aristocracy to the economically strong Americanbourgeoisie—from a kind of feudalism to capitalism. The proposed move coincides with thedevelopmental curve of the novel, which with respect to Claire runs from clan to state.In striking contrast to Newman’s optimized sort of freedom, where neither any internalized norms norany economic limitations prohibit the protagonist from acting in the way that he desires, Claire is thedaughter of a family that represents the old world, with all its limitations and restrictions on negativeliberty. In a highly concrete manner she is prohibited from acting as she wants. This is emphasized inthe question of who to marry.The analysis connects Claire’s family to the ultramontanists and legitimists circles of 19th centuryParisian aristocracy. The terms refer to the ultra-conservative and fiercely anti-liberal movements that,after the French revolution, turned against the modern state power that allegedly forced on the French Catholics secular values.Legitimism and ultramontanism are in the novel intimately connected to maintaining an organisationaround the clan. In contrast to the clan, rule of law, democracy and individual freedom is seen asconsequences of the framework of the modern, liberal state.

Fashion and Fiction in the 19th Century

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clair Hughes
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Honore De Balzac ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Realist Novel ◽  
Clear Sign ◽  
The 19Th Century

In the new middle-class world of 19th-century Europe and America, whose development parallels that of the realist novel, dress was a clear sign of order and hierarchy—key subjects of the genre’s concerns. In the shift from a traditional aristocratic order to that of the bourgeoisie, dress was of anxious concern to those who lived through this change. It was a minefield, and failure to navigate its codes courted disaster: Dress could conceal and flatter, but also betray, deceive, and seduce—all of which provided the novelist with powerful material. The quest for social and economic success was central to the novelistic plot, though this took one trajectory for men and another for women—whose goal was matrimony. The French Revolution, Honoré de Balzac explained, banished hierarchies, and in dress left only nuances, which became increasingly important to the novel: details were foregrounded, while outfits as a whole were understood. In mid-19th century England, Charles Dickens, considered the quintessential realist, in fact used dress sporadically for comic effect or quirks to identify a character; the role of dress in William Thackeray’s novels, on the other hand, were more structured, often symbolic. By late in the century, men were less interesting in dark suits. As women were now more visible in work and in public spaces, their clothes became of concern to the novelist. Male dress was about hierarchy and status, female dress about cost, taste, and, above all, morality. Husband–hunting heroines advisedly wore white, but novelists grew less judgmental of the pleasures of dress. In allegedly classless America, women enjoyed greater social freedoms than in Europe, producing more nuanced approaches to fictional dress. For Henry James, dress was a “brick” in his House of Fiction; sparingly deployed but crucial. Stereotypes were questioned, as was “proper” dress. Throughout the 19th-century novel, clothes and money interacted in relation to family and inheritance. Fin de siècle America was both immensely wealthy and class-conscious, and Edith Wharton, though a member of New York’s elite, confronted her consumerist society with what its frivolity could destroy.

scholarly journals The Point of View (in Four Ways)

2019 ◽  
pp. 129-140
Author(s):  
Zofia Mitosek
Keyword(s):  
Henry James ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Main Theme ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Claude Simon ◽  
Starting Point

The article aims to analyse four important point of view novels, namely Henry James’ The Ambassadors, Zasypie wszystko, zawieje [Everything Will Be Covered by the Snow] by Włodzimierz Odojewski, The Flanders Road by Claude Simon, and Morfina [Morphine] by Szczepan Twardoch. The notion of point of view serves as a starting point for considering the epistemological aspects of the novel and for tracing its evolution. James, both in his theory and novelistic practice, uses the point of view to make the character’s consciousness the main theme of his novels. Odojewski employs internal monologue to render the characters’ perspective, while Simon combines internal monologue with other voices. Finally, Twardoch’s novel can be interpreted as a parody of the point of view technique.

“What Freedom?”

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-331
Author(s):  
John Owen Havard
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Free Condition ◽  
Narrative Design ◽  
Economic Liberalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
John Owen

John Owen Havard, “‘What Freedom?’: Frankenstein, Anti-Occidentalism, and English Liberty” (pp. 305–331) “If he were vanquished,” Victor Frankenstein states of his monstrous creation in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), “I should be a free man.” But he goes on: “Alas! what freedom? such as the peasant enjoys when his family have been massacred before his eyes, his cottage burnt, his lands laid waste, and he is turned adrift, homeless, pennyless, and alone, but free.” Victor’s circumstances approximate the deracinated subject of an emergent economic liberalism, while looking to other destitute and shipwrecked heroes. Yet the ironic “freedom” described here carries an added charge, which Victor underscores when he concludes this account of his ravaged condition: “Such would be my liberty.” This essay revisits the geographic plotting of Frankenstein: the digression to the East in the nested “harem” episode, the voyage to England, the neglected episode of Victor’s imprisonment in Ireland, and the creature’s desire to live in South America. Locating Victor’s concluding appeal to his “free” condition within the novel’s expansive geography amplifies the political stakes of his downfall, calling attention to not only his own suffering but the wider trail of destruction left in his wake. Where existing critical accounts have emphasized the French Revolution and its violent aftermath, this obscures the novel’s pointed critique of a deep and tangled history of English liberty and its destructive legacies. Reexamining the novel’s geography in tandem with its use of form similarly allows us to rethink the overarching narrative design of Frankenstein, in ways that disrupt, if not more radically dislocate, existing rigid ways of thinking about the novel.

L’absence chez Michel Butor. L’Emploi du temps et Degrés

2012 ◽  
pp. 66-80
Author(s):  
Michał Mrozowicki
Keyword(s):  
Human Memory ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Narrative Discourse ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Michel Butor ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
One Year ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Narrative Mode ◽  
The City

Michel Butor, born in 1926, one of the leaders of the French New Novel movement, has written only four novels between 1954 and 1960. The most famous of them is La Modification (Second thoughts), published in 1957. The author of the paper analyzes two other Butor’s novels: L’Emploi du temps (Passing time) – 1956, and Degrés (Degrees) – 1960. The theme of absence is crucial in both of them. In the former, the novel, presented as the diary of Jacques Revel, a young Frenchman spending a year in Bleston (a fictitious English city vaguely similar to Manchester), describes the narrator’s struggle to survive in a double – spatial and temporal – labyrinth. The first of them, formed by Bleston’s streets, squares and parks, is symbolized by the City plan. During his one year sojourn in the city, using its plan, Revel learns patiently how to move in its different districts, and in its strange labyrinth – strange because devoid any centre – that at the end stops annoying him. The other, the temporal one, symbolized by the diary itself, the labyrinth of the human memory, discovered by the narrator rather lately, somewhere in the middle of the year passed in Bleston, becomes, by contrast, more and more dense and complex, which is reflected by an increasinly complex narration used to describe the past. However, at the moment Revel is leaving the city, he is still unable to recall and to describe the events of the 29th of February 1952. This gap, this absence, symbolizes his defeat as the narrator, and, in the same time, the human memory’s limits. In Degrees temporal and spatial structures are also very important. This time round, however, the problems of the narration itself, become predominant. Considered from this point of view, the novel announces Gerard Genette’s work Narrative Discourse and his theoretical discussion of two narratological categories: narrative voice and narrative mode. Having transgressed his narrative competences, Pierre Vernier, the narrator of the first and the second parts of the novel, who, taking as a starting point, a complete account of one hour at school, tries to describe the whole world and various aspects of the human civilization for the benefit of his nephew, Pierre Eller, must fail and disappear, as the narrator, from the third part, which is narrated by another narrator, less audacious and more credible.

Corruption as a Political Issue in Modern Societies: France, Great Britain and the United States in the Long 19th Century

Public Voices ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Ivo Engels
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Corruption ◽  
The United States ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Political Issue ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Bureaucratic State

The so-called “long 19th century”, from the French Revolution to the First World War, ranks as the crucial phase in the genesis of the modern world. In the Western countries this period was characterized by the differentiation of the public and the private spheres, the birth of the modern bureaucratic state and the delegitimation of early modern practices such as clientelism and patronage. All these fundamental changes are, among other things, usually considered important preconditions for the modern perception of corruption.This paper will concentrate on this crucial phase by means of a comparative analysis of debates in France, Great Britain and the United States, with the aim to elucidate the motives for major anti-corruption movements. The questions are: who fights against corruption and what are the reasons for doing so? I will argue that these concerns were often very different and sometimes accidental. Furthermore, an analysis of political corruption may reveal differences between the political cultures in the countries in question. Thus, the history of corruption serves as a sensor which enables a specific perspective on politics. By taking this question as a starting point the focus is narrowed to political corruption and the debates about corruption, while petty bribery on the part of minor civilservants, as well as the actual practice in the case of extensive political corruption, is left aside.

Good Governance

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henk Addink
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Good Governance ◽  
National Level ◽  
Administrative Law ◽  
Modern State ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
The Third ◽  
Legal Perspective ◽  
Further Development

The pivotal aim of this book is to explain the creation, development, and impact of good governance from a conceptual, principal perspective and in the context of national administrative law. Three lines of reasoning have been worked out: developing the concept of good governance; specification of this concept by developing principles of good governance; and implementation of these principles of good governance on the national level. In this phase of further development of good governance, it is important to have a clear concept of good governance, presented in this book as the third cornerstone of a modern state, alongside the concepts of the rule of law and democracy. That is a rather new national administrative law perspective which is influenced by regional and international legal developments; thus, we can speak about good governance as a multilevel concept. But the question is: how is this concept of good governance further developed? Six principles of good governance (which in a narrower sense also qualify as principles of good administration) have been further specified in a systematic way, from a legal perspective. These are the principles of properness, transparency, participation, effectiveness, accountability, and human rights. Furthermore, the link has been made with integrity standards. The important developments of each of these principles are described on the national level in Europe, but also in countries outside Europe (such as Australia, Canada, and South Africa). This book gives a systematic comparison of the implementation of the principles of good governance between countries.

The Monk

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Lewis
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Young Girl ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Ghost Stories ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Black Magic ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Profound Insight

‘He was deaf to the murmurs of conscience, and resolved to satisfy his desires at any price.’ The Monk (1796) is a sensational story of temptation and depravity, a masterpiece of Gothic fiction and the first horror novel in English literature. The respected monk Ambrosio, the Abbot of a Capuchin monastery in Madrid, is overwhelmed with desire for a young girl; once having abandoned his monastic vows he begins a terrible descent into immorality and violence. His appalling fall from grace embraces blasphemy, black magic, torture, rape, and murder, and places his very soul in jeopardy. Lewis’s extraordinary tale drew on folklore, legendary ghost stories, and contemporary dread inspired by the terrors of the French Revolution. Its excesses shocked the reading public and it was condemned as obscene. The novel continues to beguile and shock readers today with its gruesome catalogue of iniquities, while at the same time giving a profound insight into the deep anxieties experienced by British citizens during one of the most turbulent periods in the nation’s history.

Man and Wife

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wilkie Collins
Keyword(s):  
Legal Status ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Country House ◽  
Radical Critique ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Marriage Laws ◽  
Woman In White ◽  
The Moonstone ◽  
Status Of Women

This time the fiction is founded upon facts' stated Wilkie Collins in his Preface to Man and Wife (1870). Many Victorian writers responded to contemporary debates on the rights and the legal status of women, and here Collins questions the deeply inequitable marriage laws of his day. Man and Wife examines the plight of a woman who, promised marriage by one man, comes to believe that she may inadvertently have gone through a form of marriage with his friend, as recognized by the archaic laws of Scotland and Ireland. From this starting-point Collins develops a radical critique of the values and conventions of Victorian society. Collins had already developed a reputation as the master of the 'sensation novel', and Man and Wife is as fast moving and unpredictable as The Moonstone and The Woman in White. During the novel the atmosphere grows increasingly sinister as the setting moves from a country house to a London suburb and a world of confinement, plotting, and murder.

Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending "Critical Attitudes" in the Face of Societal Ruination

2011 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Adrian J. Wallbank
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
British Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Concerted Effort ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
The Face ◽  
Literary Techniques

Adrian J. Wallbank, "Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending 'Critical Attitudes' in the Face of Societal Ruination" (pp. 1–36) In the aftermath of the French "Revolution Controversy," middle-class evangelical writers made a concerted effort to rehabilitate the moral fabric of British society. Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts (1795–98) are recognized as pivotal within this program, but in this essay I question whether they were really as influential as has been supposed. I argue that autobiographical evidence from the period demonstrates an increasing skepticism toward overt didacticism, and that despite their significant and undeniable penetration within working-class culture, the Cheap Repository Tracts, if not all "received ideologies," were increasingly being rejected by their readers. This essay examines the important contribution that Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues (1801) made to this arena. Hill, like many of his contemporaries, felt that British society was facing ruination, but he also recognized that overt moralizing and didacticism was no longer palatable or effective. I argue that Hill thus experimented with an array of literary techniques—many of which closely intersect with developments occurring within the novel and sometimes appear to contradict or undermine the avowed seriousness of evangelicalism—that not only attempt to circumvent what Jonathan Rose has described as the "critical attitudes" of early-nineteenth-century readers, but also effectively map the "transitional" nature of the shifting literary and social terrains of the period. In so doing, Hill contributed signally to the evolution of the dialogue form (which is often synonymous with mentoring and didacticism), since his use of conversational mimesis and satire predated the colloquialism of John Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianae (1822–35) and Walter Savage Landor's Imaginary Conversations (1824–29).

“Tlatelolco me bautizó”: Literary Renewal and the Neoliberal Transition

2012 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-286
Author(s):  
Samuel Steinberg
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Relative Lack ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Conservative Restoration ◽  
Social Privilege

This essay takes as its starting point the relative lack of a contender to the “novel of ′68” in Mexico. I argue that Jorge Volpi's 2003 El fin de la locura constitutes the final writing of such a novel, to appear some 35 years after the original events of that year. The double “renewal” pursued by this work is explored both as an intended restoration of the literary to a place of social privilege after a period of decline, and also as a conservative restoration of order following the revolutionary sequences of the 20th century. However, I argue, the novel cannot finally commit to artistic renewal without also confirming the “madness” of the century; the literary renewal pursued in Volpi's text thus becomes the very political renewal that the author seeks to avoid.

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