Aleksandr Sumarokov's Elegit liubovnye and the Development of Verse Narrative in the Eighteenth Century: Toward a History of the Russian Lyric Sequence

Slavic Review ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 521-546 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald Vroon
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Silver Age ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Critical Tradition ◽  
Lyric Sequence ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lyric Sequences

Most studies of the lyric sequence (or “cycle,” as it is most commonly referred to in the Russian critical tradition) situate its origins in the Romantic period, and its period of greatest flowering in the Silver Age. More and more frequently, however, scholars have come to question this assumption, suggesting that the phenomenon has its roots in the eighteenth century, perhaps even earlier. This claim would appear, at first glance, to be suspect. The aesthetics of neoclassicism did not encourage— indeed, to the best of our knowledge, did not even recognize—the production of lyric sequences. Russian poets of the eighteenth century have nothing to say about them, nor are they acknowledged as such by readers or critics.

The History of Missed Opportunities

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
William H. Galperin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Missed Opportunities ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Everyday World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiple Levels

This study is about the emergence of the everyday as both a concept and a material event and about the practices of retrospection in which it came to awareness in the romantic period in “histories” of the missed, the unappreciated, the overlooked. Prior to this moment everyday life was both unchanging and paradoxically unpredictable. By the late eighteenth century, however, as life became more predictable and change on a technological and political scale more rapid, the present came into unprecedented focus, yielding a world answerable to neither precedent nor futurity. This alternative world soon appears in literature of the period: in the double takes by which the poet William Wordsworth disencumbers history of memory in demonstrating what subjective or “poetic” experience typically overlooks; in Jane Austen, whose practice of revision returns her to a milieu that time and progress have erased and that reemerges, by previous documentation, as something different. It is observable in Lord Byron, thanks to the “history” to which marriage and domesticity are consigned not only in the wake of his separation from Lady Byron but during their earlier epistolary courtship, where the conjugal present came to consciousness (and prestige) as foredoomed but an opportunity nonetheless. The everyday world that history focalizes in the romantic period and the conceptual void it exposes in so doing remains a recovery on multiple levels: the present is both “a retrospect of what might have been” (Austen) and a “sense,” as Wordsworth put it, “of something ever more about to be.”

Flora's Go-betweens: Nectar, Insects, and Flowers in the Romantic Natural History of Pollination

Romanticism ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Hankinson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Plant Reproduction ◽  
Boundary Crossing ◽  
Direct Link ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Erasmus Darwin

A boundary-crossing substance connecting flowers and insects, nectar occupied a contested position during the Romantic period, provoking debates regarding who stood most to profit from it: insects or the plants themselves? Such questions also surrounded another floral substance: pollen mediated between the plant and animal kingdoms, constituting not only a means of plant reproduction but also a food for bees. Despite these shared qualities, a direct link between nectar and the dissemination of pollen was not made until the late eighteenth century, when Kölreuter and Sprengel separately discovered the secret of their connection. Taking into consideration speculations on nectar in the writings of Erasmus Darwin, as well as discussions regarding plant-insect analogy, competition, sexuality, and nutrition, I describe how naturalists came to understand (or refused to understand) the relationships governing pollination, in the process confronting a nature far more hybrid and mediated than they initially imagined.

On the Origins of Adaptation, as Such

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Glenn Jellenik
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Alternate History ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Concept

Adaptation scholars frequently gesture toward a vague history of adaptation, pointing out that the repurposing of stories stretches back to the beginnings of storytelling. This essay offers a more specific history, arguing that adaptation rose as a simple abstraction in the late eighteenth century. It identifies George Colman’s Iron Chest, which adapts William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, as the first adaptation, as such. Colman’s play achieves this distinction not through adaptive innovation, but rather through the critical reaction to the play—specifically an essay by John Litchfield that functions as the first piece of fidelity criticism. Thus, the cultural concept of adaptation is a critical construction that rose with the fidelity urge. Unpacking this alternate history of both adaptation and the Romantic period reveals adaptation as a vital cultural reaction that catalyzed and shaped Romanticism’s critical shifting and redefining of notions of originality, which literary scholars subsequently used to marginalize adaptation.

A history of botanical collections in the Luangwa Valley, Zambia

1998 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-291
Author(s):  
P.S.M. PHIRI ◽  
D.M. MOORE
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Environmental Impact ◽  
Impact Assessment ◽  
Vascular Plants ◽  
Central Africa ◽  
Peak Activity ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Made In

Central Africa remained botanically unknown to the outside world up to the end of the eighteenth century. This paper provides a historical account of plant explorations in the Luangwa Valley. The first plant specimens were collected in 1897 and the last serious botanical explorations were made in 1993. During this period there have been 58 plant collectors in the Luangwa Valley with peak activity recorded in the 1960s. In 1989 1,348 species of vascular plants were described in the Luangwa Valley. More botanical collecting is needed with a view to finding new plant taxa, and also to provide a satisfactory basis for applied disciplines such as ecology, phytogeography, conservation and environmental impact assessment.

Reframing the Sciences of the Long Eighteenth Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 58-66
Author(s):  
Giuliano Pancaldi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Science Policy ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Half Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Past Half

Here I survey a sample of the essays and reviews on the sciences of the long eighteenth century published in this journal since it was founded in 1969. The connecting thread is some historiographic reflections on the role that disciplines—in both the sciences we study and the fields we practice—have played in the development of the history of science over the past half century. I argue that, as far as disciplines are concerned, we now find ourselves a bit closer to a situation described in our studies of the long eighteenth century than we were fifty years ago. This should both favor our understanding of that period and, hopefully, make the historical studies that explore it more relevant to present-day developments and science policy. This essay is part of a special issue entitled “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: HSNS at 50,” edited by Erika Lorraine Milam.

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