A Literary History of Germany: The Nineteenth Century 1830-1890

1977 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 79
Author(s):  
Gerhard H. Weiss ◽  
G. Wallis Field ◽  
W. H. Bruford
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
History Of

The History of ‘the Reading Public’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Collini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Reading Matter ◽  
History Of ◽  
Victorian Periodicals

This chapter argues that accounts of ‘the reading public’ are always fundamentally historical, usually involving stories of ‘growth’ or ‘decline’. It examines Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public, which builds a relentlessly pessimistic critique of the debased standards of the present out of a highly selective account of literature and its publics since the Elizabethan period. It goes on to exhibit the complicated analysis of the role of previous publics in F. R. Leavis’s revisionist literary history, including his ambivalent admiration for the great Victorian periodicals. And it shows how Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy carries an almost buried interpretation of social change from the nineteenth century onwards, constantly contrasting the vibrant and healthy forms of entertainment built up in old working-class communities with the slick, commercialized reading matter introduced by post-1945 prosperity.

The Geological Unconscious

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Groves
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Literary History ◽  
German Language ◽  
Stable Point ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Current Climate ◽  
Environmental Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Point Of Reference

Already in the nineteenth century, German-language writers were contending with the challenge of imagining and accounting for a planet whose volatility bore little resemblance to the images of the Earth then in circulation. In The Geological Unconcious, Jason Groves traces the withdrawal of the lithosphere as a reliable setting, unobtrusive backdrop, and stable point of reference for literature written well before the current climate breakdown, let alone the technologies that could forecast those changes. Through a series of careful readings of romantic, realist, and modernist works by Tieck, Goethe, Stifter, Benjamin, and Brecht, the author traces out a geological unconscious—in other words, unthought and sometimes actively repressed geological knowledge—where it manifests in European literature and environmental thought. This inhuman horizon of reading and interpretation offers a new literary history of the Anthropocene in a period where this novel geological epoch, though arguably already underway, remains unnamed and otherwise unmarked. These close readings also unearth an entanglement of the human and the lithic in periods well before the geological turn of cotemporary cultural studies. In those depictions of human-mineral encounters on which The Geological Unconcious lingers, the minerality of the human and the minerality of the imagination becomes apparent. While The Geological Unconcious does not explicitly set out to imagine alternatives to fossil capitalism, in elaborating a range of such encounters and in registering libidinal investments in the lithosphere that extend beyond Carboniferous deposits and beyond any carbon imaginary, it points toward alternative relations with, and less destructive mobilizations of, the geologic.

Corruption and Redemption: The Legend of Valluvar and Tamil Literary History

2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 449-482 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Blackburn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Language Ideologies ◽  
Cultural Identities ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
History Of Literature

This [the Valluvar legend] is one of the traditions which are so repugnant to inveterate popular prejudice that they appear too strange for fiction, and are probably founded on fact. (Robert Caldwell 1875:132).If we now recognize that literary history is more than a history of literature, it is perhaps less widely accepted that the writing of literary history is an important subject for literary historiography. Yet literary histories are a rich source for understanding local conceptions of both history and literature. More accessible than archaeology, more tangible than ethnology, literary histories are culturally constructed narratives in which the past is reimagined in the light of contemporary concerns. Certainly in nineteenth-century India, the focus of this essay, literary history was seized upon as evidence to be advanced in the major debates of the time; cultural identities, language ideologies, civilization hierarchies and nationalism were all asserted and challenged through literary histories in colonial India. Asserted and challenged by Europeans, as well as Indians.

A Literary History of Spain: The Nineteenth Century

1975 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 667
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Ribbans ◽  
Donald L. Shaw ◽  
G. G. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
History Of

Addison and the Victorians

2021 ◽  
pp. 308-328
Author(s):  
Brian Young
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Feminist Criticism ◽  
Literary Biography ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Valuable Study ◽  
History Of

The masculine world of Addison’s eighteenth-century ‘republic of letters’ was mirrored by that inhabited by Victorian ‘Men of Letters’, and hence much of the lively interest taken in him by nineteenth-century cultural commentators and makers of (and historians of) public opinion. The agnostic manliness of such men as Leslie Stephen and W. J. Courthope informed the way they wrote about Addison, whose Christianity they tended to slight and who was described by them as ‘delicate’. Macaulay had been more admiring of Addison as a Christian gentleman, while Thackeray praised him as an English humorist. Pope and Swift continued to enjoy an ascendancy in eighteenth-century English literary history, with Addison and Steele appreciated more for having been ‘characteristic’ of their age than as acting in any way as intellectually innovative figures. Matthew Arnold was notably critical of Addison, whom he found provincial and narrow. Both Addison and his Victorian critics were subjected to feminist criticism by Virginia Woolf, who happened to be Stephen’s daughter, but she in her turn slighted the most significant early Victorian study of Addison, the life written by the Unitarian Lucy Aikin. The ‘long nineteenth century’ in the English literary history of the eighteenth century is thus bookended by studies of Addison by women, and it is time that justice was paid to Aikin’s pioneering and still valuable study, submerged as it has been by readers of Macaulay’s essay on Addison, which was ostensibly a review of Aikin’s exercise in literary biography.

"Sons of White Fathers": Mulatto Vengeance and the Haitian Revolution in Victor Sééjour's "The Mulatto"

2010 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marlene L. Daut
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
William Wells Brown ◽  
Tragic Mulatto ◽  
White Fathers ◽  
History Of ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
American Author ◽  
The Haitian Revolution

Marlene L. Daut, "'Sons of White Fathers': Mulatto Vengeance and the Haitian Revolution in Victor Sééjour's 'The Mulatto'"(pp. 1––37) Although many literary critics have traced the genealogy of the tragic mulatto/a to nineteenth-century U.S. letters, in this essay I argue that the theme of tragedy and the mixed-race character predates the mid-nineteenth-century work of Lydia Maria Child and William Wells Brown and cannot be considered a solely U.S. American concept. The image can also be traced to early-nineteenth-century French colonial literature, where the trope surfaced in conjunction with the image of the Haitian Revolution as a bloody race war. Through a reading of the Louisiana-born Victor Sééjour's representation of the Haitian Revolution, "Le Mulââtre" or "The Mulatto," originally composed in French and first published in Paris in 1837, this essay considers the implications of the conflation of the literary history of the tragic mulatto/a with the literary history of the Haitian Revolution in one of the first short stories written by an American author of African descent.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Historiographical Poetics

2016 ◽  
Vol 77 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi Levine
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Transnational History ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Intellectual Engagement ◽  
History Of

Abstract Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s imperfect rhymes, criticized since the nineteenth century, strangely resemble her blank verse. This essay argues that her experiments in poetic form should be viewed in relation to her reading and writing of literary history, particularly her intellectual engagement with the work of Henry Hallam. Barrett Browning’s remarks in the margins of Hallam’s books and in a historiographical essay of her own reveal a poet thinking about her craft in the context of a transnational history of poetry. Barrett Browning’s idiosyncratic prosody becomes another means of writing literary history.

scholarly journals Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 273-279
Author(s):  
Ryan Sweet
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Advertising Campaign ◽  
Television Broadcasting ◽  
History Of ◽  
Network Channel ◽  
Paralympic Games ◽  
The Way

AbstractThis concluding chapter uses British free-to-air television broadcasting network Channel 4’s “Superhumans Return” advertising campaign for its coverage of the 2016 Paralympic Games as a case study with which to explore the overlaps between nineteenth-century and contemporary cultural representations of prosthesis users. It highlights the way that contemporary sources, including Channel 4’s campaign, interrogate a privileging of normalcy while remaining encoded by ableist inclinations. The chapter draws together the various strands of the book’s argument to make the case that the literary history of prosthesis is rich, complicated, and conflicted.

Introduction: A Literary History of Migration, 1750–1850

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
JoEllen DeLucia ◽  
Juliet Shields
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Western World ◽  
Romantic Literature ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Primary Means ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literature Of Migration ◽  
History Of Migration ◽  
The Wanderer

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are central to recent influential theories and histories of migration because they saw the rise of urbanization, industrialization, and imperial expansion in the western world. Yet, despite the centrality of the wanderer and exile as a figure in Romantic literature, there is relatively little work on the literature of migration prior to the mid-nineteenth century. Literary history might seem like an odd lens through which to study migration, but this introduction contends that one of the primary means of understanding the migrant experience is through stories, whether those of historical individuals or those recounted in literary works. By focusing on the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries, this collection explores alternatives to the stories of migration as a form of either irrevocable loss or transcendent gain that crystallized later in the nineteenth century.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document