At the Threshold to the New World

Transfers ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 83-98
Author(s):  
Michael Bies

This article deals with representations of equator crossings in travel literature. Focusing on the accounts of European travelers to Brazil, it considers descriptions of crossing-the-line ceremonies that were performed on board ships since the sixteenth century and shows that, since the late eighteenth century, writers have increasingly staged crossings of the equator as an individual and private experience. Furthermore, it addresses the relation of travel and knowledge that descriptions of equator crossings establish by referring to distinctive epistemological approaches to the New World and by producing a “liminal knowledge” characteristic of travel narratives. The article draws on travel literature from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, paying special attention to the postromantic description of an equator crossing in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s famous memoir Tristes Tropiques.

2006 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoe Detsi-Diamanti

The aim of this paper is to explore the changing aesthetic and ideological connotations of the representation of America as an Indian woman in the sixteenth-century engravings of the discovery and conquest of the New World and the late-eighteenth-century political cartoons of America's national conflict and eventual secession from mother England. In both cases, the male enterprise of colonization and nation-making is aesthetically expressed in the fetishistic and symbolic representation of the female body as the simultaneously alluring and devouring female, seductively naked before the white male European, and as the victim of political violence and the national struggle for independence.


2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 1269-1325
Author(s):  
Ethan Matt Kavaler

Early modern ornament might profitably be considered as a set of systems, each with its own rules. It signaled wealth and status. It offered pleasure and prompted curiosity. It cut across the apparent divide between the vernacular and the classicizing. It was relational, understood in the context of a given subject but not necessarily subservient to it. The notion of ornament as essentially supplemental and the prejudice against ornamental excess are both children of the late eighteenth century. Both ideas depend on a post-Enlightenment conviction of the work of art as an autonomous, aesthetically self-sufficient object, an idea not fully formed in the early modern era.


2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 347-368
Author(s):  
Matthew Ylitalo

From the late eighteenth century until the early twentieth century, British Arctic whaling vessels called at the Shetland Islands to hire additional crew members. Whalers valued Shetlanders for their boat-handling expertise, and Shetlanders benefitted from earning cash wages. After 1872, local documentation on Shetlanders in Arctic whaling becomes scarcer. This article traces social, economic and environmental factors to contextualise Shetland’s involvement in Arctic whaling during its last decades. It draws information from British merchant marine crew agreements to identify prosopographical characteristics of Shetlanders joining the whalers, and it links this information to other Shetland sources to understand how whaling influenced Shetland’s society and economy. The article also demonstrates the value of using crew agreements to develop alternative perspectives of social, economic and labour histories across a multiscalar range of local, regional and transoceanic histories.


1994 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 363-377 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. M. Jacob

The aim of this paper is to examine the evidence from a number of charity schools, for attitudes towards the childhood of the ‘poorer sort’ in the early eighteenth century. Conventionally it has been claimed that lack of affection, and even brutality, characterized the relationship between parents, especially fathers, and their children. Lawrence Stone, in particular, has promoted the view that, as a result of the very high mortality rate among children until the late eighteenth century, parents did not invest much affection in them in order to insulate themselves from the sorrow resulting from their likely deaths before reaching adulthood. This view was also taken by Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt. They pointed out the formality of address seen in letters between children and parents of the upper classes, and suggested that cruelty to children and flogging was commonplace at all levels of society. These views have been challenged by Linda Pollock, who has suggested that, when examined carefully, the evidence suggests that, from the sixteenth century at least, nearly all children seem to have been wanted, loved, and cared for. She claims that the majority of children were not subject to brutality, and that physical punishment was used relatively infrequently and as a last resort. Pollock suggests that from the eighteenth century onwards parents were much concerned with ‘training’ a child in order to ensure that he or she absorbed correct values and beliefs and would grow into a model citizen.


1980 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-52
Author(s):  
Bruce Cruikshank

In 1767 Charles III issued his famous decree expelling the Jesuits from Spain and the Spanish colonies around the world. The repercussions of this edict were felt even on Samar, a large but relatively unimportant province in the eastern Visayas in the Philippine colony (see Map One) whose missions, later parish churches, had been staffed by Jesuit missionaries from the last few years of the sixteenth century until the order of expulsion arrived on Samar in September 1768. The Jesuits were replaced by Augustinians in the pueblos of Guivan, Balangiga, and Basey; and in the rest of the pueblos by Franciscans (see Map Two).


2011 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 169
Author(s):  
Barbro Klein

During the late eighteenth century, folk art developed in new and intriguing ways in several Scandinavian regions. This essay concentrates on the developments around Lake Siljan in Dalarna, primarily as they were expressed by Winter Carl Hansson, one of the most accomplished of the artists. In his renditions of biblical topics such as the Workers in the Vineyard and the Descent from the Cross, one may observe a skilful blending of religious mystery and mundane life, as well as complex contrasts between floral arrangements and imposing cities. Through his remarkable ability to enhance common features of Dalecarlian folk art, this unschooled artist communicates striking powers of presence. Ultimately, the new artistic energies - in works by Winter Carl and others - must be understood in light of the influence of the many printed texts and images that were then available. Thus, to the extent that a general breakthrough into new cultural and social concerns took place during the late eighteenth century, this is true also of folk art. Furthermore, the folk art that was shaped at this time had a profound impact in the twentieth century, when it came to signify the most appealing aspects of Sweden's national cultural heritage.


Author(s):  
Mika LaVaque-Manty

This chapter traces some of the conceptual history from the late eighteenth century, when arguments about equal, intrinsic, and universal human dignity became politically important, to the mid-twentieth century, when the idea of universal human dignity was enshrined in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. The chapter argues that this universalization process primarily took place in the nineteenth century, in political controversies around gender, race, and labor. The chapter argues that a particular Christian conception about the dignity of labor, expressed by Pope Leo XII, helped cement the value of inherent human dignity while at the same time weakening its more radical political potential.


Author(s):  
Fiona Sampson

This chapter considers the Gesamtkunstwerk, which English musicologists translate as ‘total artwork’. Richard Wagner had used the expression to characterise his operas, though he had only ever used the term in two essays, both published in 1849: ‘Art and Revolution’ and ‘The Artwork of the Future’. Moreover, the term did not originate from Wagner himself, and he did not even spell it in the conventional way. Since the late twentieth century ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ has been applied to other artforms, particularly architecture, which like opera can unite a number of elements. (Architecture, for example, marries engineering, landscaping and interior decoration, among others.) But the term's origins are in the late eighteenth-century notion that all the arts could be unified in poetry.


2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 364-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Filomeno V. Aguilar

AbstractAlthough the Philippines is hardly known for sending out migrants prior to the twentieth century, and even among seafarers only the galleon age is remembered, this article provides evidence of transcontinental maritime movements from the late eighteenth century until the early twentieth century. These migrants were known in the English-speaking world as Manilamen. Most were seafarers, but some became involved in pearl-shell fishing, while others engaged in mercenary activities. They settled in key ports around the world, their numbers in any one location fluctuating in response to changing circumstances. Despite relocation to distant places, the difficulties of communication, and the impetus toward naturalization, Manilamen seem to have retained some form of identification with the Philippines as homeland, no matter how inchoately imagined.


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