Contemplation and Criticism: Coleridge, Derrida and the Sublime

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-45
Author(s):  
David Vallins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Recent Criticism ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Liberalism ◽  
Historical Materialist ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Romantic Era

Recent criticism has often contrasted both deconstruction and Romantic idealism with diverse ‘progressive’ ideologies, whether historical-materialist in origin, or associated with the economic liberalism of British Whigs in the early nineteenth century. At the same time, however, Romantic idealism is often seen as involving a Platonic essentialism which distinguishes it from deconstruction as much as from historical materialism. My essay seeks to unravel these dichotomies and paradoxes, highlighting the political ambiguity of the advocates of Romantic-era political economy, as well as the anti-essentialist aspects of Coleridge's idealism, and the important elements it has in common with Derrida's questioning of ‘self-presence’ and logocentrism. The principal form of the sublime that I explore arises from Coleridge's and Derrida's recognition of the indefinableness of the origin of consciousness or the source of meaning in language – a recognition which, I argue, is progressive in its resistance to reductive and instrumentalizing definitions of humanity.

Free Trade and State Formation: The Political Economy of Fisheries Policy in Britain and the United Kingdom circa 1780–1850

2000 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 288-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Gambles
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Economic Policy ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
State Formation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
British State ◽  
The Relationship

It is striking that historians of the early nineteenth century have been relatively reluctant to consider relationships between economic policy and the consolidation of the British state. In today's context, the economic and political challenges posed by both European integration and resurgent nationalism have generated hotly contested controversies on the political economy of state formation. From the perspective of the United Kingdom, the prospect of political and administrative devolution has forced us to address the implications of political decentralization for regional economic development (and vice versa) and to consider in turn the impact of these dynamics on the political integrity of a multinational state. For Britain, the period between circa 1780 and 1850 was characterized by unprecedented economic growth, imperial crisis and acquisition, and political consolidation. In a metropolitan sense the most dramatic feature of this process was, of course, the creation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1800. Insofar as historians of early nineteenth-century Britain have examined the relationship between “state formation” and economic policy, however, they have tended to focus on the ideas, politics, and pressures surrounding the retreat of the state from economic intervention. Thus in more general accounts it became axiomatic that the nineteenth-century state shrank progressively from social and economic intervention, liberating commerce, and resting the fiscal system on secure but modest direct taxation.More recently, the relationship between the concept of “laissez-faire” and British state formation has been dramatically revised and refined by Philip Harling and Peter Mandler.

The Cultivation System (1830–1870) and its private entrepreneurs on colonial Java

2007 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulbe Bosma
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Census Data ◽  
Sugar Industry ◽  
Cane Sugar ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultivation System ◽  
Economic Liberalism ◽  
Plantation Economy ◽  
Private Entrepreneurs ◽  
Colonial Government

AbstractEver since the interregnum from 1811 to 1816 of Lieutenant Governor General Stamford Raffles, British trading interests had been firmly established in colonial Indonesia. The implementation of the Cultivation System in 1830 on Java by the Dutch colonial government was an attempt to bring this potentially rich colony under Dutch economic control, but it is usually considered a departure from the principles of economic liberalism and a phase during which private entrepreneurs were barred from the emerging plantation economy. However, on the basis of census data and immigration records, and with reference to recent literature on the development of the nineteenth-century sugar industry, this article argues that British trading houses present on Java in the early nineteenth century continued to play an important role in the development of the production there of tropical goods, and that the emerging plantation economy attracted a modest influx of technicians and employees from various European nations. This article proposes to consider the Cultivation System and private enterprise not as mutually exclusive, but as complementary in making the cane sugar industry of Java the second largest in the world after that of Cuba.

What the Climber Saw: Strauss's Alpensinfonie and the Romantic Tradition of Nature Representation

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
David Larkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Emotional Reactions ◽  
Tone Poem ◽  
Peak Response ◽  
Landscape Features ◽  
Musical Compositions ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
The Relationship

Initially criticized for its naïve representation of landscape features, Strauss's Alpensinfonie (1915) has in recent years been reinterpreted by scholars as a deliberate challenge to metaphysics, a late outgrowth of the composer's fascination with Nietzsche. As a consequence, the relationship between Strauss's tone poem and earlier artworks remains underexplored. Strauss in fact relied heavily on long-established tropes of representing mountain scenes, and when this work is situated against a backdrop of similarly themed Romantic paintings, literature, travelogues and musical compositions, many points of resemblance emerge. In this article, I focus on how human responses to mountains are portrayed within artworks. Romantic-era reactions were by no means univocal: mountains elicited overtly religious exhalations, atheistic refutations of all supernatural connections, pantheistic nature-worship, and also artworks which engaged with nature purely in an immanent fashion. Strauss uses a range of strategies to distinguish the climber from the changing scenery he traverses. The ascent in the first half of Eine Alpensinfonie focuses on a virtuoso rendition of landscape in sound, interleaved with suggestions as to the emotional reactions of the protagonist. This immanent perspective on nature would accord well with Strauss's declared atheism. In the climber's response to the sublime experience of the peak, however, I argue that there are marked similarities to the pantheistic divinization of nature such as was espoused by the likes of Goethe, whom Strauss admired enormously. And while Strauss's was an avowedly godless perspective, I will argue in the final section of the article that he casts the climber's post-peak response to the sublime encounter in a parareligious light that again has romantic precedents. There are intimations of romantic transcendence in the latter part of the work, even if these evaporate as the tone poem, and the entire nineteenth-century German instrumental tradition it concludes, fades away into silence.

scholarly journals The Politics of Gift Exchange in Early Qajar Iran, 1785–1834

2016 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 550-576 ◽  
Author(s):  
Assef Ashraf
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Political History ◽  
Gift Exchange ◽  
The Political ◽  
Gift Giving ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Center Periphery

AbstractThis article uses gift-giving practices in early nineteenth-century Iran as a window onto statecraft, governance, and center-periphery relations in the early Qajar state (1785–1925). It first demonstrates that gifts have a long history in the administrative and political history of Iran, the Persianate world, and broader Eurasia, before highlighting specific features found in Iran. The article argues that the pīshkish, a tributary gift-giving ceremony, constituted a central role in the political culture and economy of Qajar Iran, and was part of the process of presenting Qajar rule as a continuation of previous Iranian royal dynasties. Nevertheless, pīshkish ceremonies also illustrated the challenges Qajar rulers faced in exerting power in the provinces and winning the loyalty of provincial elites. Qajar statesmen viewed gifts and bribes, at least at a discursive level, in different terms, with the former clearly understood as an acceptable practice. Gifts and honors, like the khil‘at, presented to society were part of Qajar rulers' strategy of presenting themselves as just and legitimate. Finally, the article considers the use of gifts to influence diplomacy and ease relations between Iranians and foreign envoys, as well as the ways in which an inadequate gift could cause offense.

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