George Barker in the 1930s: Narcissus and the Autodidact

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 250-268
Author(s):  
Leo Mellor
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Classical Mythology

This article traces the complex and potent role of classical mythology in the poet George Barker's work of the 1930s. Noting Geoffrey Grigson's rage about ‘narcissism’ when reviewing Barker in 1935 it shows why this barb was more perceptive and apposite – in acknowledging an obsession with both a figure and an overtly classical precedent – than the acclamation given to Barker at the time, from T. S. Eliot among others. Central to the article is an exploration of Barker's heterodox version of a common modernist urge: encountering and reworking of fractured myths. For the radical and ever-present notions of uncertainty with which classical tales and Gods are treated in Barker's work is also revelatory of the autodidactic process – incomplete, unstable, and without class-annotated cultural authority – by which he gained such knowledge. The article thus situates Barker within a cultural matrix, and draws renewed attention to the pluralities of poetry within 1930s Britain.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheila Murnaghan ◽  
Deborah H. Roberts
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Further Education ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Fantasy Literature ◽  
Childhood Experiences ◽  
Pleasure Reading ◽  
Classical Mythology ◽  
Children And Young Adults

The preceding work is summed up as a study of adults’ attempts over a century-long period to make sense of their own childhood experiences of antiquity and to recreate those experiences for new generations through the medium of absorbing pleasure reading. Such experiences are valued for their capacity to stimulate the imagination, to expand moral understanding, to pave the way for further education, and to bring renewal or redemption to the disturbed modern world. The chapter ends with a brief survey of developments in classical mythology and historical fiction for children and young adults from the mid-1960s until the present, including the emergence of new forms of fantasy literature and the role of new media such as video games and fan fiction.

Grammar in verse: Latin pedagogy in seventeenth-century England

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Moul
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Educational Experience ◽  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Latin Poetry ◽  
Main Subject ◽  
Modern Education ◽  
Latin Verse

Latin was the medium as well as the main subject of all early modern education across Europe, in both Protestant and Catholic countries. This chapter examines the surprisingly widespread use of Latin verse (rather than prose) for pedagogical and memnonic purposes from the very earliest stages of education, focused on the role of Latin grammatical verse for the teaching of Latin, but discussing also the related phenomena of Latin verse grammars of Greek and Hebrew, and the reflections of this early educational experience in popular Latin poetry of the period. It argues that the use of grammatical Latin verse was both mnemonically effective and also served to establish from the earliest stages of education the moral and cultural authority and importance of Latin verse as a whole.

Lucrezia Marinella

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Galli Stampino
Keyword(s):  
Literary Production ◽  
Council Of Trent ◽  
Fourth Crusade ◽  
Classical Mythology ◽  
Role Of Women ◽  
Individual Voice ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
Point Of Reference

Lucrezia Marinella (b. 1571–d. 1653) was a widely known author in Venice and throughout Italy in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Her poetry and prose works were printed (and even reprinted), attracting notice and renown. Despite her subsequent fame as a proto-feminist, most of her writing is devoted to religious topics, in which her personal, pro-woman stance is present but expressed in ways that are in keeping with the constraints of genre and the culture of her time. She was daughter, sister, and wife to physicians. Marinella’s knowledge emerges as varied and extensive in her writings. Her published texts fall between 1595 and 1605 and then 1617 and 1648; this hiatus is usually explained by the date of her marriage (1607). As remarkable as the length of her career is the span of topics her works engage: lives and stories of the Virgin and of several saints, the struggle of man to defeat sin under the guise of classical mythology, the role of women in society and culture, and the Fourth Crusade are but a few. From her will we know she had a son and a daughter, as well as a granddaughter from the latter. Her diverse topics, choice of form, wide-ranging selection of dedicatees, individual voice, and long career make her an important point of reference for exploring post–Council of Trent literary production by women in Italian.

Whitman and Stevenson: Singing the Nation from Scotland to Sāmoa via Ohio and Hawai‘i

2021 ◽  
pp. 254-268
Author(s):  
Emma Sutton
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Song Cycle ◽  
Song Cycles ◽  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Ralph Vaughan Williams ◽  
King David ◽  
In Memoriam ◽  
Vaughan Williams

This chapter explores the role of song in the intermingled reception of Whitman’s and Robert Louis Stevenson’s work. The first section introduces Stevenson’s part in disseminating Whitman’s work in Polynesia, discussing Stevenson’s writings on Polynesian song and his friendships with Hawai’ian musicians King David Kalākaua and Queen Liliʻuokalani with whom he shared an interest in Whitman. It suggests the importance of song to their understandings of cultural authority and challenges to colonial influence. The second section considers several composers – including Ralph Vaughan Williams and Ernst Bacon – who set work by both Whitman and Stevenson, focusing particularly on James H. Rogers’ song cycle In Memoriam (1919). It considers the ways in which relationship between the two writers was constructed by these composers and their critics and explores the role of anthologising – whether in poetry anthologies or song cycles – in constructions of national identity and exoticism.

Acting Like an Author

2019 ◽  
pp. 118-153
Author(s):  
Sarah Zimmerman
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Authority ◽  
William Hazlitt ◽  
Delivery Style

William Hazlitt was steeped in a 1790s culture of radical speaking. Listening to Coleridge as a Dissenting preacher and hearing him recite his verse fostered Hazlitt’s hopes in political and aesthetic reform. In Lectures on the English Poets (1818) he responded to the dashing of those hopes by developing an aesthetic agenda that might renew them and a conversational prose that would become his signature as a critic. He advocated looking to the earliest British poets for examples of how to achieve lasting fame and, rejecting Coleridge’s extemporaneity, honed a delivery style that emphasized qualities he associated with the kind of authorship he championed by preparing full scripts and adopting a studied distance from auditors. In assuming the role of lecturer Hazlitt attempted to supplant his former mentor and assume his own cultural authority.

The Spirituality of Sport and the Role of the Athlete in the Tennis Essays of David Foster Wallace

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyle R. King
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Cultural Discourse ◽  
David Foster Wallace ◽  
Making Meaning ◽  
Select Group ◽  
Professional Tennis ◽  
Creative Writer

The well-known novelist and creative writer David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) belongs to a select group of “occasional sportswriters” whose writings about sport have influenced cultural discourse about tennis and animated future sports writing. Wallace uses three rhetorical tactics—providing knowledge to the reader as confidant, making meaning out of the athletic cliché, and translating the form of professional tennis into prose—that establish his cultural authority on tennis while positioning the athlete as a transcendent spiritual practitioner. This characterization redefines dominant understandings of the athlete’s relationship to religion and the spectator’s relationship to the athlete, while discarding the possibility of recognizing the athlete as citizen.

'Āšūrā' as a Female Ritual Challenge to Masculinity

Arabica ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 400-439
Author(s):  
Mohammed Maarouf
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Cultural Hegemony ◽  
Religious Ritual ◽  
The Status ◽  
Male Authority ◽  
Ethnographic Image

AbstractThis paper presents an ethnographic image of 'Āšūrā' delineating how a cultural and religious ritual may play the role of establishing and sustaining cultural hegemony in Morocco. It forwards into a position of prominence the carnivalesque aspect of the ritual. The cultural authority of the male is transgressed, mocked and crushed down by the joyful moment of female becoming in a ritual outlet that permits power to rejuvenate its yoke of domination over women in the normal existing social conditions. Carnival is a form of social control of the low by the high and thus serves the interests of the official culture that it apparently opposes. It is a licensed relief. Hegemony permits the ritual inversions of hierarchy and status degradations to re-affirm the status quo. In this sense, 'Āšūrā' seems to offer an occasion for the ritual emancipation of women fulfilled by their practice of magic and ceremonial alfresco gatherings, chanting songs of challenge to the male authority.

Dryasdust Antiquarianism and Soppy Masculinity: The Waverley Novels and the Gender of History

2003 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Goode
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Historical Inquiry ◽  
Visual Discourse ◽  
The Past ◽  
Waverley Novels ◽  
Forms Of Knowledge

This essay attempts to widen the discursive contexts through which scholars understand Romantic historicism and the role of Walter Scott's Waverley Novels in its development. Placing Scott's The Antiquary (1816) and ''Dedicatory Epistle'' to Ivanhoe (1819) in dialogue with contemporaneous verbal and visual discourse over antiquaries, Edmund Burke, and the Lady Hamilton affair, the essay proposes that Romantic historicism disciplined bodies as it defined and authorized new forms of knowledge. Romantic historicists perceived the ability to relate to and know the past properly as dependent on the manliness of the historical thinker's sentimental and sexual constitution. Thus, the era's arguments over the legitimacy of different forms of historical inquiry, as well as over the historical novel's cultural authority in relation to the field of history, frequently became contests over the manliness and sensibility of their practitioners' bodies.

ERNEST RENAN'S RACE PROBLEM

2015 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 309-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERT D. PRIEST
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Language Groups ◽  
Semitic Language ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Two Sides ◽  
Race Problem

ABSTRACTThis review revisits the role of race in Ernest Renan's thought by situating contemporary debates in a long perspective that extends back to his texts and their earliest interpreters. Renan is an ambivalent figure: from the 1850s onwards he used ‘race’ to denote firm differences between the ‘Aryan’ and ‘Semitic’ language groups in history; but after 1870, he repeatedly condemned biological racism in various venues and contexts. I show that the tension between these two sides of Renan's thought has continually resurfaced in criticism and historiography ever since the late nineteenth century. Renan's racial views have been subject to particularly close scrutiny following Léon Poliakov's and Edward Said's critiques in the 1970s, but the ensuing debate risks developing into an inconclusive tug-of-war between attack and apologia. I propose three fresh directions for research. First, historians should situate the evolution of Renan's ideas on race in closer biographical context; secondly, they must reconsider the cultural authority of his texts, which is often more asserted than proven; thirdly, they should pay greater attention to his reception outside Europe, particularly regarding his writing on Islam.

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