The Romantics in Alternate History from Hawthorne to Clarke: Generic Edges and the Counterfactual Turn

Romanticism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-215
Author(s):  
Alex Broadhead
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Alternate History ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Critical Interest

In 2009, Damian Walford Davies called for a counterfactual turn in Romantic studies, a move reflective of a wider growth of critical interest in the relationship between Romanticism and counterfactual historiography. In contrast to these more recent developments, the lives of the Romantics have provided a consistent source of speculation for authors of popular alternate history since the nineteenth century. Yet the aims of alternate history as a genre differ markedly from those of its more scholarly cousin, counterfactual historiography. How, then, might such works fit in to the proposed counterfactual turn? This article makes a case for the critical as well as the creative value of alternate histories featuring the Romantics. By exploring how these narratives differ from works of counterfactual historiography, it seeks to explain why the Romantics continue to inspire authors of alternate history and to illuminate the forking paths that Davies's counterfactual turn might take.

Reading the Gothic and Gothic readers

Interventions ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
The Self ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Relationship

In ‘Reading the Gothic and Gothic Readers’ Andrew Smith outlines how recent developments in Gothic studies have provided new ways of critically reflecting upon the nineteenth century. Smith then proceeds to explore how readers and reading, as images of self-reflection, are represented in the fin de siècle Gothic. The self-reflexive nature of the late nineteenth-century Gothic demonstrates a level of political and cultural scepticism at work in the period which, Smith argues, can be applied to recent developments in animal studies as a hitherto largely overlooked critical paradigm that can be applied to the Gothic. To that end this chapter examines representations of reading, readers, and implied readers in Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), focusing on how these representations explore the relationship between the human and the non-human. An extended account of Dracula identifies ways in which these images of self-reflection relate to the presence of the inner animal and more widely the chapter argues for a way of rethinking the period within the context of animal studies via these ostensibly Gothic constructions of human and animal identities.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 11-28
Author(s):  
Glyn Morgan ◽  
C. Palmer-Patel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Contemporary Novel ◽  
Alternate History ◽  
History Texts ◽  
The Relationship

The introduction provides a summary of the genre’s literary history from its earliest roots to the contemporary novel, presenting important examples of alternate history literature from nineteenth century French novels to early-twentieth century essays and more recent examples of science fiction short stories, novels, television and films. It provides definitions and distinctions for key terminology such as ‘nexus point’, ‘counterfactualism’, ‘secret history’ and ‘alternate future’, as well as an overview of important existing research, and explores the relationship between alternate history texts and their source historical narratives. After setting out the aims and aspirations of this collection of essays, the introduction concludes with a precis of the essays in the rest of the collection, underlining connections between them.

Disease and Civilization: A Scottish Atlantic Network of Physicians in the Enlightenment

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-216
Author(s):  
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
Practice Of Medicine ◽  
Benjamin Rush ◽  
American Physician ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
A Current

Through an examination of the extensive papers, manuscripts and correspondence of American physician Benjamin Rush and his friends, this article argues that it is possible to map a network of Scottish-trained physicians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These physicians, whose members included Benjamin Rush, John Redman, John Morgan, Adam Kuhn, and others, not only brought the Edinburgh model for medical pedagogy across the Atlantic, but also disseminated Scottish stadial theories of development, which they applied to their study of the natural history and medical practices of Native Americans and slaves. In doing so, these physicians developed theories about the relationship between civilization, historical progress and the practice of medicine. Exploring this network deepens our understanding of the transnational intellectual geography of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century British World. This article develops, in relation to Scotland, a current strand of scholarship that maps the colonial and global contexts of Enlightenment thought.

Pater's Parerga: Framing the Imaginary Portraits

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-135
Author(s):  
Giles Whiteley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Formal Structure ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Liminal Space ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Similar Operation ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Relationship

Walter Pater's late-nineteenth-century literary genre of the imaginary portrait has received relatively little critical attention. Conceived of as something of a continuum between his role as an art critic and his fictional pursuits, this essay probes the liminal space of the imaginary portraits, focusing on the role of the parergon, or frame, in his portraits. Guided by Pater's reading of Kant, who distinguishes between the work (ergon) and that which lies outside of the work (the parergon), between inside and outside, and contextualised alongside the analysis of Derrida, who shows how such distinctions have always already deconstructed themselves, I demonstrate a similar operation at work in the portraits. By closely analysing the parerga of two of Pater's portraits, ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ (1887) and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893), focusing on his partial quotation of Goethe in the former, and his playful autocitation and impersonation of Heine in the latter, I argue that Pater's parerga seek to destabilise the relationship between text and context so that the parerga do not lie outside the text but are implicated throughout in their reading, changing the portraits constitutively. As such, the formal structure of the parergon in Pater's portraits is also a theoretical fulcrum in his aesthetic criticism and marks that space where the limits of, and distinctions between, art and life become blurred.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine Auyoung
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Cognitive Research ◽  
Theoretical Assumptions ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure ◽  
Mental Acts ◽  
The Relationship

The conclusion of this book calls attention to the relationship between comprehending realist fiction and Aristotle’s claim that mimetic representation provides a form of aesthetic pleasure distinct from our response to what is represented. It also argues that, by demonstrating how much nineteenth-century novelists depend on the knowledge and abilities that readers bring to a text, cognitive research on reading helps us revisit long-standing theoretical assumptions in literary studies. Because the felt experience of reading is so distinct from the mental acts underlying it, knowing more about the basic architecture of reading can help literary critics refine their claims about what novels can and cannot do to their readers.

New Work on Speech Acts

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Speech Act Theory ◽  
New Work ◽  
Half Century ◽  
Recent Advances ◽  
Current Thinking ◽  
Semantics And Pragmatics ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
The Relationship

The essays collected in this book represent recent advances in our understanding of speech acts-actions like asserting, asking, and commanding that speakers perform when producing an utterance. The study of speech acts spans disciplines, and embraces both the theoretical and scientific concerns proper to linguistics and philosophy as well as the normative questions that speech acts raise for our politics, our societies, and our ethical lives generally. It is the goal of this book to reflect the diversity of current thinking on speech acts as well as to bring these conversations together, so that they may better inform one another. Topics explored in this book include the relationship between sentence grammar and speech act potential; the fate of traditional frameworks in speech act theory, such as the content-force distinction and the taxonomy of speech acts; and the ways in which speech act theory can illuminate the dynamics of hostile and harmful speech. The book takes stock of well over a half century of thinking about speech acts, bringing this classicwork in linewith recent developments in semantics and pragmatics, and pointing the way forward to further debate and research.

Suffering in Art

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ritchie Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Words And Images ◽  
The Relationship

Ritchie Robertson situates Lessing’s text within debates over the proper depiction of extreme suffering in art, focusing on Goethe’s essay on the Laocoon group (1798), as well as other late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century works on the representation of pain. The issue of suffering in art was of utmost significance to Goethe’s ideology of the classical, Robertson explains; more than that, the themes introduced in Lessing’s essay—above all, its concerns with how suffering can be depicted in words and images—proved pivotal within Goethe’s prescriptions about the relationship between idealism and individuality (or ‘the characteristic’) in art. As part of a larger campaign against what he called ‘naturalism’ in art, Goethe argued that the ancients did not share the false notion that art must imitate nature. For Goethe, responding to Lessing, the power of the Laocoon group lay precisely in its depiction of bodily suffering as something not just beautiful, but also anmutig (‘sensuously pleasing’).

‘Each Song Was Just Like a Little Sermon’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isaac Land
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Military Training ◽  
One Dimensional ◽  
National Pride ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter is central to the volume’s chronological contentions, as its argument accounts for the specialized, one-dimensional Dibdin of ‘Tom Bowling’ that has endured into recent scholarship. Focusing on Dibdin’s posthumous reception, it examines the moral and rhetorical difficulties of repackaging Dibdin’s works for a Victorian sensibility; it explores the specifics of mid-century concert culture previously highlighted by Derek Scott and William Weber as central to changes in nineteenth-century taste and programming; and it develops the theme of nostalgia into a revelatory consideration of the relationship between new naval technologies, national pride, and military training, and the songs, people, and language of a remembered Napoleonic ‘golden age’—to which Dibdin proves to have been as central, in the Victorian imagination, as Nelson.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Jones
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Old English ◽  
English Studies ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Two Phases ◽  
Scholarly Contribution ◽  
Anglophone World ◽  
The Relationship

This introductory chapter contextualizes the philological study of language during the nineteenth century as a branch of the evolutionary sciences. It sketches in outline the two phases of poetic Anglo-Saxonism for which the rest of the book will subsequently argue in more detail. Moreover, the relationship between Anglo-Saxonism and nineteenth-century medievalism more generally is articulated, and historical analogies are drawn between nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism and more recent political events in the Anglophone world. Finally, the scholarly contribution of Fossil Poetry itself is contextualized within English Studies; it is argued that ‘reception’ is one of the primary objects of Anglo-Saxon or Old English studies, and not merely a secondary object of that field’s study.

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