Cosmopolitan Space: Political Topographies in ‘Lord Arthur Savile's Crime’

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 124-142
Author(s):  
Giles Whiteley

This essay responds to Julian Wolfreys's suggestion that Oscar Wilde's London is primarily psycho-geographical by seeking to read his texts within the historical and spatial context of late nineteenth-century London. Taking as a test the short story ‘Lord Arthur Saville's Crime’, this essay deploys the critical insights of Henri Lefebvre to suggest that Wilde's city writing engages more closely with London life than has been hitherto suggested. Following Lord Arthur on his three perambulations across the city, from Hyde Park and Piccadilly to Covent Garden, through Soho, and finally from St James's to the Embankment, the article focuses particularly on the ways in which Wilde's use of what might easily be assumed to be an incidental location, namely Cleopatra's Needle, invites us to reread the text's revolutionary politics within the context of the French Revolution. Concluding with a discussion of Wilde's treatment of London's ‘cosmopolitan space’, the essay shows that the way in which seemingly stock imagery deployed in Wilde's representation of the city may in fact be read as part of a wider and complex engagement with both the politics and the aesthetics of space.

2020 ◽  
pp. 35-56
Author(s):  
Alexandra Wilson

This chapter analyses the ways in which La bohème was influenced by popular romantic representations of Paris and the ways in which it, in turn, helped shape them. It discusses the late nineteenth-century Italian fascination with French culture and the way in which Puccini’s opera was nostalgically depicting an old Paris that had been swept away by Baron Haussmann’s regeneration of the city. The chapter considers Puccini’s conception of Bohemianism, demonstrating that it had Italian as well as French roots. It examines the composer and his librettists’ reading of certain archetypal Bohemian figures, such as the good-hearted demimondaine, and of symbolic Parisian locations, such as the pavement café. The chapter concludes with a consideration of Puccini’s representation of ‘picturesque poverty’ and discusses the ways in which directors have attempted to make the work more or less gritty through their stagings.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-41
Author(s):  
W. Walker Hanlon ◽  
Casper Worm Hansen ◽  
Jake Kantor

Using novel weekly mortality data for London spanning 1866-1965, we analyze the changing relationship between temperature and mortality as the city developed. Our main results show that warm weeks led to elevated mortality in the late nineteenth century, mainly due to infant deaths from digestive diseases. However, this pattern largely disappeared after WWI as infant digestive diseases became less prevalent. The resulting change in the temperature-mortality relationship meant that thousands of heat-related deaths—equal to 0.9-1.4 percent of all deaths— were averted. These findings show that improving the disease environment can dramatically alter the impact of high temperature on mortality.


2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Carlos Jaramillo Estrada

Born in the late nineteenth century, within the positivist paradigm, psychology has made important developments that have allowed its recognition in academia and labor. However, contextual issues have transformed the way we conceptualize reality, the world and man, perhaps in response to the poor capacity of the inherited paradigm to ensure quality of life and welfare of human beings. This has led to the birth and recognition of new paradigms, including complex epistemology, in various fields of the sphere of knowledge, which include the subjectivity, uncertainty, relativity of knowledge, conflict, the inclusion of "the observed" as an active part of the interventions and the relativity of a single knowable reality to move to co-constructed realities. It is proposed an approach to the identity consequences for a psychology based on complex epistemology, and the possible differences and relations with psychology, traditionally considered.


2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Wells

As U.S. cities burgeoned in the late nineteenth century, their environmental problems multiplied. In response, some urban elites worked to rebuild the city to alleviate its environmental ills; others relocated to more environmentally enticing surroundings in new suburban developments. For members of both groups, new forms of transportation infrastructure profoundly shaped how they responded to the era's environmental crisis. Whereas efforts to rebuild and retrofit downtown were hampered by the difficulties and expense of working in densely built and populated areas, efforts to build on the urban fringe faced few serious obstacles. As a result, the most significant late nineteenth-century attempts to use transportation to remake city dwellers' relationships with nature in the United States - including tools developed with an eye on rebuilding dense city centers - exercised far greater influence on the expanding periphery of cities than on their environmentally fraught cores.


2017 ◽  
pp. 59-74
Author(s):  
Barbara A. E. Bell

Scottish theatre, from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, has been characterised by a distinctive performance culture that values anti-illusionist techniques, breaking the fourth wall, music and song, strongly physical acting styles and striking visual effects. These were accepted traits of the Georgian theatre as a whole; however, they endured in Scotland through the music hall and pantomime traditions, when late nineteenth-century Western theatre was focused on realism/naturalism. Their importance to the search for a distinctive Scottish Gothic Drama lies in the way that the conditions of the Scottish theatre during the Gothic Revival valued these skills and effects. That theatre was heavily constricted in what it could play by censorship from London and writers were cautious in their approach to ‘national’ topics. At the same time a good deal of work portraying Scotland as an inherently Gothic setting was imported onto Scottish stages.


Author(s):  
Christina Petraglia

This chapter posits a psychoanalytic reading of Iginio Ugo Tarchetti’s short story ‘I fatali’ (‘The Fated Ones’) published posthumously in the collection Racconti fantastici (Fantastic Tales) (1869). It focuses on the mortal rivalry between the father and son figures, Count Sagrezwitch and Baron Saternez, who become known in late nineteenth-century Milanese society of the short story as true embodiments of fatal beings belonging to popular superstition, known as jinxes – bringers of bad fortune, illness, harm, and even death to others. Drawing from Otto Rank and Sigmund Freud’s conceptions of the Doppelgänger, it is argued that these protagonists emerge as complementary doubles for one another, as opposing incarnations of Death in the form of mysterious foreigners. This chapter also highlights the post-Unification, socio-cultural undertones of Tarchetti’s fantastic tale, affirms the existence of an Italian Gothic, and reveals the author’s portrayal of death’s spectacular nature.


2019 ◽  
pp. 27-52
Author(s):  
Marco Pinfari

This chapter explores the use of monster metaphors in framing “terrorist” actors since the French Revolution. While acknowledging that these metaphors effectively present the “terrorist” as an abject “other,” it argues that the main purpose of the use of monster imagery in framing “terrorists” is to highlight their unmanageability, which may be instrumental in securing popular backing for specific types of rule-breaking behavior in counterterrorism. It presents these arguments while reviewing examples drawn from the origins of modern terrorism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These include the gorgon Medusa, which appears for instance in relation to Robespierre’s “Reign of Terror,” and the many-headed hydra—one of the oldest metaphors for representing unruly behavior that proves unmanageable. It then introduces another type of unmanageable monster that would become particularly popular to frame terrorists—Frankenstein’s monster—and its use in the late nineteenth century to frame Irish nationalism.


Author(s):  
Noel Malcolm

This essay presents a hitherto unknown work: the first autobiography ever written by an Albanian. It was composed in 1881–2 by a young man (born in 1861) called Lazër Tusha; he wrote it in Italian, and the manuscript has been preserved in an ecclesiastical archive in Italy. Tusha was the son of a prosperous tailor in the city of Shkodër, which was the administrative centre of the Catholic Church in Albania. He describes his childhood and early education, which gave him both a love of Italian culture and a strong desire to serve the Church; at his insistence, his father sent him to the Catholic seminary there, run by the Jesuits. He describes his disappointment on being obliged, after six years, to leave the seminary and resume lay life, and his failed attempts to become either a Jesuit or a Franciscan. Some aspects of these matters remain mysterious in his account. But much of this unfinished draft book is devoted to things other than purely personal narrative: Tusha writes in loving detail about customs, superstitions, clothes, the city of Shkodër, its market and the tailoring business. This is a very rich account of the life and world of an ordinary late-nineteenth-century Albanian—albeit an unusually thoughtful one, with some literary ambition.


1997 ◽  
Vol 50 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 421-453 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Notley

Late nineteenth-century journalistic criticism in Vienna offers many precedents for Paul Bekker's interpretation of the symphony. Beethoven's symphonies provided the model for an aesthetics of the genre-couched in metaphors connecting it to "the people"-that motivated the reception of works by Brahms and Bruckner. Activists who wished to inaugurate symphonic Volksconcerte in the city took the figurative utopian function of the genre literally. Though their efforts were confounded not only by institutionalized elitism but also by the preferences of the Viennese Volk for other kinds of music, their work bore fruit in the early twentieth century with the founding of the Wiener Konzertverein and the Arbeiter-Symphonie-Konzerte.


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