scholarly journals Investing in a Third: Colonization, Religious Fundamentalism, and Adolescence

2014 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 36-45
Author(s):  
Elaine P. Miller
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
Religious Fundamentalism ◽  
Keynote Address ◽  
The Political ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
New Form ◽  
The Way ◽  
The French Revolution

In her keynote address to the Kristeva Circle 2014, Julia Kristeva argued that European Humanism dating from the French Revolution paradoxically paved the way for “those who use God for political ends” by promoting a completely and solely secular path to the political. As an unintended result of this movement this path has led, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, to the development of a new form of nihilism that masks itself as revolutionary but in fact is the opposite, in Kristeva’s view.  Kristeva analyzed the culture of religious fundamentalism as “adolescent” in the sense that the adolescent, in contrast to the child, is a believer rather than a questioner.  Although the psychoanalytic consideration of religious fundamentalism added a new dimension to attempts to explain the increase of this phenomenon in the late 20th and 21st centuries, Kristeva’s subsequent linkage of fundamentalism to the revolts in French suburbs in 2005 and beyond fell short of an insightful critique by neglecting the historical context of France’s colonial history.

scholarly journals Culture, Strategy, and State-Centered Explanations of Revolution, 1789 and 1989

2003 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. C. Sharman
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Cultural Aspects ◽  
Culture Strategy ◽  
The Way ◽  
The French Revolution

Social scientists studying revolutions have increasingly argued that explanations of revolutions that do not include subjective factors, such as culture, are inadequate. The failure to explain the anti-Communist revolutions of 1989 is forceful testimony to this inadequacy. But the way in which cultural aspects are being added to existing approaches tends to undermine past advances in studying revolutions. Recent historiography of the French Revolution provides an example of a more thorough-going approach to political culture. A productive synthesis that both preserves past advances and better explains the revolutions of 1989 is achieved by analyzing the effects of cultural change on state elites.

Feeling Like It Wasn't

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-103
Author(s):  
Rae Greiner
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Georg Lukacs ◽  
The Past ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Renaissance Italy ◽  
Or History ◽  
The Way ◽  
The French Revolution

In “Is There a Problem with Historical Fiction (or with Scott's Redgauntlet)?”—an essay, as it happens, on Sir Walter Scott's great counterfactual novel—Harry E. Shaw calls on literary critics more fully to register “the remarkable variety of things history can do in novels, by short-circuiting the assumption that the representation of history in fiction is really always doing the same sort of work, or should be.” History might be a source of imaginative energy, a sort of launching pad for a book about timeless truths, as in Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (“ultimately about individual sacrifice and transcendence, not about the French Revolution in the way in which Scott's Waverley is about the Forty-Five”); or the past might function as “a pastoral,” which is to say, as a field onto which authors project the concerns of their own times, as in Romola (depicting problems “in definitively Victorian terms and then project[ing them] back on to Renaissance Italy,” where they would have been understood quite differently [176–77]). Or history, what Shaw calls “objective history,” might be a work's actual subject (180). An historical novel of this last sort tells it like it was, or tries to. But even that novel is only doing so much, only making a use of history. Georg Lukács is therefore wrong in thinking that “a sufficiently dialectical mode of representation could capture everything” (Shaw 175). No one mode can capture all of even a highly delimited history at once.

PROTESTANTISM AND PROGRESS IN THE YEAR XII: CHARLES VILLERS'SESSAY ON THE SPIRIT AND INFLUENCE OF LUTHER'S REFORMATION(1804)

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 303-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL PRINTY
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Social Struggle ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Broad Interest ◽  
The French Revolution

This article examines Charles Villers'sEssay on the Spirit and Influence of Luther's Reformation(1804) in its intellectual and historical context. Exiled from France after 1792, Villers intervened in important French and German debates about the relationship of religion, history, and philosophy. The article shows how he took up a German Protestant discussion on the meaning of the Reformation that had been underway from the 1770s through the end of the century, including efforts by Kantians to seize the mantle of Protestantism for themselves. Villers's essay capitalized on a broad interest in the question of Protestantism and its meaning for modern freedom around 1800. Revisiting the formation of the narrative of Protestantism and progress reveals that it was not a logical progression from Protestant theology or religion but rather part of a specific ideological and social struggle in the wake of the French Revolution and the collapse of the Old Regime.

scholarly journals History as a discourse in Jeanette Winterson's "The passion" : the politics of alterity

2000 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
María del Mar Asensio Aróstegui
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Political Choice ◽  
Historiographic Metafiction ◽  
Historical Material ◽  
The Fantastic ◽  
The French Revolution

Set in the historical context of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, Jeanette Winterson's The Passion is an outstanding example of the kind of fiction that Elizabeth Wesseling (1991: vii) calls postmodernist historical novels, that is, "novelistic adaptations of historical material". Besides, being profoundly self-reflexive, the novel also falls under Linda Hutcheon's (1988) category of historiographic metafiction. The present paper focuses on Winterson's political choice of two representatives of historically silenced groups, a soldier and a woman, who use two apparently opposed narrative modes, the historical and the fantastic, to tell a story that both exposes history as a discursive construct and provides an alternative fantastic discourse for the representation of feminine desire.

Among the Romantics: E. P. Thompson and the Poetics of Disenchantment

2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 322-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Epstein
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Abstract Theory ◽  
The French Revolution

AbstractThis article examines key themes in the political and intellectual life of E. P. Thompson. It argues for the centrality of romanticism to his work; it focuses on his unfinished study of the early Romantics. Thompson drew parallels between socialist hopes and disappointments of his own day and the reactions of the early romantic poets to the failed promise of the French Revolution. This article charts the trajectory of the early Romantics as they moved from political engagement to retreat, and relates this trajectory to Thompson's own politics. Thompson discerned a pattern whereby intellectuals and artists moved through stages from political engagement to disenchantment and then to “apostasy” or default. Disenchantment could be a productive condition; at issue was how the poet handled the “authenticity of experience,” how disenchantment was dealt with in verse. Both Thompson and the Romantics privileged the concept of “experience” which they set in opposition to abstract theory. The article's final section turns to themes that Thompson had intended to address but left unfinished, including shifting views of patriotism and the defeated cause of women's rights. For Thompson the romantic impulse was ultimately linked to utopian desire, to the capacity to imagine that which is “not yet.”

Exile, Imprisonment, or Death

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Swann
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
Royal Family ◽  
Civil Strife ◽  
Royal Authority ◽  
Royal Power ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
Cultural Origins ◽  
The French Revolution

Between the assassination of Henri IV in 1610 and the French Revolution of 1789, thousands of French nobles, including members of the royal family, courtiers, bishops, generals, and judges suffered internal exile, imprisonment, or even death for having displeased their sovereign. For most that punishment was independent of the legal system and was the result of a simple royal command or a written order, known as a lettre de cachet. Yet rather than protest, the victims were willing to obey, spending months, even years in disgrace without any knowledge of when, or even if, their ordeal would end. Their punishment was for many a terrible personal blow, striking at the heart of their own identity and relationship to the king, and it threatened the future of their families, friends, and political allies. This book is the first in-depth study of political disgrace, which was intrinsic to the exercise of royal power, drawing on the mystique of monarchy and the ideologies of divine right, patriarchy, and justice that underpinned royal authority. It explores the rise and consolidation of a new model of disgrace amongst the nobility for which obedience to the king gradually replaced the rebellious attitudes fostered during the years of religious and civil strife. Yet for all the power of royal disgrace, it was always open to challenge and in the course of the eighteenth century it would come under a sustained attack that tells us much about the political and cultural origins of the French Revolution.

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