scholarly journals Extraordinary Ordinariness: Realism Now and Then

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Levine
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ordinary Experience ◽  
Daily Routines ◽  
Uncle Tom's Cabin ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
Adam Bede ◽  
Mad Men ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Sopranos ◽  
Serial Television

Critics have often assumed that realism betrays its dedication to ordinary reality when it takes on lots of narrative and political excitement, but this article argues that realism works best when it combines humdrum routine with narrative shock. Levine claims that the nineteenth-century novel invented a paradoxical realist technique that has been adopted by contemporary serial television, which she calls “the shock of the banal.” Representing daily routines in ways that render them unfamiliar, funny, or strange, realist fictions strive to make ordinary experience feel extraordinary. This essay explores the formal, historical, and political implications of “the shock of the banal” in Adam Bede, Bleak House, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and their echoes in The Sopranos, Mad Men, and The Wire.

On the Foundations of Dahlhaus’s Foundations

2021 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-229
Author(s):  
Tobias Robert Klein
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Music History ◽  
Political Music ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Structural History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theoretical Reflection

In the foreword to his Grundlagen der Musikgeschichte (1977), translated into English as Foundations of Music History (1983), Carl Dahlhaus names three reasons for writing the book: the lack of theoretical reflection in his own field; the problem of mediation between methodological maxims and their political implications; and the difficulties he encountered while preparing his history of nineteenth-century music. Each of the three reasons can now be understood more precisely and historically contextualized in light of recently uncovered letters and notes. Dahlhaus’s methodological critiques of political music as conceptually distinct from aesthetically autonomous works—contrary to a popular claim by Anne Shreffler (2003)—were directed mainly at the “Western left.” Moreover, in the 1980s this controversy became intertwined with historiographical questions regarding the concept of “event” that was reinforced in publications by the “Gruppe Poetik und Hermeneutik.” A postscript discusses the English translation of the book and the concept of “structural history” in late Dahlhaus.

Paperwork and Philanthropy: Dickens’s Involvement in Metropolitan Improvement

2018 ◽  
pp. 130-172
Author(s):  
Joanna Hofer-Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Network ◽  
Housing Stock ◽  
Personal Involvement ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
East End ◽  
Charity Work ◽  
Octavia Hill

This chapter analyses Dickensian afterlives in nineteenth-century philanthropic works alongside an investigation of Dickens’s personal involvement in a scheme to improve London’s provision of housing stock for the East End poor. Dickens collaborated with a number of his social network on this project, including Angela Burdett Coutts and Dr Thomas Southwood Smith. His chief contributions were bureaucratic, and, contemporaneously with this work, he explored tensions between the effectiveness and ineffectiveness of paperwork in Bleak House. Thus, this chapter suggests that Dickens’s practical and administrative involvement in charity work informed his imaginative representation of the utility and futility of paperwork, and how he conceptualised the effectiveness of different forms of writing. Dickens famously contended for pet causes in his fiction, but the various ways in which Dickens’s works were appropriated by other people, and recontextualised to promote or to criticise philanthropic projects, reveal that his writing was not always useful in the sense that he imagined. Indeed, the instrumentality of Dickens’s fiction to effect charitable projects was often indirect. For example, philanthropists, including Mary Carpenter and Octavia Hill, curated literary afterlives to enhance the effectiveness of their arguments in published treatises, even though the novels are not always relevant to their causes.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
Maria A. Windell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Native American ◽  
New England ◽  
Uncle Tom's Cabin ◽  
Theatrical Performance

It is nearly impossible to talk about US sentimentalism without talking about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s influential 1852 best-selling novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The Introduction thus discusses US reactions to an 1887 Mexican theatrical performance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to illustrate how Transamerican Sentimentalism dislocates familiar scholarly narratives about US literary sentimentalism as a New England or abolitionist mode. The Introduction links transamerican and sentimental scholarship through questions of incommensurability before elaborating on how US sentimentalism connects to a broader Americas tradition. It then delineates the parameters of a transamerican sentimentalism by articulating the implications of reorienting such an important national and transatlantic mode. Finally, the Introduction offers an overview of how persistent recurrences of transamerican sentimentalism enabled African American, Native American, and Latinx writers to navigate the violent, multivalent realm of the nineteenth-century Americas.

‘Is This an Hotel? Are There Thieves in the House?’

2020 ◽  
pp. 204-239
Author(s):  
Ushashi Dasgupta
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Criminal Behaviour ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
Social Discourses ◽  
The Moonstone ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Aesthetic Forms

This chapter suggests that tenancy plays a major role in nineteenth-century detective fiction, an emerging genre that counted Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Charles Warren Adams as enthusiastic early practitioners. The chapter starts by investigating the relationship between geography, class, and morality in contemporary social discourses, focusing on the ‘low’ or ‘common’ lodging house in London. Low lodging houses were widely associated with criminal behaviour, and Dickens and Collins were interested in the function they could perform in their fiction. The chapter moves on to examine the murders that take place in Bleak House, The Moonstone, and The Notting Hill Mystery, and argues that rented space becomes a tool in the battle between detective and criminal. The chapter ends with an extended reading of Krook’s lodging house and rag-and-bone shop in Bleak House. Here, a mystery narrative intersects with farce and the Gothic, attesting to the porosity between aesthetic forms.

scholarly journals “MULHERES DIFÍCEIS”: A anti-heroína na ficção seriada televisiva americana

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 27007
Author(s):  
Mayka Castellano ◽  
Melina Meimaridis
Keyword(s):  
Mad Men ◽  
The Sopranos

Tendo em vista a expressiva quantidade de séries televisivas centradas em anti-heróis com destaque nas últimas décadas, tais como The Sopranos, Mad Men e Dexter, este artigo busca pensar a figura da anti-heroína. Para isso, apresentamos uma perspectiva histórica sobre a representação das mulheres nesse tipo de produção, destacando papéis recorrentes e suas implicações sociais. Para problematizar o contexto contemporâneo, quando personagens femininas mais complexas começam a aparecer, tomamos como objeto central da análise o drama UnREAL e partimos do pressuposto de que, embora apontem uma diversificação nas formas de representação da vivência feminina na ficção, as anti-heroínas são construídas através da aproximação ora com elementos tradicionalmente associados ao universo masculino, ora com habituais estereótipos de gênero.

Military Professionalism and Professional Militarism in Brazil, 1870–1970: Historical Perspectives and Political Implications

1972 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick M. Nunn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Ballistic Missile ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
Historical Perspectives ◽  
American States ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Military Professionalism

Since 1964 Brazil has been governed by successive regimes dominated by the armed forces and presided over by army generals. The men in charge of Brazil's destiny are professional officers, and like their counterparts in the neighboring Spanish American states they conceive of their governance as an obligation as much as a privilege, if not more. The professional officer in Latin America today is as far removed from his nineteenth century counterpart as ballistic missile systems are from the ballista.

The Rhetoric of Fragmentation: Fear and Faith in International Law

2009 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNE-CHARLOTTE MARTINEAU
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Legal Discourse ◽  
The Other ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Critical View ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The One ◽  
Fragmentation Of International Law

AbstractOver the last decade international lawyers have been increasingly concerned with the ‘fragmentation’ of international law. However, given that this expression has been repeatedly used by the profession since the mid-nineteenth century to depict the state of international law, one may wonder about its recent revival in the international legal discourse. Why has it re-emerged? What can we learn from previous invocations? An answer may be sought by contextualizing the fragmentation debate in a historical perspective. This brings out the repetitive and relatively stylized modes in which the profession has narrated legal developments. This essay suggests a correlation between periods of crisis in general and a critical view of fragmentation on the one hand, and periods of scholarly enthusiasm and the prevalence of positive views about fragmentation on the other. This analysis sheds critical light on both the implicit assumptions and political implications of the current debate on fragmentation.

scholarly journals ‘Get the Best Article in the Market’: Prostheses for Women in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Commerce

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Sweet
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
British Army ◽  
Card Holder ◽  
Nineteenth Century Literature ◽  
Daily Routines ◽  
Impaired People ◽  
The One ◽  
Century Literature

In 1822, George Webb Derenzy, a former captain in the British army, published a volume titled Enchiridion: Or, A Hand for the One-Handed. The text highlighted what Derenzy called his ‘One-Handed Apparatus,’ a collection of twenty instruments that he had made after losing his arm in the Napoleonic Wars. Designed to ease his daily routines of washing, eating, writing, and socializing, Derenzy’s inventions included, among other items, an egg cup that tilted in any direction and a card-holder that fanned out and folded up for easy transportation. This chapter examines Derenzy’s motivations for publishing the Enchiridion; the responses he received from readers around the globe; and the presuppositions about gender and class that ultimately constrained his consumer appeal and profit. Derenzy chose to publish, not patent, his contraptions due to his charitable desires to share them with others with lost limbs. His focus on using his prostheses to reclaim aspects of his social respectability and manly independence that his impairments seemed to threaten, however, ended up alienating poor, middling, and female patrons and limiting his success as an entrepreneur and a philanthropist. Perhaps due to these marketing missteps, Derenzy experienced the plight of many physically-impaired people during the period; unable to profitably labour, he sustained a steady descent into poverty.

Beyond Contempt: Ways to Read Uncle Tom's Cabin

PMLA ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 133 (3) ◽  
pp. 633-639
Author(s):  
Faye Halpern
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Harriet Beecher Stowe ◽  
Women Authors ◽  
Uncle Tom's Cabin ◽  
Popular Book ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States

I wrote my dissertation in the late 1990s. it compared harriet beecher stowe and other antebellum sentimental women writers with professional male orators and rhetoricians. I argued that these women authors hadn't been writing in a rhetorical room of their own. Instead, they were solving problems that the professionals could not. While writing the dissertation, I asked a friend who was in my program to read my chapter on the most popular book in the nineteenth-century United States, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

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