scholarly journals Hidden Meaning: Andrew Lang, H. Rider Haggard, Sigmund Freud, and Interpretation

Author(s):  
Kathy Alexis Psomiades

This essay examines the role Andrew Lang played in the circulation of ideas within and among the fields of anthropology, literature, and psychoanalysis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lang popularized anthropologist Edward Tylor’s theories about myth, and championed them against those of the philologist Max Müller. He provided the occasion for novelist H. Rider Haggard’s engagement with these ideas in the novel She, which Haggard dedicated to him, and he drew upon these theories of myth in essays that explain the value of Haggard’s novels. Finally, both Haggard’s novel and Lang’s anthropological writing shaped the work of Sigmund Freud. Attention to Lang’s role as a transmitter of the ideas of others across genres and disciplines allows us to see how central the problem of interpretation was to the disciplinary formation of anthropology, literature, and psychoanalysis.

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxwell Uphaus

The burgeoning subfield of literary oceanic studies has largely neglected modernist literature, maintaining that the end of the age of sail in the late nineteenth century also marks an end to maritime literature's substantive cultural role. This essay outlines a way of reading the maritime in modernism through an analysis of the engagement with history and temporality in Joseph Conrad's sea novel The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897). The novel depicts the sea as variously an anachronistic sphere left behind by history, an integral foundation to history, an element that eclipses history, and an archive of history's repressed violence. This article traces the interactions of these various views of the sea's relationship to history, highlighting how they are shaped and inflected by the novel's treatment of race. Based on this analysis, it proposes an approach to the sea in modernist literature that focuses on its historiographical rather than social import.


Author(s):  
Cristina Vatulescu

This chapter approaches police records as a genre that gains from being considered in its relationships with other genres of writing. In particular, we will follow its long-standing relationship to detective fiction, the novel, and biography. Going further, the chapter emphasizes the intermedia character of police records not just in our time but also throughout their existence, indeed from their very origins. This approach opens to a more inclusive media history of police files. We will start with an analysis of the seminal late nineteenth-century French manuals prescribing the writing of a police file, the famous Bertillon-method manuals. We will then track their influence following their adoption nationally and internationally, with particular attention to the politics of their adoption in the colonies. We will also touch briefly on the relationship of early policing to other disciplines, such as anthropology and statistics, before moving to a closer look at its intersections with photography and literature.


2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 140
Author(s):  
LUDMYLLA MENDES LIMA

<p><strong>Resumo: </strong>O presente artigo trata de analisar o modo particular como Machado de Assis constrói a representação dos fatos históricos brasileiros no romance <em>Esaú e Jacó</em>. Este romance traz em seu enredo dois importantes fatos históricos ocorridos no final do século XIX: a Abolição da Escravatura, em 1888 e a Proclamação da República, em 1889. O tratamento literário dado pelo autor aos fatos, imprimindo irrelevância aos mesmos no contexto do enredo, revela que para ser Realista ‘à brasileira’, naquelas circunstâncias específicas, era necessário mostrar o curso da História tendo como base a ausência de transformação.</p><p><strong>Palavras-chave</strong>: Machado de Assis – <em>Esaú e Jacó</em> – História do Brasil.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Abstract: </strong>This paper intends to analyze the special way Machado de Assis builds the representation of Brazilian historical facts in the novel <em>Esaú e Jacó</em>. This novel brings in its plot two important historical events that happened in the late Nineteenth century: the Abolition of Slavery, in 1888; and the Proclamation of the Republic, in 1889. The literary treatment given by the author to the events, printing irrelevance to them, in the context of the plot, reveals that to build a Brazilian realism, in those circumstances, it was necessary to show the course of history based on the absence of transformation.</p><p><strong>Keywords</strong>: Machado de Assis – <em>Esaú e Jacó –</em> Brazilian History.</p>


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilma Fitriani ◽  
Leni Marlina

This thesis is the analysis of a novel which written by Chris Abani entitled Graceland (2004). It explores the issue of step up efforts to enlightenment which reflected by the main character. It is also intended to find out the contribution of fictional devices such as character, plot (conflict), and setting in revealing the issue of efforts to enlightenment. This analysis is related to the concept of life instinct which self-awareness by Sigmund Freud that is supported by the text-based and context-based interpretation. The result of this analysis shows about the way the main character effort to enlightenment in dealing with any situation in his life by building self-awareness, gaining thinking skill and having vocational skill.  


Urban History ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (04) ◽  
pp. 722-746
Author(s):  
ANNE PETTERSON

ABSTRACT:Public monuments are considered an important tool in the nineteenth-century nation-building project. Yet while the intended (nationalist) message of the monumental landscape is often clear, the popular perception of the statues and memorials has been little problematized. This contribution analyses the popular interaction with public monuments in late nineteenth-century Amsterdam and questions whether ordinary people understood the nationalist meaning. With the help of visual sources – engravings, lithographs and the novel medium of photography – we become aware of the multilayered meanings and usages of the monuments in daily urban life, thus tackling the methodological challenge of studying the monumental landscape from below.


PMLA ◽  
1956 ◽  
Vol 71 (5) ◽  
pp. 900-909
Author(s):  
Henry A. Grubbs

A critical cliché often heard today is that Proust was fundamentally a poet rather than a novelist. The historians of literature and the critics do not put it quite as crudely as that, but their remarks frequently permit such an assumption on the part of the reader. Thus the Castex and Surer manual, in its twentieth-century volume, finds in “toute l'œuvre [de Proust] un climat d'intense Poesie” (p. 82). And Georges Cattaui, in his recent survey of the present status of Proust, though he does not in so many words call Proust a poet or his novel a poem, does say that Proust is above all the heir “de Nerval, de Baudelaire, de Mallarmé,—de ces poètes qui lui ont enseigné l'art de transfigurer les choses, l'art de délivrer la beauté prisonnière … ” Now all this is true if it is merely taken as a vivifying figure of speech, if it merely means that Proust was not a realistic novelist, and that he shows the influence of the great French poets of the late nineteenth century, or that, to use a convenient term, he was a symbolist, like his contemporaries, Claudel, Gide, and Valéry. But it has so often been said in our time that the twentieth century has seen the breaking down of the distinctions between the novel and poetry, that it seems to me useful to demonstrate, by studying two treatments of the same subject, one that of a novelist, Proust, the other that of a poet, Valéry, that there remains a fundamental and profound difference between the intent and the method of prose fiction and of poetry, at least the type that is today called “pure” poetry.


1974 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stanley Rothman ◽  
Phillip Isenberg

Relying heavily upon Freud's greatest work, The Interpretation of Dreams, Professors Carl Schorske and William McGrath have attempted to increase our understanding of the origins of psychoanalysis. Both authors feel that the key to Freud's discoveries lies in his reaction to the sociopolitical realities of late nineteenth-century Vienna, and while the articles differ somewhat in emphasis their arguments are sufficiently similar so that they can be treated together. To Schorske and McGrath psychoanalysis had its origins in Freud's decision to give up his initial desire to mount a direct political (even revolutionary) attack on the inequities of the existing society for a “counter-political” psychology which enabled him to adjust to the existing political situation and even achieve a measure of scientific success. As a youth Freud had radical political aspirations and was even active in radical political organizations. However, the hopelessness of the liberal position in Vienna and the rise of anti-Semitic popular movements led Freud to believe that direct political action would not be successful. By reducing political conflict to father-son conflict Freud, like other liberals, would ignore the reality of the political and learn to live (albeit imperfectly) in a world which he could not influence. A career in science could bring recognition and at least partial acceptance, and thus a minimum of satisfaction at least.


2009 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-107
Author(s):  
Deak Nabers

The realist novel has long been understood in terms of its representation of the diffusion of political agency into social and economic practices. This essay claims that realism, at least as it emerged in the work of late-nineteenth-century American writers such as William Dean Howells, does not record this process of diffusion so much as anatomize it, and that novels like A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) participated in a widespread and multivalent effort, in American law and literature alike, to specify the proper boundaries of the state's authority in relation other increasingly visible forms of social and economic coercion.


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