scholarly journals Coleridge’s Late Confessions: Personification, Convention, and Free Agency

Author(s):  
Joshua King

In this essay, I freshly examine Coleridge’s late poems, asking how several respond to his abiding fear of authors and readers surrendering their free wills to the fashions and conditioned attitudes of nineteenth-century print culture. Connecting this anxiety to Coleridge’s views of personification, the Bible, and his own public image, I interpret his late poems as confessions of the conventional determination of writing and reading that he resisted in his critical prose. This late concession, I suggest, might also be an unexpected defense of free agency: by displaying their conventionality, these late poems appear—at least to several early and recent readers—to reflect the strategy of a self-aware and self-determining poet.

2021 ◽  
pp. 228-244
Author(s):  
John Parker

This chapter considers the transformation from a culture of speaking about death to one which included writing and reading about death. It spotlights the final quarter of the nineteenth century, from the creation of the British Crown Colony of the Gold Coast in 1874 to its expansion with the formal incorporation of Asante and the savanna hinterland to the north in 1901–2. The chapter focuses on literacy and print culture as they developed on the Gold Coast littoral, a process which would extend into Asante and beyond only in the twentieth century. This print culture comprised both vernacular African languages and, with the departure of the Dutch in 1872, the language of the remaining colonizing power: English. The former was particularly associated with the Basel Mission, whose European and African agents pioneered the transcription of Ga and Twi as written languages and produced the first vernacular printed texts: prayer books, primers, dictionaries, the gospels and, by the 1860s to 1870s, compete translations of the Bible. The Bible, of course, has a great deal to say about mortality and the ends of life, however, the chapter concentrates on a different, secular medium of entextualized discourses about death: newspapers, which, as in Europe, 'accorded mortality new openings.'


2001 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Ober

Although the noted nineteenth-century Danish-Jewish writer Meïr Goldschmidt (1819–1887) made his entry into literature with a novel on Jewish themes, his later novels treated non-Jewish subjects, and his Jewish heritage appeared progressively to recede into the background of his public image. Literary historians have paid little attention to his complex perception of his own Jewishness and have made no effort to discover the immense significance he himself felt that Judaism had for his life and for his literary works. Moreover, no previous study has comprehensively treated Goldschmidt’s far-reaching network of interrelationships with an astonishing number of other major Jewish cultural figures of nineteenth-century Europe. During his restless travels crisscrossing Europe, which were facilitated by his phenomenal knowledge of the major European languages, he habitually sought out and associated with the leading Jewish figures in literature, the arts, journalism, and religion, but this fact and the resulting mutually influential connections he formed have been overlooked and ignored. This is the first focused and documented study of the Jewish aspect of Goldschmidt’s life, so vitally important to Goldschmidt himself and so indispensable to a complete understanding of his place in Danish and in world literatures.


2019 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 81-104
Author(s):  
Manu Braithwaite-Westoby

Few scholars would deny that some Old Norse myths have Christian counterparts, a phenomenon first noticed by nineteenth-century archaeologists and antiquarians in their observations of Anglo-Scandinavian stone sculpture in northern England. It is strange, therefore, that despite this long tradition, there is no systematic study on the topic. While this ambition is unfortunately outside the scope of this article, it does seek to address a number of Old Norse myths/legends and place them in conjunction with their Christian counterparts. One of the most important myths for Anglo-Scandinavian craftsmen was probably Sigurðr, who has an obvious parallel in Christ. The apocalyptic narrative in Voluspa known as Ragnarök was also a very popular subject and has a clear cognate in the apocalyptic sections of the Bible. Þórr and the Miðgarðsormr, though less appealing to artists, strongly recalls accounts of the conflict between Christ and Satan or Leviathan. This article uses a theoretical methodology called ‘figural interpretation’ to examine the Old Norse myths and explore how they reflect certain myths from the new religion. While distinctly art historical in approach, this article also invokes some Old Norse texts where relevant, which may themselves have been influenced by Christian thinking.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth Renker

American literary histories of the post-Civil War period typically treat “poetry” and “realism” as oppositional phenomena. The core narrative holds that “realism,” the major literary “movement” of the era, developed apace in prose fiction, while poetry, stuck in a hopelessly idealist late-romantic mode, languished and stagnated in a genteel “twilight of the poets.” This chapter excavates the historical origins of the twilight narrative in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It shows how this narrative emerged as a function of a particular idealist ideology of poetry that circulated widely in authoritative print-culture sites. The chapter demonstrates that the twilight narrative was only one strain in a complex cultural debate about poetry, a debate that entailed multiple voices and positions that would later fall out of literary history when the twilight narrative achieved institutional status as fact.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 320
Author(s):  
Ralph Lee

In many countries with a strong Orthodox Christian presence there are tensions between Evangelicals and Orthodox Christians. These tensions are rooted in many theological, ecclesiological, and epistemological differences. In practice, one of the crucial causes of tension comes down to different practical understandings of what a Christian disciple looks like. This paper examines key aspects of discipleship as expressed in revival movements in Orthodox Churches Egypt, India and Ethiopia which are connected to the challenges presented by the huge expansion of Evangelical Protestant mission from the nineteenth century. Key aspects will be evaluated in comparison with aspects that are understood to characterize disciples in Evangelical expressions, including: differing understandings of the sacraments and their place in the life of a disciple; ways in which different traditions engage with the Bible and related literary works; contrasting outlooks on discipleship as an individual and a community way of life; and differing understanding of spiritual disciplines.


1995 ◽  
Vol 82 (2) ◽  
pp. 712
Author(s):  
R. Laurence Moore ◽  
Peter J. Wosh

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