scholarly journals Anon is Not Dead: Towards a History of Anonymous Authorship in Early-Twentieth-Century Britain1

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Kopley

In 1940, Virginia Woolf blamed the printing press for killing the oral tradition that had promoted authorial anonymity: “Anon is dead,” she pronounced. Scholarship on the printed word has abundantly recognized that, far from being dead, Anon remained very much alive in Britain through the end of the nineteenth century. Even in the twentieth century, Anon lived on, among particular groups and particular genres, yet little scholarship has addressed this endurance. Here, after defining anonymity and sketching its history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, I offer three findings. First, women had less need for anonymity as they gained civil protections elsewhere, but anonymity still appealed to writers made vulnerable by their marginalized identities or risky views. Second, in the early twentieth century the genre most likely to go unsigned was autobiography, in all its forms. Third, on rare occasions, which I enumerate, strict anonymity achieves what pseudonymity cannot. I conclude by suggesting that among British modernist authors, the decline of practiced anonymity stimulated desired anonymity and the prizing of anonymity as an aesthetic ideal.

1966 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wyatt Macgaffey

Recent accounts of the proto-history of Africa use data from physical anthropology, but also concepts of race which physical anthropologists in general have abandoned as unsatisfactory; the paper seeks to explain this phenomenon sociologically. Late nineteenth-century political and sociological trends helped to produce patterns of thought which can no longer be regarded as affording adequate explanations of social processes. These patterns combined idealism, or the method of contrasting ideal types, with pseudo-Darwinism, which sought the origins of political development in the interaction of differently endowed groups. In African ethnography of the early twentieth century such concepts led to the view that the continent was inhabited by two groups, Caucasoids and Negroids, and by mixtures of the two which remained mixtures, to be analysed as such. The Caucasoid and Negroid types were regarded as absolute and universal, represented equally in the biological, linguistic, cultural and political aspects of man.


2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 27-50
Author(s):  
Hanna Walsdorf

The written history of German sword dance has seen a number of quaint twists. With the rediscovery in 1455 of a short Tacitus quote (98 C.E.) presumably proving the existence of the sword dance in ancient Germanic times, claims were soon made that it had persisted for millennia. From the late nineteenth century onward, nationalists and body culture theorists, each in their way, favored the idea of revitalizing an ethnic German dance form. This article aims to delineate the respective discourses, and illustrates these by portraying the choreographic renditions of an imagined German sword dance tradition by Olga Desmond and Harald Kreutzberg.


1977 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gene R. Garthwaite

The very use of the term “Bakhtiyārī” with its implicit notion of sociopolitical unity has obscured the nature of the organization and relationships of these pastoral nomadic tribes.1 At the same time that observers of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Iran described the Bakhtiyārī as a unit, they could not explain the prevailing disunity that characterized tribal relationships. Major obstacles for analysis of this problem have been the office of the īlkhānī, paramount chief of all the Bakhtiyārī, and the domination of tribal history by the family of those eligible for this position, which has imposed a certain unity upon recent Bakhtiyārī history. The view that an īlkhānī had long ruled the Bakhtiyārī and that the tribes constituted a confederation has been accepted since the late nineteenth century. Yet the first īlkhānī, Husain Qulī Khan, was not appointed until 1867, and possibly only during his. tenure in office (d. 1882), and again during the Persian Revolution, have the Bakhtiyārī functioned as a true confederation. The significance of prevailing disunity under a temporary political and administrative unity goes beyond the history of the Bakhtiyārī and has important implications for an understanding of Iranian society and history itself.


Love, Inc. ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 83-112
Author(s):  
Laurie Essig

Getting engaged now requires more emotional and financial resources than ever before. Here Essig traces the history of engagements from the birth of companionate marriages in the nineteenth century to the invention of rituals like the bended knee and fetish items like the diamond ring in the early twentieth century. But the real change happened at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as engagements became “spectacular,” requiring not just highly staged events but also highly produced videos and images that could then be disseminated to the larger world.


Author(s):  
Brian Porter

This chapter argues that as recently as the 1880s, Catholicism, as it existed in Poland at the time, was still somewhat resistant to expressions of antisemitism. Catholicism, in other words, was configured in such a way in the late nineteenth century as to make it hard for antisemites to express their views without moving to the very edges of the Catholic framework. Catholicism and antisemitism did overlap at the time, but the common ground was much more confined than it would later become. If one moves forward fifty years, to the 1930s, one sees a different picture: the discursive boundaries of Catholicism in Poland had shifted to such a degree that antisemitism became not only possible, but also difficult to avoid. The upshot of this argument is that Catholicism in Poland is not antisemitic in any sort of essential way, and that religion did not directly generate the forms of hatred that would become so deadly and virulent in the early twentieth century. None the less, Catholicism did become amenable to antisemitism in Poland, so much so that the Church in Poland between the wars was one of the country's leading sources of prejudice and animosity.


Author(s):  
Gerard P. Loughlin

This chapter considers how gay identities—and so gay affections—were formed in the course of the twentieth century, building on the late nineteenth-century invention of the ‘homosexual’. It also considers earlier construals of same-sex affections and the people who had them, the soft men and hard women of the first century and the sodomites of the eleventh. It thus sketches a history of continuities and discontinuities, of overlapping identities and emotional possibilities. The chapter resists the assumption that gay identity and experience can be reduced to anything less than the multitude of gay people, and that as Christians they have to give an account of themselves in a way that heterosexual Christians do not. The chapter warns against thinking gay identity undone in Christ.


2020 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 434-454
Author(s):  
Dan D. Cruickshank

This article uses the history of the Ornaments Rubric in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to explore the emergence of claims to self-governance within the Church of England in this period and the attempts by parliament to examine how independent the legal system of the church was from the secular state. First, it gives an overview of the history of the Ornaments Rubric in the various editions of the Book of Common Prayer and the Acts of Uniformity, presenting the legal uncertainty left by centuries of Prayer Book revision. It then explores how the Royal Commission into Ritualism (1867–70) and the Public Worship Regulation Act (1874) attempted to control Ritualist interpretations of the Ornaments Rubric through secular courts. Examining the failure of these attempts, it looks towards the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline (1904–6). Through the evidence given to the commission, it shows how the previous royal commission and the work of parliament and the courts had failed to stop the continuation of Ritualist belief in the church's independence from secular courts. Using the report of the royal commission, it shows how the commissioners attempted to build a via media between strict spiritual independence and complete parliamentary oversight.


Experiment ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-71
Author(s):  
Louise Hardiman

This article examines several important designs by Elena Dmitrievna Polenova (1850-1898) for art embroideries and textile panels. These are the least studied of Polenova’s works, but offer new insights into the artist’s role as a leader of the neo-national movement in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Russian art. Linking extant designs with photographs of exhibition displays and unpublished archival sources, including contemporary accounts by the British art journalist Netta Peacock (1864-1938), this project seeks to initiate the important process of identifying and analysing Polenova’s designs within the context of the movement.


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