Rus’/Russia and the Mongols: Some Remarks on the Historical Meaning and the Present Debate of the Mongol-Tatar yoke

The Mongol conquests and the following dominations have long been the subject of historical reevaluation by the scientific community. The spread and progressive specialization of Mongolian studies of the latest decades have also affected the westernmost of the four khanates resulted from the division of the Empire: the ulus Jochi, better known as Golden Horde. Russia’s territorial vastity, its proximity to Western Europe, and its multicultural characters have all attracted the historians’ attention to the Mongol era. By retracing the crucial historiographical passages, from nineteenth-century studies to the present day, this article aims to provide a broad and updated perspective of how the scientific debate has developed internationally and its relationship with the macro-levels of the Russian society today: from politics to public opinion.

Ecological Formalism; or, Love Among the Ruins

The current global environmental crisis is an uncanny but perversely material aftereffect of Victorian England, the world’s first fossil-fueled industrial society and its most powerful global empire. Our entanglement with this past challenges current procedures of cultural analysis, requiring a new attention to form and method, and bridging the divide between ecological and postcolonial approaches in nineteenth-century studies. In response we propose an ecological formalism, which focuses on the category of form as a means for producing environmental and therefore political knowledge. The chapters in this volume explore how Victorian writers recognized empire and ecology as posing problems of intellectual scale and recognize that these aesthetic or formal concerns generate challenges of critical methodology.

The Audience of Ammianus Marcellinus and the Circulation of Books in the Late Roman World

Since the late nineteenth century, studies of Ammianus’ audience have reached widely divergent conclusions. Research has focused on two opposed theses: while some scholars have seen the pagan senatorial aristocracy as the audience of the Res Gestae, others have assigned that role to the imperial bureaucracy. However, in thinking that a work could reach—or target—exclusively the members of a specific social group, the prevalent views on Ammianus’ audience contradict what we know about the circulation of books in the late Roman world. In contrast to previous research, this study proposes a new approach based on an analysis of the information available on book circulation in Ammianus’ time. This analysis shows that the audience of the Res Gestae was most likely socially diverse.

Some Remarks on the Nineteenth Century Studies of the Euthyphro in Poland

The present paper examined how Polish philosophers, historians and classicists understood and interpreted Plato’s Euthyphro in the 19th century. The article provides evidence for a twofold interest that Polish readers had for the dialogue in this period. Firstly, Catholic think­ers focused on the ethical issues of the dialogue and supported the reviv­al of the Scholasticism, confirming, at the same time, the vitality of Plato’s thought. Secondly, the text of Plato’s opusculum was a conveni­ent didactic material for various teachers of the Greek language: while the Euthyphro gave them the opportunity to raise ethical and logical issues, they also taught philosophy on the basis of this dialogue.

Introduction

This chapter evaluates the competing ways that ‘style’ has been said to operate in language. Rather than figure thought as primary and pre-verbal, and language as a secondary delivery system, this chapter recommends a messier relationship, whereby writing is not a simple act of translating but also a means of clarifying or generating ideas. The twenty subsequent chapters of this book exemplify this account of style as a mode of thinking through. Outlines of these individual essays are given, and correspondences drawn. The value of the book as a whole is addressed, as it contributes to scholarship on style and on the essay, and to nineteenth-century studies in particular: by revaluating some of the most influential figures of that age, providing a literary context for those celebrated ‘minds’ and ‘moralists’, while also re-imagining the possible alliances, interplays, and generative tensions between thinking, thinkers, style, and stylists.

Thinking Through Style

What is ‘style’, and how does it relate to thought in language? It has often been treated as something merely linguistic, independent of thought, ornamental; stylishness for its own sake. Or else it has been said to subserve thought, by mimicking, delineating, or heightening ideas that are already expressed in the words. This ambitious and timely book explores a third, more radical possibility, in which style operates as a verbal mode of thinking through. Rather than figure thought as primary and pre-verbal, and language as a secondary delivery system, style is conceived here as having the capacity to clarify or generate thinking. The book’s generic focus is on non-fiction prose, and it looks across the long nineteenth century. Leading scholars survey twenty authors, to show where writers who have gained reputations as either ‘stylists’ or as ‘thinkers’ both in fact exploit the interplay between the what and the how of their prose. But the study demonstrates more than that celebrated stylists might after all have thoughts worth attending to, or that distinguished thinkers might be enriched for us if we paid more due to their style. More than reversing the conventional categories, the innovative chapters collected here show how ‘style’ and ‘thinking’ can be approached as a shared concern. At a moment when, especially in nineteenth-century studies, interest in style is re-emerging, this book revaluates some of the most influential figures of that age, re-imagining the possible alliances, interplays, and generative tensions between thinking, thinkers, style, and stylists.

Interventions

This book explores a number of new critical contexts in which nineteenth century literature can be discussed. The volume also explores the idea of the Victorian ‘Afterlife’ and examines neo-Victorian text based narratives and film adaptations. Topics discussed include science, poetry, the Gothic, anatomical exhibitions, the spread of liberalism, Anglo-American publishing, and Punjabi popular culture. The national contexts of literary production are explored as are the international cultural exchanges of the period. The book is intended to provide a critical re-examination of the long nineteenth century by bringing together a number of intellectually challenging perspectives that seek to develop the field of nineteenth century studies.