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This challenging book brings to light a mythic dimension of seventeen important eighteenth and early nineteenth-century narratives that revolve around the persecution of one or more important female characters, and offers original reading of novels by Richardson, Fielding, Burney, Radcliffe, Godwin, Austen, Scott, and others. The myth in question, which Raymond Hilliard calls "the myth of persecution and reparation," serves as a major vehicle for the early novel's preoccupation with the "mother," a mythic figure distinct from the historical mother or from the mother as she is represented in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century maternal ideology. Hilliard argues that the myth of persecution and reparation derives from the ropos of female sacrifice in the romance tradition, and shows that this topos is central to several kinds of novels-realist, Gothic, Jacobin, feminist, and historical. Hilliard contends that the narrative of persecution and reparation anticipates the twentieth-century maternal myth associated with the work of Melanie Klein and other "relational model" psychoanalytic theorists, and he thus also examines the psychosexual significance of the "mother." Hilliard explores the relation of psychosexual themes to social representations, and delineates a new theory of plot-both tragic and comic plots- in the early novel. --Book Jacket.
John Locke asked, “since all things that exist are merely particulars, how come we by general terms?” Essential Scots and the Idea of Unionism in Anglo-Scottish Literature, 1603–1832 tells a story about aesthetics and politics that looks back to the 1603 Union of Crowns and James VI/I’s emigration from Edinburgh to London. Considering the emergence of British unionism alongside the literary rise of both description and “the individual,” Rivka Swenson builds on extant scholarship with original close readings that illuminate the inheritances of 1603, a date of considerable but untraced importance in Anglo-Scottish literary and cultural history whose legacies are still being negotiated today. The 1603 Union of Crowns spurred interest in exploring the aesthetic politics of unionism in relation to an alleged Scottish essence that could be manipulated to resist or support “Britishness,” even as the king’s emigration generated a legacy of gendered representations of traveling Scots and “Scotlands-left-behind.” Discussing writers such as Bacon, Defoe, Smollett, Johnson, Macpherson, Ferrier, and Scott along with lesser-known or forgotten popular authors (and ballads, transparencies, newspapers, joke books, cant dictionaries, political speeches, histories, travel narratives, engravings, material artifacts such as medals and snuffboxes), Essential Scots describes the years 1603 to 1832 as a crucial period in British history. Paradoxically, the political and cultural exploration of ideas about “unionism” in relation to a supposed “essential Scottishness” participated in the increasing prominence of both description and the “individual” in nineteenth-century Scottish literature; Swenson persuasively concludes that essential Scottishness (as both “identity” and symbolism) was refigured to mediate a national synthesis between the emergent individual and the nascent British nation—as well as the naturalized, even de-politicized, literary synthesis of particulars within putatively analogous narrative wholes.
"In a searching but sympathetic series of textual analyses, Wallace argues that the canon of eighteenth-century English Literature was bron out of the interplay between literary nationalism and an imperial internationalism. Imperial Characters will add considerably to the globalization of the discipline that has been underway for some years now."---Suvir Kaul, University of Pennsvlvania --
In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literature, Scandinavia emerged as a setting for Gothic terror. This book explores the extensive use of Nordic superstition as it provided a vocabulary for Gothic texts, examining the cultural significance these references held for writers exploring Britain’s northern heritage. In Gothic publications, Nordic superstition sometimes parallels the representations of Catholicism, allowing writers to gloat at its phantasms and delusions. Thus, runic spells, incantations, and necromantic communications (of which Norse tradition afforded many examples) could replace practices usually assigned to Catholic superstition. Yet Nordic lore did more than merely supplant hackneyed Gothic formulas; it presented readers with an alternative conception of ‘Otherness’. Nordic texts—chiefly based on the Edda and the supernatural Scandinavian ballad tradition—were seen as pre-Christian beliefs of the Gothic (i.e., Germanic) peoples, including the Anglo-Saxons. The book traces the development of this Nordic Gothic, situating it within wider literary, historical, political, and cultural contexts.
This volume focusses on the rarely discussed reverse side of traditional, ‘given’ objects of studies, namely absence rather than presence (of text) and silence rather than sound. It does so from the bifocal and interdisciplinary perspective which is a hallmark of the book series Word and Music Studies. The twelve contributors to the main subject of this volume approach it from various systematic and historical angles and cover, among others, questions such as to what extent absence can become significant in the first place or iconic (silent) functions of musical scores, as well as discussions of fields ranging from baroque opera to John Cage’s 4’33’’. The volume is complemented by two contributions dedicated to further surveying the vast field of word and music studies. The essays collected here were originally presented at the Ninth International Conference on Word and Music Studies held at London University in August 2013 and organised by the International Association for Word and Music Studies. They are of relevance to scholars and students of literature, music and intermediality studies as well as to readers generally interested in phenomena of absence and silence.
Challenging the ‘success story’ of curiosity from original sin to intellectual virtue, this study uses an innovative methodological approach to the history of ideas as a non-teleological neural network based on current research in information technology and neurophysiology. The network offers a dynamic alternative to the ‘development’ of curiosity within the progress-oriented mythology of the Enlightenment, emphasizing the oscillation and interaction of ideas within the processes of their construction, as well as exposing the power relations behind them. The text corpus focuses on enactments of curiosity in English literature of the 'Long' Eighteenth Century (c. 1680-1818), such as transgression of boundaries, breach of taboo, gendered curiosity, sensationalism, or academic endeavour, bringing together a variety of examples from all major genres. The Age of Curiosity contributes to current debates on a post-Foucauldian renewal of Lovejoy’s history of ideas in Enlightenment studies, exploring both curiosity as an indispensable trait for the search of answers to the fundamental yet unresolved questions of ‘identity’ or ‘truth’, and its potential as cura, the care for others and the world.
An in-depth view of the way popular female stereotypes were reflected in—and were shaped by—the portrayal of women in Disney’s animated features. In Good Girls and Wicked Witches, Amy M. Davis re-examines the notion that Disney heroines are rewarded for passivity. Davis proceeds from the assumption that, in their representations of femininity, Disney films both reflected and helped shape the attitudes of the wider society, both at the time of their first release and subsequently. Analyzing the construction of (mainly human) female characters in the animated films of the Walt Disney Studio between 1937 and 2001, she attempts to establish the extent to which these characterizations were shaped by wider popular stereotypes. Davis argues that it is within the most constructed of all moving images of the female form—the heroine of the animated film—that the most telling aspects of Woman as the subject of Hollywood iconography and cultural ideas of American womanhood are to be found. “A fascinating compilation of essays in which [Davis] examined the way Disney has treated female characters throughout its history.” —PopMatters
This open access book is the culmination of many years of research on what happened to the bodies of executed criminals in the past. Focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it looks at the consequences of the 1752 Murder Act. These criminal bodies had a crucial role in the history of medicine, and the history of crime, and great symbolic resonance in literature and popular culture. Starting with a consideration of the criminal corpse in the medieval and early modern periods, chapters go on to review the histories of criminal justice, of medical history and of gibbeting under the Murder Act, and ends with some discussion of the afterlives of the corpse, in literature, folklore and in contemporary medical ethics. Using sophisticated insights from cultural history, archaeology, literature, philosophy and ethics as well as medical and crime history, this book is a uniquely interdisciplinary take on a fascinating historical phenomenon.
Set against Iceland's stark landscape, Hannah Kent brings to vivid life the story of Agnes, who, charged with the brutal murder of her former master, is sent to an isolated farm to await execution. Set against Iceland's stark landscape, Hannah Kent brings to vivid life the story of Agnes, who, charged with the brutal murder of her former master, is sent to an isolated farm to await execution. Horrified at the prospect of housing a convicted murderer, the family at first avoids Agnes. Only Tv=ti, a priest Agnes has mysteriously chosen to be her spiritual guardian, seeks to understand her. But as Agnes's death looms, the farmer's wife and their daughters learn there is another side to the sensational story they've heard. Riveting and rich with lyricism, Burial Rites evokes a dramatic existence in a distant time and place, and asks the question, how can one woman hope to endure when her life depends upon the stories told by others?
A timely and comprehensive history of female husbands in Anglo-America from the eighteenth through the turn of the twentieth century.