{"title":"Going underground: race, space, and the subterranean in the nineteenth-century United States","authors":"Nicole Waller","doi":"10.1080/08905495.2023.2219479","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2023.2219479","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43278,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"45 1","pages":"303 - 305"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44818700","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Charles Marville and the politics of the urban sublime","authors":"R. Rexer","doi":"10.1080/08905495.2023.2217816","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2023.2217816","url":null,"abstract":"Beginning in the 1850s, the city of Paris underwent an unprecedented transformation. At the instigation of Baron Haussmann, urban planner to Emperor Napoleon III, the city’s maze of narrow streets was systematically torn down to make way for grand, modern boulevards. The daunting task of documenting the city in transition fell to one Charles Marville, who was granted the official title of “photographer of the city” in 1862 and would spend the next two decades photographing old and new Paris on municipal commission (Kennel 2013, 28–29). Marville was remarkably prolific, producing hundreds of photographs during two periods of work for the city government before and after the Paris Commune, and received accolades for his photographic skill during his life. Yet perhaps because most of the work Marville did in the 1860s and 1870s was destined for government archives, he was not even given an obituary upon his death in 1879 (Kennel 2013, 40). He remained largely forgotten until 1980, when the first major show of his work cemented Marville’s status as a premier urban archivist, fostered by the burgeoning post-modern fascination with the archive as genre. As such he often appeared in scholarly debates about attempts to canonize other “archival” photographers, particularly Eugene Atget, as the rock to which such arthistorical pretensions were bound and sunk. More recently, a major show of his work at the National Gallery of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2014 took precisely the opposite approach, attempting to reposition him as an underappreciated artist and to show the breadth of Marville’s talents, from the early days of his career as an illustrator through his turn as the photographer of Paris. No attempts to rehabilitate Marville, however, can shake one enduring blot on his reputation: his purportedly bad politics. While Marville and his contemporaries left few traces concerning the perceived political implications of his work, twentiethand twenty-first-century scholarship of Marville has been nearly unanimous in its stance on the issue. Shelley Rice has called Marville “Haussmann’s advance man,” and accused him of using the camera to redefine the streets in “the same terms used by his ‘boss’” (1999, 86; 88). In this view, Marville’s photographs of Paris are, in the words of one critic, “part of an official discourse meant to produce the built forms [of the new Paris] and to control their reception” (Lee 2013, 110). Recent work on Marville that valorizes his work both in aesthetic and documentary terms, such as articles and book chapters by Kennel, Locke, and Clayson, complicate Rice’s claim but do not go so far as to argue for a total reconsideration of his reputation as a shill for","PeriodicalId":43278,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"45 1","pages":"233 - 252"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44859453","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The heart of the nation: fraternal love and nation-building in the histories of Jules Michelet","authors":"Brad Montgomery-Anderson","doi":"10.1080/08905495.2023.2212090","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2023.2212090","url":null,"abstract":"In A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution , Mona Ozouf notes that the fi rst two com-ponents in the famous revolutionary slogan liberté , égalité , fraternité represent a demand for rights, while the third is a moral obligation. The cry for fraternité has various interpret-ations – Is it expressing a right to rebellion? A sentiment that is a necessary precursor to liberté and égalité ? She notes that this third component of the slogan was a late addition; it only fi rst appeared in the Constitution of 1791 (1989, 716). Fraternity does seem to be a necessary component in many de fi nitions of the term nation . Benedict Anderson famously de fi ned it by using the idea of an imagined community : “ … it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship ” (1983, 6). A century earlier Ernst Renan in What is a Nation? de fi ned it as “ a vast solidarity ” (2018, 261). In both de fi nitions the nation is a creation of the imagination, a construct based on idealized bonds of a ff ection for imagined fellow citizens. The nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet especially emphasizes the role of fraternité in building the French nation. In his vision, the ideal political entity is the nation-state, a convergence of the machinery and laws of the state with the warm and personal fraternal bonds that hold together the nation. The French Revolution reaches its apogee when nation – “ la grande amitié qui contient tous les autres ” (Michelet 1974, 199) [the great friendship that contains all the others] – converges with the impersonal political power of the state. 1 France is unique in Michelet ’ s thought because it is the fi rst country to achieve this new status of nation-state. Fraternity is the means as well as the ends of this process, and fraternal love is an active force that creates and","PeriodicalId":43278,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"45 1","pages":"215 - 231"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46806324","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The recurring “discovery” of Hokkaido and the Ainu: three decades of nineteenth-century British travelogues","authors":"John L. Hennessey","doi":"10.1080/08905495.2023.2200129","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2023.2200129","url":null,"abstract":"What is the explorer or scientist to do when rapid advances in technology, communi-cations, and transport leave few truly untouched regions for them to “ discover ” ? This article will explore the case of Europeans and Americans during the second half of the nineteenth century who sought to make a name for themselves by exploring Hokkaido and studying the Ainu, a people indigenous to the Okhotsk region in Northeast Asia. I will argue that despite appearances, a careful reading and comparison of published sources from this period reveals that the Ainu in fact were visited by a signi fi cant number of Westerners and that these “ explorers ” made extensive use of a pre-existing travel infrastructure which expanded over time. I will analyze the diverse strategies that these Westerners combined to sell their travelogues to a British reading public, including emphasizing and exaggerating their supposed “ discoveries, ” claiming important contributions to science, and employing humor and exoticism.","PeriodicalId":43278,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"45 1","pages":"253 - 270"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46243831","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Islam, technology, circulation, and the global humanist imaginary in ʿAli Mubārak's ʿAlam al-Dīn (1882)","authors":"Mona El-Sherif","doi":"10.1080/08905495.2023.2188825","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2023.2188825","url":null,"abstract":"In the nineteenth century, steamers, trains, and telegraphs altered the social experience of space and time, leading to the development of a sense of simultaneity and proximity among previously disparate parts of the world (Kern 1983). In Egypt technologies of travel and communication such as trains, steamers, and telegraphs were implemented shortly after the inauguration of the first Arabic press in Bulāq, Cairo in 1822. Both modernization efforts and colonial interests accelerated the proliferation of telegraph poles and train connections in the country (Barak 2013). Previous studies illustrate how those new technologies facilitated political centralization and enabled the development of a nascent public sphere that informed new notions of nationhood in Egypt (Fahmy 2014, 20). Less commonly known, however, is the impact of those technologies of travel and communication on cultural and artistic innovations in nineteenth-century Egypt. In the fictional account, ʿAlam al-Dīn, written by the Egyptian modernizer ʿAlī Mubārak pasha (1823–1893), the intertextual link between technology and information shapes his approach to narrative writing. ʿAlam al-Dīn’s style and content are emblematic of the innovative ways in which nineteenth-century Egyptian authors deployed ArabIslamic knowledge to address the unprecedented sense of simultaneity and proximity that resulted from the proliferation of new technologies heralding a new stage of global human history. In this essay, I analyze how ʿAlam al-Dīn illustrates the links between the embryonic nineteenth-century Arabic narrative discourse and the proliferation of new media that expanded the reach of networks of circulation in Egypt and the Arab world. I argue that Mubārak’s pseudo-fictional translation project in the text underscores the new links between materiality, textual representation, and the concern with information in the Egyptian-Arabic context. ʿAlam al-Dīn reflects the development of a new realist mode of narrative representation that privileged verifiability and plausibility over the distinctive style of classical Arabic narrative modes that relied on artistic wizardry and linguistic craftsmanship (El-Sherif 2018). And yet, despite its concern with information, ʿAlam al-Dīn reflects the influence of indigenous Arabic literary forms such as the epic [sira] and the picaresque [maqāmmah] that, according to Mohamed-Salah Omri, shaped Arabic and other Middle Eastern novels in the modern period (2007, 323). In Alam al-Dīn’s frame narrative, new technologies of print media, telegraphic transmission, and steamers inform the dialogs between the two main protagonists, an","PeriodicalId":43278,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"45 1","pages":"271 - 286"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42754585","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The rise and fall of the historical novel? A study of nineteenth-century periodical reviews","authors":"Helen Kingstone, Jonathan Taylor","doi":"10.1080/08905495.2023.2196887","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2023.2196887","url":null,"abstract":"As historical novelist Hilary Mantel acknowledged, “ some readers are deeply suspicious of historical fi ction. They say that by its nature it ’ s misleading ” (Mantel 2017, 5). The sus-picion largely stems from the genre ’ s hybrid of factual and fi ctional components, fi rst sys-tematically theorised by Alessandro Manzoni in the 1820s. 1 However, the genre keeps being written and enjoyed, both in its nineteenth-century heyday and in a current revival epitomised in Mantel ’ s own work. What is more, since history ’ s “ linguistic turn ” (White 1973; White 2014), and the rise of historiographic meta fi ction (Hutcheon 1995) leading to a revival in the literary status of (certain scions of) the genre, scholars have had to re-evaluate the terms of this critique. This article investigates how the historical novel was received during the nineteenth century, and what reviewers expected or required of it at di ff erent times. We combine quantitative and qualitative techniques, examining a dataset of reviews of the genre from nineteenth-century British periodicals, to investigate the grounds on which reviewers evaluated historical novels, and how its reception in periodicals changed, or stayed the same, across the century. This study, focused on genre rather than on any single author, contributes not only to our understanding of the history of literary tastes and practices, but also to the study of nineteenth-century periodicals more generally. Our analysis shows that longstanding questions in literary history – about the kinds of truth that fi ction and history each could o ff er – took new forms in the nineteenth century due to the signi fi cance of this particular novelistic sub-genre. What makes a “ successful ” historical novel has been under debate throughout the genre ’ s lifespan. György Lukács argued that the historical novel in a particular Marxist sense – a novel that reveals the structural changes taking place in a past society, typically through the sort of “ mediocre hero ” that Walter Scott creates in Waverley (1814) – ground to a halt after the failure of the 1848 Revolutions","PeriodicalId":43278,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"45 1","pages":"125 - 144"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45274635","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Down from London: seaside reading in the railway age","authors":"Mattie Armstrong-Price","doi":"10.1080/08905495.2023.2195603","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2023.2195603","url":null,"abstract":"“the value of Black women’s labor in an economy otherwise inclined to cheat, forget, and abandon Black subjects of capitalism as so much bad debt” (116). The book concludes with a coda on Oscar Wilde which nicely encapsulates the multiple meanings of “queer.” At Wilde’s 1895 trials for “gross indecency,” the prosecution constructed a “moralized financial narrative” (156) in which the writer was cast as “an extravagant queer debtor” (159) for his excessive spending on art, jewelry, flowers, and champagne. In particular, Wilde’s many gifts of money to working-class youths seemed clear proof of sexual entanglements. When the prosecution demanded a valid reason for Wilde’s payments to one young man, the writer replied: “Because he was poor, because he had no money and because I liked him. What better reason is there for giving a person money than that?” (160) Here, as elsewhere in his writings, Wilde rejects a rational system of exchange based on set values or what a person deserved. As these few examples make clear, Queer Economic Dissonance offers fresh readings of familiar works while also developing bold counter-narratives to the old Victorian accounts of self-help, individual initiative, upward mobility, and wealth accumulation. Dobbins’ cast of economic misfits—frauds, bankrupts, spendthrifts, and wastrels, many of them women —reminds us that many Victorian writers were sympathetic to those persons left behind or marginalized by modern capitalism. These writers imagined more humane alternatives to an economic system driven by competition and a seemingly endless quest for profit and personal advancement. Although densely argued, Queer Economic Dissonance is written in clear, accessible prose. It also provides a nice balance of critical theory, historical research, and close readings of literary texts. Ultimately, Dobbins knocks homo economicus off his dusty pedestal, replacing him with “better, messier, more complex stories of the pleasures, risks, perks, and liabilities of capitalist life” (28).","PeriodicalId":43278,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"45 1","pages":"202 - 205"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48540976","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Thought’s wilderness: Romanticism and the apprehension of nature","authors":"Dewey W. Hall","doi":"10.1080/08905495.2023.2195528","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2023.2195528","url":null,"abstract":"MATTHEW C. JONES is an Assistant Instructional Professor in the University Writing Program at the University of Florida, whose research focuses on long nineteenth-century Welsh cultural and literary history, and on British imperial history of this period more broadly. He is currently at work on a monograph that places the colonial history ofWales in conversation with other colonial subjects of the British Empire of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.","PeriodicalId":43278,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"45 1","pages":"207 - 210"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45493298","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“A Greek land of promise” as a bone of contention: modern Greece in the early years of The Illustrated London News, 1843–1850","authors":"Konstantina Georganta","doi":"10.1080/08905495.2023.2196888","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2023.2196888","url":null,"abstract":"The Illustrated London News (ILN) was the first newspaper to integrate image and text in reporting the news. Illustrated journalism occupied significant space in the newspaper, promoting the brave new world of the image and urging readers to visualize the story being told. As Anne Hultzsch (2017, 9) notes in her discussion of the architectural image in the early ILN, “by relieving readers of the task of visualising text in their minds, the illustrated press externalised and stabilised vision, while at the same time introducing a new mode of kinetic experience through the combination of word and image.” A significant innovation at an opportune moment, only a year after the appearance and success of Punch, the popular illustrated comic weekly, the ILN offered sixteen pages featuring thirty-two woodcuts, large and small, accompanying forty-eight columns of news (see Leary 2011). For sixpence, every Saturday it presented, in a regular format, the events of the preceding week. Considering that the ILN sold over 100,000 weekly copies by the 1850s, attracting a mainly middleto upper-class readership, these narratives reached a wide audience who were slowly becoming educated in what we might think of as the lures of the visual (Ellegård 1971, 22; see also Baillet 2017 on the visual representations of the labouring and lower classes in the mid-Victorian illustrated press). As Gerry Beegan (2008, 55) has suggested, wood engraving, the ILN’s reproductive method, asserted the newspaper’s middle-class character and “became the means through which middle-class magazine readers expected to see their world depicted”: “The drawn image was not simply a depiction but an explanation, its purpose to clarify and make sense of the incident it portrayed.” An exploration of these images and their accompanying texts more than a century-and-a-half later, when visual journalism has become a vital part of mass media and the arts, is an exploration of the history of the visual in the media, and how it came to call attention to specific aspects of reality. On 19 June 1847, the ILN published a letter sent to the editor by an indignant “traveller in the Levant, and a friend of Greece” on the “atrocities” perpetrated around what came to be known as the Don Pacifico Affair, which led to the blockade of the main Athenian port of Piraeus by British forces in the early 1850s. The letter was published under the title “Brigandage in Athens” and was paired with a small illustration depicting the house of Don Pacifico “after the sacking” (Figure 1). The small drawing, showing an external view of a three-storey house with the","PeriodicalId":43278,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"45 1","pages":"181 - 200"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42666506","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}