scholarly journals Introduction: Provincialising the Rise of the British Novel in the Transatlantic Public Sphere

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-66
Author(s):  
Elahe Haschemi Yekani
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
British Novel ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
Mary Seacole ◽  
New Imperialism

AbstractIn the introduction to Familial Feeling, Haschemi Yekani proposes a transatlantic reframing of Ian Watt’s famous work on the rise of the novel. Offering a critical overview of the intertwined histories of enslavement and modernity, this chapter proposes a focus on transatlantic entanglement already in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century to challenge the more prevalent retrospective paradigm of “writing back” in postcolonial studies. Introducing the concepts of familial feeling and entangled tonalities, Haschemi Yekani describes the affective dimension of literature that shapes notions of national belonging. This is then discussed in the book in relation to the four entangled aesthetic tonalities of familial feeling in early Black Atlantic writing and canonical British novels by Daniel Defoe, Olaudah Equiano, Ignatius Sancho, Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, Robert Wedderburn, Charles Dickens, and Mary Seacole. To provide context for the following literary readings, scholarship on sentimentalism and the abolition of slavery is introduced and significantly extended, especially in relation to the shifts from moral sentiment and the abolition of the slave trade in the eighteenth century to social reform and the rise of the new imperialism and colonial expansion in the nineteenth century.

scholarly journals Conclusion: Queer Modes of Empathy as an Ethics of the Archive

2020 ◽  
pp. 273-291
Author(s):  
Elahe Haschemi Yekani
Keyword(s):  
Reading Strategies ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
British Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Archive ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
Negative Affects ◽  
Reparative Reading

AbstractAddressing the boom of memorial events and special exhibitions as well as the establishment of the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool celebrating the bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade in 2007, the conclusion of Familial Feeling returns to the question of ethics in dealing with the archive of slavery. Reflecting on methodology in literary studies by contrasting surface reading with approaches that foreground negative affects, Haschemi Yekani, via a recourse to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “reparative” reading, proposes a queering of empathy that should not rest on a celebratory understanding of the past, as trauma overcome, but serve as a foundation of ongoing tension in contemporary narratives of familial feeling and national belonging. For this purpose, Haschemi Yekani examines the 2007 installation Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service by artist Lubaina Himid. The author proposes that by engaging with the messy entanglements of marginalised and hegemonic voices in the establishment of Britishness as familial feeling, one can arrive at more complex reading strategies of the literary sources from the historical archive of the early Black Atlantic and the British novel as well as a less congratulatory contemporary memorial culture that seeks British “Greatness” in the past.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Greg Forter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Frederic Jameson ◽  
The Indian Ocean

The Introduction lays the theoretical groundwork and historical frame for the main chapters. It engages debates on materialist vs. poststructuralist approaches to postcolonial studies; on the utopian imagination; on expanding the black Atlantic frame of reference to include the Indian Ocean; on the Anglophone biases of postcolonial studies and how these implicate the discipline in contemporary capitalism; on the genesis of the historical novel in the nineteenth century; and on the cycles of finance capital to which the postcolonial inflection of historical fiction is a response. Theorists discussed include Giovanni Arrighi, Ian Baucom, Walter Benjamin, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Frederic Jameson, and Georg Lukács.

Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ushashi Dasgupta
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Dense Network ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Domestic Ideology ◽  
The Social ◽  
Literary Collaboration ◽  
Economic Relationship

This book explores the significance of rental culture in Charles Dickens’s fiction and journalism. It reveals tenancy, or the leasing of real estate in exchange for money, to be a governing force in everyday life in the nineteenth century. It casts a light into back attics and landladies’ parlours, and follows a host of characters—from slum landlords exploiting their tenants, to pairs of friends deciding to live together and share the rent. In this period, tenancy shaped individuals, structured communities, and fascinated writers. The vast majority of London’s population had an immediate economic relationship with the houses and rooms they inhabited, and Dickens was highly attuned to the social, psychological, and imaginative corollaries of this phenomenon. He may have been read as an overwhelming proponent of middle-class domestic ideology, but if we look closely, we see that his fictional universe is a dense network of rented spaces. He is comfortable in what he calls the ‘lodger world’, and he locates versions of home in a multitude of unlikely places. These are not mere settings, waiting to be recreated faithfully; rented space does not simply provide a backdrop for incident in the nineteenth-century novel. Instead, it plays an important part in influencing what takes place. For Dickens, to write about tenancy can often mean to write about writing—character, authorship, and literary collaboration. More than anything, he celebrates the fact that unassuming houses brim with narrative potential: comedies, romances, mysteries, and comings-of-age take place behind their doors.

Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century

2009 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Science And Literature ◽  
Creative Writers ◽  
Humphry Davy ◽  
The Individual ◽  
John Tyndall ◽  
Michael Faraday

‘It has been said by its opponents that science divorces itself from literature; but the statement, like so many others, arises from lack of knowledge.’ John Tyndall, 1874 Although we are used to thinking of science and the humanities as separate disciplines, in the nineteenth century that division was not recognized. As the scientist John Tyndall pointed out, not only were science and literature both striving to better 'man's estate', they shared a common language and cultural heritage. The same subjects occupied the writing of scientists and novelists: the quest for 'origins', the nature of the relation between society and the individual, and what it meant to be human. This anthology brings together a generous selection of scientific and literary material to explore the exchanges and interactions between them. Fed by a common imagination, scientists and creative writers alike used stories, imagery, style, and structure to convey their meaning, and to produce work of enduring power. The anthology includes writing by Charles Babbage, Charles Darwin, Sir Humphry Davy, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Michael Faraday, Thomas Malthus, Louis Pasteur, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Mark Twain and many others, and introductions and notes guide the reader through the topic's many strands. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

scholarly journals The past and present of pandemic management: health diplomacy, international epidemiological surveillance, and COVID-19

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Flavio D’Abramo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Epidemiological Surveillance ◽  
Health Diplomacy ◽  
The Past ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
Administrative Systems

AbstractThe establishment of international sanitary institutions, which took place in the context of rivalry among the great European powers and their colonial expansion in Asia, allowed for the development of administrative systems of international epidemiological surveillance as a response to the cholera epidemics at the end of the nineteenth century. In this note, I reflect on how a historical analysis of the inception of international epidemiological surveillance and pandemic management helps us to understand what is happening in the COVID-19 pandemic today.

“SAVING BRITISH NATIVES”: FAMILY EMIGRATION AND THE LOGIC OF SETTLER COLONIALISM IN CHARLES DICKENS AND CAROLINE CHISHOLM

2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-280
Author(s):  
Terra Walston Joseph
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
British Literature ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
The Social ◽  
White Settlers ◽  
Emotional Identification

As Cambridge historian J. R. Seeley writes inThe Expansion of England (1883), the fear of colonial secession, inspired by that of the United States, haunted Britons’ perception of their “second Empire” throughout the nineteenth century, effectively working against a sense of shared national destiny with the white settlers of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia (14–15). One important way Victorian writers combatted the “optimistic fatalism” Seeley observed in his fellow Britons was through an imperial economy of affect, which circulated sentiment and stressed emotional identification between settlers and metropolitan Britons (15). If mid-nineteenth-century British literature can be said to negotiate the tensions of Britain's empire through representations of racial, cultural, and linguistic difference, then narratives of sameness – of British families across the oceans – offer models for cohering the British settler empire. In such a model, techniques designed to reinforce the sentimental bonds of settlers to their families might also reinforce the social, political, and affective connections of the settlers to the metaphorical “mother country.”

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