Nineteenth Century Studies

This contribution focuses on one particular politeness formula for requests, fare la carità di 'be so good as to (give)'. The aim of the paper was to reconstruct the meanings and contexts for the usage of fare la carità di in nineteenth-century Italy. The following sources were used: conduct books, dictionaries, novels and diachronic corpora. The essay first looked at politeness metadiscourse and examined the available language advice for requests in CGIO, a corpus of 51 nineteenth-century Italian conduct books. However, as there is none available for fare la carità di, three nineteenth-century dictionaries were consulted. These findings from the metadiscourse were then read against those from a qualitative analysis covering all the examples found in two of the most influential novels of that period, Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi, 'The Betrothed', 1840, and Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio, 1883. Finally, quantitative data from the historical corpora DiaCORIS and MIDIA were provided. This combined analysis (using metadiscourse alongside qualitative discourse analysis and quantitative data) produced the following results: the formula is used in two contexts, to make a (sometimes forceful) request and to beg for a handout. Both appear in roughly equal proportions until the end of World War II. After that, fare la carità di disappears from DiaCORIS. The paper tentatively concludes that the absence of the formula from the advice on requests in conduct books may be partly explained by its use as a specialised marker for alms-seeking, given that conduct books fiercely criticise almsgiving to the undeserving poor.

The essay deals with the judicial activity of a criminal court of the Regno Lombardo-Veneto in the firs half of nineteenth century. It is particularly analysed the legal reasoning of the judges in front of crimes which were submitted to their jurisdiction. Their discussions were about the codex foresight, but also of clues and evidences.

Baha’u’llah’s Bishārāt (Glad-Tidings):
A Proclamation to Scholars and Statesmen
Christopher Buck and Youli A. Ioannesyan
Baha’i Studies Review 16 (2010): 3–28.

This article is a historical and textual study of the one of the major writings of Baha’u’llah: the Lawḥ-i Bishārāt (‘Tablet of Glad-Tidings’), revealed circa 1891, and advances new theories as to its provenance and purpose. The ‘Tablet of Glad-Tidings’ is a selective compendium of Baha’u’llah’s laws and principles, sequentially presented in a series of fifteen ‘Glad-Tidings.’ As the Arabic term, bishārāt, suggests, these ‘Glad-Tidings’ were a public announcement of some of the essential teachings of the new Baha’i religion. The ‘Glad-Tidings’ is the most extensive of several ‘Tablets’ by Baha’u’llah that present key teachings in a numbered structure. The Glad-Tidings may, in part, be regarded as serially articulated ‘world reforms’ intermixed with religious reforms emanating from Baha’u’llah in his professed role as ‘World Reformer.’ The ‘Glad-Tidings’ also functioned analogously (albeit anachronistically) to a press release, serving not only as a public proclamation, but to rectify the inaccuracies and gross misrepresentations that had previously circulated in print. Intended for widespread translation and publication, the Glad-Tidings was sent to scholars — notably Russian orientalist, Baron Viktor Rosen (1849–1908) and Cambridge Orientalist, Edward Granville Browne (1862–1926) — and possibly pre-revolutionary Russian statesmen as well. As a ‘Proclamatory Aqdas,’ the Tablet of Glad-Tidings was part of a much broader proclamation by Baha’u’llah, who proclaimed his mission to the political and religious leaders of the world. This study will argue that the Baha’u’llah may have revealed the Tablet of Glad-Tidings for E.G. Browne — or rather through him, since Baha’u’llah evidently intended that Browne should translate and publish the Bishārāt in order to make the nature of the Baha'i teachings more widely known. This would then correct the distortions that had previously been published regarding Baha’u’llah's purpose and the nature of the religion that he founded, thereby, promoting a public awareness that a new world religion was on the horizon of modernity.

Using a broad, comparative approach, this study shows how the figure of the gift structures poetic discourse and does so from the age of Homer up through twenty-first century conceptual poetics. Beginning from a. new interpretation of Derrida's writings on the gift, Rosenthal argues that this ambivalent figure names at one and the same time poetry's most extreme aneconomic privilege and the point of its closest contact with the interested exchange of the market. In this way, the gift conducts material relays of patronage and theories of poetic origination in genius, inspiration and imagination. Poetics and the Gift capitalizes on this double function in order to read material historical accounts of poetry alongside philosophical and poetic ones.

"The Culture of Dress History in France: The Past in Fashion, 1814-1900," studies the role of historic dress and dress history in creating knowledge about the past in nineteenth century France. This research examined how the practice of writing about, collecting, exhibiting, making, and representing historic and historicizing dress helped the French visualize their past. The conceptual questions raised by looking at the way that people observed and used historic artifacts not only expands the history of studying artifacts but also contributes to our thinking about how to study an artifact.

Directed by Peter Miller and Michele Majer. 433 pages. Defended in September, 2015. Registered in ProQuest in 2016.

The Colonial Public and the Parsi Stage is the first comprehensive study of the Parsi theatre, colonial South and Southeast Asia’s most influential cultural phenomenon and the precursor of the Indian cinema industry. By providing extensive, unpublished information on its first actors, audiences, production methods, and plays, this book traces how the theatre—which was one of the first in the Indian subcontinent to adopt European stagecraft—transformed into a pan-Asian entertainment industry in the second half of the nineteenth century. Nicholson sheds light on the motivations that led to the development of the popular, commercial theatre movement in Asia through three areas of investigation: the vernacular public sphere, the emergence of competing visions of nationhood, and the narratological function that women served within a continually shifting socio-political order. The book will be of interest to scholars across several disciplines, including cultural history, gender studies, Victorian studies, the sociology of religion, colonialism, and theatre.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Brazil, Mexico, and Peru were among the countries participating in the most important world's fairs in Europe and North America. These mass gatherings focused on national self-images as well as technological development and commodities, but the Latin American exhibition organizers also understood them to be transnational spaces that contributed to the mobility of persons, objects, and knowledge. In this context, the scientific display of pre-Columbian 'antiquities' was regarded as being as important as the participation in archaeological and anthropological congresses. By understanding the world's fairs as 'spaces of global knowledge', this article highlights the agency of Latin American scientists, intellectuals, and collectors in the transnational endeavour to create a 'Latin American antiquity' at the fairgrounds. Although most fair attendees sought to study and display the pre-Columbian past in an objective manner, the older dream of reconstructing the splendour of America's ancient civilizations never completely vanished.

This book is OPEN ACCESS and available for download on JSTOR and other online repositories (see attached link to Cornell Press page and JSTOR DOI).

Institutionalizing Gender analyzes the relationship between class, gender, and psychiatry in France from 1789 to 1900, an era noteworthy for the creation of the psychiatric profession, the development of a national asylum system, and the spread of bourgeois gender values.

Although the 19th-century Sufi figure al-Shaikh Māʾ al-ʿAynain led a major resistance movement in the Northwestern Sahara and Morocco and was one of the most widely printed authors on the Fez lithographic press, very little information on his literary and scholarly output exists in Europhone sources. This is largely due to the marginalization of texts inconsistent with Middle East-centered narratives of reform and revival inspired by the encounter with Europe. As part of a larger effort to read Maghrebi literatures on their own terms rather than imposing European or Middle Eastern timelines and concepts, this paper reads Māʾ al-ʿAynain’s 1858 riḥla (travelogue) to Mecca for how he conceptualized his world and traveled within it, including local, regional, and transregional elements.

Considérer l’image dans la dimension technique de son élaboration n’est pas une réflexion périphérique à la question de la caricature chez les Goncourt. Si l’image est plus volontiers abordée sur les plans stylistique et politique, la fabrique des estampes caricaturales demeure un paramètre majeur, ce dont témoigne le discours critique et essayiste des Goncourt développé dans le Journal, la correspondance, la critique d’art ou encore la monographie sur Gavarni. La fabrique graphique de la caricature, c’est d’abord une pratique personnelle pour les Goncourt. On sait par ailleurs la passion des deux frères pour la collection et leur attrait pour la bibliophilie, intérêts qui questionnent directement l’esthétique, la facture et la valeur de l’image. Si le commentaire des Goncourt prend la forme d’un discours avisé, c’est aussi parce qu’ils ont été très tôt versés dans la critique d’art. Ces considérations posent la question de la nature et de la portée du propos des Goncourt sur les modalités matérielles de la fabrique des images caricaturales, que ce savoir émane des sociabilités artistiques et culturelles, d’une expérience de critique d’art ou encore d’une participation à la presse. Gravure, lithographie, eau-forte occupent une place centrale dans la vision du monde des Goncourt, à une époque où l’estampe gagne une visibilité à travers les associations d’artistes. Mais c’est avant tout par les sociabilités et le réseau amical que se forme chez les deux frères une conscience des techniques de l’image.

George M. Johnson does a fine analysis of the vital role the Society for Psychical Research played in the making of modernist fiction.  For those interested in psychology, theories of subjectivity, and conceptions of the unconscious, this is essential reading.  Johnson's analysis of individual texts is not as strong as his history of the Society for Psychical Research or his work on psychology more generally.  But the book is very useful nonetheless.

Marie Duval (Isabella Emilie Tessier [1847–1890]), was one of the most unusual, pioneering and visionary cartoonists of the later nineteenth century. Duval’s work appeared in serial magazines and books, at a time––the 1860s and 70s––when the professional identity of visual journalists, cartoonists and illustrators was in radical flux, for both men and women. In particular, weekly magazine serialisation offered opportunities for the invention of new mass entertainments that combined current affairs and theatrics with a focus on urban life: the first appearance of a mass leisure culture.
Duval took advantage of this radical flux in distinct ways: strategically mimicking the work of the most successful male artists in an older tradition, making her own usurpation of the magazine page into a parodic identity of the working woman, and utilising her experience of her other profession, as a stage actress, to produce a vivid comedic visualisation of London life.
The paper provides a critical introduction to the work of Duval as she struggled and succeeded in creating a new urban visual culture. It will look in turn at key aspects of Victorian mass leisure industry, such as tourism, day-tripping, fashion, the theatre, art and the ‘season.’ Placing Duval in the visual context of the emerging profession of visual journalism, practiced by the “woman of my modern type”, it offers an enticing glimpse of the exciting, strange and world-changing media environment of London in the last part of the nineteenth century.

The development of the joint-stock company in the nineteenth century challenged the foundations on which business had hitherto been based. Given the scale of company operations, it was unlikely that investors would have direct contact with boards of directors. Companies therefore developed mechanisms to foster trust in the new impersonal economy. This chapter identifies a tension between new forms of trust formation (usually involving ‘objective’ statistics enshrined in balance sheets and financial reports), and old ones (faith in the character of the gentlemen behind a business). Focusing on a case study of a major fraud, this chapter argues that investors tended to rely on the perceived character of the directors. In exposing the unreliability of these traditional processes of trust formation, the scandal prompted the state to attempt to improve access to objective data on companies, and this chapter ends by examining the reasons for the failure of these reforms.

Published in: Tom Crook, Glen O'Hara (eds), Statistics and the Public Sphere: Numbers and the People in Modern Britain, c. 1800-2000 (Routledge, 2011).

Une réflexion sur la philosophie de la médecine de Félix Ravaisson (1813-1900), à partir de son ouvrage "De l'habitude". L'article a été publié dans L’Épistémologie française, 1830-1970, sous la direction de Michel Bitbol et Jean Gayon, Paris, P.U.F., 2006, p. 413-p. 430. Traduction en chinois en 2011, The Commercial Press, p. 451-p. 471. Réédition aux éditions Matériologiques en 2015.

The paper deals with the conflicts between groups of young unmarried peasants  of some villages of Veneto in the first half of nineteenth century. Several criminal trials instructed from the local courts concerned homicides or wounds which originated from the amorous rivalries between young unmarried men of bordering villages or hamlets.

From Aristotle to social contract theory, contract doctrine has been through transformations, and by the 18th century, it had developed the principle that the state should not interfere with individual contract freedom. As the Industrial Revolution emerged, however, the unequal contract conditions between employees and employers had become worse. In order to found his call for legal reformation of these unequal conditions on a solid base, Green criticised social contract theory and the individualist conception of contractual freedom and constructed an alternative theory consisting of individual freedom, common goods and government intervention. The present article aims to expound the practical significance of Green’s theoretical works, and accordingly, it will explicate how the class representation issue in the 19th century British Labour Legislation movement prompted Green to reconstruct the theorem of liberalism and provide a theory for the reformation. What Green thus established is a popular democratic theory with a focus on contractual justice and state duty.

La civilisation du journal ne voit pas seulement apparaître une circulation accrue des idées, une extension du lectorat, un mode d’information tissé de romanesque et de nouveaux rythmes liés à la quotidienneté. Elle instaure aussi un rapport spécifique à l’objet en papier. À l’heure où triomphe la chose imprimée, la culture médiatique est éminemment matérielle : manipulations, appropriations, circulations invitent à considérer les usages concrets du livre, du journal, de la brochure et de l’affiche, depuis les modes d’étalage à la vente jusqu’aux modalités de collection du livre et de conservation du roman-feuilleton, en passant par le démembrement du tract et le recyclage de l’affiche. Cet article examine les objets en papier produits par les éditeurs de pittoresques et de littérature panoramique dans les années 1830-1860 en France.

By mid-nineteenth century, just when the Spanish Liberal Revolution was reaching its climax and a national political sphere was beginning to set up in Spain, discourses about the nation of the Spanish liberals were deeply marked by a foreign image of Spain that excluded this country from the European modernity (or, at best, it left if at its margins) and they had to negotiate with it. The Spanish authors complained about the predominance of the foreign representation in the Spanish political sphere and about the little significance of its own. Fearing a denaturalization of their compatriots, these liberals took a nationalistic attitude, more aggressive in its demands.

This book aims to establish the position of the sidekick character in the crime and detective fiction literary genres. It re-evaluates the traditional view that the sidekick character in these genres is often overlooked as having a small, generic or singular role—either to act as the foil to the detective in order to accentuate their own abilities at solving crimes, or else to simply tell the story to the reader. Instead, essays in the collection explore the representations and functions of the detective’s sidekick across a range of forms and subgenres of crime fiction. By incorporating forms such as children’s detective fiction, comics and graphic novels and film and television alongside the more traditional fare of novels and short stories, this book aims to break down the boundaries that sometimes exist between these forms, using the sidekick as a defining thread to link them together into a wider conceptual argument that covers a broad range of crime narratives.

Being one of the historically most densely populated and most urbanised regions of Europe, nineteenth century Belgium was imagined as a markedly urban landscape. Politically this was translated in the notion of municipal autonomy, a key principle of Belgian political life which counterbalanced the centralising tendencies of the newly founded state.
The central argument of this chapter is that municipal autonomy at once strengthened and weakened national unity. On the one hand, it functioned as a safety valve to relieve the pressure from ideological, socio-economic and ethnic quarrels that might threaten the unity of the nation. Liberal town authorities, for instance, could follow their own agenda under a hostile Catholic government and vice versa. The municipal level also played a crucial role in alleviating the tensions of democratization as a laboratory for electoral reform. On the other hand, in the long run municipal autonomy may have undermined the state's capacity to harness differences within the nation, by providing local interests an eminently patriotic excuse to escape the state's nationalising reach.

EMENTA O interesse pelas relações de gênero não é recente, mas há ainda muito a ser feito no que diz respeito à história das mulheres, sobretudo das brasileiras do século XIX. Esta disciplina procura pensar a produção de estudos biográficos sobre mulheres e a relação delas com a literatura ou com a escrita de forma geral. Para tanto, faremos a leitura de textos produzidos por mulheres letradas e textos literários escritos pela pena feminina. O recorte temporal é o século XIX, mas recuos no século XVIII e avanços no século XX serão contemplados. OBJETIVO DA DISCIPLINA O objetivo da disciplina é traçar possibilidades para a pesquisa e o estudo da história das mulheres, sobretudo das escritoras e literatas do século XIX. Pensar sobre questões teórico-metodológicas que nos ajudem a produzir pesquisas de história sobre as mulheres envolvidas de alguma forma com a escrita e a literatura. Conhecer a produção de escritoras brasileiras e inseri-las no contexto internacional é uma forma de retirá-las da obscuridade e desafiar a autoridade masculina do cânone literário e acadêmico. Os estudos sobre as mulheres do século XIX, em especial da primeira metade, são negligenciados, pois a maioria dos trabalhos se concentra numa história dos antecedentes do movimento sufragista dos anos 1920. Os pouco numerosos estudos sobre o século XIX brasileiro restringem-se às últimas décadas do século, que, segundo eles, se deve a presença mais visível de mulheres nos meios públicos. Minha pergunta é se isto é um fato ou apenas resultado da ausência de pesquisas.

Looking at two distinctly different approaches to the occult and performance, this article demonstrates that a range of late-Victorians turned to theatrical performance as an avenue to mystical communication. The editors of Borderland: A Psychical Quarterly, W. T. Stead and Ada Goodrich Freer, focused on performance in large part for strategic purposes intended to assist in the popularization of spiritualism and other psychical phenomena. Meanwhile, Moina and Samuel ‘MacGregor’ Mathers, central members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, developed their Ceremony of Isis not only for marketing purposes, but also to engage performance as a mode of human transmigration and a powerfully allusive embodiment of key values of pagan occultism.

https://www.amazon.com/United-States-Transatlantic-Americas-1776-1867/dp/0300212410/

While much of modern scholarship has focused on the American slave trade’s impact within the United States, considerably less has addressed its effects in other parts of the Americas. A rich analysis of a complex subject, this study draws on Portuguese, Brazilian, and Spanish primary documents—as well as English-language material—to shed new light on the changing behavior of slave traders and their networks, particularly in Brazil and Cuba. Slavery in these nations, as Marques shows, contributed to the mounting tensions that would ultimately lead to the U.S. Civil War. Taking a truly Atlantic perspective, Marques outlines the multiple forms of U.S. involvement in this traffic amid various legislation and shifting international relations, exploring the global processes that shaped the history of this participation.

We set out briefly the two contraposed concepts of law that emerged in the nineteenth century: the triumph of the codification of a rational law, which subsequently resulted in the definitive abandonment of the old compilations – a technique and tool used until that time for compiling legislation in force that might have been promulgated centuries earlier.