Ann Rigney
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199644018
- eISBN:
- 9780191738784
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199644018.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Using street-names referring to Waverley and Abbotsford as a starting point, this book explains how the work of Walter Scott (1771-1832) became an all-pervasive point of reference for cultural memory ...
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Using street-names referring to Waverley and Abbotsford as a starting point, this book explains how the work of Walter Scott (1771-1832) became an all-pervasive point of reference for cultural memory and collective identity in the nineteenth century, and why he no longer has this role. It breaks new ground in memory studies and the study of literary reception by examining the dynamics of cultural memory and the ‘social life’ of literary texts across several generations and multiple media. Attention is paid to the remediation of the Waverley novels as they travelled into painting, the theatre, and material culture, as well as to the role of ‘Scott’ as a memory site in the public sphere for a century after his death. Using a wide range of examples and supported by many illustrations, this book demonstrates how remembering Scott’s work helped shape national and transnational identities up to World War I, and contributed to the emergence of the idea of an English-speaking world encompassing Scotland, the British Empire, and the United States. It shows how Scott’s work provided an imaginative resource for creating a collective relation to the past that was compatible with widespread mobility and social change; and that he thus forged a potent alliance between memory, literature, and identity that was eminently suited to modernizing. In the process he helped prepare his own obsolescence. But if Scott’s work is now largely forgotten, his legacy continues in the widespread belief that showcasing the past is a condition for transcending it.Less
Using street-names referring to Waverley and Abbotsford as a starting point, this book explains how the work of Walter Scott (1771-1832) became an all-pervasive point of reference for cultural memory and collective identity in the nineteenth century, and why he no longer has this role. It breaks new ground in memory studies and the study of literary reception by examining the dynamics of cultural memory and the ‘social life’ of literary texts across several generations and multiple media. Attention is paid to the remediation of the Waverley novels as they travelled into painting, the theatre, and material culture, as well as to the role of ‘Scott’ as a memory site in the public sphere for a century after his death. Using a wide range of examples and supported by many illustrations, this book demonstrates how remembering Scott’s work helped shape national and transnational identities up to World War I, and contributed to the emergence of the idea of an English-speaking world encompassing Scotland, the British Empire, and the United States. It shows how Scott’s work provided an imaginative resource for creating a collective relation to the past that was compatible with widespread mobility and social change; and that he thus forged a potent alliance between memory, literature, and identity that was eminently suited to modernizing. In the process he helped prepare his own obsolescence. But if Scott’s work is now largely forgotten, his legacy continues in the widespread belief that showcasing the past is a condition for transcending it.
Ann Rigney
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199644018
- eISBN:
- 9780191738784
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199644018.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Chapter 6 concentrates on public recollections of Scott the author. It begins with an analysis of the strategies Scott used to brand himself as the ‘author of Waverley’, and then goes on to give an ...
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Chapter 6 concentrates on public recollections of Scott the author. It begins with an analysis of the strategies Scott used to brand himself as the ‘author of Waverley’, and then goes on to give an account of key public commemorations of his memory: his funeral in 1832, the erection of the enormous Edinburgh monument 1840–6, and the lavish centenary celebrations of 1871, which is placed within a broader framework of the nineteenth-century cult of centenaries and the role of literary canons. An analysis is given of these performances of memory that highlights their role in creating embodied communities in conjunction with various ‘imagined communities’. The centenary of 1871 in particular showed how ‘Scott’ as memory site had become a transnational point of reference which different parties used to stake out their position and articulate their identity within the Empire and the imagined confederation of the English-speaking world.Less
Chapter 6 concentrates on public recollections of Scott the author. It begins with an analysis of the strategies Scott used to brand himself as the ‘author of Waverley’, and then goes on to give an account of key public commemorations of his memory: his funeral in 1832, the erection of the enormous Edinburgh monument 1840–6, and the lavish centenary celebrations of 1871, which is placed within a broader framework of the nineteenth-century cult of centenaries and the role of literary canons. An analysis is given of these performances of memory that highlights their role in creating embodied communities in conjunction with various ‘imagined communities’. The centenary of 1871 in particular showed how ‘Scott’ as memory site had become a transnational point of reference which different parties used to stake out their position and articulate their identity within the Empire and the imagined confederation of the English-speaking world.
Matthew Bell
- Published in print:
- 1994
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198158943
- eISBN:
- 9780191673429
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198158943.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
For many readers in the English-speaking world, Goethe has somehow remained separate from the European intellectual and literary tradition. This study aims to correct this view by showing how Goethe ...
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For many readers in the English-speaking world, Goethe has somehow remained separate from the European intellectual and literary tradition. This study aims to correct this view by showing how Goethe portrayed human beings as part of a natural continuum, very much in the spirit of the Enlightenment. The author's fresh readings of Goethe's major and lesser-known texts are set against the background of the science and philosophy of the age, and the writer's debts to other thinkers are analysed. Placing Goethe in an anthropological context, this book demonstrates that 18th-century anthropological thought provides an essential, hitherto overlooked context for the understanding of Goethe's literary enterprise from Werther to Die Wahllverwandtschaften.Less
For many readers in the English-speaking world, Goethe has somehow remained separate from the European intellectual and literary tradition. This study aims to correct this view by showing how Goethe portrayed human beings as part of a natural continuum, very much in the spirit of the Enlightenment. The author's fresh readings of Goethe's major and lesser-known texts are set against the background of the science and philosophy of the age, and the writer's debts to other thinkers are analysed. Placing Goethe in an anthropological context, this book demonstrates that 18th-century anthropological thought provides an essential, hitherto overlooked context for the understanding of Goethe's literary enterprise from Werther to Die Wahllverwandtschaften.
Werner Hüllen
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199254729
- eISBN:
- 9780191719868
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199254729.003.0001
- Subject:
- Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
Roget's Thesaurus is an outstanding work of English lexicography. When it appeared in 1852, it was the first of its kind. It has been on the bookshelves of almost every educated man and woman in ...
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Roget's Thesaurus is an outstanding work of English lexicography. When it appeared in 1852, it was the first of its kind. It has been on the bookshelves of almost every educated man and woman in Britain, the United States, and indeed the whole of the English-speaking world ever since, as the many reprints and new editions testify. This is true of both the countries with an indigenous English-speaking population and the countries whose inhabitants learn English as a second or foreign language. From these areas it wandered throughout the world to wherever people think they cannot afford to neglect something which enjoys such general acceptance. Moreover, Roget's Thesaurus gave rise to similar word collections, at least in many of the major European languages. This book traces the history of Roget's Thesaurus, focusing on its origins, development, and design.Less
Roget's Thesaurus is an outstanding work of English lexicography. When it appeared in 1852, it was the first of its kind. It has been on the bookshelves of almost every educated man and woman in Britain, the United States, and indeed the whole of the English-speaking world ever since, as the many reprints and new editions testify. This is true of both the countries with an indigenous English-speaking population and the countries whose inhabitants learn English as a second or foreign language. From these areas it wandered throughout the world to wherever people think they cannot afford to neglect something which enjoys such general acceptance. Moreover, Roget's Thesaurus gave rise to similar word collections, at least in many of the major European languages. This book traces the history of Roget's Thesaurus, focusing on its origins, development, and design.
Chris Andrews
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231168069
- eISBN:
- 9780231537537
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231168069.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter considers how Bolaño’s fiction became well received in the English-speaking world. It explores the question of reception on a large scale—what happened to the works, culturally, when ...
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This chapter considers how Bolaño’s fiction became well received in the English-speaking world. It explores the question of reception on a large scale—what happened to the works, culturally, when they came to the English-speaking world via the publishing phenomenon. This chapter further argues that while a series of reasons for Bolaño’s success in translation can be proposed, the phenomenon was (and is) contingent in important ways. Bolaño knew that this was always the case, and he made the contingency of reception a recurrent theme in his fiction. Both in his fiction and in conversation, he saw, more clearly than those who would claim that his success in North America was predictable, how literary writing is, as Menger writes, “modeled by uncertainty,” from the conception of the work to its long-term reception.Less
This chapter considers how Bolaño’s fiction became well received in the English-speaking world. It explores the question of reception on a large scale—what happened to the works, culturally, when they came to the English-speaking world via the publishing phenomenon. This chapter further argues that while a series of reasons for Bolaño’s success in translation can be proposed, the phenomenon was (and is) contingent in important ways. Bolaño knew that this was always the case, and he made the contingency of reception a recurrent theme in his fiction. Both in his fiction and in conversation, he saw, more clearly than those who would claim that his success in North America was predictable, how literary writing is, as Menger writes, “modeled by uncertainty,” from the conception of the work to its long-term reception.
William O. Coleman
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198753254
- eISBN:
- 9780191814853
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198753254.003.0001
- Subject:
- Economics and Finance, Economic History, Public and Welfare
In the early twenty-first century Australia appears to be drifting from the tendency of the English-speaking world in matters of economic and social policy. Australia seems to be following a ‘special ...
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In the early twenty-first century Australia appears to be drifting from the tendency of the English-speaking world in matters of economic and social policy. Australia seems to be following a ‘special path’ of its own that it laid down more than a century ago in the ‘Australian Settlement’. This chapter defines the subject and scope of this Australian exceptionalism. It provides empirical illustration of this phenomenon and defends against sceptics the value of its investigation. It contends that the phenomenon has been neglected and distinguishes its study from the typical tendency of Australian studies. It concludes by suggesting the topic is of particular moment in the current circumstances of the world economy.Less
In the early twenty-first century Australia appears to be drifting from the tendency of the English-speaking world in matters of economic and social policy. Australia seems to be following a ‘special path’ of its own that it laid down more than a century ago in the ‘Australian Settlement’. This chapter defines the subject and scope of this Australian exceptionalism. It provides empirical illustration of this phenomenon and defends against sceptics the value of its investigation. It contends that the phenomenon has been neglected and distinguishes its study from the typical tendency of Australian studies. It concludes by suggesting the topic is of particular moment in the current circumstances of the world economy.
