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Li 理/Coherence

Stephen C. Angle

in Sagehood: The Contemporary Significance of Neo-Confucian Philosophy

Li is a difficult term, sometimes translated as “principle” or “pattern,” that lies at the center of Neo-Confucian philosophizing. Building on the insights of Willard Peterson, ... More

Li is a difficult term, sometimes translated as “principle” or “pattern,” that lies at the center of Neo-Confucian philosophizing. Building on the insights of Willard Peterson, Brook Ziporyn, and other scholars, the chapter argues that li means “the valuable and intelligible way that things fits together,” and chooses “coherence” as the best short translation of li. The chapter draws not only on Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming, but also on other Neo-Confucians like Zhang Zai and Luo Qinshun. P.J. Ivanhoe's important arguments concerning the influence of Huayan Buddhism on Neo-Confucianism are both developed and critiqued. The chapter examines li's combination of subjective and objective dimensions, including the way that li is partly constituted by human purposes. Other topics include the ontological status of li, its causal role, and its simultaneous unity and multiplicity. The chapter concludes by showing that once li is understood as coherence, the question of how it can be both descriptive and prescriptive—which has long bedeviled interpreters, some of them worried by Hume's distinction between “is” and “ought”—is readily answered.Less

Re-scripting Ivanhoe

Ann Rigney

in The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move

Chapter 3 continues the discussion of procreativity, focusing on Ivanhoe (1819), the Scott novel that has generated the greatest number of versions of itself on page, stage, and screen. Why was this ... More

Chapter 3 continues the discussion of procreativity, focusing on Ivanhoe (1819), the Scott novel that has generated the greatest number of versions of itself on page, stage, and screen. Why was this novel so procreative and, relative to other works by Scott, over such a long period? Analysing the multiple Ivanhoe scripts produced for stage and screen, it shows how it helped relay stories (specifically relating to Robin Hood) from oral culture into the mass media. It argues that Ivanhoe’s longevity was above all generated by its structural ambivalence. It offered a highly narrativized account of the Middle Ages, but was also fraught by a tension between the story’s outcome and its emotional and aesthetic economy, centred on the outsider figure of the Jewess Rebecca. This tension resonated with contemporary identity formations in several countries inviting people to continuously engage with it by re-writing the story.Less

Re-enacting Ivanhoe

Ann Rigney

in The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move

Chapter 4 pursues the case of Ivanhoe, concentrating on its afterlife in the USA and critically revisiting Mark Twain’s claim that Scott somehow ‘caused’ the American Civil War. An account is offered ... More

Chapter 4 pursues the case of Ivanhoe, concentrating on its afterlife in the USA and critically revisiting Mark Twain’s claim that Scott somehow ‘caused’ the American Civil War. An account is offered of the performative reception of Scott’s work in the USA, particularly of the re-enactments of Ivanhoe in the form of tournaments in the South and other appropriations of the story in material culture. It shows how Scott’s novels were used as a narrative template to understand the divisions within American society. It argues that Scott did not cause the Civil War, but that his work helped shape its political imaginary and, as a memory site known both North and South, its subsequent remembrance. As an imaginary resource, Scott’s work was appropriated in radically opposed ways by both those advancing racism (Griffith) and those opposing it (Chesnutt)Less

Love-Mad Women and Political Insurrection in Regency Fiction

Helen Small

in Love's Madness: Medicine, the Novel, and Female Insanity, 1800-1865

The themes of love-madness and war were clearly coming together in fiction of the early 1810s, albeit often in little more than an attempt to enliven otherwise jaded material. Lady Charlotte Bury's ... More

The themes of love-madness and war were clearly coming together in fiction of the early 1810s, albeit often in little more than an attempt to enliven otherwise jaded material. Lady Charlotte Bury's Self-Indulgence: A Tale of the Nineteenth Century and Louis Sidney Stanhope's Madelina: A Tale, Founded on Facts (1814) both fended off evident anxieties about the freshness of the convention by placing their love-mad women against the background of contemporary Anglo–French politics. The desire both to entertain and to disown the spectacle of rebellion is evident in the most notorious novel of the 1810s, showing interest in the madwoman as a symbol of Irish rebellion. Lady Caroline Lamb's Glenarvon was a kiss-and-tell account of her affair with Lord Byron. Meanwhile, Ivanhoe overturns the determining features of the love-madness convention, rewriting them in colours of violence.Less

The Name Is Changed, but the Tale Is Told of You

Michael Gibbs Hill

in Lin Shu, Inc.: Translation and the Making of Modern Chinese Culture

This chapter analyzes Lin Shu's rise to prominence in the late-Qing cultural scene. Many translations Lin Shu and his collaborators produced before the 1911 revolution constituted a substantial ... More

This chapter analyzes Lin Shu's rise to prominence in the late-Qing cultural scene. Many translations Lin Shu and his collaborators produced before the 1911 revolution constituted a substantial agenda for reconfiguring the relationships between language, literature, and society. Versions of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1901), Aesop's Fables (1903), and Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1905) brought together “foreign” texts, the rhetoric of anticolonialism and domestic reform, the cultural prestige ascribed to ancient-style prose (guwen), and a keen sense for commercial publishing, producing a formula that enjoyed far-reaching influence in intellectual circles and brought unprecedented commercial success to Lin’s main publisher, the Commercial Press. These early works also constitute an attempt to revive ancient-style prose as a medium to both convey and critique the “universal principles” (gongli) of citizenship, national identity, and equality Lin believed could be found in the texts he translated.Less

The Condition of England: Ivanhoe and Kenilworth

Andrew Lincoln

in Walter Scott and Modernity

This chapter looks at the time when Scott first turned to English history in his fiction, and shows the relevance of public spectacle in creating popularity. It first examines Ivanhoe, which deals ... More

This chapter looks at the time when Scott first turned to English history in his fiction, and shows the relevance of public spectacle in creating popularity. It first examines Ivanhoe, which deals with a condition created by disruptive change or typical of modernity. The novel also leaves individual identities obscure and shows the function of spectacle in establishing political power. The second novel studied in the chapter is Kenilworth, which focuses on a world where the characteristic features of modernity emerge very distinctly. The chapter studies the emphasis Scott placed on appearance, which allows a relevant gap to emerge between the private and the public individual. It also observes the dual role of the novel and its moral themes, which are in conflict with the theme of national unity.Less

Friends and Enemies in Walter Scott’s Crusader Novels

David Simpson

in Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger

This chapter first takes a look at Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice to provide an overview of the relations, tension, and binary distinction between the Christian and the Jew, the friend and the ... More

This chapter first takes a look at Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice to provide an overview of the relations, tension, and binary distinction between the Christian and the Jew, the friend and the enemy, the self and the other. By examining the roles and relationship between Shylock and Antonio, the chapter is able to relate it to other similar and reversed roles that have emerged in literature, particularly those in Walter Scott’s works, Ivanhoe, The Bethrothed, and The Talisman. These works reflect Scott’s task of creating a national history. His Invanhoe shows Richard the Lionheart to have been as comfortable in exploiting and punishing Jews as doing battle with Saracens, a quality that does not make him very much removed from his predecessor Henry II. Thus the chapter explores the politics in Scott’s works: his insistence on the integrity of the refusal to convert, or his refusal to suggest that tolerating radical differences is possible.Less

Ivanhoe

Johanna Drucker

in SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing

This chapter discusses Ivanhoe, the second project at SpecLab. This project was inspired by the desire to design a project that could embody and demonstrate critical principles while providing a ... More

This chapter discusses Ivanhoe, the second project at SpecLab. This project was inspired by the desire to design a project that could embody and demonstrate critical principles while providing a model digital environment for next-generation pedagogy and scholarship. The idea for the project came from an e-mail exchange between the author and Jerry McGann. Together they designed Ivanhoe as a game of interpretation and structured the design to reveal what they felt was at stake in exposing assumptions about texts and textuality and reading and knowledge production.Less

Hunger and cannibalism: James Hogg’s deconstruction of Scottish military masculinities in The Three Perils of Man or War, Women, and Witchcraft!

Barbara Leonardi

in Martial Masculinities: Experiencing and Imagining the Military in the Long Nineteenth Century

This chapter contends that hunger and cannibalism are extended metaphors that James Hogg utilises in his novel The Three Perils of Man (1822) to denounce the human losses in the Napoleonic Wars and ... More

This chapter contends that hunger and cannibalism are extended metaphors that James Hogg utilises in his novel The Three Perils of Man (1822) to denounce the human losses in the Napoleonic Wars and to convey an indirect critique of the violent death of so many millions in the campaign of Buonaparte. In so doing, Hogg deconstructs the potent stereotype of Highland masculinity, so pivotal in the militaristic discourse of the British Empire. Hogg exposes the ideology of self-sacrifice of the British soldier explicitly in two poetical works: ‘The Pilgrims of the Sun’ (1815) and ‘The Field of Waterloo’ (1822), the first published and the second composed in the same year of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, while conveying the same critique more implicitly some years later in Perils of Man, where the hunger for meat is a ubiquitous trope meant to expose the destructiveness of tyrannical power.Less

Taras Bulba and the Jewish Literary Context: Walter Scott, Gogol, and Russian Fiction

in The Ridiculous Jew: The Exploitation and Transformation of a Stereotype in Gogol, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky

This chapter discusses the literary context of Gogol's representation of Jews. Since Gogol creatively assimilated the literary culture of his time, we can better understand the Jews in Taras Bulba ... More

This chapter discusses the literary context of Gogol's representation of Jews. Since Gogol creatively assimilated the literary culture of his time, we can better understand the Jews in Taras Bulba when seen against the most popular novel of the times, Scott's Ivanhoe. To highlight what Gogol could have done and chose not to with the material at hand, given the fact that he quotes from Scott in reference to his own Jew, Yankel, the chapter compares Gogol's comic treatment of Yankel in Taras Bulba with the more problematic and existential treatment of Isaac of York and Rebecca in Ivanhoe. It also compares Gogol's treatment of the Jews in Taras Bulba with the portrayal of Jews in the most popular contemporary Russian novels, such as Faddey Bulgarin's Mazepa and Ivan Vyzhigin, both of which preceded Gogol's work and included more serious portrayals of both positive and negative Jewish types.Less

The End of History? Scott, His Precursors and the Violent Past

Fiona Price

in Reinventing Liberty: Nation, Commerce and the Historical Novel from Walpole to Scott

The fifth chapter examines how Scott would finally be unable to erase the unease evident in the earlier historical novel. Having attempted to calm the post-French Revolution debate concerning history ... More

The fifth chapter examines how Scott would finally be unable to erase the unease evident in the earlier historical novel. Having attempted to calm the post-French Revolution debate concerning history in The Antiquary, in Ivanhoe (1820) Scott is unable to escape its tropes, giving a coded response to ancient constitutionalism; to the call for the redistribution of sensibility; to radical readings of stadial history and even to the more conservative narrative of history as a kind of scientific medicine for the national body. Moreover, as he responds to previous points of historiographic and political tension, his sense of the inherent violence of commerce and its fit with governmental structures grow. Finally analysing St. Ronan’s Well (1823) (a novel in which the transitions of modern commerciality are themselves seen as violent), this chapter explores how Scott negotiates the historiographically-shaped economic apprehensions of his predecessors.Less

Inclusion and Exclusion in the British State: Walter Scott’s and

Alison Lumsden

in Literature and Union: Scottish Texts, British Contexts

When we consider questions of literature and union, it is impossible to ignore Walter Scott, whose works have been read repeatedly in terms of their pro-union sympathies. However, recent ... More

When we consider questions of literature and union, it is impossible to ignore Walter Scott, whose works have been read repeatedly in terms of their pro-union sympathies. However, recent re-evaluations have recognized more complex dynamics within his poetry and fiction. This chapter examines how Scott explores the ways in which key groups are excluded from concepts of union and the loss that such exclusion represents. By way of a discussion of Ivanhoe and The Fortunes of Nigel within the dynamics of exclusion and through the paradigms of space, place, and generic expectation, it posits a more ambivalent and cautious reading of Scott in relation to the modern nation state.Less

‘Barbarous Hymn’: The Extinction of Early Saxon Poetry in the Romantic Imagination

Chris Jones

in Fossil Poetry: Anglo-Saxon and Linguistic Nativism in Nineteenth-Century Poetry

This chapter begins by contrasting the current popularity of Beowulf with its relative obscurity at the start of the nineteenth century. It suggests that the most well-known ‘Anglo-Saxon’ poem during ... More

This chapter begins by contrasting the current popularity of Beowulf with its relative obscurity at the start of the nineteenth century. It suggests that the most well-known ‘Anglo-Saxon’ poem during the nineteenth century was ‘Ulrica’s hymn’ from Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe. The chapter details how this poem was both shaped by, and shaped, nineteenth-century antiquarian writing on Anglo-Saxon poetry, drawing on many works held in Scott’s library at Abbotsford. Scott’s ‘Saxon’ poem is seen as a product of Romantic Primitivism, and an idealized staging, or performance of early English literature. Ulrica’s ‘Hymn’ stands both as an origin for contemporary English literary culture, and also as a problem that the novel must erase. As such it provides an apt introductory emblem for nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxon poetry.Less

The 1890s: The Final Decade

Ian Bradley

in Arthur Sullivan: A Life of Divine Emollient

Arthur Sullivan’s final decade was overshadowed by increasing and debilitating ill health and growing criticism of the light-weight nature of his work by critics associated with the English Musical ... More

Arthur Sullivan’s final decade was overshadowed by increasing and debilitating ill health and growing criticism of the light-weight nature of his work by critics associated with the English Musical Renaissance centred around two younger composers, C.H. Parry and C.V. Stanford. Sullivan did at last produce the grand opera, Ivanhoe (1891), which he had wanted to write for so long. He also continued to write comic operas for the Savoy Theatre, most of them with librettists other than Gilbert. He wrote a ballet and a hymn tune for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, set a patriotic song by Rudyard Kipling to raise funds for the families of troops serving in the Boer War, and wrote a Te Deum to be used when that war ended. He died in 1900, mourned and remembered as much as a church musician and for his sacred works as for his comic operas.Less