Search Results

This book offers an account of Dante's reception in a wide range of media: visual art, literature, theatre, cinema, and music, from the late eighteenth century through to the early twentieth. It thus explores various appropriations and interpretations of his works and persona during the era of modernization in Europe, the United States, and beyond. It includes work by internationally recognized experts and a new generation of scholars in the field, and the eighteen chapters are grouped in sections which relate both to themes and regions. The volume begins and ends by addressing Italy's reception of the national poet, and its other main sections show how a worldwide dialogue with Dante developed in France, Britain, Germany, the United States, Ireland, India, and Turkey. The whole collection demonstrates how this dialogue explicitly or implicitly informed the construction, recovery, or re-definition of cultural identity among various nations, regions, and ethnic groups during the ‘long nineteenth century’. It not only aims at wide coverage of the period's voices and concerns, and includes discussion of well-known writers such as Ugo Foscolo, Giosuè Carducci, Mary Shelley, John Ruskin, George Eliot, Charles Eliot Norton, and Ralph Waldo Emerson — along with a large number of significant but less familiar figures.

An adolescent girl is mocked when she takes a bath with her peers, because her genitals look like those of a boy. A couple visits a doctor asking to ‘create more space’ in the woman for intercourse. A doctor finds testicular tissue in a woman with appendicitis, and decides to keep his findings quiet. These are just a few of the three hundred European case histories of people whose sex was doubted during the long nineteenth century that this book draws upon. The book offers a refreshingly new perspective on the relation between physical sex and identity over the long nineteenth century. Rather than taking sex, sexuality and gender identity as a starting point for discussing their mutual relations, it historicizes these very categories. Based on a wealth of previously unused source material, the book asks how sex was doubted in practice—whether by lay people, by hermaphrodites themselves, or by physicians; how this doubt was dealt with; what tacit logics directed the practices by which a person was assigned a sex, and how these logics changed over time. The book highlights three different rationales behind practices of doubting and (re)assigning sex: inscription, body and self. Sex as inscription refers to a lifelong inscription of a person in the social body as male or female, marked by the person's appearance. This logic made way for logics in which the truth of inner anatomy and inner self were more significant.

This book examines the British ghost story within the political contexts of the long nineteenth century. By relating the ghost story to economic, national, colonial and gendered contexts it provides a critical re-evaluation of the period. The conjuring of a political discourse of spectrality during the nineteenth century enables a culturally sensitive reconsideration of the work of writers including Dickens, Collins, Charlotte Riddell, Vernon Lee, May Sinclair, Kipling, Le Fanu, Henry James and M.R. James. Additionally, a chapter on the interpretation of spirit messages reveals how issues relating to textual analysis were implicated within a language of the spectral.

This book explores a number of new critical contexts in which nineteenth century literature can be discussed. The volume also explores the idea of the Victorian ‘Afterlife’ and examines neo-Victorian text based narratives and film adaptations. Topics discussed include science, poetry, the Gothic, anatomical exhibitions, the spread of liberalism, Anglo-American publishing, and Punjabi popular culture. The national contexts of literary production are explored as are the international cultural exchanges of the period. The book is intended to provide a critical re-examination of the long nineteenth century by bringing together a number of intellectually challenging perspectives that seek to develop the field of nineteenth century studies.

In the nineteenth century paleontologists claimed that, from just a single bone, they could identify and sometimes even reconstruct previously unknown prehistoric creatures. Such extraordinary displays of predictive reasoning were accomplished through the law of correlation, which proposed that each element of an animal corresponds mutually with all the others. Although this law, which was pivotal in the development of the new science of paleontology, was formulated by Georges Cuvier amidst the tumult of post-revolutionary Paris, it was in Britain and America that it took particular hold. Paleontologists such as Richard Owen were heralded as scientific wizards who could resurrect the extinct denizens of the ancient past from merely a glance at a fragmentary bone. Show Me the Bone examines the distinctive anglophone engagement with Cuvier’s renowned method of reconstruction across the whole of the long nineteenth century. It considers how the law of correlation was successively repackaged by different audiences, including those across the Atlantic and in the furthest outposts of the British Empire, and was used for diverse and often contradictory purposes. Even after the law of correlation had been decisively refuted by Thomas Henry Huxley and other expert practitioners in the 1850s, claims about Cuvier’s unerring and almost prophetic powers continued to circulate in works of science popularization as well as in fiction and poetry. The remarkable afterlife of Cuvier’s famous law had important consequences both for the cultural authority of scientific naturalism and the development of paleontology in the late nineteenth century.

Offering a window into the history of the modern legal profession in Western Europe, this book presents a history of lawyers in the most industrialized city on the Mediterranean. Far from being mere curators of static law, Barcelona's lawyers were at the center of social conflict and political and economic change, mediating between state, family, and society. Beginning with the resurrection of a decadent bar during the Enlightenment, this book traces the historical evolution of lawyers throughout the long nineteenth century. Among the issues it explores are: the attributes of the modern legal profession; how lawyers engaged with the Enlightenment; how lawyers molded events in the Age of Revolution and helped consolidate a liberal constitutional order; why a liberal profession became conservative and corporatist; and how lawyers promoted fin-de-siecle nationalism. From the vantage point of a city with a distinguished legal tradition, the book provides fresh insight into: European social and legal history; the origins of liberal professionalism; education, training, and the practice of law in the nineteenth century; the expansion of continental bureaucracies; and the corporatist aspects of modern nationalism.