British Representations of the Middle East in the Exhibition Space, 1850–1932
British Representations of the Middle East in the Exhibition Space, 1850–1932

Author: Holly O'Farrell

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-11-10

Total Pages: 171

ISBN-13: 1000988899

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This volume analyses British exhibitions of Middle Eastern (particularly ancient Egyptian and Persian) artefacts during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – examining how these exhibitions defined British self image in response to the Middle Eastern ‘other’. This study is an original interpretation of the exhibition space along intersectional constructionist lines, revealing how forces such as gender, race, morality and space come together to provide an argument for British supremacy. The position of museums as instruments of representation of display made them important points of contact between the British national imperialist scheme and the public. Displays in the British Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum and Burlington House provide a focus for analysis. Through the employment of a constructionist lens, the research outlines a complex relationship between British society and the Middle Eastern artefacts presented in museums during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This allows a dialogue to emerge which has consequences for both societies which is achieved through intersections of gender, race and morality in space. This book will be of value to students and scholars alike interested in museology, cultural studies, history and art history.

Travel and Space in Nineteenth-Century Europe
Travel and Space in Nineteenth-Century Europe

Author: Anna P.H. Geurts

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-06-27

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1040094058

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This detailed study of eighty European journeys examines the everyday spatial concerns of nineteenth-century travelers, with a focus on travelers from the Netherlands and North Sea region. From common soldiers in revolutionary Belgium to guests of the tsars in Russia, many of their travel accounts are here examined for the first time. Chapters analyze the different meanings of the home and homeliness; travelers’ desires for socializing but equally their intricate privacy norms; their intense attachment to cleanliness, order, space, and light; and the discomforts of cold, hot, wet, hard, and cramped spaces. Author Anna P.H. Geurts details what spatial characteristics travelers valued, what measures they took to ensure them, and what sensations, emotions, and thoughts this resulted in. Geurts’s careful attention to gender, class, and individual experience turns existing conceptions of industrial modernity on their head. From Napoleonic stagecoaches and sailing-boats to the steam-powered journeys of the belle époque, the continuities in travel experiences are surprising, as are the commonalities between travelers of different social classes and genders. Significant shifts in their spatial micropolitics should be sought less in the world of administration and industrial machinery, and more in travelers’ increasingly flexible and egalitarian mindset and changing economic relations. This book will be of value to students and researchers of cultural history as well as contemporary planning and design.

Death in Dublin During the Era of James Joyce’s Ulysses
Death in Dublin During the Era of James Joyce’s Ulysses

Author: Patrick Callan

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-09-27

Total Pages: 371

ISBN-13: 1040145930

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The funeral of Paddy Dignam in James Joyce’s Ulysses serves as the pivotal event of the ‘Hades’ episode. This volume explores how Dignam’s interment in Glasnevin Cemetery allowed Joyce the freedom to consider the conventions, rituals and superstitions associated with death and burial in Dublin. Integrating the words and characters of Ulysses with its figurative locale, the book looks at the presence of Dublin in Ulysses, and Ulysses in Dublin. It emphasises the highly visible public role assigned to death in Joyce’s world, while also appreciating how it is woven into the universe of Ulysses. The study examines the role of Glasnevin Cemetery – where the Joyce family plot was opened in 1880 and remained in use for eight decades – as well as the social and medical problems associated with life in Dublin, a city divided by class, status, wealth and health. Nineteen burials took place in Glasnevin on 16 June 1904, and the analysis of this group illuminates the role of undertakers and insurers, along with the importance of memorialisation. This book is an important contribution to Joyce and Irish studies, as well as to international studies related to the treatment of the dead body and the development of garden cemeteries.

Growing Old in a Better World
Growing Old in a Better World

Author: Robert Troschitz

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-09-23

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 1040123600

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As utopias question social ills and express human wants and unfulfilled dreams, they offer insights into the problems, desires and ideals of a certain time. This book uses this lens to examine cultural representations of ageing and old age in utopian writings from the Renaissance till today. The individual chapters offer detailed analyses and interpretations of numerous utopias from Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) to contemporary science fiction. Through close readings, the book explores age-related fears and ideals and investigates how perceptions of ageing and the life course as well as attitudes towards older people have developed over the centuries. Covering a large time span and a broad range of different utopias, the book identifies long-term developments and also puts certain dreams such as that of ever-lasting youth into a wider perspective. It thus enriches both our understanding of the cultural history of ageing and the history of utopian thought. The book will appeal to scholars and students from the fields of cultural gerontology and utopian studies, as well as literary studies and cultural history more generally.

Forms of Temporality and Historical Time in the Work of Johann Gottfried Herder
Forms of Temporality and Historical Time in the Work of Johann Gottfried Herder

Author: Liisa Steinby

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-09-30

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 1040115446

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This edited collection is the first volume solely dedicated to research on Johann Gottfried Herder’s understanding of history, time, and temporalities. Although his ideas on time mark an important transition period that advanced the emergence of the modern world, scholars have rarely addressed Herder’s temporalities. In eight chapters, the volume examines and illuminates Herder’s conception of human freedom in connection with time; the importance of the concept of forces (Kräfte) for a dynamic ontology; human beings’ sensuous experience of inner and external temporality; Herder’s conception of Bildung, speculations on extra-terrestrial beings and on different perceptions of time; the mythological figure Nemesis and Herder’s view of the past and the future; the temporal dimension in Herder’s aesthetics; and Herder’s biblical studies in relationship to divine infinitude and human temporality. The volume concludes by outlining the influence of Herder’s understanding of time on following generations of thinkers. Forms of Temporality and Historical Time in the Work of Johann Gottfried Herder is ideal for scholars, graduates, and postgraduates interested in Herder’s metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of history, as well as any scholar concerned with eighteenth-century concepts of time and the emergence of the modern world at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

The Natural History of a Neapolitan Miracle
The Natural History of a Neapolitan Miracle

Author: Francesco de Ceglia

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-11-01

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 1040172350

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This book examines Naples’s patron saint, Gennaro, the history of his blood relic, and the mystery of its periodical liquefaction. Three times a year, Neapolitans gather to witness the recurring phenomenon of the liquefaction of San Gennaro’s blood. From the seventeenth century to the present, crowds have prayed to the city’s patron for protection from fires, earthquakes, plagues, droughts, and the fury of Mt. Vesuvius. In the “miraculous” moment of transposition from solid to liquid, the faithful seek respite from the ills of the world in the saintly blood, a visual reminder of the blood of Christ spilled for their salvation. In Naples, the periodical liquefaction of San Gennaro’s blood is not officially recognized as miraculous by the Catholic Church, which now more cautiously refers to it as a prodigy. Nevertheless, for centuries, this phenomenon has been called “a miracle” in liturgical texts approved by the ecclesiastical authority and in the words of bishops, cardinals, popes, and saints. However, not everyone agreed. This volume follows the efforts of theologians, alchemists, charlatans, and scientists who, through the centuries, have tried to answer questions such as: Is the liquefaction of San Gennaro’s blood really a miracle? If not, how is it possible to explain a phenomenon that occurs only on dates liturgically relevant to the saint? The Natural History of a Neapolitan Miracle will be of great value to those interested in Religious Studies, Italian Studies, Medieval and Early Modern Studies, as well as the History of Science, Anthropology, and Ethnography.

Reconciling Art and Technology
Reconciling Art and Technology

Author: Subrata Dasgupta

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-05-14

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1040035663

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This book examines two venerable cultures, art and technology, and uses the young "interdiscipline" of cognitive history combined with case studies of both ancient and modern artifacts to explore, and unveil, some of the bridges by which this reconciliation of two seemingly distant and oppositional cultures can be effected. Art and technology are commonly regarded as oppositional. While both are concerned with made things – artifacts – and both have their origins in pre-literate antiquity, the primary purposes they are intended for are quite distinct: the artifacts of technology serve utilitarian purposes while those of art serve affective needs. This opposition between art and technology, notably argued by such scholars as Lewis Mumford and George Kubler is challenged in this book. For, when we consider art and technology as creative phenomena, then many significant, interesting, and often subtle commonalities emerge whereby a reconciliation – a unity – of these two great cultures seems possible. This book utilizes case studies of both ancient and modern artifacts – ranging from the Nataraja sculpture of ancient India, a great astronomical clock of ancient China, and Japanese Samurai swordmaking, through Gothic cathedrals and Renaissance paintings of Europe to English Elizabethan machinery to the French Impressionists to modernist concrete structures and paintings in both East and West. This book will be of interest to students and professional scholars interested in the histories of art and technology, cultural history, and creativity studies.

The Power of Neo-Slave Fiction and Public History
The Power of Neo-Slave Fiction and Public History

Author: Grant Rodwell

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-10-13

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1000987167

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Professional historians, schools, colleges and universities are not alone in shaping higher-order understanding of history. The central thesis of this book is the belief historical fiction in text and film shape attitudes towards an understanding of history as it moves the focus from slavery to the enslaved—from the institution to the personal, families and feminist accounts. In a broader sense, this contributes to a public history. In part, using the quickly growing corpus of neo-slave counterfactual narratives, this book examines the notion of the emerging slavery public history, and the extent to which this is defined by literature, film and other forms of artistic expression, rather than non-fiction—popular or scholarly—and education in history in the school systems. Inter alia, this book looks to the validity of historical fiction in print or in film as a way of understanding history. A focal point of this book is the hypothesis that neo-slave narratives—supported by selective triangulated readings and viewings of scholarly works and non-fiction—have assisted greatly in re-shaping the historiography of antebellum slavery, and scholarly historians followed in the wake of these developments. Essentially, this has meant a re-shaping of the historiography with a focus from slavery to that of the enslaved. Moreover, it has opened new vistas for a public history, devoid of top-down authoritative scholarship. An important and provocative read for students and scholars interested in understanding the history of slavery, its harrowing effects and how it was culturally defined.

Anthropology and Race in Belgium and the Congo (1839-1922)
Anthropology and Race in Belgium and the Congo (1839-1922)

Author: Maarten Couttenier

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-11-03

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 1000997200

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This books examines the history of Belgian physical anthropology in the long nineteenth century and discusses how the notion of ‘race’ structured Belgian pasts and presents as well as relations between metropole and empire. In a context of competing European nationalisms, Belgian anthropologists mainly used physical characters, like skull form and the color of hair and eyes, to delimitate ‘races’, which were believed to be permanent and existent. Their belief in a supposed racial superiority was however above all telling about their own origins and physical characters. Although it is often assumed that these ideas were subsequently transferred to the colony, the case of Belgian colonization in Congo shows that colonial administrators, at least in theory, were reluctant to use the idea of permanent ‘races’ because they needed the possibility of ‘evolution’ to legitimize their actions as part of a ‘civilizing mission’. In reality, however, colonization was based on military occupation and economic exploitation, with devastating effects. This book analyzes how, in this violent context, widespread racial prejudices in fact dehumanized Congolese. This not only allowed colonizers to act inhuman but also reduced Congolese, or their body parts, to objects that could be measured, photographed, casted, and ‘collected’. This volume will be of use to students and scholars alike interested in social and cultural history as well as imperial and colonial history.

A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Art
A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Art

Author: Michelle Facos

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2018-09-10

Total Pages: 723

ISBN-13: 111885635X

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A comprehensive review of art in the first truly modern century A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Art contains contributions from an international panel of noted experts to offer a broad overview of both national and transnational developments, as well as new and innovative investigations of individual art works, artists, and issues. The text puts to rest the skewed perception of nineteenth-century art as primarily Paris-centric by including major developments beyond the French borders. The contributors present a more holistic and nuanced understanding of the art world during this first modern century. In addition to highlighting particular national identities of artists, A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Art also puts the focus on other aspects of identity including individual, ethnic, gender, and religious. The text explores a wealth of relevant topics such as: the challenges the artists faced; how artists learned their craft and how they met clients; the circumstances that affected artist’s choices and the opportunities they encountered; and where the public and critics experienced art. This important text: Offers a comprehensive review of nineteenth-century art that covers the most pressing issues and significant artists of the era Covers a wealth of important topics such as: ethnic and gender identity, certain general trends in the nineteenth century, an overview of the art market during the period, and much more Presents novel and valuable insights into familiar works and their artists Written for students of art history and those studying the history of the nineteenth century, A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Art offers a comprehensive review of the first modern era art with contributions from noted experts in the field.