Showing papers on "Cultural history published in 1991"

Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction

Abstract: In Cultural Imperialism, John Tomlinson deals with issues ranging from the ideological effects of imported cultural products, to the process of cultural homogenization, to the nature of cultural autonomy. He examines a number of related discourses: thedebate about "media imperialism" the discourse of national cultural identity; the critique of multinational capitalism and the critique of cultural modernity. His analysis reveals major problems in the way in which the idea of cultural, as distinct from economic or political, imperialism is formulated.

Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader

Abstract: (Contents arranged thematically) Foreword Acknowledgements 1. Formalist, structuralist and post-structuralist poetics, linguistics and narratology 2. Deconstruction 3. Psychoanalysis 4. Poetics, ideology, cultural history 5. Feminism 6. Hermeneutics, reception theory, reader-reponse 7. Cognitive literary scholarship Contents are arranged: a. historically b. thematically

The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age

Abstract: Joseph M. Levine provides a witty and erudite account of one of the most celebrated chapters in English cultural history, the acrimonious quarrel between the "ancients" and the "moderns" which Jonathan Swift dubbed "the Battle of the Books." The dispute that amused and excited the English world of letters from 1690 until the 1730s was, Levine shows, an installment in the long-standing debate about the relationship of classical learning to modern life. Levine argues that the debate was fundamentally a quarrel about the rival claims of history and literature concerning the proper way to understand the authors of the past. He skillfully examines how both sides wrote their own brands of history: The moderns, led by Richard Bentley, proposed that the "modern" inventions of classical scholarship and archaeology gave them a superior insight into the past; the ancients, marshaled by Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, held out for a more direct imitation of antiquity and opposed the new scholarship with all the force of their satire and invective. Levine demonstrates that the ancients and the moderns influenced each other in powerful ways, and had much more in common than they knew. Chronicling a critical episode in the development of modem scholarship, The Battle of the Books illuminates the roots of present-day controversies about the role of the classics in the curriculum and the place of the humanities in education.

The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy

Abstract: Pindar’s epinikian odes were poems commissioned to celebrate athletic victories in the first half of the fifth century BCE. Drawing on the insights of interpretive anthropology and cultural history, Leslie Kurke investigates how the socially embedded genre of epinikion responded to a period of tremendous social and cultural change. Kurke examines the odes as public performances which enact the reintegration of the athletic victor into his heterogeneous communities. These communities—the victor’s household, his aristocratic class, and his city—represent competing, sometimes conflicting interests, which the epinikian poet must satisfy to accomplish his project of reintegration. Kurke considers in particular the different modes of exchange in which Pindar’s poetry participated: the symbolic economy of the household, gift exchange between aristocratic houses, and the workings of monetary exchange within the city. Her analysis produces an archaeology of Pindar’s poetry, exposing multiple systems of imagery that play on different shared cultural models to appeal to the various segments of the poet’s audience. The Traffic in Praise aims to provide new insight into Pindar’s poetry as well as into the conceptual world of archaic and classical Greece.

Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie

Abstract: 1. Horror Movie Histories Part I: Genre History 2. Facts, Figures, and Frightful Fiends 3. Genre History I: 1931-1960 4. Genre History II: 1961-1984 Part II: Narrative Resources 5. Narratives 6. Events - Characters - Settings Part III: Science, Supernature, Psyche 7. Mad Science 8. Lurkers at the Threshold 9. The Sleep of Reason 10. Security and Paranoia.

Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars

Abstract: Most studies of the interwar years have focussed upon literary elites, rendering that past and its literature in almost exclusively male terms. In "Forever England" Alison Light argues that we cannot make sense of Englishness in the period, or understand the changes within literary culture, unless we recognzse the extent to which the female population represented the nation between the wars. From the traumatic aftermath of the First World War, "Forever England" traces the making of a conservative national temperament which could be defensive and protective, yet modernizing in outlook. In a series of literary analyses, the author suggests some of the tones and accents of this new version of Englishness; in particular she looks at new kinds of readership and fiction, at the historical and emotional significance of the "whodunit", the burgeoning of historical romance, and the creation of a middlebrow culture in the period. "Forever England" aims to evoke a powerful sense of period and of the pleasures of reading, providing an intimate picture of interwar life from inside the English middle classes. This book should be of interest to students and lecturers in modern literature, gender studies, cultural studies and cultural history.

Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition

Abstract: Images of Australian identity, and of Australian nationhood, are social and cultural constructs There are several dominant themes and elements, one of the most pervasive being the Australian bushman confronting a vast and barren landscape This is a specifically Australian conception of the battle between Man and Nature Throughout the myths, traditions and literary creations of Australia are underlying assumptions about gender and sexual difference: assumptions about masculinity and femininity within the nationalist tradition, which affect perceptions today In this new critique, Kay Schaffer applies the insights of feminist scholarship and of literary analysis to examine the national character She looks at how the concept of 'the typical Australian', and the woman who stands in relation to him, has evolved across a range of cultural forms, including historical and literary texts, film and the media She concentrates in particular on the writings of Henry Lawson and of Barbara Bayton The circulation of ideas about these writers, their contribution to a national mythology, and the different ways their importance has been represented to modern readers, is explored and discussed This thoughtful and provocative study will interest readers concerned with Australian literary and cultural history, as well as the broader questions of Australia's changing self-image It will be of particular value to those interested in feminist approaches to culture and society

Literary into cultural studies

Abstract: Through criticism of British cultural studies, New Historicism and cultural materialism, Easthope examines the discipline of cultural studies as it comes out of literary studiesThis title available in eBook format wwwebookstoretandfcouk

Archaeology as Cultural History: Words and Things in Iron Age Greece

Abstract: List of Illustrations. Preface and Acknowledgements. Journal Abbreviations. Part I:. 1. Archaeology as Cultural History. Part II:. 2. Archaeologies of Greece. 3. Inventing a Dark Age. Part III:. 4. Equality for Men. 5. Antithetical Cultures. Part IV:. 6. The Past, the East, and the Hero of Lefkandi. 7. Rethinking Time and Space. Part V:. 8. Conclusions. Notes. References. Index.

Shakespeare's Caliban: A Cultural History

Abstract: Preface Acknowledgements Note on editions Introduction 1. Caliban in Shakespeare's text Part I. Origins: 2. Historical contexts 3. Literary contexts Part II. Receptions: 4. Literary criticism 5. The American school 6. Colonial metaphors 7. Stage history 8. Filmography 9. Artists' renditions 10. Poetic invocations Conclusion 11. Caliban's Odyssey Notes Index.

The State of Ethnohistory

Abstract: The boundaries separating anthropology from history, and ethnohistory from history, were once more clearly drawn than they are at present. At different moments, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Robert Lowie, and Hugh Trevor-Roper all became symbolic of a wide chasm between anthropology and history. In 1929, after ruminating for more than a decade about the conversion of his mentor W. H. R. Rivers to diffusionism and speculative historical reconstruc­ tions (174:267-82), Radcliffe-Brown (244:598) asserted that history , for the most part, "does not really explain anything at all," a remark that came to represent the anti-diffusionist and anti-evolutionist ahistorical bent of British structural-functionalism, both his brand and Bronislaw Malinowski's. By that time, Lowie (183:40) had already proclaimed that one cannot "attach to oral traditions any value whatsoever under any circumstances whatsoever" be­ cause "we cannot know them to be true," which has come to stand not simply for a disbelief in the historicity of indigenous accounts of past events but also for an alleged lack of interest on the part of an entire generation of American cultural anthropologists in history . And decades later Trevor-Roper (304:9) argued that only history of Europeans in Africa was worthwhile-"the rest is largely darkness, like the history of pre-European, pre-Columbian America. And darkness is not a subject for history." We should not, Trevor-Roper continued, "amuse ourselves with the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant comers of the globe"-a fairly remarkable statement that became more than fleetingly symbolic of the ethnoand Eurocentrism of which many have accused traditional historiography.

Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political History

Abstract: In this imaginative and illuminating work, Annabel Patterson traces the origins and meanings of the Aesopian fable, as well as its function in Renaissance culture and subsequently. She shows how the fable worked as a medium of political analysis and communication, especially from or on behalf of the politically powerless. Patterson begins with an analysis of the legendary Life of Aesop, its cultural history and philosophical implications, a topic that involves such widely separated figures as La Fontaine, Hegel, and Vygotsky. The myth’s origin is recovered here in the saving myth of Aesop the Ethiopian, black, ugly, who began as a slave but become both free and influential, a source of political wisdom. She then traces the early modern history of the fable from Caxton, Lydgate, and Henryson through the eighteenth century, focusing on such figures as Spenser, Sidney, Lyly, Shakespeare, and Milton, as well as the lesser-known John Ogilby, Sir Roger L’Estrange, and Samuel Croxall. Patterson discusses the famous fable of The Belly and the Members, which, because it articulated in symbolic terms some of the most intransigent problems in political philosophy and practice, was still going strong as a symbolic text in the mid-nineteenth century, where it was focused on industrial relations by Karl Marx and by George Eliot against electoral reform.

Contemporary Cultural Theory: An Introduction

Abstract: 1 Cultural Studies and Cultural Theory 2 Literature and Society: From Culturalism to Cultural Materialism 3 Critical Theory: From Ideology Critique to the Sociology of Culture 4 Semiology: From Structuralism to Post-Structuralism 5 The Cultural Politics of Difference 6 Postmodernism and Cultural Theory 7 Cultural Criticism and Cultural Policy

Labor and Desire: Women's Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America

Abstract: This critical, historical, and theoretical study looks at a little-known group of novels written during the 1930s by women who were literary radicals. Arguing that class consciousness was figured through metaphors of gender, Paula Rabinowitz challenges the conventional wisdom that feminism as a discourse disappeared during the decade. She focuses on the ways in which sexuality and maternity reconstruct the ""classic"" proletarian novel to speak about both the working-class woman and the radical female intellectual. Two well-known novels bracket this study: Agnes Smedley's Daughters of Earth (1929) and Mary McCarthy's The Company She Keeps (1942). In all, Rabinowitz surveys more than forty novels of the period, many largely forgotten. Discussing these novels in the contexts of literary radicalism and of women's literary tradition, she reads them as both cultural history and cultural theory. Through a consideration of the novels as a genre, Rabinowitz is able to theorize about the interrelationship of class and gender in American culture. Rabinowitz shows that these novels, generally dismissed as marginal by scholars of the literary and political cultures of the 1930s, are in fact integral to the study of American fiction produced during the decade. Relying on recent feminist scholarship, she reformulates the history of literary radicalism to demonstrate the significance of these women writers and to provide a deeper understanding of their work for twentieth-century American cultural studies in general.

The nervous nineties : Australian cultural life in the 1890s

Abstract: A cultural history of Australia during the 1890s with emphasis on the remarkable creativity of the period in stories, novels, paintings, design, journalism, intellectual and political movements.

II. On Dance Ethnography

Abstract: The strength of ethnography and ethnographic criticism is their focus on detail, their enduring respect for context in the making of any generalization, and their full recognition of persistent ambiguity and multiple possibilities in any situation. (Marcus and Fischer 1986:159) Movement as Cultural Knowledge: The term “ethnography” literally means “portrait of a people.” Perhaps “portrait” is too thin and two-dimensional a metaphor to represent the goal of ethnography, for an ethnographer seeks not only to describe but to understand what constitutes a people's cultural knowledge. Cultural knowledge includes, in anthropologist Clifford Geertz's words, “a people's ethos—the tone, character, and quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood—and their world view—the picture they have of the way things in sheer actuality are, their most comprehensive ideas of order” (1973:89). The ethnographer wants to know nothing less than how a given group of people find or, more accurately, make meaning. To examine dance from an ethnographic perspective, then, is to focus on dance as a kind of cultural knowledge. Dance ethnography depends upon the postulate that cultural knowledge is embodied in movement, especially the highly stylized and codified movement we call dance. This statement implies that the knowledge involved in dancing is not just somatic, but mental and emotional as well, encompassing cultural history, beliefs, values, and feelings. If movement encodes cultural knowledge then, for example, ballet can be examined for the messages it embodies about enduring gender conventions derived from the court society of Renaissance Europe and performance art can be examined as a response to the demands of survival in urban America.

Religion and nationality in Antiquity: the worship of Yahweh and ancient Israel

Abstract: There is a particularly interesting, important, and, I think, generally unacknowledged cleavage within the study of the Geist, cultural history, Geisteswissenschaften, the human sciences, sociology or whatever term you employ. This deserves our consideraion.

Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India: The Shaping of a Public Culture in Surat City, 1852-1928

Abstract: Reviews of Books royal family and his activities in the Free Thai Move- ment should have strengthened his political position. Yet after the country returns to normal, Pibul comes out on top, and Pridi loses (again). Why? Chronology alone cannot explain or even clarify the issues that make the 1930s and 1940s such a critical turning point in modern Thai history. CONSTANCE M. WILSON Northern Illinois University SYED NESAR AHMAD. Origins of Muslim Consciousness In India: A World System Perspective. Foreword by IMMAN- UEL WALLERSTEIN. (Contributions to the Study of World History, number 29.) New York: Greenwood. 1991. Pp. xv, 311. $47.95. Syed Nesar Ahmad's work is one of synthesis and analysis, reviewing a wide range of secondary works to explain Muslim consciousness, conceptualized as a separate Muslim political consciousness. The book proceeds chronologically, with chapters on nine- teenth-century Islamic revival movements in re- sponse to British rule; the rise of modernism in the context of the great depression of the late nine- teenth century; the rise and decline of Hindu-Muslim unity through the course of World War I and into the 1920s; and, in a long final chapter, Muslim separat- ism during the Depression of the 1930s and World War II. Ahmad's approach has two valuable charac- teristics: first, to show identities as historically consti- tuted in interaction with social, economic, and politi- cal contexts; and second, to show the critical importance of placing those contexts in a larger geographical setting than the boundaries of the na- tion-states that so often define our histories. The motor to political action and indeed Muslim consciousness in Ahmad's analysis is elite material interests. Recalling studies by scholars like Paul Brass (for example, his Language, Religion and Politics in North India (1974]), Ahmad emphasizes competition among elites who then, as political grids change, deploy cultural symbols in order to mobilize the popular support needed to participate in those grids. Ahmad links class developments to broad patterns of economic change to show that, far from any single communal interest, it is the interests of powerful groups, interests potentially at odds with those of co-religionists, that are at stake. Thus, the jotedars of Bengal emerge as a powerful class of small landlords whose interests diverge from the powerful, largely Hindu, big landowners as well as from the Muslim lower peasantry who are, ultimately, persuaded to support them nonetheless on grounds of shared religion. While suggestive of significant developments, Ah- mad's analysis will seem to many readers too singular, particularly because of his neglect of the wholly new context of a public culture, created by new modalities AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW of communication, that transforms identities and public action. As Immanuel Wallerstein notes in his foreword (p. ix), If one composed two lists of world- wide names of ... 'groups,' one list say as of 1500 and one say as of 1950, some on the two lists ... would be the same nominally. But would they be the same existentially, or sociologically? Ahmad offers an im- plicit description of the contrast signaled in Waller- stein's statement, but one would wish for a richer sense of the transition. For that, the approaches of social and cultural history would come into play as they do not here and would be seen as integral to, not separate from, the economic and political structures emphasized throughout. Hindu and ' Muslim sol- idarities-let alone those denoted fundamentalist, orthodox,'' and heterodox -are often treated here as historically continuous categories and not as groupings that are in the process of construction. The topic of this book, the creation of politicized ethnicity and community in the twentieth century, could not be more timely given today's world events. Ahmad was a young scholar tragically killed in an airplane hijacking in 1986. In this posthumously published work, he has raised important questions, and, in his emphasis on economic differentiation and competition, he has left us a significant legacy for further research. BARBARA D. METCALF University of California, Davis Dou GLAS E. HA YNES. Rhetoric and Ritual in Cownial India: The Shaping of a Public Culture in Surat City, 1852-1928. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1991. Pp. xi, 363. $49.95. Douglas E. Haynes has written a thoughtful book about ideology and nationalism in colonial India. He starts with the founding of Surat municipality in western India in 1852. His interest initially was polit- ical history; that this history was written in language familiar to him struck him as strange. He conceptu- alizes his task as explaining the development of political ideology along liberal democratic lines, look- ing at symbolic behavior-rhetoric and ritual-to show that Surat's public culture, while constrained by its development under colonial rule, was formulated by the elite through struggle and interaction with colonial officials and institutions. Haynes sees himself as an ethnohistorian, inter- ested in the construction of cultural meaning, and he puzzles over why the leaders of India's independence movement used the language of liberal, representa- tive democracy when that language ill-served the interests of the underclasses. In his conclusion, his concern with contemporary India is clear. He sug- gests that the most important test of democracies that have grown out of colonial contexts rather than out of demands from deeper within society is whether FEBRUARY 1993

More's Utopia

Abstract: "Utopia" has a strong claim to be the most misunderstood book ever written; its name has been hijacked by countless idealistic schemes having little in common with More's own assessment of social possibilities. For although it contributes to a line of argument that can be traced from Plato to Marx, "Utopia" is first and foremost a literary work that appeals to the imagination and seeks to question us rather than to proffer answers. This study prepares the reader for these challenges, placing the work in the context of early sixteenth-century Europe and the intellectual preoccupations of More's own humanist circle, and clarifying those sources in classical and Christian political thought that provoked his writing. "Utopia" is presented as a penetrating reflection on political idealism, one that has lost none of its relevance in an age that has witnessed the collapse of Marxists aspirations to social control. Dominic Baker-Smith also surveys the varied critical reception accorded to "Utopia" over the last four centuries, providing an intriguing look at "Utopia's" role in cultural history.

Celebrations: The Cult of Anniversaries in Europe and the United States Today

Abstract: In the twentieth century, celebrations of historical anniversaries abounded. There was the bicentennial of the French Revolution, the 150th anniversary of photography, Bach's 300th anniversary, and the 200th anniversary of the American Constitution, to name just a few. Every year hundreds of anniversaries still attract media attention and government investment in ever greater degrees. Deploying an astonishing array of insights, "Celebrations" explores the causes and consequences of this major phenomenon of our time. As Johnston shows, anniversaries fulfill a number of needs. They provide the kind of experience of regularity across a lifetime that the weekly cycle supplies in daily life. The use of anniversaries for political ends emerged during the French Revolution and expanded to promote nationalism during the nineteenth century, although there are differences in how they are used. Europeans tend to celebrate cultural heroes, while Americans tend to celebrate events. Entire nations exploit anniversaries of founding events in order to promote national identity. Commercially, there are whole industries built around commemoration, and they provide intellectuals an opportunity to take center stage. Using methods of cultural history, sociology, and religious studies, Johnston shows how the cult of anniversaries reflects postmodern concerns. It fills a void left by the disappearance of ideologies and avant-gardes. In an era when there is little consensus about styles or methods, anniversaries allow intellectuals, businesses, and governments to acknowledge and celebrate every nuance of opinion. By suggesting ways to use anniversaries more creatively, this book offers a broad range of insights.

Constructing a New Cultural History of Prewar Japan

Abstract: In January 1925, the Osaka Asahi newspaper organized a spectacle. This gathering of close to one hundred children, whose names contained the Chinese ideogram "Sho" of the imperial, Taisho reign, is preserved in a photograph in the pictorial magazine Asahi Gurafu. The newspaper publisher was commemorating the new newspaper comic strip serial The Adventures of Shochan, and children wore knitted "Shochan" hats topped with pom-poms to that end. But more than the mass-produced apparel was being advertised. As the cultural historian Tsurumi Shunsuke has pointed out, the discerning consumer of the photograph was at once made aware of the comic strip, the hat company that had donated the uniform attire, the newspaper company, and the imperial reign for which both the children and

George Cruikshank's Life, Times, and Art

Abstract: "Patten consistently manages with great deftness to intertwine the personal and the historical, the strands of Cruikshank's life and those of his caricatures, illustrations, and moralities without a sign of jargon or pedantry. . . . This is a monumental life and works."--Ronald Paulson, The Johns Hopkins University "At last, an authoritative, exhaustively researched biography of one of nineteenth-century England's greatest popular artists! It will rescue him from the biographical obscurity in which he has dwelt and inspire a fresh estimate of his achievement as a rough-and-tumble caricaturist and prolific book illustrator."--Richard D. Altick, Ohio State University The etchings and wood engravings by George Cruikshank (1792-1878) recorded, commented on, and satirized his times to such an extent that they have been frequently used to represent the age. Cruikshank, a popular artist in the propaganda war against Napoleon, an ardent campaigner for Reform and Temperance, and the foremost illustrator of such classics as Grimms' Fairy Tales, Scott's novels, and Dickens's Oliver Twist, is known for his versatility, imagination, humor, and incisive images. His long life, marked by a ceaseless struggle to win recognition for his art, intersected with many of Britain's important political, social, and cultural leaders. Robert Patten provides the first documentary biography of Cruikshank. In this first volume of a two-volume work, which covers the artist's Regency caricatures and early book illustrations, Patten demonstrates the ways that Cruikshank was, as his contemporaries frequently declared, the Hogarth of the nineteenth century. Having reviewed over 8,500 unpublished letters and most of Cruikshank's 12,000 or more printed images, Patten gives a thorough and reliable account of the artist's career. He puts Cruikshank's achievement into a variety of larger contexts--publishing history, political and cultural history, the traditions of figurations practiced by Cruikshank's contemporaries, and the literary and social productions of nineteenth-century Britain. Published to coincide with the Fall 1992 bicentennial celebrations of the artist's birth, this biography provides both the general reader and the specialist with a wealth of new information conveyed in a lively, non-technical prose. Patten's book contributes to current investigation of the rich interactions between high art and low art, texts and pictures, politics and imagination.

Making sense in life and literature

Abstract: This work describes an intellectual trajectory that can be traced from the interdisciplinary re-orientation of the humanities in Germany between 1975 and 1990 to similar issues being discussed in North America today. Its point of departure is the progression from the traditional positions of hermeneutics and reception aesthetics to new practices in the field of cultural history, central to which are concepts of "sense" and "reality" that motivated a fresh interest in the socio-historical contexts of literature and culture. On this basis, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht develops a nontextual theory of narrative and advances a historical outline of canonized and non-canonized texts and cultural institutions in Europe from the Renaissance to the 20th century.