Nineteenth Century Studies

Matteucci and du Bois-Reymond: A Bitter Rivalry

by Gabriel Finkelstein

This essay considers a long-standing controversy between two nineteenth century pioneers in electrophysiology: the... more This essay considers a long-standing controversy between two nineteenth century pioneers in electrophysiology: the German scientist Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818-1896), and his Italian rival Carlo Matteucci (1811-1868). Historians have generally described their disagreement in du Bois-Reymond’s terms: the product of a contrast in scientific outlook. While not discounting this interpretation, I want to suggest that the controversy was driven as much by the rivals’ similarity as it was by their difference.

Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis as Sexual Sourcebook for Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness

by Heike Bauer

Not a translation but a mutilation": The Limits of Translation and the Discipline of Sexology

by Heike Bauer

"The Franklin Mystery"

by adriana craciun

cover essay for May 2012 Literary Review of Canada

This essay considers current 21st century searches for the ships and debris of the John Franklin Arctic disaster in... more This essay considers current 21st century searches for the ships and debris of the John Franklin Arctic disaster in relation to ongoing debates over access to Northwest Passage waterways, aboriginal heritage, and configurations of the Arctic as an energy frontier.

Anonymity, Authorship, and Recirculation: A Civil War Episode

by Ellen Gruber Garvey

‘Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory’: The Cinematic Adaptation of American Poetry

by Michael Devine

Adaptation 5.1 (March 2012): 1-17

This essay reconstructs a forgotten crisis in American letters and film: President Theodore Roosevelt's unpopular... more This essay reconstructs a forgotten crisis in American letters and film: President Theodore Roosevelt's unpopular campaign to make ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ the nation's poem in 1908 and the poem's popular film adaptation in 1911. As the cinematic response to poetry's failure as a national art, the Vitagraph film became a collectivist hymnal for the nation's dream of assimilation. Featured prominently in American poet Vachel Lindsay's pioneering work of film theory, The Art of the Moving Picture (1915), the adaptation effectively reasserted the popular roots of the otherwise genteel ‘Battle Hymn’ poem and by doing so helped to modernize poetry's communal function and the nation's literary tradition.

‘The “Wakened Echoes” of Maxwell’s Poetic Physics’

by Stella Pratt-Smith

Book chapter in interdisciplinary essay collection on physicist James Clerk Maxwell, ed. Raymond Flood, Mark McCartney, and Andrew Whitaker (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2012)

Le libraire de Cogels. Leescultuur en levenscyclus van een Antwerpse elitefamilie (1815-1846)

by Gerrit Verhoeven

Cristina León Alfar. Fantasies of Female Evil: The Dynamics of Gender and Power in Shakespearean Tragedy. London: Associated University Presses, …

by Rebecca Nesvet

A Short History of Superimposition: From Spirit Photography to Early Cinema

by Simone Natale

Early Popular Visual Culture 10.2 (2012): 125-145

Free download in the Francis&Taylor site (only available for a limited time):
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/9ZVBXSfGTn7xhzsTdMmw/full

As several scholars have noted, the use of superimposition effects in cinema to conjure such apparitions as ghosts,... more As several scholars have noted, the use of superimposition effects in cinema to conjure such apparitions as ghosts, fairies, devils, and other fantastic creatures finds a significant precedent in spirit photography, a spiritualist practice by which the image of one or more spirits was ‘magically’ captured on a photographic plate. However, arguing for a relationship of direct filiation between spirit photography and the tricks employed in film remains problematic, especially given that spirit pictures were entangled with matters of religious belief. This article calls for a more solid insertion of spiritualism’s visual culture into the pre-history of film practice, giving three main cases in support of the relationship between spirit photography and early cinema. Firstly, the commercial use of spirit photographs within the spiritualist movement suggests that the circulation of these images was not exclusively informed by matters of belief. Secondly, the popularization of exposures of spirit photography operated by numerous stage magicians in the late nineteenth century can contribute towards explaining the insertion of multiple-exposure techniques in the technical expertise of early filmmakers. Thirdly, a documented case in which spirit photographs were presented to a paying public in the vein of magic lantern entertainments demonstrates that the spiritualist visual culture intersected the nineteenth-century tradition of the projected image, too. Thus, by sketching a history of superimposition effects in photography, stage magic, magic lantern, and cinema, this article claims that visual representations of ghosts in the nineteenth century constantly wavered between religion and spectacle, fiction and realism, and still and moving pictures.

Levinas Face to Face with Fichte

by f. scott scribner

Published:

Southwest Philosophy Review. pgs 151-160, Vol 16, Number 1, Jan., 2000

Against Levinas' own dismissal of Fichte, this paper considers Fichte's very own meditation on the face as an... more Against Levinas' own dismissal of Fichte, this paper considers Fichte's very own meditation on the face as an important precursor to Levinas.

National Art Museum Practice as Political Cartography in 19th Century Britain

by Chris Whitehead

in Knell S; Aronsson P; Amundsen AB; Barnes A; Burch S; Carter J; Gosselin V; Hughes S; Kirwan AM (eds), National Museums: New Studies from Around the World, Routledge 2010

This chapter will explore one of the key characteristics of nineteenth-century national museums in Britain: that of... more This chapter will explore one of the key characteristics of nineteenth-century national museums in Britain: that of mapping the world, both geographically, epistemologically and socially. I will argue that the national museum provided an institutional technology for mapping, while in its morphology it was, literally, a multi-dimensional map which constructed knowledge spatially, connectively and divisively, to represent cultural and natural hierarchies and relations and differences between things and between people. The chapter begins with a brief exploration of the notion of the museum as map by examining the use of cartographic technology within the context of institutional collecting and display of material cultures. Then, looking at the network of national museums in mid-nineteenth-century London, the chapter will discuss the importance of geography, mobility, travel, cartography and appropriation of objects within the organising structures of curatorial practice and knowledge construction with predominant reference to the notion of art and the idea of the work of art. Within this, the paper will also look at the nature of national museum representations of the home nation. Where was Britain’s place on the map? And what were the cartographical politics of national othering and selfing? In relation to the latter the paper will also consider the national museum as a cartographic technology for social mapping through which, in a post-1832 context, the social and moral order of the new British electorate was plotted. The chapter will conclude with a account of the apparently weak expressions of nationhood in mid-century national museums, enabling a view of Britain as cultural cartographer rather than as obvious cultural territory, and opening up a way of discussing the museum as space for theorising, whether explicitly or not, the complex political relations between places, cultures and peoples past and present.

Rebellious Children of Wales: Amy Dillwyn and the Sons and Daughters of Rebecca

by Rita Singer

forthcoming in 'Journal of Victorian Culture Online'

Between the years 1839 and 1843, South Wales witnessed a number of curious nocturnal events as elshmen with blackened... more Between the years 1839 and 1843, South Wales witnessed a number of curious nocturnal events as elshmen with blackened faces and clad in women's clothes, calling themselves the Daughters of Rebecca, frequently set fire to the toll-gates that littered the roads in the countryside. Although the Rebecca Riots did not immediately return improved conditions for the local farmers, they were, nevertheless, a strong attack on a system of unfair taxation and absentee landlordism by a politically unrepresented peasant class. Amy Dillwyn's novel The Rebecca Rioter: A Story of Killay Life (1880) approaches this critical moment in Victorian history by illustrating the origin of domestic insurgencies. Inspired by her father's detailed eyewitness account of an attack on the Pontarddulais turnpike on 10 September 1843, Dillwyn presents her readers with a re-examination of recent history from below for the protagonist is a participant in the riots. Thereby, Dillwyn challenges contemporary historiography that repeatedly presents the Welsh as a hoard of Celts on the verge of anarchy without glossing over the criminal nature of Rebecca. The historical novel portrays
impoverished Welsh village life not as the result of racial degeneration but, instead, from Anglocentric economic policies that threaten to destabilize the coherence of Britain as a Union of Nations. I want to argue that the social criticism of the novel serves as a contemporary warning about the fragility of the British Empire because the mechanism between disinterested politics and domestic insurrections are easily transferred to a global level.

'Crânement beau tout de même': Still life and Le Ventre de Paris', French Studies, LVIII, no. 2 (2004), pp. 177-187

by Kate Tunstall

“‘Almost idolatrous love’: Caroline Dall, Sarah Knowles Bolton, Mary C. Crawford, and the Case of Elizabeth Whitman.” Women Writers and the Artifacts of Celebrity in the Long Nineteenth Century. Ed. Ann R. Hawkins and Maura Ives. London and Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Press, 2012. (119-132)

by Jennifer Harris

Santa Maria in Cosmedin a Roma: questioni di storiografia architettonica medioevale. [S. Maria in Cosmedin in Rome: on the historiography of Medieval architecture]

by Piero Cimbolli Spagnesi

In: G. Fusciello, Santa Maria in Cosmedin a Roma.Roma: QUASAR. 2011, pp. vii-xiii
ISBN 978-88-7140-460-8

Uncommon Valor, Common Soldier: Edward Hall Armstrong, 3rd Regiment North Carolina Troops

by Rebecca Zimmer

"They Both Got History": Using Diary Entries to Analyze the Written Language and Historical Significance of Free Black Philadelphia

by Kaye Wise Whitehead

This paper analyzes the diary entries of Emilie Davis and Amos Webber, two nineteenth-century freeborn blacks, to... more This paper analyzes the diary entries of Emilie Davis and Amos Webber, two nineteenth-century freeborn blacks, to critically examine both their perceptions of public and private events, and their personal relationships. Their entries are used as starting points to investigate and explore how their language choices provide insight into how their linguistic contact may have shaped their linguistic identity within the free Black community. Emilie’s and Amos’ entries provide a skeleton blueprint of their lives and outline their mobile subjectivity, particularly in relation to the ideologies that shaped and formed their racial, gendered, and linguistic identity.

“Ishmael’s Recovery: Injury, Illness, and Convalescence in Moby-Dick.” Special issue on Disability. Ed. Samuel Otter and David T. Mitchell. Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 8 (March 2006): 17-34.

by James Emmett Ryan

Young ladies' institutions: the development of secondary schools for girls in Scotland, 1833-c. 1870

by Lindy Moore

History of Education, 32 (3) May 2003, 249-272.