1,720,970 research outputs found
"Time's Renewal": Death and Immortality in Thomas Hardy's 'Emma Poems'
No full textThis essay examines how Hardy’s poetry considers the possibility of immortality, a concept that
preoccupied him throughout his life, and which he examined within the context of rapidly shifting
philosophical and scientific theories about time. The publication of Wessex Poems in 1898
coincided with the publication of William James’s Human Immortality, at a time when
philosophers and spiritualists were grappling with the implications of Darwin’s theory as it
pertained to long-held ideas about the soul and posthumous eternity. The subject intrigued Hardy,
who acquired a copy of James’s Human Immortality and also Henry Drummond’s Natural Law in
the Spiritual World (1894). While much critical attention has been focused on Hardy’s ‘Poems of
1912-1913’, scholarly studies of this series are often driven by a biographical interest and
primarily examine how this sequence of elegies captures the psychological trauma of sudden
bereavement. In my essay I demonstrate that while Hardy’s elegies are highly personal responses
to the death of his first wife Emma, they are also reflections on the relationship between time and
death. I offer a reading of the ‘Poems of 1912-1913’, in light of Hardy’s interest in spiritualism,
and how this reading of Bergson, and his later reading in Einstein, impacted on his later poetry on
the subject of mortality and death, including poems published posthumously in Winter Words
(1928). Through close reading of poems on mortality from the death of Emma in 1912 to poems
from the posthumously published Winter Words (1928), I examine how linear ideas about time in
Hardy’s elegies contend with his belief (held from 1875) in the unreality of time, as he examines
the possibility of life after death, or life outside of time
Henry Hawley Smart’s The Great Tontine and the Art of Book-Making
No full textAlthough relatively neglected by the periodical press, Henry Hawley Smart’s fiction was reviewed in an unlikely forum, Chance and Luck (1887) in which Richard A. Proctor sought to demonstrate the immorality of gambling. This chapter will not only examine Hawley Smart’s fiction in the context of contemporary debates about gambling but also with speculation in the literary marketplace at a time when Samuel Smiles suggested that a writer of popular literature could attain success essentially through making his own luck. This chapter argues literary publishing, like the tontine, is a lottery played for an indefinite stake and that underpinning the narrative of The Great Tontine is a self-reflexive preoccupation on writing strategically for the literary marketplace of the mid-nineteenth century
‘Introduction: Exploring the Hinterland of Victorian Fiction’
No full textIn their introductory chapter, Downes and Ferguson examine the complexities of the Victorian literary marketplace and some problems inherent in the very idea of canonicity in that period, when there was a vogue for ‘Best Books’ lists. They explore the challenge of establishing apt criteria for the selection of neglected and forgotten novels, and highlight that what should remain of paramount concern in such a scholarly endeavour is the question of literary quality. While the collection’s essays focus on a diverse range of texts, the editors foreground the complexities involved in canon formation, arguing for a re-evaluation of the received meta-narratives of Victorian literary history
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
You are too slow::Time Travel in Around the World in 80 Days' in Trish Ferguson (ed.) Victorian Time
No full text'Gatsby's Defunct Clock and the Philosophy of Time'
No full textWhile previous critical interpretations of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby have analyzed the narrative's time shifts and fragmentations, this study turns to the philosophy of time as a lens to explore the novel's depiction of permanence and change. Thus, natural daily and seasonal cycles come into focus as counters to modernity's broken clock-time and destructive pace
‘Perpetual recurrence’ : The arrest of time in Decadent poetry
No full textThis chapter proposes an exploration of Decadent 1890s poetry through the lens of the complex Nietzschean postulate of ‘eternal recurrence’, a concept that served to destabilise conventional narratives of evolutionary or technological progress. The poetics of Decadence hinges upon patterns of repetition which were indebted to the Paterian ‘aesthetic of delay’. The image of the female dancer is a defining one in decadent art, as exemplified here by Michael Field, Wilde and Symons. The representation of the garden illuminates a similar cessation of the temporal, whilst the action of the waves of the sea evokes significantly potent images of recurrence. It is suggested in conclusion that this stress on the ‘moment of vision’ would become a defining motif in cultural modernism
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
- …
