9,089 research outputs found
Matthew Henry: The Bible, Prayer, and Piety – A Tercentenary Celebration
No full textThe summer of 2014 marked the tercentenary of the death of Matthew Henry (1662–1714), a leading figure among early eighteenth-century Dissenters and author of the six-volume Exposition of the Old and New Testaments (1707–1714/25). This monumental work, which by 1855 had already been published in twenty-five different editions, attempted a peculiarly practical approach to the biblical text and continues to be widely used and readily accessible even today in both print and online versions. The theme of foreign (or ‘strange’) wives and Israelite intermarriage is one which occurs throughout the Hebrew Bible and, accordingly, throughout Matthew Henry’s commentary upon it. Where it appears, the practice of intermarriage is characterized by Henry as (at best) unwise and (at worst) a very real threat to both social and religious cohesion. This essay explores how Henry deals with the issue of ‘strange wives’, why he believes they continue to pose a threat, and (in view of the overall intention of his commentary) what ‘practical observations’ he offers to his reader as a result. In doing so it is argued that Henry’s commentary traces a thematic thread from the ante-diluvian age to the post-exilic period of calamities resulting from mixed marriages between ‘professors of religion’ and their ‘strange wives’
Gothic Landscapes of the South
No full textSurveying the development of the Southern Gothic landscape, Sivils locates its origins in seventeenth-century captivity narratives by figures such as Garcilaso de la Vega and Captain John Smith. He then traces the cultural evolution of the Southern Gothic landscape through a selection of texts by Henry Clay Lewis, Charles Chesnutt, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and others. Referencing critics such as María del Pilar Blanco and Yi-Fu Tuan—and placing emphasis upon the portrayal of the swamp as related to issues of racial oppression—Sivils ultimately argues that these landscapes function as much more than just passive settings. They are, rather, dynamic sites of haunting that reflect, and at times participate in, the South’s legacy of human and environmental abuse.In Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic, edited by Susan Castillo Street and Charles L. Crow. 83–93. London: Palgrave, 2016 reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan'. 'This extract is taken from the author's original manuscript and has not been edited. The definitive, published, version of record is available here: http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137477736.</p
Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
No full textIn its broadest sense, the ecogothic is a literary mode at the intersection of environmental writing and the gothic, and it typically presupposes some kind of ecocritical lens. Indeed, in the only book devoted to the topic, Andrew Smith and William Hughes define ecogothic as “exploring gothic through ecocriticism,” demonstrating the virtual inextricability of the two concepts. Emergent in the 1990s, ecocriticism has devoted itself to studying the literary and cultural relationships of humans to the nonhuman world—to animals, plants, minerals, climate, and ecosystems. Adopting a specifically gothic ecocritical lens illuminates the fear, anxiety, and dread that often pervade those relationships: it orients us, in short, to the more disturbing and unsettling aspects of our interactions with nonhuman ecologies.This is the table of contents and a manuscript of the introduction of a book published as Keetley, Dawn and Matthew Wynn Sivils (eds.) Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. New York: Routledge, 2017. Posted with permission.</p
Review: Abby L. Goode, Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability
No full textIn her compelling and astute reconsideration of the development of early American agricultural thought, Abby L. Goode pays special attention to the ways that racist, nativist, eugenic, and expansionist rhetoric influenced the evolution of the concept of sustainability across America's long nineteenth century and beyond. The book begins with a helpful roadmap to demonstrate how the texts explored in Agrotopias challenge accepted views of how Thomas Jefferson's agricultural ideas informed early concepts of sustainability. Chapter 1, “No Rural Bowl of Milk: Unsustainability and the Demographic Agrarian Ideal,” examines Herman Melville's 1852 novel, Pierre, along with some of his lesser-known agricultural essays. Goode argues that in Pierre, Melville highlights the anxieties of certain mid-nineteenth-century labor and agricultural reformers who advocated for the formation of small, demographically diverse farming communities that would embody what they saw as a sustainable agricultural ideal. Pierre, however, disrupts this ideal to present, as Goode writes, “the reproductive subtext of this rhetoric: the idea that sexual disorder and racial intermingling enfeeble population fertility and agricultural productivity”.This review is published as Matthew Sivils; Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability. The New England Quarterly 2023; 96 (3): 272–274. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/tneq_r_00998. Posted with permission
Blood in the Watershed: Systems Ecology, Violence, and Cooper’s 'The Pioneers'
No full textWe could not have asked for a better theme for a James Fenimore Cooper conference than the one the organizers selected for this year—watersheds. Like the best conference themes, it invites timely papers devoted to specific topics while also allowing for scholarship that takes off in more unexpected directions. It's a rare example of strength in ambiguity, for even in its most literal sense, a watershed remains a relatively abstract, deceptively complex, concept. As the venerable Oxford English Dictionary contends, a watershed is merely "The line separating the waters flowing into different rivers or river basins; a narrow elevated tract of ground between two drainage areas." I like to think Cooper—whose works often incorporate lush descriptions of actual river systems, while also investigating the socio-political repercussions associated with invisible, and often arbitrary, "dividing lines"—would have approved of this theme as a point of entry into discussing the continued impact of his work, a project that becomes increasingly important as we move deeper into a twenty-first century marked by so much promise and so much more uncertainty.This article originally appeared as Sivils, Matthew Wynn. "Blood in the Watershed: Systems Ecology, Violence, and Cooper’s The Pioneers." The James Fenimore Cooper Society Journal 29, no. 2 (2018): 5-15. Posted with permission.</p
Citation expectations: are they realized? Study of the Matthew index for Russian papers published abroad
No full textWe consider the "Matthew effect" in the citation process which leads to reallocation (or misallocation) of the citations received by scientific papers within the same journals. The case when such reallocation correlates with a country where an author works is investigated. Russian papers in chemistry and physics published abroad were examined. We found that in both disciplines in about 60% of journals Russian papers are cited less than average ones. However, if we consider each discipline as a whole, citedness of a Russian paper in physics will be on the average level, while chemistry publications receive about 16% citations less than one may expect from the citedness of the journals where they appear. Moreover, Russian chemistry papers mostly become undercited in the leading journals of the field. Characteristics of a "Matthew index" indicator and its significance for scientometric studies are also discussed
What America’s first board game can teach us about the aspirations of a young nation
No full textIn 2023 alone, the board game industry topped US40.1 billion by 2032.
Classics like “Scrabble” are being refreshed and transformed, while newer inventions such as “Pandemic” and “Wingspan” have garnered millions of devotees.
This growing cardboard empire was on my mind when I visited the American Antiquarian Society in August 2023 to research its collection of early games.This article is published as Sivils, M.W., What America’s first board game can teach us about the aspirations of a young nation. The Conversation. May 2024.;https://theconversation.com/what-americas-first-board-game-can-teach-us-about-the-aspirations-of-a-young-nation-228581. Posted with permissio
An Interview with Matthew Kaiser on Competition and Play
No full textAn Interview with Matthew Kaiser on Competition and Play, by Sean Scanlan. Matthew Kaiser, the author of The World in Play: Portraits of a Victorian Concept (Stanford UP, 2012) says that “[c]ompetition is the disease from which modern life suffers,” and that “[c]ompetition is the only cure” for this suffering. This contradictory pairing seems to get at the heart of his thesis: play, as a totalizing, umbrella-like concept, emanates from a host of philosophical, political, and scientific work produced by Victorians who posed many of their ideas of play in sports metaphors, competitive logics, and narratives of struggle. Kaiser goes beyond the dichotomy of competition and play/competition or play, by stating “I’m interested in the totalizing potential of both concepts, the way that play, or competition for that matter, swallows the world whole, becomes in the minds of so many people, the organizing principle of reality, whether of culture or nature or consciousness, or of all three.
Monstrous Stewardship and the Plantation in Charles Chesnutt's “The Goophered Grapevine”
No full textThis chapter analyzes Charles W. Chesnutt’s 1887 short story “The Goophered Grapevine” in light of both cultural monster theory and environmental literary criticism. Specifically, it looks at how Chesnutt imagines the plantation as both the product and embodiment of a monstrous system of agriculturally-based racial oppression. Chesnutt’s story counters the romantic portrayals of the southern plantation so common to stories of the late nineteenth-century period. In so doing, he points out that the plantation system lives on in the post-bellum era, highlighting the idea that the combined racial and environmental abuse of the plantation derives from a cruel and short-sighted agricultural stewardship, one from which both southern and northern interests have much to gain.This accepted book chapter is published as Sivils, M.W. Monstrous Stewardship and the Plantation in Charles Chesnutt's “The Goophered Grapevine”. in Stewardship and the Future of the Planet
Transcorporeality and the Pursuit of Happiness in Leonora Sansay's Laura (1809)
No full textThis article examines the way in which Laura , a short novel by Leonora Sansay published in 1809, associates the theme of the search for the founding happiness of the Young Republic to the dream, full of hope but doomed to failure, of conjugal bliss within a pastoral paradise. Sansay, in this little studied novel, uses the conventions of seduction novel and pastoral landscape around Philadelphia to question the validity of the social and physical boundaries that define a set of tensions between the human body and the natural world, and, finally, to question the possibility even for the young women of the nascent Republic to participate in the collective quest for happiness.This article is published as Sivils, M.W., Transcorporeality and the Pursuit of Happiness in Leonora Sansay's Laura (1809). French Review of American Studies. 2018/4(157); 104-116. Posted with permission. </p
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