1,721,717 research outputs found
Introduction to Portraits of Merchants. Multifocal Approaches to Money, Credit and the Market
No full textSubstantial forms of interaction and intersection between the
seemingly disparate fields of Economics and the Humanities have
also been brought to light in a much wider literary and cultural
scene. This Introduction illusrates the theoretical framework of the volume and its key contribution to the ongoing debate
"My well-won thrift which he calls interest". Merchants and Usurers on the Elizabethan Stage
No full textIn the wake of recent insights into the discursive practices of ‘debt’ and ‘credit’ (Kolb-Oppotz-Trotman 2020; Kolb 2021) in early modern English culture, the essay examines the multifaceted socio-cultural context against which the hybrid, and partly overlapping identities of merchants and usurers took shape in Elizabethan England, and the conflictual ideological models that underpin their characterization on the early modern stage. Considering Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London (1581) and William Haughton’s Englishmen for My Money (1598), along with Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1596-97), the essay explores how issues related to ‘Jewishness’ and to the increasingly disturbing presence of ‘foreigners’, ‘strangers’ and ‘aliens’, that seemed to threaten English national identity, became inextricably related to the Elizabethan discourses on an emerging mercantile society between the 1580s and the 1590s
Introduction
No full textThe first part of the Introduction (pp. 1-6) refers to the first section of the Volume including essays on Matthew Arnold, Edward Burnett Tylor and Thomas Henry Huxley, and to the selected readings from Arnold's "Culture and Anarchy" (1869), Tylor's "Primitive Culture" (1871), and Huxley's "Science and Culture" (1880
Il Digital Turn negli studi shakespeariani: aspetti applicativi, criticità e prospettive di ricerca
No full textPartendo da quello che il dibattito critico degli ultimi ha definito «the mutual importance of the “digital” as a context that influences the study of Shakespeare and, conversely, the importance of Shakespeare as a case study to understand the developing nature of the digital world» (Kirwan, Carson 2014: 1), il saggio analizza le implicazioni teorico-metodologiche e le nuove prospettive di ricerca delineate dall’incontro tra tecnologie digitali e studi shakespeariani. Analizzando, da una parte, l’impatto di nuovi paradigmi editoriali sulla presentazione e fruizione dei testi dei plays e vagliando, dall’altra, metodi e strumenti utili all’identificazione e all’analisi delle fonti materiali e immateriali che ne sostanziano la tessitura, il lavoro propone una riflessione sulle opportunità sottese allo studio dell’(inter)testualità shakespeariana in ambiente digitale, misurandone efficacia e criticità sul piano ecdotico, analitico e fruitivo
The humanist and the anthropologist: Victorian notions of culture in Matthew Arnold and Edward Burnett Tylor
No full textThe essay focuses on the forerunners of the debate on culture: Matthew Arnold and Edward Tylor with the exceptionally multifaceted context of Victorian England. More specifically, the essay sheds light on Arnold's humanistic view of culture as the pursuit of perfection "by means of getting to know [...] the best that has been thought and said in the world", which the scholar sees as an alternative to the impending risk of social chaos and anarchy. On the other hand, Tylor's anthropological view of culture is illustrated against the background of the lively debate of the 1870s. As the essay illustrates, Tylor's basic assumptions bear traces of the scientific environment that stongly affected them, and of the long process that eventually led to the recognition of anthropology as a distinct branch of science
Culture and the Legacy of Anthropology Transatlantic Approaches 1870–1930
No full textThe reader investigates the changing face of the notion of culture, tracing how it emerged in some of the most important and controversial phases of the lively Anglo-American debate on the subject from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, including the crucial years of Modernism. Shedding light on the cross-disciplinary approaches that characterized the debate and focusing especially on the legacy of anthropology, the volume presents a selection of some of the most distinguished voices from such assorted fields as literature, linguistics, anthropology, sociology and ethnology, whose interests and areas of enquiry apparently converged and partly overlapped. A selection of primary sources from leading figures such as Matthew Arnold, Bronisław Malinowski, Ruth Benedict, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Aldous Huxley provide an overview of the crucial issues raised on a wide array of topics: civilization, race, nation, progress, evolution, education, art, science, literature and politics. The primary sources are accompanied by critical essays that offer new insights into these classic texts. This reader will be of use to undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as to scholars exploring the cross-disciplinary or transatlantic nature of the study of culture
"For thou must now know farther» Representation, Illusion and Unstable Perspectives in The Tempest
No full textScholars in the last few decades have pointed out the manifold relations of Shakespeare’s The Tempest with the increasingly sceptical frame of mind of early modern English culture. As Robert Peirce argued in 1985, different forms of sceptical thought may be identified in the play. Along with the philosophical background which saw the revival of Pyrrhonism and of Sextus Empiricus’ thought, the article examines The Tempest in the light of recent investigations of early modern visual culture, a period in which the reliability of human vision was deeply undermined by the new discoveries in the fields of medicine, science, technology and art theory, as well as by the controversial debates on the illusions of magic, demonic deceptions and witchcraft. Different forms of ethical and epistemological scepticism in The Tempest are explored, taking into account a variety of structural features which include the weaving of multiple ‘narrative’ voices in the opening act; the condition of the shipwrecked crew «in troops [...] dispersed [...] ’bout the isle» (I, 2, 220), in which each group is ignorant of the truth about the others; and the role of Ariel, who reflects all the characters’ conflicting views as a moving mirror. Prospero’s island, whose circular space introduces a sort of ‘unstable perspective’ allowing virtually infinite viewpoints all around it, is examined in the light of the far reaching ideological implications of early modern theories of linear perspective (Panofsky) and of the «unresolvable contradictions that structure the Western discourse on vision, representation and subjectivity» (Massey)
Informatica umanistica, Digital Humanities: verso quale modernità?
No full textSe le denominazioni di Informatica Umanistica e Digital Humanities evocate dal titolo richiamano l’attenzione su complessi problemi di definizione di un ambito di studi dai confini sfuggenti e in costante evoluzione, è principalmente la domanda «verso quale modernità?» a orientare la riflessione di questo volume, che raccoglie le considerazioni emerse dal Convegno organizzato nell’ottobre 2022 dal Centro Interuniversitario di Ricerca della Modernità (CIRM) presso l’Università degli Studi di Bari. Delineando un possibile “stato dell’arte” della riflessione nel nostro Paese sullo sfondo dello scenario internazionale, i contributi raccolti nel volume mirano, parallelamente, a far luce su possibili linee di evoluzione dell’attuale panorama, coniugando aspetti teorico-metodologici e applicativi, individuando punti di forza e criticità dei casi di studio presi in esame. Nella pluralità delle prospettive di ricerca proposte, il volume solleva interrogativi diversi e suggerisce riflessioni in settori che spaziano dall’archivistica alla biblioteconomia, dall’editoria alla didattica e in ambiti disciplinari che vanno dalle arti figurative alla musicologia, dalla linguistica, alla filologia, alla letteratura, dove l’ausilio di vari strumenti di analisi del testo digitalmente assistita hanno aperto nuovi orizzonti ermeneutici e possibilità di analisi
“Such stuff as ‘texts’ are made on”. Digital Materialities and (Hyper)editing in The Internet Shakespeare Edition of ‘King Lear’
No full textAgainst the background of increasingly pervasive digital technologies, much scholarly attention has been attracted, over the last few decades, by the impact of digital tools and resources in the field of Shakespearean textual studies, where several issues are still open to debate (Erne 2021; Estill 2019; Lavagnino 2014; Malone, Greatley-Hirsch 2021; Greatley-Hirsch, Jenstad 2016; Massai 2021). In the light of a radical rethinking of the ‘materiality’ of the text, this article more specifically addresses some of the affordances, as well as the possible dangers and prospects of digital scholarly editions of the playwright’s works. Focusing on Michael Best’s Internet Shakespeare Edition of King Lear (2001) as a remarkable case in point, the article illustrates how print-based views of textual transmission and editorial mediation are radically reconceptualized within an interactive environment (Driscoll, Pierazzo 2016) where readers are allowed to navigate across the diverse textual variants of the play, including old-spelling transcriptions of the early witnesses, and to access a huge amount of multimedia materials available at the click of the mouse (Best 2011). Considering the paradigm shift from ‘editing’ to ‘archiving’ (Desmet 2017; Galey 2014) and the more recent expansion of platforms hosting interoperable digital humanities projects (Jenstad et al. 2018; Malone, Greatley-Hirsch 2021), the article eventually illustrates how, in the wake of Best’s pioneering model, a digital edition of King Lear could be further enhanced with dynamic links to other interoperable resources and tools. Their still partly unexplored hermeneutic potential invites reflection on how the affordances of the digital medium affect our engagement with and understanding of Shakespeare’s textual heritage
"Hybridizing Textual Bodies and Neogothic Identities: Frankenstein's Afterlife in Shelley Jackson's Fiction"
No full textAgainst the background of the current scholarly debate on the Neo-Gothic fascination with the body manipulation and dissection, this paper examines some recent transmutations of the archetype of the hybrid monster of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. More specifically, the paper focuses on Shelley Jackson’s production, from the hypertexts Patchwork Girl, or A Modern Monster (1995) and My Body. A Wunderkammer (1997) to The Melancholy of Anatomy (2002), up to her most recent project Skin (2010). Although she cannot be strictly considered part of the Neo-Gothic stream, her works exemplify significant ways in which posthuman thought intersects with Gothic textuality. By reimagining Frankenstein’s archetype of the assembled creature, Jackson explores emerging postmodern paradigms of disturbingly porous and disjointed identities in the context of digital culture, where the parallel evolution of fragmented and hybrid textual spaces allows innovative forms of cross-genre and cross-media performances of the self
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