A similar sensibility of engaging with "unmistakably 'Oriental' character" ("unverkennbar 'morgenländischem' Charakter"; 75), occurred also during this time with interpretations of Islam. Olav Krämer ...illustrates the way that Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim's poems in Halladat oder Das rothe Buch (1774/75), being influenced by Friedrich Eberhard Boysen's 1773 translation of the Koran, represented the religion, like Gottlieb Konrad Pfeffel with respect to China, as a model of virtue. However, in so doing, no explicit references to the Koran or to Mohammed were made; rather the image of Islam was created with orientalizing elements ("die orientisierenden Elemente"; 80-88), such as with supposed Arabic sounding names and places. According to Alexander Kosenina, August Klingemann, the most unknown known (249), attempted to identify a similar relativizing sensibility with the voyages of Christopher Columbus. In his popular play Columbus (1808), Klingemann deemphasized the pursuit of ambition and glory, by stylizing Columbus as a cautious explorer and researcher, an interpretation that Alexander von Humboldt later asserted in his formulation of the Columbian encounter as "conquest through reflection" ("Eroberung durch Nachdenken"; 263). In contrast, as Dieter Heimböckel illustrates, two novellas by Heinrich von Kleist, Das Erdbeben in Chili (1807) and Die Verlobung in St. Domingo (1811), depict the colonial encounter in quite different terms, and pose the question, in contradistinction to Herder's universalistic cultural theory, as to whether cross-cultural understanding can actually be realized. Moreover, even another way of thematizing the issue is through the prism of cultural syncretism, which Robert Krause employs in his analysis of three interrelated texts: Voltaire's Tancrède (1760), which addresses the interactions between Christians and Muslims; Goethe's translation/adaptation of it, Tancred (1801), which emphasizes more strongly the cultural differences, and Schiller's Braut von Messina (1803), which responds to Goethe and adds elements of antiquity to understanding the issue of cultural interactions.
The Long Goodbye Hand, Eric
The Wilson Quarterly,
09/2010, Letnik:
34, Številka:
4
Book Review, Magazine Article
In Voyager, a long and occasionally labored meditation on the nature and meaning of exploration, Pyne braids his narrative with anecdotes from the two earlier exploratory eras: the flood of ...15th-century ships that Portugal unleashed in search of gold and glory, and the intracontinental journeys of the late 18th century, rooted in the science of the industrial age Enlightenment and exemplified by Alexander von Humboldt's exploration of South America. These encounters contrast with the gripping (and often murderous) confrontations between earlier explorers and indigenous peoples. ... while journeys of previous eras hewed mostly to the Odyssean ideal of the return, each Voyager spacecraft, having escaped the sun's gravity altogether, will eventually exit the solar system and drift through the vast emptiness of the galaxyperhaps outliving Earth.
BOOKS RECEIVED
Eighteenth - Century Studies,
10/2012, Letnik:
46, Številka:
1
Book Review
Recenzirano
Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Everton, Michael J. The Grand Chorus of Complaint: Authors and ...the Business Ethics of American Publishing (New York: Oxford University Press USA, 2012). Mozart's Chamber Music with Keyboard (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). The Gordon Riots: Politics, Culture and Insurrection in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History (New York: Oxford University Press USA, 2012).
In the opening chapters, Smethurst deploys Bruno Latour's theory of 'cycles of accumulation' to underpin his account of the 'museum order' as a taxonomic matrix for returning exotic 'mobiles' to the ...European 'centre of calculation', as well as imposing order upon distant nature and cultures.1 Much of this material is familiar from the work of other scholars but Latour's iterative model of accumulation supports the book's overarching thesis of an increasingly abstract account of nature in the period. Jettisoning dualistic theories, Smethurst leaves us with a useful definition of nature as 'the active and dialectic space forged out of social systems through science, exploration, literary and artistic practice, landscape, tourism, and all the other spatial practices which continue to act on it' (p. 200). The scholarly breadth and intellectual ambition of Travel-Writing and the Natural World is a welcome addition to the field, making it indispensable reading for scholars and students alike. 1 Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Milton Keynes, 1987).
This dissertation explores the relationship between feminism and imperialism and suggests that men and women produced different narratives of Empire because their imperial experiences were different. ...Women's narratives of Empire are subversive because they claim territory for women through writing, which territory was culturally denied to them since imperial practice relegated women to domestic roles. Paradoxically, in claiming territory for themselves, women writers retained the illusion of English cultural superiority, thereby using their act of resistance to propagate patriarchal imperial ideology. In order to retain the integrity of their feminist ideology (i.e., to present feminism as a non-hegemonic discourse), some women writers are forced to mask or submerge their imperialist ideology in narratives that ostensibly deal with domestic issues.This paradox of resistance and complicity with patriarchal imperial ideology is examined in the writings of three women writers—Charlotte Bronte, Virginia Woolf, and Doris Lessing—all of whom have been celebrated in academic circles a "feminist" writers. The chapter on Bronte examines her collaborative writing with her brother, Branwell, and argues that in her adult work, she displaces her imperialist ideology and presents her imperial narrative in the guise of a domestic one and consequently masks her imperialist ideology. This study presents Virginia Woolf's disguised commentary on imperialism as a means of retaining her readership and suggests that Woolf subverted the travel narrative to claim a place for the woman in English imperial history. Doris Lessing constantly battles with her conflicting ideology and attempts to reconcile ideological conflicts through experimentation in the form of the narrative. Her space fiction is a masked narrative of imperialism. This study does not attempt to undermine feminism nor try to be an apologia for English women writers; it simply explores the complexity of writing about self-empowerment in an imperialist culture.
Out of the wilderness Cocker, Mark
New Statesman,
12/2015, Letnik:
144, Številka:
5291
Book Review, Magazine Article
The real achievement of this wonderful biography is that it is as much a rattling good read as it is an explicit attempt to revive Humboldt's reputation. It all began in rather mundane circumstances. ...His cold, aloof mother came from business, his father from the military, and the young Humboldt was educated by private tutors at the family estate near Berlin. Connections to the Prussian royal family gave him a head start in what might have been the dullest of careers, yet beneath several stolid years in the ministry of mines was a volcano of intellectual fervour.
Topics covered include the convergence of Goethe's optical and autobiographical studies with their interest in multiple reflection (Andrew Piper); the persistence of the gothic in Goethe's conception ...of architecture even after his years in Italy (Clark Muenzer); an interpretation of the poem "Über allen Gipfeln" as hieroglyph (Benjamin Bennett); Goethe's formation of a small choir in Weimar in the years between 1807 and 1814 for the performance of multipart sacred vocal music (Meredith Lee); and the mirroring of figures, particularly within Wilhelm Meister, as steps on the way from "Sturm und Drang" subjectivism to an attempt at greater objectivity (Helmut Ammerlahn).
