Chapter

. Features of Early Louisiana Literature and the Cultural Milieu

October 2013

DOI:10.14325/mississippi/9781617039102.003.0002

In book: Louisiana Creole Literature (pp.17-27)

Authors:

The status of early (French-language) Louisiana literature within the larger corpus of French literature is examined initially in connection with the general questions of provincial or regional writing and of what is now called Atlantic literature. The literary worth of nineteenth-century Louisiana writing, viewed broadly, is assessed, along with its connection to Romanticism and its notable features. High culture in New Orleans— theatres, opera, schools, publishing, clubs—is reviewed. Neighborhoods and their features are sketched. The particular achievements of Free People of Color are stressed. The chapter identifies particular features of Louisiana writing: the role played by characteristic Louisiana landscapes and by hurricanes, and the significance of the French Quarter as a center of literary imagination.

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Article

"Moulder[ing] into nothingness among the rocks": Sharpshooters in Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book...

October 2017 · Configurations

Harrison Dietzman

During the American Civil War, sharpshooters were contested figures in the Northern media. Magazines published romanticized profiles of Union snipers, while simultaneously worrying about the deadliness of Confederate sharpshooters. Years after the war, in 1896, the aging painter Winslow Homer wrote that the sharpshooters’ task was as “near to murder as anything I ever could think of in connection ... [Show full abstract] with the army.” Accompanying this sentiment, Homer sketched, in the letter, a soldier trapped within the crosshairs of a sniper’s scope. I use this sketch, along with Homer’s words to his friend, as a way to understand the significance of two battlefield portraits of deceased Confederate sharpshooters found in Alexander Gardner’s iconic Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War. Art historian Anthony Lee posits that the photographic book, as a whole, is an “effort at imaginative recovery.” The past, for Gardner, is “unromantic,” and the future, “uncertain, and unpromising.” Locked in Gardner’s camera’s scope, the Southern sharpshooter is memorialized as a failed warrior, while the Northern sharpshooter is allowed to safely fade from memory. As figures of moral controversy and anarchic disunion, the sharpshooters of both armies must be consigned to the past in order to pave the way for the tenuous Federal future.

Chapter

Love In The City

July 2015

Helen Hok-sze Leung

In many of the Hong Kong films, love is portrayed as a by-product of circumstances such as neighborhood dynamics, changes in city policies, or shifts in urban demographics. These films are not only telling stories about romantic love, they are at the same time detailing the nuance and complexity of a specific and ever-changing urban experience. This chapter describes a pair of seemingly very ... [Show full abstract] different films: the moody and melancholic Claustrophobia and the cheeky, light-hearted Love in a Puff. Each film portrays the nitty-gritty details of white collar work, the trials and tribulations of negotiating heterosexual romance, and the changing dynamics of urban living that are redrawing the boundaries of intimacy between young people in contemporary Hong Kong. The chapter focuses on the films’ contrasting geographical imagination and the ways in which each film “places” intimacy along the Hong Kong-Beijing axis.

Article

Ideas on Atlantic Culture in the Northwest Iberian Peninsula: “Myths” and “Realities”

September 2002 · Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe

Joaquítein Rodríguez Campos

This paper is based on a definition of romantic anthropology as that anthropology which has the aim of constructing histories of societies from the starting point of the myths that guide the reconstruction of these societies as ‘imagined communities' Focussing on the end of the 19th century into the first third of the 20th century, I analyze the historical roles played by ethnographers, writers, ... [Show full abstract] and other thinkers—both Galician and Spanish - in the development of a Galician identity as being a historical community within the Spanish state. During this time period, the political and social crises that affected Spain as a result of its loss of the remains of its colonial empire in the Americas served to promote widespread reflection on the ideas of “culture” and ‘nation', creating new myths on which to base the emergence of a cultural identity of Galicia as being an “Atlantic” culture. The main themes of this historical reflection on Galician identity were the following: the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela, the significance of emigration, women's roles in Galician society, and Galicia as a peripheralized society. These ideas endured much beyond the historical period I am examining to be converted later in the 20th century into the basis for authentic national myths.

Book

William Gilbert and Esoteric Romanticism: A Contextual Study and Annotated Edition of 'The Hurricane...

June 2018

Paul Cheshire

Article

William Blake and the transformations of the Renaissance notion of melancholy

January 1999

Anca Violeta Munteanu

In order to understand Blake's relation to the history of ideas, his reactions to, and transformation of intellectual traditions, this study offers a critical examination of the role played by traditions of melancholy, especially the Renaissance tradition in his verbal and visual work. Before looking at the different embodiments of this motif in Blake's early prophecies, the introductory chapter ... [Show full abstract] establishes the parameters/contexts that influenced and informed Blake's uses of melancholy and explains how Blake's productions transcend both Agrippa's and Durer's understanding of the concept and the sentimentalized and romanticized versions of it in English 18th and 19th century literature and art. The first chapter, focusing on The Book of Thel , discusses the connections between Blake's first prophetic text and Durer's Melencolia I in the context of the history of Durer's engraving. The Gates of Paradise is examined in light of mannerism, a cultural and intellectual movement for which both Blake and Fuseli shared a profound admiration. As suggested here, mannerism, the destabilizing aspect of Renaissance precarious equilibrium serves Blake's prophetic aims beautifully and assists him in establishing an intellectual agenda centered on this sort of questioning, destabilizing, interrogative approach to everything. The third chapter on The Book of Urizen seeks to illuminate the ways in which Blake exploited the Saturn-Melancholy-Geometry. Using a new phenomenological approach initiated by a contemporary philosopher, this chapter supports a completely new reading of the poem, one that essentially runs against the current of much scholarship of this text and restores Urizen to the position of a creator/artist whose sufferings and self-sacrifice allow Humanity and Imagination to exist. The final chapter on Visions is likewise a revisionist reading of the poem in the context of melancholia and a number of other paradigms—Oothhon as an abandoned and rejected woman, her connections with Sappho and Phaedre, her artistic nature etc.—all of them used to better understand one of the most complex and fascinating female characters in Blake's entire creation.

Chapter

Stevens and romanticism

January 2007

Joseph Carroll

For Wallace Stevens, the romantic period extends from the late eighteenth century through the late nineteenth century, and it includes both English and American writers. The chief romantic influences on Stevens’ poetry include Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Emerson, Whitman, and Tennyson. (There are lesser echoes of Blake and Coleridge; Byron seems to have had little impact.) Stevens was born in ... [Show full abstract] 1879, and both Whitman and Tennyson died in 1892. For Stevens, then, romanticism was not a remote historical episode. It overlapped with his own life, and it formed the immediate historical background to his life’s work as a poet. Moreover, in Stevens’ conception, romanticism is not just a single historical period. It is a recurrent mode of the poetic imagination, and for Stevens that mode constitutes the wellspring of all poetic vitality. In a letter of 1940-when he was sixty years old and writing the poems included in Parts of aWorld-Stevens succinctly sketched out a comprehensive theory of poetic history as a cycle. The cycle begins in romanticism, as a phase of imaginative vitality, moves in a degenerative direction leading to exhaustion, and then returns to romanticism. “I suppose that the way of all mind is from romanticism to realism, to fatalism and then to indifferentism, unless the cycle re-commences and the thing goes from indifferentism back to romanticism all over again” (L 350). The middle terms in this sequence take their inflection from the direction of the sequence. For Stevens, romanticism is the highest form of imaginative fulfillment. “Realism” might seem a neutral or even positive term, but “fatalism” has a sinister ring, and “indifferentism” is unmistakably negative in connotation. Indifferentism is a blank absence of interest and pleasure in the world. “Realism” and “fatalism” thus measure out stages in the descent from fulfillment to despair.

Article

Katrina Narratives: What Creative Writers Can Teach Us about Oral History

May 2008 · Oral History Review

Creative writing graduate students—living in post-Katrina Louisiana and struggling for a means to aid their devastated community—ask their peers about the stories they are telling concerning the hurricanes, how their peers construct their individual hurricane narratives, and how the creative process/discipline bears on the material we call history. The authors frame the discussion around Ronald ... [Show full abstract] Grele and Alessandro Portelli's writings on narrative. They argue that the oral history informant and the professional storyteller are linked by certain common pursuits and practices and thereby create common byproducts as well and that these connections offer useful insights into the study of oral history. In this essay, they work to bring the two disciplines together and to explore possible overlaps so that we might benefit from a place of new understanding not yet imagined.

Data

Full-text available

SIM 3080 spatial data

February 2015

John Ashley Barras

Scientific Investigations Map 3080 "Land Area Change and Overview of Major Hurricane Impacts in Coastal Louisiana, 2004-08" spatial data in Erdas Imagine (raster data) and shapefile formats (vector data). Readme for all SIMM 3080 downloadable files The spatial data were from various existing sources. Data are projected using the NAD83 datum and the UTM Zone 15N coordinate system. List of SIM ... [Show full abstract] 3080 files: 1. SIM_3080_Map.pdf 2. SIM_3080_Readme.txt 3. SIM_3080_spatial_data.zip Contains the following compressed files A. raster_data directory: lca_2004_2006_2008_sep30-oct8_trends_2.7acres_ovl_2008lw_fl.img lca_2004_2006_2008_sep30-oct8_trends_2.7acres_ovl_2008lw_fl.rrd lca_la_tm5_fall_2004_lw_mosaic.img lca_la_tm5_fall_2004_lw_mosaic.rrd lca_la_tm5_fall_2006_lw_mosaic.img lca_la_tm5_fall_2006_lw_mosaic.rrd lca_la_tm5_fall_2008_lw_mosaic_2008sep30-oct08_fl.img lca_la_tm5_fall_2008_lw_mosaic_2008sep30-oct08_fl.rrd B. vector_data directory: 1) boundaries directory lca_fastlands.dbf lca_fastlands.prj lca_fastlands.shp lca_fastlands.shx lca_trend_area_phys_provinces.dbf lca_trend_area_phys_provinces.prj lca_trend_area_phys_provinces.shp lca_trend_area_phys_provinces.shx 2) hurricane_tracks directory: gustav_track_utm_15.dbf gustav_track_utm_15.prj gustav_track_utm_15.shp gustav_track_utm_15.shx ike_track_utm15.dbf ike_track_utm15.prj ike_track_utm15.shp ike_track_utm15.shx katrina_track_utm15.dbf katrina_track_utm15.prj katrina_track_utm15.shp katrina_track_utm15.shx rita_track_utm15.dbf rita_track_utm15.prj rita_track_utm15.shp rita_track_utm15.shx 4. SIM_3080_data.zip Contains the following compressed files A. gifs directory: 2004-2006-2008_colortable.act (photoshop color table for gif files) lca_chenier_plain_2004_2006_2008_sep30-oct8_trends.gfw lca_chenier_plain_2004_2006_2008_sep30-oct8_trends.gif lca_coastal_2004_2006_2008_composite_trends_post-2005_hurricanes_2008lw_ovl.gfw lca_coastal_2004_2006_2008_composite_trends_post-2005_hurricanes_2008lw_ovl.gif lca_deltaic_plain_2004_2006_2008_sep30-oct8_trends.gfw lca_deltaic_plain_2004_2006_2008_sep30-oct8_trends.gif lca_marginal_deltaic_plain_2004_2006_2008_sep30-oct8_trends.gfw lca_marginal_deltaic_plain_2004_2006_2008_sep30-oct8_trends.gif B. excel directory: SIM_3080_tables.xls 5. Pamphlet: The map on p. iv is best viewed on screen at 200% ; labels on the map will be legible when printed out.

Book

Reinventing dixie: Tin Pan Alley's songs and the creation of the mythic south

January 2015

J.B. Jones

Tin Pan Alley, once New York City's songwriting and recording mecca, issued more than a thousand songs about the American South in the first half of the twentieth century. In Reinventing Dixie, John Bush Jones explores the broad impact of these songs in creating and disseminating the imaginary view of the South as a land of southern belles, gallant gentlemen, and racial harmony. In profiles of ... [Show full abstract] Tin Pan Alley's lyricists and composers, Jones explains how a group of undereducated and untraveled writers-the vast majority of whom were urban northerners or European immigrants-constructed the specific and detailed images of the South used in their song lyrics. In the process of evaluating the origins of Tin Pan Alley's songbook, Jones analyzes these songwriters’ attitudes about North-South reconciliation, ideals of honor and hospitality, and the recurring theme of the yearning for home. Though a few of the songs employed parody or satire to undercut the vision of a peaceful, romantic South, the majority ignored the realities of racism and poverty in the region. By the end of Tin Pan Alley's era of cultural prominence in the mid-twentieth century, Jones contends that the work of its writers had cemented the “moonlight and magnolias” myth in the minds of millions of Americans. Reinventing Dixie sheds light on the role of songwriters in forming an idyllic vision of the South that continues to influence the American imagination. © 2015 by Louisiana State University Press. All rights reserved.

Article

‘Realpoetik’: Revolution by Other Means in European Romantic Restoration Thought

September 2012 · History of European Ideas

Paul Hamilton

This essay speculates about the degree to which a counter-image of Europe imagined by Romantic period writers showed them to be transforming an inherited idea of the republic of letters for political purposes. While Anglophone romanticists recognise that the French Revolution is an indisputable agent in shaping the contemporary English literary imagination, they then usually ignore the role ... [Show full abstract] played by the Restoration which followed. Romantic criticism can perhaps learn an appropriate sensitivity here from the work of critics of English Restoration writing of the seventeenth century. That epochal uncertainty, when the regicides beheaded the King and then wondered what to do politically, was succeeded in the Restoration by a kind of Dissenting determination to continue under or memorialise that uncertainty, not as a dilemma but as the experience of political opportunity. A similar pattern of pursuing revolution by other means is visible in the political revisionism and literary experimentation of post-Revolutionary Romantic radicals. In my picture, then, the Romantic transformation of the republic of letters recovers an older literary republicanism. In what is here dubbed Realpoetik the battle for what is to be political reality is fought on a rhetorical field whose free speech is exemplary of what politics should be like.

Article

Positive Fantasies Dampen Charitable Giving When Many Resources Are Demanded

February 2012 · Journal of Consumer Psychology

Previous research found that positive fantasies about an idealized future yield low energy to pursue the fantasized future. We examined how positive fantasies about the resolution of a crisis (i.e., a lack of pain medication in Sierra Leone, the risk of flooding after Hurricane Irene) influence people's agreement to donate to charitable efforts directed at crisis resolution. In three studies, ... [Show full abstract] positive fantasies dampened the likelihood of agree-ing to donate a relatively large amount of money, effort, or time, but did not affect the likelihood of agreeing to donate a relatively small amount of these resources. The effect of positive fantasies was mediated by perceiving the donation of larger (but not smaller) amounts of resources as overly demanding. These findings suggest that charitable solicitations requesting small donations might benefit from stimulating positive fantasies in po-tential donors, but those requesting large donations could be hurt.

Article

"Drugi! Bratstvennyj sonm!" Mariana Cvetaeva's cycle "Derev'ja" in the context of her French reading...

January 2005

M.-L. Bott

This article investigates, for the first time, the significance of French literature on the work of Cvetaeva. 1. Prior to 1917, Cvetaeva was prompted by Voloshin to read the work of the romantic poet Desbordes-Valmore, the post-Symbolist Noailles, and the work of such emancipatory and socially engaged figures as de Staël und George Sand. These writers served to orient Cvetaeva in the troubles she ... [Show full abstract] experienced in her role as a woman and poet who objected to society. They supported the formation of the heroic loving woman in Cvetaeva's poetry. The equal preference for epitaphs also in the work of Noailles prompted Cvetaeva to write two programmatic poems in 1913. At a crisis-point in 1916, she translated Noailles' novel "La nouvelle espérance". Cvetaeva's cycle of poems "Derevya" from 1922 takes up one of the crucial scenes from the novel: the dialogue with trees of the unhappy protagonist Sabine, whose love is unacceptable to society. 2. Following the October revolution, repeated readings of de Staël, George Sand and Noailles, complemented by the post-revolutionary memoirs of de Ligne and others, strengthened Cvetaeva's revolt against the Soviet's departure from European cultural traditions. Cvetaeva's "French counterrevolution" (1919) is an attempt to compensate for her own cultural self-affirmation, as the political liberalization and social emancipation of Soviet-Russia had already succumbed to civil war. 3. Following emigration, the creative reading of Noailles's and Proust's tree-motifs contributes to a reorientation of Cvetaeva's poetry of epitaphs in the cycle "Derevya": She understands the task of émigré poetry, in a new sense, as the perpetuation of a perished cultural epoch in poetic memory. Her interpretation of Proust is expressed in her words at the Franco-Russian meeting of writers in 1930. There she defended the social importance of Proust's poetic imagination vis-à-vis conservative Russian emigrants. Cvetaeva needs to be brought back into this context of European modernity.