In de voetsporen van Max Friedländer

In the fifteenth century, a number of master painters, including Jan van Eyck and Roger Campin, flourished in the Netherlands. However, by the early nineteenth century many of their works had been dispersed by the upheavals of the French Revolution. Any contemporary understanding of these artists and their paintings must take into account that historical data about them remains fragmentary and that art historians from different disciplines have approached them in varying ways. Rather than offering a chronological discussion, this book presents early Netherlandish paintings as individual objects that have confronted scholars with countless interpretive challenges. Part One analyzes the style and provenance of each work, the insights gained from it, and the questions that remain, while Part Two is devoted to the history of collecting and of art historical research and interpretation during the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. Part Three addresses how three fields of modern art-historical research - technical examination, archival research into patronage, and iconology - have produced analyses of these artworks. "Early Netherlandish Painting" advances the scholarly dialogue about an important period in European art by assembling the current scholarly research in the field and underscoring the common ground among scholars from different disciplines.

ABSTRACTThis article reexamines how scholars have approached writing about the domestic setting in Early Netherlandish painting and analyzes the depictions of interiors in the works of some of the fifteenth century's leading artists to begin a dialogue on how domesticity was defined in Northern Europe during the Renaissance. It interrogates the emerging meanings and understandings of domesticity and explores how artists manipulated representations of the home setting to construct signifiers of their artistic production and heritage through a case study of paintings by Robert Campin and Rogier van der Weyden.

Sámi Literature in Norwegian Language Arts Textbooks

Reconstructing the City, Constructing the State: Government in Valparaíso after the Earthquake of 1906

“A Revolution in Labor”: African Americans and Hybrid Labor Activism in Illinois during the Early Jim Crow Era

Cunning Distortions: Folk Christianity and Witchcraft Allegations in Early Mormon History

Thinking with the Nation"National" Literatures at the Cusp Sukanya Banerjee (bio) Critical discussions of the nineteenth-century nation tend to be anachronistic inasmuch as we retrofit contemporary notions of the nation into nineteenth-century politico-cultural formations. One can be forgiven for this anachronistic move because nineteenth-century literary and cultural history bears ample evidence of the singularity with which the spirit of nationalism imbued itself in and through aesthetic and cultural practices, be it in Romantic imaginings or the literary artifact of the Victorian novel. However, it is worth noting that the object of nationalism—the nation—remained considerably opaque throughout the century. Incidentally, while the French Revolution is widely understood to mark the point at which state power begins to affix itself to national sentiment, the sovereign nation-state was hardly a ubiquitous phenomenon until about the mid-twentieth century.1 But it is also the case that the nation itself was quite amorphous over the course of the nineteenth century. Even as Walter Bagehot authored a definitive treatise on what is a key instrument of nationhood, the constitution (in this case, the English constitution), he also mused: "But what are nations?"2 The opacity of the nation arose not so much from its mutability (changing borders) but from the uncertainty regarding its organizing logic. What was the coherent element around which a community imagined itself? Was it language? Was it race? How much could one put store in territoriality, which, after all, could shift? As twenty-first century readers and scholars, we are all too familiar with the artifice of the nation, the fact of its constructedness. But so were thinkers in the nineteenth [End Page 84] century. What does it mean, then, to read this contingency back into the nineteenth century, when nations were are at various stages of making, nonmaking, and unmaking? How does such a chronologically apposite view impinge upon our otherwise unitary understanding of "national literature" or "national tradition" that a post–Second World War critical and political legacy has bequeathed us? How might revisiting the nation in the late nineteenth century, at the cusp, in fact, between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reorient our thinking about the nation and the critical frameworks that it might generate? In addressing these questions, I want to consider analytical frameworks that might be apropos to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries given that this was a period that came in the wake of the Italian Risorgimento and German unification but also witnessed an upsurge in anticolonial agitation as well as colonial nationalisms that understood sovereignty and affiliation as nested, layered, and dispersed.3 The idea of the nation was very much in the air in Britain, too, where national sovereignty had been continually negotiated through franchise reform (the latest installment in 1882) and national identity found expression in patriotic jingoism attending the Boer wars. But the British nation was also inextricable from its empire, and if, as Hedinger and Hee point out, the tendency of "transnational history" is to "nationalize empires," such that "imperial history is read as the history of a nation-state beyond its borders,"4 then it is worth noting the inadequacy of the transnational as an analytical template in this context, not least because of the impossibility of reading the British nation as a discrete formation. In trying to read the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nation and the literatures and traditions that gathered under its rubric, it might be productive, instead, to consider theories of nation extant in the nineteenth century, which is to say, to read through the nineteenth century and with the Victorians—widely understood—rather than retrospectively superimpose our late twentieth- and twenty-first-century critical frameworks upon them. At one level, then, I am making a temporal argument about our reading of the nation, suggesting that while we tend to read back into the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nation and its literatures and cultures, we should focus instead on the nineteenth century and use that as a basis for reading [End Page 85] forward. Evidently, the famed temporal paradoxes of the nation inflect our reading habits, as well. But why focus on the...

Notes on Contributors

This paper explores the fabrication, managing, and defending of the “champagne bubble” during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bringing together heterogenous elements – material, cultural, economic, political, legal, mythical – champagne is a powerful symbol and extremely valuable brand. I show how the champagne bubble is both fragile and rigid, both needing to be actively defended, and capable of rising from the ashes of wars as well as economic crises. Just as the bubbles in a champagne glass are influenced by numerous forces, so the metaphorical champagne bubble is subject to complex influences. Some of these are explored in this paper.

Fetishizing the Foot: Mobility and Meaning in Indian Ocean Sandals

Reviewed by: The Beauty and the Book: Women and Fiction in Nineteenth-Century China Ying Wang (bio) Ellen Widmer. The Beauty and the Book: Women and Fiction in Nineteenth-Century China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006. xiv, 407 pp. Hardcover $49.95, ISBN 0–674–02146–0. Ellen Widmer’s newly published book, The Beauty and the Book: Women and Fiction in Nineteenth-Century China, challenges two conventional views in the field of Chinese fiction: that the nineteenth century saw a decline of vernacular novels and that women did not start to write fiction until the turn of the twentieth century. A combination of detailed historical documentation and perceptive literary analysis, Widmer’s book offers the first extensive study of women’s relationships with fiction in a period when fiction reading and writing were off-limits to Chinese women. Her findings in this study are fascinating and groundbreaking as they enlighten us about some important developments in Chinese fiction that have been previously unnoticed or neglected. Several recent studies focusing on nineteenth-century vernacular fiction include David Der-wei Wang’s 1997 book, Fin-de-siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849–1911, and Patrick Hanan’s 2004 book, Chinese Fiction of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. In echoing both Wang and Hanan, Widmer sees the nineteenth century as a period of innovation, pregnant with many new possibilities. More significantly, however, she further reinforces this conviction by bringing to light women’s participation in fiction writing. If nothing else, the single fact of two surges of women writers and critics in the genre of vernacular fiction would be sufficient to mark the nineteenth century as a unique and critical period in the history of Chinese literature. In a format of two parts (with five chapters in the first part and three chapters in the second), Widmer’s book focuses on two important historical periods of the nineteenth century (1791–1830; 1877 and after) when two genres, tanci (prosimetric narrative) and zhanghui xiaoshuo (full-length vernacular novel), either became a women’s narrative form or inspired some elite women writers to try their hands at it. The first part of the book maps out the initial involvement of women in the genre of fiction circa 1830 and introduces some prominent figures who were instrumental to such a development. According to Widmer, the 1791 publication of the Cheng Gao edition of Honglou meng (Dream of the red chamber) was a milestone for women’s reception and production of fiction. A significant change was apparent not only in the clear evidence of women’s participation in fiction writing and critiquing, but also through the conscious efforts of male writers to elicit a female audience and to reflect women’s views in their own novels. As Widmer indicates, Li Ruzhen’s (1763–1830) Jinghua Yuan (Flowers in the mirror) qualifies as an early example of male support of female talent, and it demonstrates [End Page 267] Li’s attempt to reach out to a female readership by employing ambiguous rhetoric intended for both men and women while enlisting women’s endorsements of the novel. In parallel with Jinghua yuan, Widmer informs us, women writers turned to fiction directly for the purposes of promoting personal beliefs, expressing inner emotions, or even economic gain. If, writing in the form of tanci, Hou Zhi (1764–1829) and Liang Desheng (1771–1847) lectured their readers (mainly women, but not exclusive of men) on the moral codes of guixiu (gentlewomen), Wang Duan (1793–1939) became the writer of zhanghui xiaoshuo, expressing her political views about dynastic change, and Yun Zhu (1771–1833) became the critic, providing her emotional and poetic response to Honglou meng. Female writers, editors, and critics of tanci and zhanghui xiaoshuo, although still a small number, seemed to have carved out a niche in the field of fiction for themselves that simply did not exist before. Widmer concludes the first part of her book by examining how women responded to Honglou meng and by comparing the early nineteenth century to the early Qing (mid seventeenth century). Here we are informed that existing sources indicate there are forty or fifty poems...

REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTES

Cunning and Disorderly: Early Nineteenth-Century Witch Trials of Joseph Smith

Suburbs for a Labor Elite

Teaching & Learning Guide for: ‘I mak Bould to Wrigt’: First-person Narratives in the History of Poverty in England, c. 1750-1900