English Aristocracy Research Articles

Trajectories of Aristocratic Wealth, 1858–2018: Evidence from Probate

AbstractIn the past two decades, the decline of the British aristocracy and its apotheosis, the hereditary peerage, have received scant scholarly attention. Major historical works in the 1960s to the 1990s laid much responsibility for the decline on features of the British aristocracy that are anachronistic in modern capitalist societies, such as their landed, rentier status, conspicuously sumptuous lifestyles, and disdain for commerce, helped on by reductions in the value of agricultural land from the 1870s. This article reappraises these arguments by examining the decline of the hereditary peerage's wealth using a newly created data set that includes all available probate grants for peers from 1858 to 2018. The article challenges established research by finding that peers’ absolute wealth but also relative mean wealth did not decline during the agricultural depression of the late nineteenth century, and that serious decline only began and accelerated from World War II. Signs of resurgence appeared in the 1980s, with the value of peers’ grants reaching Victorian levels in real but not relative terms. The comprehensive character of the data and the distinction between real and relative wealth allow for multiple conceptual and analytic additions to the existing debates. We find that new peerages created for businessmen who were much wealthier than the older, landed peers masked decline in the interwar years. Significantly, however, the differences in wealth between old and new peerages disappeared over time, suggesting that the wider aristocracy's decline was due less to characteristics particular to it than to external forces allied to the broader postwar political and fiscal environment.

Power and Politics in World Athletics: A Critical History

The International Amateur Athletics Federation (IAAF) has escaped the kind of scholarly attention that has been given to the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC). This is surprising because, as Jörg Krieger discusses in this monograph, elements of the organizational histories of the IOC and the IAAF overlap. Nonetheless, Krieger has now rectified this historiographical gap. The picture is not always a pretty one, and without Kreiger's work we may never have seen it at all. As the author discusses in the introduction, the IAAF was tetchy about offering access to its archives in the first place.Krieger's thesis is that the IAAF has been autocratically controlled on behalf of its presidents and that the long arm of history reaches well into the twenty-first century. IAAF presidents’ pronouncements on gender, race, “fair play,” politics, and international relations have been taken as received wisdom, irrespective of any scientific, historical, or ethical truths which might disprove them. Sport economics and cultural tone may have changed since the IAAF's 1913 foundation, and the association has had to adjust to those realities, but even now, it remains (even if recently renamed as the more grandiose World Athletics) a vehicle for its presidents’ ambitions.The author's approach is chronological, with chapters coinciding with IAAF presidents and eras of their reigns. The IAAF was initially formed out of low-key conflict with the IOC over who would act as the world governing body of athletics and how to adjudicate rules. In the end, it was Sweden and the United States who would drive the early creation of the IAAF, creating an arrangement where the IAAF would remain amateur (placating the IOC) while acknowledging the right of national bodies to interpret amateur/professional conflicts for themselves. Swedish industrialist Sigfrid Edström was the first to maneuver his way into the presidency. Notably, when the First World War suspended international sport and IAAF Congress meetings, he rewrote organizational statutes and sacked board members who stood in his way.Krieger argues all subsequent presidents have benefitted from this, with Edström establishing a template for dealing with external threats. Thanks to Edström, it would be the IAAF's role to define gender equality and femininity within athletics. The early success of the French Women's Sporting Federation (FSFSF) led Edström on a ruthless campaign against its general secretary, Alice Milliat, for the purposes of co-opting women's sport under the IAAF banner—thus limiting the number of events women would be allowed to compete in. Edström's successor, English aristocrat David Burghley, accelerated moves begun under Edström for sex testing, with suspicion of “gender fraud” usually being politically and racially motivated. Burghley's humorous comments about women athletes being forced to parade naked for inspection by all-male doctors has clear echoes in current president Sebastian Coe's treatment of the South African runner Caster Semenya.The IAAF also sought to uphold the racial and international relations order. Archival evidence found by Krieger shows Edström's favorable treatment of Nazi Germany may have been linked to his own anti-Semitism. Burghley devised a voting system at IAAF Congresses whereby European and North American nations were given a far greater share of votes. More difficult to prove was that the IAAF appeared to bend the rules on doping to suit influential nations it wanted to keep on its side. The exception to this lack of proof regarding doping, of course, is the Senegalese Lamine Diack, convicted in 2020 of accepting bribes from Russian officials over anti-doping. The inference is clear: not every IAAF president has been treated the same. The flamboyant Primo Nebiolo, president during the 1980s and 1990s, may have had conspicuously expensive taste, but he was also a deft political operator, doing deals to ensure greater power of Global South countries in exchange for buying into his vision of an IAAF based on modern marketing and long-term television contracts. The IAAF's inaugural World Championship in 1983 was itself partly a creation of a marketing push by Horst Dassler of Adidas. Nebiolo thus echoed João Havelange's presidency of FIFA.Krieger believes that the IAAF's/World Athletics’ most consistent sin has been the maintenance of a system that has never placed the welfare of athletes at its heart. In fact, the author views the spectacle of an empty, hot stadium at the 2019 World Athletics Championships in Doha, Qatar, as a fitting monument to IAAF presidents who see in un-democratic nations a reflection of themselves. We await the critical histories of international federations in other sports. In the meantime, we can purchase a copy of Krieger's excellent book for our own university libraries, as he has given one possible template for how they might be written.

MODERN BRITISH CULTURE AND ARISTOCRACY

The article provides an analysis of the contemporary British aristocracy, which promotes the monarchical principle. The aristocratic aspect, class division and social hierarchy remain important components of the modern culture of Great Britain. In addition to the traditional hereditary aristocracy, which actively participates in public life, one can also talk about the aristocracy of the middle class, which partly adopted and inherited the traditions of high society.

English Aristocratic Women and the Fabric of Piety, 1450–1500, by Barbara J. Harris

English Aristocratic Women and the Fabric of Piety, 1450–1500, by Barbara J. Harris

English Lexemes Nominating Nobility Semantics and Evolution under Different Socio-cultural Context

The relevance of the work is determined by the fact that, although the interaction of history, culture and language is constantly in the field of view of linguists, historians, linguoculturologists, as well as all those who study the evolution of a particular language, it has not yet received a complete analysis in detail, in particular, when describing the language pictures of different countries. The aim of the work is to prove that the semantics of the words of nominating titles of the English nobility of the Victorian era has not changed. The materials for the work were modern and classical, starting from the XIX century, word usage from the English language, contained in modern media texts from Internet sources, as well as the texts of novels by English writers of the late XIX century. At least 2000 such word usages were analyzed using the method of etymological analysis, the method of semantic analysis and the method of functional analysis, which allowed us to obtain a reliable picture of their functioning. The triple union of history, culture and language in the approach to the study of linguistic pictures of different countries is at the center of research in recent years. The interaction of these phenomena has become the subject of close attention in many articles and dissertations of linguists, historians, linguoculturologists, as well as all those who study the evolution of a particular language. Lexemes denoting the noble status of a person are important concepts of the British national linguistic picture of the world and culture. The semantics of lexemes was studied according to lexicographic sources. The sources of examples of contextual use were the texts of novels by English writers of the late XIX century and modern English-language texts of the Internet: online versions of newspapers, advertising texts, blogs. To achieve the goal of our research, the article uses such methods as the method of continuous sampling, the method of lexicographic description, the comparative method, the statistical method, and a number of others.

Structure, Geometry And Method In Peter Greenaway's The Draughtsman’s Contract. The 4 Dimensions In The Cinematic “Canvas”

The draughtsman’s contract summarizes the adventures of an artist hired by an English aristocrat for the execution of 12 drawings of his rural house and the gardens that surround it. It takes place at the end of the 17th century, when this type of commissions was fashionable in that society in order to perpetuate the memory of the properties of its members. The text of the contract functions as the script of the film. Each section corresponds to a drawing and foresees some preparations, a schedule and a complement or sequel. The film combines the reading of each of the sections of the contract with a musical overture, the scenes of the preparations and the execution of each drawing, the interferences of other characters and the meeting of the cartoonist with Mrs. Herbert as agreed. Artifacts and techniques derived from the background of Masaccio, Dürer, Alberti and Brunelleschi are used for the execution of the drawings. The invention of geometric perspective is an antecedent of cinema due to its capacity for space-time relationship. The third dimension is actually an optical illusion. Assembly and composition are tools of both cinema and painting, with their respective peculiarities. The pictorial models of the drawings are those of the time and in turn of the scenes of the film are part of the trend known as pictorialism.

Evelyn Waugh’s War Novels in Francoist Spain

Evelyn Waugh’s experiences as captain in the Second World War represented the raw material for several novels, such as Put out More Flags (1942), Men at Arms (1952) and Brideshead Revisited (1945). These novels depict, on the one hand, the experiences of once immature bright young people who are now confronting the war reality, and, on the other, they satirize the military bureaucracy and portray the nostalgia for the conservative age of Catholic English nobility, which disappeared during the war. It could be assumed that these three novels might have been well received in Franco’s Spain as the Catholic theme as well as Waugh’s right-wing conservative beliefs could have influenced the censors’ approval or disapproval. Thus, the present paper will analyse the reception in Spain of Put out More Flags, Men at Arms and Brideshead Revisited considering the reports enclosed in the censorship files guarded at AGA (General Archive of the Administration) in Alcalá de Henares, Madrid. These documents reveal that Waugh’s novels were not easily approved by the Spanish censors during the Francoist dictatorship.

Irony in communicative behaviour of Elite in Edwardian Britain

The article is devoted to the analysis of little-studied specific in functioning of irony in the speech of English social elite. The aim of the study is to conduct sociolinguistic analysis of Julian Fellowes’s TV series script "Downton Abbey" to identify the language markers of irony, used by English aristocrats in the early XXth century, describe tactics and types of speech acts attached to irony, its impact on communicants. The main methods used in the study include sociolinguistic analysis of character's speech by means of sociolinguistic categories. Analysis of the contexts, where irony is used, allowed us to come to conclusion that the information plan of the ironic statement is expressed implicitly, includes methods of labeling, devaluation of interlocutor’s merits, humiliation, and mockery by means of hyperbolic metaphor, ironic pejorative, allusion and antithesis. The data, obtained in the process of research, can be used in the course of intercultural communication, stylistics, translation and semiotics.

Revisiting the “Inhabited Space” of English Country House in Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger

The English Country House happens to be one of the most iconic topoi in English literary studies. Since narratologists have long privileged time over space, narrative space remained a relatively unexplored territory until the twentieth century, which intensified the interest in the house as the thematic fulcrum of literary works. British novelist Sarah Waters’s first venture into the realm of the sub-genre of English Country House fiction, The Little Stranger (2009) is a befitting discourse that appropriates the poetics of manorial space. Hundreds Hall, the Warwickshire seat of the Ayreses, encapsulates many roles as the epicentre of the story and as a powerful symbol of the gradual decay of English aristocracy in the post-World War II Britain. The article will try to incorporate Gaston Bachelard’s spatial criticism elaborated in his The Poetics of Space (1958) and the concept of heterotopia by Foucault for the interpretation/ (s) of the narrative. The study seeks to locate Bachelard’s bourgeoisie points of view, which the author subverts by portraying the rise of the proletariat. The focus of the article is to highlight the ingenuity of Waters’s creative process, which resorts to the genre of English Country House fiction to capture the condition of British aristocrats in a time of crises.

Made in Britain: Nation and Emigration in Nineteenth-Century America

The process of leaving a customs union is immensely complicated and time-consuming, as some politicians have belatedly discovered in post-Brexit Britain. Similarly, the thirteen colonies’ decision to depart from the customs union of the British mercantilist state led to a realization that political independence did not sever economic ties across the Atlantic with the new country’s major trading partner and financier. Despite its defeat in 1783, the British Empire remained expansive and dynamic, and American businessmen needed to maintain links. And not unlike the situation in post-Brexit Britain, the issue of citizenship hung in the balance. The more common story is how British immigrants became American despite their supposed “perpetual allegiance” to the sovereign. Yet, another issue, which is at the core of Tuffnell’s book, is that the continued economic ties across the Atlantic led to expatriate communities of Americans whose status and loyalty remained in question. Were they informal ambassadors who could leverage British power to American economic interests, or were they dangerously de-nationalized vectors of antirepublican contagion who were evading the obligations of citizenship and even serving as agents of re-colonization?At the outbreak of the American Civil War, two main expatriate groups were in Britain—about 2,800 Americans in Liverpool and 1,910 in London. The cotton trade of Liverpool linked the slave south with Lancashire mill towns; the credit and capital of London financed trade and investment in the growing economy of the United States. By the end of the century, the expatriate community in Liverpool fell to fewer than 1,000; the cotton trade could be managed by cable. By contrast, the expatriate community in the City of London rose to around 5,000 to exploit the opportunities of the world’s major financial center. Tuffnell is interested in the economic activities and associations of the two communities, even more in their social lives—their clubs and celebrations of American identity that could also foster American interests through engagement with British elites.American slavery and the Civil War created tensions in Britain. The Liverpool merchants expected support from English aristocrats and Lancashire mill owners in defense of the Confederacy. However, their networks were shallower than the social contacts that the Union’s State Department established in London. The rift was healed in the later nineteenth century through a shared “Anglo-Saxondom”—founded on racial superiority—that fostered cooperation between two kindred empires, despite the counter-charge that this form of cosmopolitanism subverted American nationalism. The debate between insular nationalism and internationalism continues in both countries to this day.Tuffnell’s analysis is compelling and well told, with generous details and incidents to inform and entertain. His main theme of the identity of expatriates in Britain is certainly worth exploring, though it has gaps. The issue of expatriate identity extends beyond the business communities in London and Liverpool to the world of culture and high society. Tuffnell mentions the “gilded prostitution” of American heiresses marrying British aristocrats—for instance, the marriage of Mary Leitner of Chicago to George Nathaniel Curzon or that of Consuelo Vanderbilt to Charles Spencer-Churchill, the duke of Marlborough. He points out that these marriages intimated the kind of international “special relationship” to which Winston Spencer Churchill alluded in his A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (New York, 1956–1958), 4 v. He fails to mention, however, expatriates like Henry James or John Singer Sargent, who inhabited a milieu of social and cultural, rather than strictly business, exchange.Tuffnell also could have deepened his focus on the business communities in London and Liverpool by considering the network of interactions in the ports of the eastern seaboard. Liverpool, London, and, for that matter, Bristol and Glasgow were part of a North American world that including Baltimore, Boston, New York, and New Orleans in which firms operated on both side of the Atlantic, whether those of the Barings, the Brown Brothers, or George Peabody. They were joined in the later nineteenth century by other businessmen who operated within the capacious limits of the British Empire, such as the mining engineer Herbert Hoover or Chester Beatty, the “king of copper,” who transformed from a New Yorker into a British knight and ultimately an honorary citizen of Ireland.Tuffnell’s study is fascinating as it stands. It is no criticism to say that it is fertile soil for future work that could extend the coverage of the expatriate community into culture and society, add links to the eastern seaboard of the United States, and move ahead to the continued connections between American business and British imperialism and, more recently, the American influence on the City of London.

Orientalist Perspective in the Letters of Lady Mary Montagu and Kelemen Mikes

An English aristocrat, poet and writer, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) was a privileged and distinguished woman traveller in her time. During her sojourn in Ottoman Istanbul, she noted down significant details as regards the Constantinople and seraglio through her vivid descriptions as a liberated woman in her Embassy Letters. Another significant oriental work, Letters from Turkey by Kelemen Mikes (1690-1761), who was a Transylvanian-born Hungarian writer and political figure, is centered upon Mikes’s life in exile between the years 1717 and 1758 within the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire. In Letters from Turkey, we can feel his strong sense of Hungarian identity and his steadiness in maintaining his cultural and religious customs and values in his elaboration of his own and the “other” culture, while his praising the benign and merciful ruling style of Ottoman Sultans offers a different view of orientalism in favour of the “other” culture (Ottoman Empire). Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to examine the Letters of Lady Mary Montagu and Kelemen Mikes from their political, ethnical, religious and personal perspectives and trace several relationships that has allusive discussion relativity in the discourse of Orientalism. After having explained the specific letters of both writers, I will attempt to use the scope of Edward Said’s Orientalism and Enlightenment Orientalism discussed in Sirinivas Aravamudan’s Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel, as a magnifying glass to different oriental images and conceptions contradictory with the reality in the eighteenth century. This study will mostly make use of Edward Said’s account of orientalism as well as Stephen Greenblatt’s theory of Self Fashioning in order to explicate the differences as to how the Orient is perceived by the authors from different cultures but from the same period. In order to highlight how the definition of Orient changes, this paper attempts to define the Orient in accordance with the works of Lady Montagu and Kelemen Mikes.

English Aristocratic Women and the Fabric of Piety, 1450–1550. Barbara J. Harris.

<i>English Aristocratic Women and the Fabric of Piety, 1450–1550</i>. Barbara J. Harris.

The Family Relationships as a Sociolinguistic Marker in the Etiquette Speech of the Aristocracy in the XIX TH Century (Anglo-Russian Parallels)

The present study is devoted to the sociolinguistic aspect of speech etiquette, illustrated by the description, analysis and comparison of the etiquette speech of the Russian nobility and the English aristocracy in the nineteenth century. The research is carried out in line with sociolinguistics. The sociolinguistic approach allows speech to be considered as a system of social signs, determining the personality, of the communicants and reveal the social aspects of the phenomenon of speech of the aristocracy. We focus our attention on the family relationships as a sociolinguistic marker in the etiquette speech of the aristocracy in the XIX th century and its role and influence on the usage of speech etiquette formulas, because the individual's belonging to a certain social class, his origin, and the environment where one lives, affects his speech; it is focused on the social marker family relations as a regulator in the usage of etiquette forms of the address. The relevance of the subject is determined by the importance of language not only as a complex system but also as a social phenomenon, serving the needs of society; providing communication of this society. And in particular, the family as a platform for collecting empirical material for sociolinguistic study, and object for studying the mutual influences between the speech constants of family members, proving and such a way the importance of etiquette in the communication as a component of the communicative activity of the individual The empirical material of the study is excerpted from the significant works of fiction in the English and Russian art literature.

The Downton Abbey Effect: 18th and 19th Century British Aristocratic Marriages and Agricultural Prices

In the four decades leading up to World War I, a significant proportion of British aristocrats married daughters of newly rich American business magnates. I provide a quantitative economic analysis of this phenomenon in the deeper context of British aristocratic marriages during the 18th and 19th centuries. I show that the decline in agricultural prices, particularly acute during the British agricultural depression of the late 19th century, by reducing the income of aristocratic landed estates at the same time as it reduced the income of landed families, led to richly dowried American brides being substituted for brides from British landed families, the traditional source of brides entering the aristocracy. I also show that this was part of a wider phenomenon of aristocratic substitution of foreign brides for landed brides during the whole of the 19th century, as well as the substitution of daughters of British businessmen for daughters of landed families in aristocratic marriages during both centuries, when agricultural prices declined. The results are consistent with a theory of positive assortative matching in the aristocratic marriage market with lump-sum transfers, where cash-constraints are placed on lump-sum transfers (dowries) from the landowning families of potential brides in periods of agricultural downturn.

Участие сословий в принятии аграрного законодательства в тюдоровской Англии середины XVI – начала XVII века

On the basis of parliamentary documents of the Tudor era the author attempts to find out the degree of participation of both direct and indirect representatives of the nobility, clergy and peasantry in the adoption of laws by parliament regarding enclosures. Analysis of the debates in the parliaments makes it possible to trace the position of the English nobility and the bourgeoisie regarding the process of enclosing the arable land of peasants. The estate of the nobility, with the support of deputies from the bourgeoisie, in fact, was able to significantly influence the content of agrarian bills. The agrarian bills prepared in government circles were significantly adjusted by the commoners, taking into account the specific interests of the gentry of individual counties. The position of the Anglican clergy boiled down to supporting the government’s point of view regarding the conversion of plowing to pasture. The peasantry declared their attitude to the process of enclosures both by sending complaints to the Privy Council, lawsuits in courts, as well as open social protests. As a result, it is noted that Elizabeth I Tudor, when adopting agrarian laws by parliament, showed political flexibility and repeatedly made concessions to the interests of the nobility. In the last parliament, her cabinet managed to reach a consensus of interests of the estates in the agrarian sphere. The results of the study allow us to better understand the mechanism of functioning of the absolute monarchy while maintaining the estate-representative body of power.

Émigrés: French Words that Turned English by Richard Scholar

MLR, .,   poetry. Rather than think about the stanzas of poems as deriving from the Italian for rooms, Steen encourages us to see poems not as highly dysfunctional rooms but as necessary spaces in between rooms. In the end, Steen helps us see the modern and contemporary ‘poem as a container of uncontainable feelings’ (p. ). C P, M H B S Émigrés: French Words that Turned English. By R S. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. . ix+ pp. £. (ebk £.). ISBN –––– (ebk ––––). e ‘émigrés’ of this engaging book, described by its author as an ‘experiment in cosmopolitan cultural criticism’ (p. ), are a very particular set of lexical borrowings which occupy an uneasy centre ground between donor and borrower language, being neither French nor fully integrated into English. is ambiguity, Richard Scholar argues, reflects a long-standing ambivalence in English cultural attitudes to things French, ranging from fascination to disdain, which can be traced back to the Restoration (–), when English aristocrats returned from exile in France and brought French manners and mores back with them. e book takes us on an eclectic journey from Restoration comedy to Winnie-the-Pooh’s companion Eeyore, John Le Carré and the Oscar-winning Little Miss Sunshine, with a passing nod to George W. Bush’s claim that ‘the French don’t have a word for entrepreneur’ (p. ). In Part , ‘Mixings’, Scholar explores à la mode, an expression which has taken on a life of its own notably in North America, where it has come to mean ‘served with ice cream’. Its émigré status in England, however, is underlined in two Restoration comedies, Dryden’s Marriage à-la-Mode () and Etherege’s e Man of Mode (), both of which seek to steer a path between slavish imitation of French manners (satirized by Etherege in the character of Sir Fopling Flutter) and discreet assimilation of French cultural norms. is tension is reflected in a semantic ambiguity through which à la mode denotes on the one hand that which is modern, and on the other that which is merely fashionable. In similar vein, another French import, galanterie, sometimes Anglicized as gallantry, combines both positive rural English notions of chivalry and more dangerous libertine qualities evoked by its French origins. A theoretical underpinning is provided by Raymond Williams’s concept of cultural keywords (Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, )). Where Williams’s own schema allowed only for fully assimilated loanwords , Scholar argues for the inclusion of conspicuously foreign-derived items, on the grounds that they visibly embody the conflict between different conceptions of culture and society. Scholar also draws on the concept of creolization, in the sense of hybridization of identities. is might seem dangerous ground: creolization as defined by French Caribbean intellectuals implies a relationship of deep inequality, rather than rivalry between colonial powers. But creolization à l’anglaise is justified  Reviews in the author’s eyes in that both sides bear the scars of domination at the other’s hands, most painfully, from an English perspective, through the Norman Conquest. Part , ‘Migrations’, focuses specifically on three émigrés: naïveté, ennui, and caprice, which again bear the hallmarks of Anglo-French ambivalence. Naïveté has thus an appreciative meaning (loss of innocence) and a deprecatory one (lapse into idiocy), only the latter surviving in its Anglicized form naivety. An entertaining chapter on ennui, borrowed during the Restoration but not established in English until the late eighteenth century, links its prestigious French origins to its class connotations, as a term denoting a condition beyond mere boredom, afflicting a nobility forced to seek meaning in a life bere of any need for paid employment. ese lexical borrowings reflect the conflicted English mix of admiration and revulsion for our near neighbours, and the book could hardly have closed, in , without reference to England’s vexed relationship with that largely French-designed institution, the European Union. Scholar cites a popular  cabaret video entitled ‘e French Brexit song’, whose singers declare, vengefully, ‘We’re taking all our French words back!’ (p. ), leaving English as the loser. Observing the perennial struggle to make sense of what is alien and strange, Scholar concludes, optimistically...

El vaivén del tiempo en “El tiempo recobrado”, de Ignacio Padilla

Este estudio revisa “El tiempo recobrado”, el último cuento de Las antípodas y el siglo. Mediante el análisis del tiempo histórico y del tiempo mítico, se propone que el texto estaría en las antípodas de En busca del tiempo perdido de Marcel Proust. En oposición al protagonista de la novela francesa, el noble británico del cuento de Padilla amplia el tiempo histórico y pierde la oportunidad de rescatar el tiempo mítico. Se muestra también que hay una relación contraria más al interior del texto, en cuanto a la recuperación del tiempo, en la representación del autor-artista y en el acto de lectura.

Childless Aristocrats: Inheritance and the Extensive Margin of Fertility

Abstract Using genealogical data of British aristocrats, we show that inheritances can affect childlessness. We study settlements, a contract restricting heirs’ powers and settling bequests for yet-to-be-born generations. Settlements reduced childlessness to the ‘natural’ rate, ensuring aristocratic dynasties’ survival. Our estimation exploits that settlements were signed at the heir’s wedding if the family head lived until this date. Whether the heir was born after a girl provides as-good-as-random assignment into settlements. Next, we develop a theory that reproduces our findings, shows that exponential discounting cannot rationalise inheritance systems restricting heirs and that inheritance systems can emerge endogenously when fertility concerns exist.

Синтаксические эмфатические конструкции в преподавании иностранных языков

The article considers the use of syntactic emphatic constructions that become a matter of rising interest not only for the science fiction translators, but also for the teachers of foreign languages and the methodologists. Special attention is paid to the communicative method of teaching, since this method has accumulated the greatest experience in introducing fiction into the field of teaching foreign languages. There has been analyzed the descriptive-analytical method which makes it possible to process the selected lexical material, and the classification method which allows determining the specifics of phenomena and their properties. The material for the study was a series of satirical novels by P. G. Wodehouse, whose characters are a British aristocrat Worcester and his servant Jeeves. In addition to the wide range of stylistic tools used in the novels the author described many realities of early twentieth-century Britain that can be used as a basis for linguoculturological study. There have been analyzed the syntactic emphatic constructions and their main models based on the classification of L. A. Sokolova, E. P. Trofimova and N. A. Kalevich and the examples from the novel. It has been inferred that using fiction literature at the lessons of foreign languages is promising and recommended for further study by specialists in the field of teaching foreign languages. The results of the study can be used in the students’ research works when writing essays, final qualifying papers, preparing creative projects in linguistics and stylistics of English language, the theory and practice of translation

The limits of imperial influence: John James Audubon in British North America

For two decades, John James Audubon (1785–1851) travelled widely and frequently while working on his illustrated natural history volumes – still highly prized today for their aesthetic and scientific merit: Birds of America (1827–1838) and Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America (1846–1854). Neither independently wealthy nor employed as a salaried scientist, the artist-naturalist with a flair for marketing financed his projects by selling subscriptions. Successfully marketing Birds to members of the British aristocracy, as well as to organizations and to artistic and intellectual elites, Audubon was reluctant to take Quadrupeds to Britain even though sales there were key to the financial viability of his work. Instead, in 1842 Audubon travelled to Canada (now Ontario and Quebec), the most populous region of British North America. The colony was, he calculated, a viable source of subscribers; however, he was wrong. Moreover, having travelled to British North America previously, he should have expected modest returns. Nonetheless, he was optimistic that this expedition would succeed where those to New Brunswick (1832) and Labrador and Newfoundland (1833) had failed. This paper examines why success eluded Audubon in the colonies, arguing that entrepreneurialism buttressed by patronage – a winning strategy in Britain – failed because there was a vast difference between metropolis and hinterland when it came to supporting the arts and sciences.