Century English Research Articles

'The Constitutional Framework for Congress's Ability to Uphold Standards of Member Conduct,' Hearing Before the House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties, 117th Cong. (March 11, 2021)

This written testimony was submitted to accompany my appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties, concerning the congressional chambers' power to discipline their own members. The testimony lays out the constitutional bases for the houses' disciplinary powers and discusses the history of their use, from the sixteenth century English Parliament to the present day. It notes the various tools of discipline--expulsion, censure, and fine--and discusses the uses and limitations of each. It concludes by suggesting that the houses make more vigorous use of their disciplinary powers.

Foundations of Practical Spiritual Theology: Walter Hilton as a Case Study in Retrieval

AbstractThis article explores the relationships between spirituality, spiritual theology, and practical theology. It proposes a synthesis of these disciplines – practical spiritual theology – as a method and methodology for retrieving the wisdom of historical Christian mystics for the purposes of sustaining and inspiring the spiritual life of contemporary Christians. The 14th century English mystic, Walter Hilton, is used to illustrate this synthesis in practice.

Synthetism and Analyticism as Characteristics of Language Structure in 18Th Century British Grammars

Synthetism and Analyticism as Characteristics of Language Structure in 18Th Century British Grammars

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.

The Representation of Yemeni Culture in Early 20th Century British Travel Writings

The present article seeks to analyze the representation of Yemeni culture in early 20th century British travel writings. It questions the British travel writings as merely stereotypical texts or regard them as vital historical documents. This article also tries to locate different themes that have been deploying by British writers in the respective period. The chosen works are by Harold Ingrams (1937) and Freya Stark (1948), which have shown different features about the relationship between Yemeni culture and the British attitude. I used the postcolonial theory and Orientalism as approaches to analyze the works under examination. In the analysis, I argued that a writer’s choice for language and content entails a lot of differences, which reflects the location of Yemeni culture in the eyes of the Western encounters, particularly British travelers’ accounts. Finally, I revealed how two writers have portrayed Yemeni culture, its land, people, and presented diverse images of Yemen to emphasize my assumption that British travel writings on Yemen are both diverse and complex in their representation.

Mythologizing the Narrative: An Analytical Study of Turnage/Berkoff’s <i>Greek</i> (1989) and the Nature of Operatic Narrative

This paper focuses on literary adaptation of the genre of music theatre, i.e. opera and its strong association with mythic narrative. It will begin with a brief discussion on the hybrid nature of music theatre and its inner struggle between the Apollonian/verbal and the Dionysian/musical principles. In order to fully apprehend operatic narrative, it is necessary to explore the connection between opera and its predecessor, the ancient Greek theatre and the genre’s association with myth and ritual. The paper will analyse a twentieth century English operatic adaptation and its social and cultural implications by using <i>Greek</i> (1989) as an example. In crafting a modern version of an ancient myth, some plausible equivalence of the original narrative motivation must be incorporated if the functional and explanatory elements are not to be lost. Opera can be considered to be the direct descendent of its ancient Greek predecessor. Furthermore, from a social and cultural prospective, opera has transformed the ancient rite of religious sacrifice into a secular social and communal offering. The nature of operatic libretto also reflects the essential characteristics of a double sacrifice in the genre of music theatre. Singers offer their talents in representing the scapegoat in a pseudo religious ritual in the modern society; librettists offer words for the ultimate amalgamation with music in the genre of music theatre. The paper concludes with the idea that the genre of music theatre is designed to epitomise a condensation of human emotions and as an offering which corresponding to the modern society’s need for ritualistic sacrifice and spiritual purification.

William Harrison&amp;apos;s Garden as an Example of 16th Century English Garden

The article is devoted to the study of the features of the English garden of the 16th century. In the center of attention is the text of the third chapter “On gardens and vegetable gardens” of William Harrison’s work “Description of England” in 1577, where he shares his arguments about what the gardens of the English — his contemporaries are. In his opinion, gardens were an important part of the life of his countrymen. They consisted of an orchard, a kitchen garden where garden and green plants were grown, spicy herbs used in cooking and in home medicine, and a flower garden. William Harrison noted that the British in their gardens grew not only local plants, but spent huge amounts of money to purchase and grow in their gardens plants that had their homeland of origin in other countries, and even continents. William Harrison believes that there are both positive and negative sides to this. On the positive side, he refers to the fact that in this way the introduction of plants occurs. And the negative side is that many local plants can be put out of use in this way. In addition, he expresses concerns that not always imported plants can be useful to local residents. William Harrison shows his awareness of how to grow different plants, although he does not consider himself a professional botanist. The author of the article believes that William Harrison himself is proud to have a garden with a variety of plants, both local and not, that his garden is a typical example of an English Renaissance garden of the late 16th century, the subject of care on the part of an English writer of the Tudor era. Although the text of the «Description of England» by William Harrison is difficult to imagine a detailed layout of his garden, to find out the exact range of his plants, to determine the presence of decorative buildings and fountains in his garden.

“Heroic” Entrepreneurship and Other Variants: Building Culturally Competent Paradigms

19th Century English historian Thomas Carlyle envisioned an heroic minority transforming the world. Although his views were repudiated by social scientists, Fredrick Jackson Turner and Elbert Hubbard revived such thinking in the New World by connecting entrepreneur-like responses with American individualism. Today, a popular vision continues to connect entrepreneurship with towering individuals. Culturally competent models and perspectives that view entrepreneurship more broadly have a significant role in avoiding ethnocentrism through the development of appropriate perspectives.

“A Foe to All Christians”: The Notorious English Corsair Captain and Ottoman Reis John Ward in Early Seventeenth Century English Literature

Privateering, which permitted private ships to attack enemy vessels and claim their prize (ship, goods, crew etc.) was only possible under a licence commissioned by a sovereign, better known as a ‘letter of marque’. In the Elizabethan Period (1558-1603), English privateering proved to be an effective way of dealing with Catholic Spain, especially during the Spanish War (1585-1603). When King James I ended the war with Spain in 1604, however, privateers such as John Ward –left without valid licenses permitting them to capture enemy merchant ships and confiscate their goods– had to find other means of support. Under these new circumstances, the former privateer Captain John Ward, also known as Jack Ward, first became pirate, then a Barbary corsair (Yusuf Reis) and Muslim operating from Tunis. This study deals with the representation of John Ward, someone who has excited the interest of audiences across England as well as being vilified by King James I, in early seventeenth century English literature. In this respect, literary texts that allude to John Ward such as broadsheet ballads, Samuel Rowlands’ poems, and Robert Daborne’s play A Christian turn’d Turke (1610-1612) will be examined with special reference to two pamphlets, Andrew Barker’s A true and certaine report of the beginning, proceedings, overthrowes, and now present estate of Captaine Ward and Danseker (1609) and the anonymous Newes from Sea, of Two Notorious Pirates Ward the Englishman and Danseker the Dutchman (1609).

Insanity and Imprisonment in British Guiana, 1814-1966

This paper explores links between incarceration and enslavement, migration, and mental health, in the colony of British Guiana. Contemporaries recognised the negative impact that mobility and labour had on the health and well-being of enslaved persons and Asian immigrants, including on plantations. Understandings of ‘insanity’ later developed to bring ideas about biology, context, and behaviour into dialogue, including through the racialisation of its prevalence and character amongst the colony’s diverse population. Before the construction of separate institutions, people who were believed to be suffering from mental illness were sometimes kept in jails, and due to a lack of capacity this continued even after lunatic asylums were developed from the 1840s. At the same time, colonial administrators recognised that incarceration itself could cause mental ill-health, and as such into the early twentieth century British Guiana engaged with global debates about criminal insanity.

Insanity and Imprisonment in British Guiana, 1814-1966

This paper explores links between incarceration and enslavement, migration, and mental health, in the colony of British Guiana. Contemporaries recognised the negative impact that mobility and labour had on the health and well-being of enslaved persons and Asian immigrants, including on plantations. Understandings of ‘insanity’ later developed to bring ideas about biology, context, and behaviour into dialogue, including through the racialisation of its prevalence and character amongst the colony’s diverse population. Before the construction of separate institutions, people who were believed to be suffering from mental illness were sometimes kept in jails, and due to a lack of capacity this continued even after lunatic asylums were developed from the 1840s. At the same time, colonial administrators recognised that incarceration itself could cause mental ill-health, and as such into the early twentieth century British Guiana engaged with global debates about criminal insanity.

Collective action, opportunism, and class agency under ineffective state enforcement: Marx on English Factory Laws

AbstractThe paper focuses on a previously unexamined aspect of Marx's discussion on the 19th century English Factory Acts, and highlights its broader relevance for contemporary discussions about the role of institutions in a market economy. The capitalists' enlightened self-interest was to better husband their work force by limiting the workday and curtailing child labor, but market competition put them in a Prisoner's Dilemma creating an opportunism hazard. The ‘Factory Acts’ addressed the problem, but the state lacked the capacity to enforce them effectively. Marx held that the organized power of workers played an essential role in how the Factory Laws could gain traction at a time when state enforcement was unreliable. Organized labor's threats of sanction were credible enough to lower the expected benefit of non-compliance, enabling capitalists to commit to acting in their long-term, collective self-interest.

Raman Spectroscopic Analysis of an Early 20th Century English Painted Organ Case by Temple Moore

An organ case from Lincoln, England, designed by the architect Temple Moore in 1907 was examined during conservation work using Raman spectroscopy in order to analyze the decorative paint composition. Samples from the six principal colours were extracted and examined using a Bruker Senterra R200-L spectrometer. The results are the first known formal analysis of a painted scheme by this architect, and they reveal a mixture of commonly used pigments for the period and the unexpected use of simpler, earth pigments, along with an unusual admixture in the red, along with an organic additive. The findings are of importance to both the conservation of Temple Moore’s artwork, in understanding the experimentation used in early twentieth-century England, and in furthering our knowledge of ecclesiastical decorative artwork of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

What Do Signatures Signify?

At the beginning of the seventeenth century English composers used only a handful of keys: they combined five keynotes (G, A, C, D, and F) with the three signatures documented in English solmization theory (♮,♭, and♭♭). By the end of the century English theorists described eighteen keys—all of the modern major and minor keys with up to four signature accidentals. But the route from eight to eighteen keys was not straightforward. This article traces this route by examining how the function of signature flats and sharps changed in seventeenth-century England. At the beginning of the century signature flats and sharps were clefs, mere notational symbols that provided a shorthand for the probable pitches in a composition. As a result, English musicians used adjacent keys (i.e., ♮-D and -D), which were distinct, well-formed versions of a broader category of D minor. In the middle of the century, composers and theorists used ad hoc and asymmetrical strategies ♭ to create new keys. Composers explored new flat keys through the process of signature creep, while theorists devised new sharp keys when they identified the parallel key relationship. Finally, theoretical interventions at the end of the century “fixed” keys into our modern system but obscured the varied pitch structure that still animated musical practice. The messy, flexible circumstances in which keys arose complicate several assumptions about modern key; this evidence challenges notions of transpositional equivalence and reveals that different kinds of keys may be built on different conceptual foundations.

The Chairs of Venice Applying Storytelling as Teaching Method to Understand Material Cultural Heritage

To understand the present and prepare for the future, we must remember our past. - And as indicated with the writings of 19th century English art critic and writer, John Ruskin; material cultural heritage holds an important lesson and plays an ethical role in establishing such a remembrance. With this paper, we discuss examples of implementing storytelling as a creative-explorative teaching method to critically reflect on- and develop the awareness and understanding of material cultural heritage among students from disciplines of Art History, Architecture, and Design. Our examples stem from a workshop held during the International Art Biennale in Venice 2019 by the Erasmus+ interdisciplinary research projectCRAFT.

Figures of Fictionality: Keywords of the Eighteenth- Century English Novel

Recent developments in the polyhedric field of Digital Humanities offer a desirable perspective for corpus-driven literary studies. This is mainly due to both the implementation of tools for the statistical treatment of textual data, as well as the rapid expansion of the Internet in terms of online availability of archives and collections. Notwithstanding a series of contributions highlighting the mutual benefits derived from the combination of computational methods and literary scholarship, traditional criticism seems to ignore the epistemological continuum between qualitative and quantitative approaches to literature, treating them as two separate impermeable realities. In this article I will attempt to reconcile these approaches by presenting an exercise in computational criticism about the linguistic and ideological constructions at the basis of the rising genre of Augustan England: the novel. The aim is to examine the keywords at the core of the extensively theorised modern paradigm of empirical narratives so as to disclose which lexical units may be seen as the distinctive trait of fictionality as well as those which constitute the figure of the novelistic canon. In this way, the article provides an example of how the application of quantitative methods in literary and cultural scholarship can enhance the quality of individual research in the pursuit of the validity of interpretation.

Freedom of Contract, Democratic Politics and State Duty: Green's Critical Reflection on the Class Representation Issue in the 19th Century British Labour Legislation Movement

Freedom of Contract, Democratic Politics and State Duty: Green's Critical Reflection on the Class Representation Issue in the 19th Century British Labour Legislation Movement

Images of Governing and Governability: A Case Study of the Propaganda during the 17th Century English Civil War

Images of Governing and Governability: A Case Study of the Propaganda during the 17th Century English Civil War

'It does not permit itself to be read': Re-reading Calcutta through the Select 18th Century English Literary Representations

'It does not permit itself to be read': Re-reading Calcutta through the Select 18th Century English Literary Representations

MISSIONARIES AND COLONIALISM: The Nineteenth Century British and Contemporary Korean Missionaries in Zambia

There are about ten Korean missionaries in Zambia, which is Christianized since experiencing colonial era under Western Christians. This situation brings a question regarding to their uniqueness compare to the nineteenth-century-British missionaries: how are these Korean missionaries distinct from Western evangelists and what has shaped this difference? To answer the question, this article compares several groups of missionaries by consulting historical records, established literature, and interviews produced by author. Especially, voices from the Korean missionaries in Zambia reveal the distinctiveness of themselves as the people who share the experience of living under colonial rule, and suggest their role within Zambian Christianity and society.