Cultural Reform Research Articles

The Barber of All Russia: Lawmaking, Resistance, and Mutual Adaptation during Peter the Great’s Cultural Reforms

Peter the Great's cultural policies are generally regarded as having broken decisively with the past. Measures aimed at Europeanizing Russians' habits of grooming and dress served to exemplify these policies, ushered in at the autocrat's behest without heed to the mood of the Russian populace. Peter's notorious decree on shaving beards has long symbolized the radical and violent nature of his policies. (1) Historians have based their findings primarily on top-down legislative acts, but without an in-depth analysis of the processes by which they were implemented, they and the reading public more broadly came to assume that Peter's beard-shaving policy had been imposed in one fell swoop, with immediate and positive results. The question of how individuals responded to Peter's innovations has likewise been neglected. Too often, the rare representations of the Russian subject in the scholarly literature have been generalizing, one-dimensional, and speculative in character. V. M. Zhivov gave his rendition a comedic quality: Deprived of his beard, the servitor, looking in the mirror and wiping his mouth, received a daily reminder that he had joined the new secular government and wondered whether he would stand 'among the shaven heretics' at the Day of Judgment, as the church had not all that long ago fixed in his mind. (2) There is a grain of truth to this view, yet I hope in this article to shed further light on the implementation of Peter's cultural initiative through the prism of individual actors' behavior--both the authorities responsible for the execution of the monarch's decrees and the ordinary subjects they influenced. This angle of analysis allows us, first, to clarify what the tsar hoped to achieve; second, to show how the implementation of his policies differed in various regional contexts, meeting not only resistance but also support; and third, to demonstrate that the development and implementation of the decree on beard shaving was closely associated with an analysis of public sentiment. For Peter attended carefully to the mood of the populace, which he tried to control--often making concessions, sometimes stifling reform, even occasionally rescinding his commands. Ultimately, I hope to answer a question that has bedeviled numerous historians: how it was that Peter managed to carry out such harsh and compulsory reforms in the cultural sphere, often in spite of existing church prohibitions, without facing serious public resistance. Why Did Peter the Great Impose the Mandatory Shaving of Beards? It is well known that in the 16th and 17th centuries, most Russians viewed shaving as a sin. Shaving the beard corrupted the image of God, who had made man in His image and likeness; eternal torment awaited the transgressor. Strict prohibitions against beard shaving were found in Stoglav and Kormchaia kniga, as well as in texts attributed to Maksim the Greek and Patriarch Adrian. (3) What, then, motivated Peter's decision to force his subjects to shave their beards? Some researchers have explained the tsar's initiative as a demonstrative break with Old Muscovite values, based on a desire to bring Russians closer to foreigners. (4) Others saw Petrine beard shaving as a battle against superstition. (5) A third group interpreted the transformation of Russian subjects' appearance in the context of the principles of good order (reguliarstvo) to be implemented in their private lives. (6) A fourth contingent tried to make sense of the beard-shaving decree from a financial point of view, as one of the new revenue-generating statutes. (7) Which point of view is most valid? Answering this question would require documentary evidence from Peter explaining his intentions. Yet not one of the tsar's well-known decrees or letters lays out his motivations for prohibiting beards. Indeed, the monarch left the motivations behind many of his acts unstated. (8) Clues to the tsar's personal outlook on the beard-shaving policy can be detected by analyzing different editions of Gistoriia sveiskoi voiny (The History of the Swedish War)--the largest historical work of Peter's time. …

Bremen, Liverpool, Marseille and Rotterdam: Port Cities, Migration and the Transformation of Urban Space in the Long Nineteenth Century

During the long nineteenth century Bremen, Liverpool, Marseille and Rotterdam developed rapidly and built new harbour districts beyond the confines of the city. These new waterfronts became the zones of the other; an area defined by the social and cultural lives of casual workers, transient migrants and other disadvantaged groups and became a place in need of social and cultural reform. Few scholars have paid attention to the specific interrelations between migration and the transformation of urban space in port cities. This article addresses the issue of how diverse national and transnational migrant movements have shaped the urban identity of these port cities in this period. In a comparative framework, it raises the question what impact a transient population had on the harbour-related districts and how the appearance of these informal zones contributed to the image of the port city as a place of otherness.

Mediterranean Enlightenment: Livornese Jews, Tuscan Culture, and Eighteenth-Century Reform by Francesca Bregoli

Mediterranean Enlightenment: Livornese Jews, Tuscan Culture, and Eighteenth-Century Reform by Francesca Bregoli

Muslims and Modernity in the Russian Empire

Slavonic and East European Review, 94, 4, 2016 REVIEW ESSAY Muslims and Modernity in the Russian Empire ALEXANDER MORRISON Tuna, Mustafa. Imperial Russia’s Muslims: Islam, Empire, and European Modernity, 1788–1914. Critical Perspectives on Empire. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2015. xiii + 276 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £64.99: $99.99. Ten years ago you could still count the number of English-language monographs on the Muslims of the Russian empire on the fingers of one hand: Adeeb Khalid’s pioneering work on the jadid reformers of Central Asia, Virginia Martin’s book on the Kazakhs of the Middle Horde, Allen Frank’s detailed study of the Tatars and Kazakhs of the Novouzensk district, Jeff Sahadeo’s study of Colonial Tashkent and Robert Crews’s attempt at a comprehensive survey of Muslim relations with the tsarist state were more or less the only book-length studies of the subject.1 Today the field, if not yet overpopulated, can certainly be described as mature, with a depth and sophistication of scholarship which at last begins to bear comparison with the history of Muslims under British or French imperial rule. We are now starting to see the fruit of what we might call the second generation of American PhD dissertations on the subject, with works by Elena Campbell, Ian Campbell, Rozaliya Garipova, Eileen Kane, James Alexander Morrison is Professor of History at Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan. 1 Adeeb Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia, Berkeley, CA, 1997; Allen J. Frank, Muslim Religious Institutions in Imperial Russia: The Islamic World of Novouzensk District and the Kazakh Inner Horde, 1780–1910, Leiden, 2001; Virginia Martin, Law and Custom in the Steppe: The Kazakhs of the Middle Horde and Russian Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century, Richmond, 2001; Robert Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia, Cambridge, MA, 2006; J. F. Sahadeo, Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865–1923, Bloomington, IN, 2007. ALEXANDER MORRISON 716 Meyer, James Pickett and Danielle Ross all either published or imminent,2 as well as important new work from relative veterans such as Agnès Nilüfer-Kefely, Charles Steinwedel and Paolo Sartori.3 Mustafa Tuna’s thought-provoking book is part of this latest wave, and like much prior scholarship focuses primarily on the Muslim encounter with ‘modernity’, and in particular those who took a ‘reformist’ or ‘jadid’ educational and religious path. In a recent article which cites Tuna’s book, Devin DeWeese has fiercely criticized what he calls this ‘Jadidocentric’ tendency, arguing that ‘modernity’ is a highly problematic analytical category, which in this context always includes a spoken or unspoken assumption that Muslim society and belief were ‘backward’, ‘stagnant’ or ‘unchanging’ until the ‘modernizers’ appeared and brought enlightenment and reform in the nineteenth century. DeWeese writes that this overlooks earlier patterns and cycles of change, ignores the beliefs and practices of the majority of Muslims who were uninterested in and unaffected by these ideas, and involves a series of unconscious value judgements in favour of the reformers, prompted by a feeling that they are somehow closer to the historian in their beliefs and values. DeWeese instead would cast them as proto-fundamentalists, because of their narrow adherence to what they considered authentic scriptural authority, their disdain for centuries 2 Elena Campbell, The Muslim Question and Russian Imperial Governance, Bloomington, IN, 2015; Ian Campbell, Knowledge and the Ends of Empire: Kazak Intermediaries and Russian Rule on the Steppe, 1731–1917, Ithaca, NY, 2017; Rozaliya Garipova, ‘The Transformation of the Ulama and the Shari’a in the Volga-Ural Muslim Community under Russian Imperial Rule’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 2013; Eileen Kane, Russian Hajj: Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca, Ithaca, NY, 2015; James Meyer, Turks Across Empires: Marketing Muslim Identity in the RussianOttoman Borderlands, 1856–1914, Oxford, 2014; James Pickett, ‘The Persianate Sphere during the Age of Empires: Islamic Scholars and Networks of Exchange in Central Asia, 1747–1917’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 2015; Danielle Ross, ‘From the Minbar to the Barricades: The Transformation of the Volga-Ural ‘Ulama into a Revolutionary Intelligentsia (1864–1918)’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 2012, and ead...

Economics, culture, and electoral reform: The case of Japanese agricultural trade negotiations

ABSTRACTThe effect of electoral structure on foreign policy is a matter of some question. The 1994 electoral reforms in Japan, which resulted in significant changes to electoral power structures, provide an opportunity to understand if and how electoral structure influences foreign policy. This article examines Japanese WTO agricultural trade negotiations in light of the 1994 reforms, looking specifically at whether or not Japan’s agricultural negotiating position as an extension of its agricultural policy changed after the 1994 electoral reforms. If democratic electoral structure has an impact on Japan’s trade negotiating position, it will do so by reconfiguring the domestic pressures against trade liberalization, producing a different equilibrium point between domestic and international pressures. The article finds that the Japanese negotiating position did not change after the 1994 reforms, raising questions regarding the impact of economic factors mediated by democratic electoral structures on economic foreign policy.

‘I don’t want orange trees, I want something that others don’t have’: Ottoman Head-Gardeners after Mahmud II

Abstract Among the many effects of the Tanzimat period’s political and cultural reforms was an overhaul of the physical appearance of the house of Osman. Borrowing from their immediate predecessor Selim III, sultans of the nineteenth century hired foreign horticultural experts to design their imperial gardens. The new post of the head-gardener, continually refilled by European expatriates until the early twentieth century, would revitalize the once prominent, pre-Tanzimat court institution of the gardeners’ corps. This article provides an in-depth look at the first of these figures, Christian Sester from Bavaria, who would design and install the last and largest of these imperial sites – the groves of Çragan Palace that would later become the Yldz palatial complex – and in the process reconfigure the corps with a group of his disciples. Sester’s scholastic foundation in the vibrant European milieu of the German Enlightenment later primed him to become the ‘noble’ garden expert among the equally multicultural émigré community that he would form in the Ottoman capital.

The Catalan-language press from 1868 to 1939

The cultural Renaixenca (Renaissance) movement in Catalonia spurred the swift development of the press in Catalonia. The journalism that took off during that period laid the groundwork for the ensuing stages, which showed extraordinary vitality spanning a period from 1868 to 1939. At the same time, this period can be divided into two stages: a “transition”, which ranged from the restorationof the monarchy (1876) until the end of World War I (1918), and a stage of “modernisation”, which approximately covers the years between the world wars (1919-1939). However, the Franco dictatorship destroyed the role that journalised once played as an indispensable tool in the advancement of the discontinuous process of civil and cultural reform in Catalonia.

Idioms and Proverbs in Teaching Turkish as a Foreign Language; “Istanbul, Turkish Teaching Books for Foreigners” Sample

Rapid changing in the world required to learn foreign languages. That necessity transformed language teaching in foreign countries into big sector. In this conditions, Turkish language working to get its place in this sector. Especiallly in recent years, the social,economical, cultural reforms and the improving value of Turkey have showed us the necesstiy of Turkish teaching to foreigners. For this reason, A number of books have been publishing, materials have been developing. The biggest problem in this issue is how to teach Turkish culture in effective way. It's widely accepted that comprehending a language is different from teaching grammar. That's why the person who learns the language must master on written and verbal culture of the language. The textbooks are one of the crucial elements of culture transfer. That's why, It is very important to choose the texts consciously for culture transfer properly. In this regard the idioms and proverbs which keep Turkish culture are accepted as an important tool of culture transfer. In this study we showed the importance of idioms and proverbs in teaching Turkish as a foreign language. Using proverbs and idioms in the books at A1, A2, B1, B2, C1 level of “İstanbul, Turkish Teaching Books for Foreigners” is examined by using document analysis methodology. According to conclusions some ideas were suggested.

Key aspects of the basic provisions of the legislative acts concerning the reform of the Ukrainian culture at the time of formation of the State of independence

Problem Setting. The article examines the Soviet heritage in the culture of independent Ukrain be late 80s early 90s of the XX century. The main aspects of the first legislative acts concerning the reform of the Ukrainian culture are analyzed, namely: “Declaration Ukraine” “Fundamentals of Ukraine on culture”.Analysis of the recent researches publications. The cultural politics of independent Ukraine in the first years of its existence was formed in the complex political, economic, historical cultural circumstances. Recalling with horror pain of the inhuman conditions in which workers find themselves in the cultural sphere, institutions enterprise culture in the 1990s to find out the objective subjective reasons for this state of affairs. Paper main body. Preventing beforehand, it should be noted that the cultural processes in the independent Ukraine evolved is not quite the way envisioned in recent years of perestroika educationist, literary figures, figures of culture, all socially active nationally conscious intiligencia. The article investigates the State of the cultural development of Soviet times the realities of culture at the beginning of Ukrainian independence. And also analyses the main provisions of the first legislative acts concerning the reform of the Ukrainian culture. Namely: Declaration on State sovereignty of Declaration of rights of nationalities of Ukraine and fundamentals of legislation on culture.Conclusions. So, at the moment of formation of the State independence of objective reality demanded immediate legislative reform in the field of culture. It should be remembered that the history of Ukrainian culture period of late 80's-early 90-ies. was formed under the influence of long-term cultural denationalization as part of Imperial Russia, in the period of USSR. At the time of adoption of the necessary legislative decisions of the cultural history of Ukraine had no other idea of the formation of the national independent Cathedral States formed an idea of national identity by virtue of the variety of cultures, polyethnic population language differences between the major regions of the country. What about making the first legal State acts of independent Ukraine, built solely on humanistic democratic ideas to reform the culture bore or declaratory or is not feasible at that time in nature. Thus, I must say that the only real democratic development of the country the effective legislation of the possible reform further development of Ukrainian culture.

Virtuality in Digital Fashion Images

Abstract Focus on Digital Fashion Image, the conceptual framework for the thesis is established from Virtuality inDigital Art. Formative characteristics and aesthetic characteristics were studied by classifying the DigitalFashion Image applied and expressed by digital media and technology. A detective research method wasused for a case study. A literature study for case-by-case data was analyzed with focus on the works expre-ssing fashion that utilized digital media and technology since the 2000s. Through this study, the Digitalrevolution has created the socio-cultural impact of a Virtual representation to implement technology andfashion culture that finds ways to take advantage of the image shown in a Digital Fashion Media by under-standing Virtuality. The results are as follows. First, it was a re-formation of the fashion culture through theexperience of virtuality with mental zone parameters between the media ‘Mediation Code’. Reflect the realityof the virtual environment as represented by a cultural image of fashion brands and fashion that reset theteam relationship and formed a Homo Ludens cultural code. Second, ‘Interactive Exchange’ acts on the ex-change interaction between the method of digital technology, the human and the machine as well as thetechnical interoperability of network elements and techniques. This exchange is applied to fashion imagesthat express emotion. Forming personalized fashion items and the user interactively storage that expressesthe interactive exchange to forward the identity of the emotional fashion by a change in the message deliverysystem fashion. Third, the emphasis on intuitive artistic expression ‘Synesthesia Immersion’ induces a senseof immersion and excitement through the fusion of the interconnected. Enhance a visual image in fashionsensory representation and maximize a tactile and visual virtual reality involvement.Key words: Digital fashion image, Virtuality, Mediation code, Interactive exchange, Synesthesia immer-sion; 디지털 패션영상, 가상성, 매개코드, 상호작용적 교류, 공감각적 몰입성

Executive power and scaled-up gender subtexts in Australian entrepreneurial universities

Deputy Vice Chancellor and Pro Vice Chancellor positions have proliferated in response to the global, corporatised university landscape [Scott, G., S. Bell, H. Coates, and L. Grebennikov. 2010. “Australian Higher Education Leaders in Times of Change: The Role of Pro Vice Chancellor and Deputy Vice Chancellor.” Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management 32 (4): 401–418]. Senior leadership is the sphere where academic and management identities are negotiated and values around the role of the university are decided. This paper examines the changing and gendered nature of the senior leadership setting and its implications for diversity in and of university leadership. The analysis draws from a three-year empirical study funded by the Australian Research Council on leadership in Australian universities. It focuses on executive leaders in three universities – one which is research-intensive, the second, in a regional site, and the third, university of technology. The article argues that the university landscape and its management systems are being restructured in gendered ways. It utilises the notion of organisational gender subtexts to make explicit how gender works through structural and cultural reform.

The Figure of the Prostitute, Tajdid, and Masculinity in Anticolonial Literature of Iraq

Abstract In the Iraqi literary production of the 1940s and 1950s, the figure of the woman prostitute appeared repeatedly, signaling a crisis in the ways Iraqi men imagined and articulated the contours of women’s liberation. Through an examination of works by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Fuʾad al-Takarli, and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, this article argues that the innovative aesthetic forms and themes adopted by men writers and their dedication to political and cultural renewal (tajdid) and social reform used the figure of the prostitute to articulate a vision of women’s liberation that emphasized secular, urban, and middle-class notions of domesticity and respectability. The literary prostitute was a marginal figure used to envision a new era of women’s rights through her exclusion and excision from the imagined national future. The instrumentalization of the figure of the prostitute in Iraqi literary production revealed the limits of representation of the masculine imagination.

Songs of Experience: Confessions, Penitence, and the Value of Error in Tasso and Spenser

As the Reformation and Counter-Reformation swept Europe in the sixteenth century, penance (or its rejection) became a cornerstone of individual and confessional identities. Extending a post-Tridentine view of sacramental penance as consolation, Torquato Tasso'sGerusalemme liberatasuggests that penance offers a means to recover and even to benefit from the experience of error—and to incorporate romance error into epic action and ethics. Through extensive intertextual dialogue, Edmund Spenser'sFaerie Queeneengages this view to explore the fears produced in some lay people by the English Reformers' rejection of penance. Book 2 interrogates the possibilities for epic heroism in a fictional environment lacking any visible means to recover from error and therefore profoundly skeptical of experience and the errors to which it might lead. Spenser's virtuoso act of cultural translation reforms Tasso's penance-based ethics, exposes the shortcomings of one approach to reformation, and affirms the educational value of human error.

Coming to America: The Reception of Sepharad and Ashkenaz in America

WHETHER EXCEPTIONAL OR NOT, American Jewish history is full of extraordinary moments, personalities, and motifs. The relatively late arrival of European Jewish historians to this realization, Salo Baron excepting, cannot and should not obscure the richness of the Jewish experience in the United States. It is to the credit of the towering figure of twentieth-century American Jewish historiography, Jacob Rader Marcus, that a vast array of source materials has been available to generations of researchers, who have drawn on them to convey that richness with ever-expanding nuance and sophistication.One of the characteristic features of Marcus's worldview, his four-part periodization of American Jewish history, has not necessarily stood the test of time. In 1958, Marcus delivered his presidential address to the American Jewish Historical Society in which he identified the following periods of American Jewish life: (1) the Sephardic Age (1654-1840); (2) the German Age (1841-1920); (3) the (concurrent) Eastern European Age (1852-1920); and (4) the American Age (1920- ). It was the last that spawned ''a homo novus, the American Jew''-fully at home in his country and assimilated into its cultural norms.There is an upward, teleological arc to this narrative that rises from the travails of immigration to the security of America, as well as from the varieties of cultural difference to the prospect of social compatibility with the American world. Marcus's scheme implies a unidirectional process of cultural reformation in two regards: in temporal terms, each phase effectively superseded the preceding one; and spatially, arrival in America, especially by the final phase, meant that lingering native cultures would soon wane.Recent scholarship has agitated for a more dynamic understanding of the social field in which Jews in the United States have operated. This scholarship has expanded and rethought the borders of Jewish cultural activity, arguing that the vectors move in multiple directions-not only from Europe or the Middle East to America but in the other direction as well. In recognition of the vitality of research in the field, this issue of JQR is devoted to differing facets of the American Jewish experience. The essays collected here, some from recognized experts in American Jewish history and others from those better known in other areas of scholarship, demonstrate that the creation of an American homo novus was not simply-or at all-a matter of leaving behind old cultural traces but rather a case of the often uneasy coexistence of competing cultural sensibilities into the twentieth century.The first essay, Aviva Ben-Ur's ''Kabbalistic Pharmacopoeia,'' does the service of expanding our angle of historical vision from the United States per se to the Atlantic at large. Ben-Ur follows the career of a fascinating book held in the Katz Center library, Ta'alumot h. okhmah. Composed over the course of 150 years in multiple languages and countries, the text is a repository of medical, folk, and culinary practices, with a persistent kabbalistic theme overall. It contains remedies, receipts, and transport documents revealing a journey that crisscrossed the Americas (and Europe) and reminds us that the commonly denominated ''America''- that is, the United States-was part of a much larger cultural ecosystem.The next essay, Ber Kotlerman's ''Going through the Seven Circles of Hell,'' shifts our focus back to U.S. shores and to one of the most prominent forms of American culture: film. The allure of film for American Jews, and recent immigrants among them in the early twentieth century, is well known. Far less well known is the allure of film for the great Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem, who was, an earlier biographer noted, ''a big admirer and trembling worshiper of the cinema.'' This passion even prompted Sholem Aleichem to try his hand at writing a script in 1915 in Yiddish, which he brought with him to America in the hope of having it produced. …

One Nation, Divided: Culture, Civic Institutions, and the Marriage Divide

Since the 1960s, the United States has witnessed a dramatic retreat from marriage, marked by divorce, cohabitation, single parenthood, and lower overall marriage rates. Marriage is now less likely to anchor adults’ lives or provide a stable framework for childrearing, especially among poor and working-class Americans. Much research on the retreat from marriage has focused on its economic foundations. Bradford Wilcox, Nicholas Wolfinger, and Charles Stokes take a different tack, exploring cultural factors that may have contributed to the retreat from marriage and the growing class divide in marriage. These include growing individualism and the waning of a family-oriented ethos, the rise of a “capstone” model of marriage, and the decline of civil society. These cultural and civic trends have been especially consequential for poorer American families. Yet if we take into account cultural factors like adolescent attitudes toward single parenthood and the structure of the family in which they grew up, the authors find, the class divide in nonmarital childbearing among U.S. young women is reduced by about one-fifth. For example, compared to their peers from less-educated homes, adolescent girls with college-educated parents are more likely to hold marriage-friendly attitudes and to be raised in an intact, married home, factors that reduce their risk of having a child outside of marriage. Wilcox, Wolfinger, and Stokes conclude by outlining public policy changes and civic and cultural reforms that might strengthen family life and marriage across the country, especially among poor and working-class families.

Worlds in the Making: Design, Management, and the Reform of Organizational Culture

The introduction of design and design thinking into the management of organizations is at an early stage. Most of the research and applications of design have focused on attitudes, skills, methods, and techniques. These have been applied to tactical issues of the development of products and services, issues of organizational operations, and issues of the vision and strategy of organizations. But there is a principle that distinguishes design as a practice of management from other schools of management over the past century. That principle focuses on the quality of experience for all of those served by organizations, whether for-profit, not-for-profit, or governmental organizations. The design movement in management aims at organizational culture reform. It is profitable for organizations, but it also serves a deeper purpose in enhancing the lives of individuals. At its best, the design movement seeks to bring innovations—sometimes radical innovations—to organizations that have to adapt to new circumstances of economic competition, social expectation, and cultural understanding. This is the challenge to design anticipated decades ago by the famous designer George Nelson, when the tactical uses of design in product development was the center of attention. The new extension of design deeper into organizational culture offers the possibility of significant consequences.

A Generational Subculture Approach to Work Values: Winning the Race for Talents in China

Building on generation theory, this survey study examined how the perceived importance of work values differs among the three generations (Cultural Revolution, Social Reform, and Millennial) in the...

Tempering Romance

Tempering Romance Katherine R. Larson (bio) The Fabulous Dark Cloister: Romance in England after the Reformation by Tiffany Jo Werth. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Pp. 248, 8 illustrations. $65.00 cloth. When John Milton sets out in Areopagitica (1644) to defend the freedom of the press against Parliament’s 1643 Press Ordinance, he advocates confrontations with seemingly seductive texts as vital opportunities for moral reform: ’Tis next alleg’d we must not expose our selves to temptations without necessity, and next to that, not imploy our time in vain things. To both these objections one answer will serve . . . that to all men such books are not temptations, nor vanities; but usefull drugs and materialls wherewith to temper and compose effective and strong med’cins, which mans life cannot want.1 Reading widely, he argues, fosters the interpretive acuity required to inculcate virtue. Romance is not an explicit focus of his argument here, but clearly Milton sees the genre, conventionally associated with vanity and temptation, as an obvious target for licensers. Warning of the difficulty of silencing musical instruments across England, for instance, he imagines the acoustic “lectures” produced by village fiddles and bagpipes as rural alternatives to romance reading: “[T]hese are the Countrymans Arcadia’s and his Monte Mayors.”2 Romances like Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1590, 1593) and [End Page 137] Jorge de Montemayor’s Diana (1559) may have constituted “recreations and pastimes”3 that were inherently suspect, but they were also integral to the didactic tempering that Milton associates with reading “promiscuously”4 and well. Elsewhere in Areopagitica, he lauds Edmund Spenser’s Sir Guyon for modeling discernment and moderation, and he concludes that readers should grapple vicariously with Mammon and the Bower of Bliss so that they too might “see and know, and yet abstain.”5 In his capacity as a writer of romance, Spenser constitutes for Milton an exemplary “teacher”6 of active readers who are challenged to demonstrate their virtue and to discern truth as they are drawn into Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) and navigate its tempting landscapes alongside Guyon. In The Fabulous Dark Cloister, Tiffany Jo Werth probes the Janus-faced attributes of romance reading that inform Milton’s argument in Areopagitica. The romance was demonized in the aftermath of the Reformation as an inherently Catholic and effeminizing genre that led readers astray. Yet Werth demonstrates that Protestant writers sought to harness its affective power for edifying purposes. As such, the romance emerges in Werth’s compelling analysis as a distinctly “hybrid” (2) genre that registers the transitional nature of the post-Reformation period through its ability both to tempt and to temper readers. Bridging Catholic and Protestant practices, the four romances featured in this rich study—Sidney’s The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, William Shakespeare’s Pericles (ca. 1607), and Lady Mary Wroth’s The Countesse of Montgomeries Urania (1621)—contributed to the ongoing religious and cultural reform of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries even as they reveal considerable ambivalence about those changes. Given the “self-reflexivity advocated in Protestant modes of reading” (101) and the related tenet of sola scriptura (by Scripture alone), it is not surprising that seemingly secular texts and the interpretive practices of their readers likewise became “fraught catalysts for—or against—faith” (5) in the post-Reformation period. Werth innovatively structures her book so as to foreground this dynamic and implicitly transformative relationship between text and reader. In part 1, “Fabulous Texts,” she examines the vilification of the romance genre in the light of the slippage between the moralizing miracles extolled in biblical parables and the potentially damning supernatural feats of secular romance. If both narrative models were widely recognized as holding the power to move readers and auditors, how might romance writers [End Page 138] deploy these affective tools to help mold pious readers? Werth begins to probe this question in chapters 1 and 2 as she considers how Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare rework romance’s familiar wonders for instructive and virtuous ends. All three of these writers rely on their readers’ memory of romance conventions and recognize the appeal of wondrous...

공적구조의 국공립문화회관에 대한 예술경영 기반의 조직개혁방안 연구

공적구조의 국공립문화회관에 대한 예술경영 기반의 조직개혁방안 연구

Black Republicans, Black Republic: African-Americans, Haiti, and the Promise of Reconstruction

This article examines the ways in which some African-Americans assigned great importance to Haiti from 1863 to 1877. At the outset of Reconstruction, a diverse cast of African-Americans derived inspiration from contemporary and historical signs of Haitian progress. But by the end of the era, middle-class and elite African-Americans, particularly urban northerners, demanded the reform of Haitian life and culture. This shift illustrates not only growing class politics within black communities but also African-Americans' varied attempts to understand and influence the immense transformations in US public life that occurred after emancipation.