Early Twentieth-century Society Research Articles

E.M. Forster's Female Musicality: Inconclusive Counter-romance in A Room with a View

Abstract: E.M. Forster's A Room with a View (1908) musically animates a "self-reflexive gender consciousness" to expose the limits of romantic female life. Employing music to confront the logics of the heterosexual marriage plot, the novel embodies a counter-romantic subtext about the desire for female independence. As such, Forster's music moves attention away from marriage and toward female hesitation about domestic identities in early twentieth-century society. Forster's own late-in-life considerations of A Room also signal that post-war disruptions provide backgazing clues to the novel's inconclusiveness over nuptial anxieties, further highlighting how ideals of heterosexual love and social inheritance obscure the aims of unrealized female selfhood.

‘Much Learning Hath Made Thee Mad’: Academic Communities, Women’s Education and Crime in Golden Age Detective Fiction

In the history of education women and their communities have always posed a threat to the male stronghold. Turning on the idea that women have historically been perceived as interlopers, and thus symbolically criminalised by their desire for, and ultimately successful, admittance to scholarly and educational spaces, this article examines a cluster of Golden Age detective novels from the 1930s and 1940s (published at a time when it was still possible for women to study for but not receive a degree) in which educated women and criminality come into violent contact. Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night (1935), Mavis Doriel Hay’s Death on the Cherwell (1935), Gladys Mitchell’s Laurels are Poison (1942), and Josephine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes (1946) are all set in women’s residential academic communities and place the question of women’s right to learning at the crux of their narratives. By invoking the concomitant history of women’s education, this article examines the way in which these authors use the genre to perform contemporary concerns about educated women and more specifically the fear that women are made monstrous, deviant, or corrupt by their contact with Higher Education. In the process they reveal the vulnerability of women’s institutions in the 1930s and 1940s and acknowledge the competing and incompatible demands of educated women’s personal and professional lives. Much of this is communicated through a preoccupation with territory and the act of trespass: the communities, and the women in them, are perceived as dangerous and threatening and yet are themselves consistently under attack. By staging the educated woman as a criminal, or at least a suspected criminal, these texts make manifest her symbolic position in early twentieth century society: she is a woman made transgressive by her crossing of figurative and literal boundaries.

The Museum of Safety: Responsibility, Awareness and Modernity in New York, 1908–1923

This article examines the construction, the development and the denouement of the Museum of Safety in New York during the early twentieth century. Through a detailed assessment of the institution's own bulletin, newspapers and accompanying literature, the manner in which the museum served its visitors, promoted its cause and failed to secure its own future will be examined. The significance of this institution has been overlooked despite the way its role and responsibilities in exhibiting safety devices and procedures to industry, workers and the public reflect important trends within late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century society. The Museum of Safety also emerged as the effects of capitalism, immigration and industrialization began to be addressed. Examining the history of this “lost museum” will, therefore, reveal how responsibility, awareness and modernity were encountered in New York.

Bones Hooks and Western Folklore: A Rhetorical Analysis of a Pioneering African American Cowboy

The myth of the Old West frontier is our national epic; the quintessential American hero is the cowboy. Scrutinizing the history and rhetoric behind the legend, however, reveals more fantasy than fact. The often told story of Mathew “Bones” Hooks, an African American cowboy from the Texas Panhandle, replete with iconic imagery, also reveals Hooks conflicted about his identity and social status as a black man in rapidly changing, early twentieth century society. This paper enlists Walter Fisher's 1984 narrative paradigm, highlights the conflicting characterizations of Hooks and examines the underlying rhetorical themes shaping his story. Lacking the “logic of good reasons,” reality collides with myth dissuading the audience from the narrative's probability and fidelity.

Bones Hooks and Western Folklore: A Rhetorical Analysis of a Pioneering African American Cowboy

The myth of the Old West frontier is our national epic; the quintessential American hero is the cowboy. Scrutinizing the history and rhetoric behind the legend, however, reveals more fantasy than fact. The often told story of Mathew "Bones" Hooks, an African American cowboy from the Texas Panhandle, replete with iconic imagery, also reveals Hooks conflicted about his identity and social status as a black man in rapidly changing, early twentieth century society. This paper enlists Walter Fisher's 1984 narrative paradigm, highlights the conflicting characterizations of Hooks and examines the underlying rhetorical themes shaping his story. Lacking the "logic of good reasons," reality collides with myth dissuading the audience from the narrative's probability and fidelity.

Catholicism, Culture, Conversion: The History of the Jesuits in Albania (1841-1946) by Ines A. Murzaku (review)

I38 SEER, 87, I, JANUARY 200g Murzaku, Ines A. Catholicism, Culture, Conversion:The History of the Jesuits in Albania (1841-1946). Orientalia Christiana Analecta 277. Pontificio Istituto Orientale, Roma, 2006. 280 pp. Illustrations.Notes. Bibliography. Index. 25.00: $29.00 (paperback). Albanian history is one of the national histories of Europe least familiar to English speakers, and themodern ecclesiastical history ofAlbania is one of the more obscure corners of this history, a corner made even darker by the absence of a sizeable literature on the topic in languages other thanAlbanian. This volume, therefore,provides an important service to anyone interested in Balkan history and especially for students ofJesuit missions in theperiod after the restoration of the Society in 1814. Moreover, Ines A. Murzaku has drawn on rare archival material that gives us a window into the experiences and attitudes ofJesuits working inAlbania and the impressions they gained from their surroundings. Perhaps most interesting for the more general reader are the firsthand accounts of vendettas and blood feuds among the Albanian mountaineers, which the fathers strove to reduce, and the references to customs in rural Albanian society before the Communist era. Yet thisvolume has significant limitations. The author offers littleanalysis of thematerials she uses to tell the storyof theJesuit presence inAlbania for over a century, and the historical survey ends abrupdy without a concluding summary. The reader hoping to gain insights into life inAlbania during the First and Second World Wars will be disappointed. The immediate reason for this and other omissions, such as more details about relations between the Catholic Church and King Zog, or the way the Jesuits responded to Mussolini's occupation ofAlbania in 1939, isperhaps the limited nature of the surviving archival materials, much having been destroyed by theCommunists after 1945. The reader is left wondering, however, why other sources were not used to round out thispicture. Other omissions include, most noticeably, the absence of any concluding summary or synthesis of the author's research, or exploration of theJesuit politics beyond Albania that shaped the Society's approach to this remote and impoverished region. These lacunae make it much more difficult to place the frequently heroic efforts of these Jesuit missionaries and teachers in the larger contexts of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century society, or of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Albania. Relying on Jesuit generated documents, Murzaku has little critical to say about individualJesuits.We gain intriguingglimpses of a few rivalries between the fathers, and sense the ongoing tensions between Italian and native Albanian Jesuits, but the root causes of these conflicts are mostly obscured by the lack of specifics provided in these documents. The occasional bishop or foreign diplomat also comes in for criticism, but again the basis for this criticism is primarily drawn from frequently opaque Jesuit sources. In addi tion, although thebook contains rare and fascinating photos of theJesuits and people theyministered to, the absence of a map leaves the reader at times unable to appreciate the significance of thedistances or geographical obstacles that theJesuits confronted. However, by presenting straightforwardly and without analysis theJesuit perspective, Murzaku inadvertently gives us an insight into how these men reviews 139 saw themselves and their relations with others, including theChurch hierar chy,Muslims, Ottoman officials and diplomats; while this is of course an incomplete picture, it does contribute to our understanding of the broader question of Jesuit self-representation. Finally, two additional factors have clearly influenced the composition of thisbook. The firstis the destruction of theJesuit mission and persecution ofJesuits by theCommunist government. This sad chapter produced martyrs for the Society and cast the history of the Jesuits in a light that anticipates these sacrifices. The second factor is the return of the Society in 1991 following the fall of Communism. The return of theJesuits allows Murzaku to tell her story as one inwhich setbacks and martyrdom are at least potentially redeemed by the end of overt oppression and the resumption of theJesuits' mission. Yet asMurzaku documents amply, the story of theJesuits inAlbania is one of repeated expulsions followed by dogged effortsto return and rebuild. The history of theJesuits inAlbania is a narrative whose ultimate significance has yet to be determined. Murzaku's work helps us understand...

The great influenza: the epic story of the deadliest plague in history

An in-depth account of the deadly influenza epidemic of 1918, a plague that took the lives of millions of people around the world, examines the causes of the pandemic, its devastating impact on early twentieth-century society, the researchers who risked their lives to confront the disease, and the lasting implications of the crisis and the scientific