History Of Genre Research Articles

ЖАНРОВІ ДОМІНАНТИ БІЛОРУСЬКОЇ ХУДОЖНЬОЇ ДОКУМЕНТАЛІСТИКИ: ДОСВІД А. АДАМОВИЧА ТА С. АЛЕКСІЄВИЧ

In the article «Genre dominants of Belorussian documentary: A. Adamovich’s and S. Alexievich’s experience» the author analyzes the concept of «documentary», «document» and «fact» in different scholars. The research deals with the process of formation of Belorussian national artistic-documentary proseon the basis of the works of Belorussian authors A. Adamovich «The Blockade book» (co-authored with D. Granin), «Out of the Fire» (co-authored with J. Bryl’ and V. Kolesnyk) and S. Alexievich «The Unwomanly Face of War…». The author reveals historical and ideological connections between these books, in which human voices are composed into a single complete whole, possessing a certain set of genre properties that manifest themselves both at the content and form levels.The focus is on distinguishing innovative features of the genre compared to «classic» documentary of the first half of the 19th century.The researcher views main peculiarities of the narrative, the author’s position while presenting eyewitness accounts, which may bе either objective or subjective. Composition, topic of the work and author’s foundation of the chosen structure are described. In the article there isthe investigation of the history of documentary genre, the reasons for its transformation and the specifics of modern «choir of voices» interpretation. The author of the article also refers to the ambiguous reception of S. Alexievich work by modern Ukrainian writers J. Andruhovich, J. Vynnychuk and O. Zabuzhko.

Рецепция А.С. Грибоедова в Интернете: на примере блога о связях писательского имени с Крымом

Almost two centuries after death, Alexander Sergeyevich Griboyedov (1794-1829) continues to influence social processes. To unravel the mystery of this phenomenon, it is necessary to answer the question about the character of perception of the writer and diplomat and to find out what features of his image appeal to modern people. The subject of this work is the perception of Griboyedov in the electronic environment. The work shows how the search engines index the blo-gosphere, which is dedicated to “the author of Famusov and Skalozub”, what topics are popular among its readers and what kind of audience it is, what influences the attendance of the only on-line-diary about the writer’s discourse, what is its history creation, purpose, structure, genre and style of material presentation, what factors determine the demand for the content of this resource and in which way it differs from similar media, what Web borrows from this project and in what manner. The basis of the narrative is made up of information that is not available in the public domain, observations over the media space are commented in the light of the state of affairs in griboedovistic. The request for the new data about the writer and diplomat on the virtual space is correlated with the attitudes of researchers and relevant publications of 2012–2020, the prospect of overcoming the identified discrepancies is associated with the changing of the agenda in modern science and disclosed by the characteristics of its tasks.

Stephen of Ripon’s Vita S. Wilfridi: Genre, Political Theory and Historical Representation in the Early Middle Ages

This article argues that the battle narratives in Stephen of Ripon’s Vita S. Wilfridi (VSW) intervene in and illuminate the connected histories of genre, political theory, and historical representation in the early Middle Ages. As I demonstrate, battle narratives are ubiquitous in early medieval “histories,” but only tend to occur in saints’ lives in the context of miracle sto- ries. Moreover, the manner of representing battle in both genres preserves a distinction be- tween political and religious spheres of action. However, the battle narratives in the VSW con- tain no miracles; instead, they argue that Wilfrid’s sanctity as bishop was transferred to King Ecgfrith and Northumbria as actors on the stage of political history. To carry out this argument, Stephen intersperses his battle narratives with discourses of ideal kingship and biblical typology. The model of sanctity he thus deploys, and the theory of closely coordinated royal and ecclesiastical power that underpins it, reflect a missionary ideology that would later be enacted in Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica and in histories from the Carolingian period. Stephen’s novel use of the battle narrative suggests that the boundary between vitae and historiae was both permeable and productive; it enabled him and others to construct a sacralised political sphere in historical narrative.

Machine Learning and Human Perspective

Numbers appear to have limited value for literary study, since our discipline is usually more concerned with exploring differences of interpretation than with describing the objective features of literary works. But it may be time to reexamine the assumption that numbers are useful only for objective description. Machine learning algorithms are actually bad at being objective and rather good at absorbing human perspectives implicit in the evidence used to train them. To dramatize perspectival uses of machine learning, I train models of genre on groups of books categorized by historical actors who range from Edwardian advertisers to contemporary librarians. Comparing the perspectives implicit in their choices casts new light on received histories of genre. Scientific romance and science fiction—whose shifting names have often suggested a fractured history—turn out to be more stable across two centuries than the genre we call fantasy. (TU)

Sounding the Dream: Crosscultural Reverberations between Can Xue and Jorge Luis Borges

Sounding the Dream: Crosscultural Reverberations between Can Xue and Jorge Luis Borges Astrid Møller-Olsen Though her writing style is strikingly individual, critics often compare the work of Can Xue (née Deng Xiaohua, 1953–) to that of Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) (Bachner 170; Chen; McCandish 2), an author whose writing she has analyzed in detail in her monograph Interpreting Borges (解读博尔赫斯). This volume is itself a textual chimera, posing as a work of criticism yet possessing a similar literary style and freedom to Can Xue’s creative writing. Borges approaches literary criticism and philosophical exegesis in a similar fashion in his works of non-fiction, many of which follow narrative patterns recognizable from his short stories in what Ned J. Davidson calls “a successful amalgam of fiction and essay” and proclaims as “an acknowledged contribution of Borges to the history of genres” (1). Both authors, then, display a disinclination to separate practices of reading and writing. This article uses Gaston Bachelard’s aural metaphor of poetic reverberation to study how literary inspiration works in ways that are more complex than the causal relationship indicated by authorial inspiration or, in aural terms, by source and echo. In his essay “A New Refutation of Time,” Borges refers specifically to the dream sequence in Zhuangzi’s butterfly parable, and this oneiric motif serves as the guiding image in the following analysis of the poetic reverberations between Zhuangzi, Borges, and Can Xue. Merely tracing the chronology of the dream as a literary motif from Zhuangzi to Borges to Can Xue would overlook the unique contributions of each writer, into whose texts several sources of conscious and unconscious inspirations blend and weave together. By contrast, the metaphor of reverberation demonstrates how literary imagery can resound in the instance of reading as a crosscultural and crosstemporal poetic experience. This article takes its cue from Wai Chee Dimock’s aural understanding of literary dynamics that focus on texts as emerging phenomena, which fail to preserve any fixed shape due to the changing context of reading, [End Page 463] as well as her designation of the reading experience, rather than the end of the writing process or the date of publication, as the birth of the text (1061).1 She asserts that “the literary […] is not an attribute resident in the text, but a relation, a form of engagement, between a changing object and a changing recipient, between a tonal presence and the way it is differently heard over time” (1064). It is this essential relation between practices of writing and reading as co-creating the text that I intend to explore by employing Bachelard’s holistic approach to reading as a process in which the text reverberates between writer and reader in a moment of intersubjectivity (Poetics of Space 9).2 In his introduction to The Poetics of Space, Bachelard uses two auditory terms to describe poetic affect. For him, the mindful appreciation of a poem is an instance of resonance, in which the poetic imagery resonates with the reader’s own memories and prior knowledge. In contrast to this conscious aesthetics, he posits the immediate affect of a strong poetic image as “reverberation,” in which the experience is not a subjective response to the text but a precognitive and spontaneous interaction between reader and text: “The poetic image is not subject to an inner thrust. It is not an echo of the past. On the contrary: through the brilliance of an image, the distant past resounds with echoes” (2). Unlike the aural linearity of resonance, with the poetic image as a catalyst that activates memory, poetic reverberation describes a melting together of author and reader in an instant of textual unity: In the resonance we hear the poem, in the reverberation, we speak it, it is our own. The reverberations bring about a change of being. It is as though the poet’s being were our being. The multiplicity of resonances then issues from the reverberations’ unity of being. (7) The poetic image is not an object conferred from author to reader, but a “specific reality” (4) that they both momentarily share. The initial reverberation, then, is a holistic textual experience, followed by a...

«Більше ніж інтерв’ю». Огляд тематичного блоку «Усна історія філософії» часопису «Філософська думка»

The article analyses how the oral history of philosophy can be conceptualized as a genre and a discipline of the history of philosophy. The need for this kind of conceptualization arose due to recent spreading of interviews in the genre of the oral history of philosophy, which in turn became a subject for the special issue The Oral History of Philosophy in Filosofska Dumka. Analysing this issue, the author proves that the “dialoguing” nature of the interview builds inflated expectations about the oral history as well as its boundaries as an approach in a historical-philosophical study. He also suggests distinguishing the interview as a genre of oral philosophy – dialogue, which is a traditional philosophical literary form, from a tool in historical-philosophical study. In the latter case, it is important to determine who will play a role of a historian: an author of historical narration, an interviewee or an interviewer. Depending on the answer to the previous question, the author distinguishes three possible perspectives of the oral history of philosophy development: an interview as a self-sufficient study in the history of philosophy, an interview as a self-sufficient source for historical-philosophical research and an interview as one of sources for historical-philosophical research. Each of them has its opportunities for a historian of philosophy and plays its role in recruiting students and doctoral students (who often are involved as interviewers) to research work. &nbsp

The Historical Typology of Sacred Music of the Christian Tradition

Three stages can be distinguished in the history of Christian music – the early Christian, medieval and modern, each of which, with a plurality of styles, genres and forms, has internal integrity and unity. The integrity of each historical type of sacred music is based on a common understanding of the sacred as a key category of religious art. The sacred in the early Christian liturgy appears as a unity of text, music and rite in the sacrament of the Eucharist as the pinnacle of religious communication, while music aimed at conveying religious emotions was not considered an autonomous, and therefore an aesthetic object. In the medieval liturgy, the sacrament of the Eucharist as the pinnacle of religious communication is inextricably linked with aesthetic categories: solemnity, prayerfulness, concentration of liturgical music, the exaltation of liturgical texts using exclusively archaic languages, become the main markers of the sacred. In Modern Period, Protestant theology rethinks the doctrine of church sacraments, which is reflected in the liturgical practice of other Christian denominations. As a result, the syncretic unity of text, music and ritual is lost in the sacred art of the Modern Period, which leads to a transformation of the relationship between its aesthetic and sacred components. This contributed to the formation of a multiplicity of forms of liturgical music in various Christian denominations, where the verbal (Protestant tradition) or the musical-aesthetic (Catholic and Orthodox traditions) component could be priorities. The autonomization of music in worship led to the emergence of non-liturgical, quasi-sacred music, which at a new historical stage actualizes medieval genres and forms, as well as meditation as the basis of musical dramaturgy, while refusing the key category of religious art – religious communication. The characterization of the historical stages of development of Christian music will allow the reader to understand both the internal mechanisms of its external transformation in the process of evolution, and to understand the reason for the diversity of its modern forms, including the appearance of those that have lost their direct connection with worship.

Mark-up and Annotation in the Corpus of Historical English Law Reports (CHELAR): Potential for Historical Genre Analysis

Adding annotation and mark-up to linguistic corpora has become a standard practice in corpus building over the past few decades as a way to facilitate data extraction and at the same time guarantee that new corpora are compatible with existing and future tools. The purpose of this article is twofold. First, we provide an overview of the main forms of annotation and mark-up available to the research community and how they have been applied to the Corpus of Historical English Law Reports 1535-1999 (CHELAR), a specialized corpus consisting of law reports or records of judicial decisions. Second, we give an account of preliminary research based on the annotated versions of CHELAR, which so far has been primarily aimed at identifying the distinctive linguistic characteristics of law reports, as well as at investigating how the language of law reports has evolved over a time span of almost five centuries. Our article illustrates the multiple advantages of applying a simple annotation schema to a corpus and how this can enhance the potential of a corpus for historical genre analysis.

Mary Wollstonecraft’s Reflections on the French Revolution in her Letters

Mary Wollstonecraft went to Paris in December 1792 to see revolutionary France for herself. Her experience in France had significant effects on her understanding of the French Revolution and even changed her earlier ideas about the Revolution. This paper traces Wollstonecraft’s view of the Revolution by examining her lesser known epistolary introduction for “A Series of Letters on the Present Character of the French Nation” and her other writings, including her reviews of other writers’ epistolary works and her personal correspondence. This paper first looks at Wollstonecraft’s reviews on Helen Maria Williams’s Letters Written in France (1790) and Catharine Macaulay’s Letters on Education (1790) to investigate Wollstonecraft’s ideas of the published epistolary writings and to illuminate their influence on her introductory letter. It also explores her personal letter to Joseph Johnson on 26 December 1792 to examine the ways in which she wrote her eyewitness account of revolutionary France in her personal correspondence. The introductory letter, written two months after her arrival in Paris, reveals her initial response to France and shows her confusion between her expectations of the Revolution and what she actually witnessed in France. By exploring the internal evidence in the introductory letter, this paper sketches out what “A Series of Letters on the Present Character of the French Nation” was like. It then examines how Wollstonecraft offered her philosophical reflection on the Revolution in this introductory letter. However, she discontinued her epistolary project and instead started writing the history of the Revolution of 1789. This paper finishes by tracing the reasons why she stopped writing the epistolary work and began writing in the genre of history.

For a Possible Theory of Lie: the Case of the Alternate History

The aim of this article is to discuss the logic of the literary genre of the alternate history. In the first paragraph we introduce the problem of the alternate history and its connection with the truth end the lie; here we try to determine a strong relation between the semantic definition of this genre and the liar paradox. In the second part we will define a short semantics for the lie. In the third paragraph we define the general characteristics of the alternate history, and finally, in the fourth paragraph, we will take in exam an example belonging to this genre: the Morsell’s novel Contropassato prossimo: Un’ipostei retrospettiva (Past Conditional: A retrospective Hypothesis).

History for Hire in Sixteenth-Century Italy: Onofrio Panvinio’s Histories of Roman Families

Onofrio Panvinio was hired by sixteenth-century Roman families to write their histories and, where necessary, be prepared to bend the facts to suit their interests. This occasionally entailed a bit of forgery, usually involving tampering with specific words in documents. In most respects, however, Panvinio employed the same techniques—archival research and material evidence such as tombs and inscriptions—which distinguished his papal and ecclesiastical histories. This suggests that genealogy, despite being commissioned by aristocratic families to glorify their ancestries, can be seen as a more serious field of historical investigation than is often assumed. Yet the contours of this genre of history for hire in sixteenth-century Italian historiography are nowhere near exact. Panvinio struck a balance between fulfilling the expectations of the noble families who commissioned him and following his own scholarly instincts as an historian, but he nevertheless did not seek their publication. By contrast, Alfonso Ceccarelli, who also composed family histories, veered considerably in the direction of flattering his patrons, even forging entire papal and imperial privileges. Indeed, he was condemned to death for the forgery of wills concerning the property rights of nobles.

The psychologist's biographer: Writing lives in the history of psychology.

How should historians employ psychological insight when seeking to understand and analyze their historical subjects? That is the essential question explored in this methodological reflection on the relationship between psychology and biography. To answer it, this paper offers a historical, historiographical, and theoretical analysis of life writing in the history of psychology. It touches down in the genres of autobiography, psychobiography, and cultural history to assess how other historians and psychologists have answered this question. And it offers a more detailed analysis of one particularly useful text, Kerry Buckley's (1989) Mechanical Man, to illuminate specific ways in which historians can simultaneously employ, historicize, and critically analyze the theories of the psychologists they study. Although ostensibly about writing biographies of eminent psychologists, this article speaks to a methodological issue facing any historian contemplating the role psychological theories should play in their historical narratives.

The Birth of Christian History: Memory and Time from Mark to Luke–Acts

Eve-Marie Becker explores in Birth of Christian History genres, subgenres, and literary forms in Hellenistic and Roman historiography in order to draw out and compare the processes that shaped the social and cultural memory of the earliest Christian literary culture. This three-chapter volume focuses particularly on the influence of early Roman Imperial historiography on the NT writings beginning with the Gospel (Mark) to the starting point of early Christian history (Luke–Acts).In ch. 1 (pp. 1–33), Becker discusses the interdependent relationship between memory and history writing. She teases out the philosophical constructs that undergird the Roman conception of memory and how the early NT writings demonstrate some similarity to Roman memorial culture. After defining and explaining the differences between counter-memory, visual memory, ritual memory, and exemplary memory in relation to early Christian literature against Roman history writing, Becker elaborates on the purposes that literary memory serves in the Gospels and Acts: (1) a didactic purpose—the involvement of memory in education; (2) an entertainment function—as later apocryphal works supplement perceived historical gaps, such as Acta literature; and (3) an authoritative function—when later Christian Fathers refer back to early Christian literary memory in claiming normative and heretical errors.In ch. 2 (pp. 34–129), Becker looks extensively into how ancient historians explain/interpret the past and how they paraphrase the narrativized past. The Hellenistic and Roman historians—such as Velleius, Sallust, Strabo, Livy, Dio Cassius, and Appian—reference an existing master plan behind the narrative while also claiming their own view. In this sense, historians choose topics and subgenres according to the moral value that they aim to depict; thus, they assert their own moral value on different levels (causality in the narrative, use of rhetorical forms and genre, and interpretation on a metahistorical level) in order to affect their contemporary and future audiences. Becker finds the most prominent comparison in Velleius Paterculus’s catalog of virtues and values in his description of Tiberius’s reign. Becker applies a form of Vellieus’s approach to Mark’s Gospel and discerns literary causal connections and patterns, such as how Mark’s metahistorical interpretation—the “way of the cross”—serves as an overarching moral value in the narrative.In ch. 2, Becker also approaches an understanding of NT historiography from two levels—discussing the theoretical contributions of ancient historians and philosophers (those before and contemporary with Mark and Luke–Acts) while also examining ancient historiography through the ideas and opinions of contemporary scholars and theorists. For example, when discussing “person-centric” historiography, Becker consults the writings of Ivo Bruns (1896) in relation to personhood and concerning the distinction between major characters and minor characters as distinct from biography. She draws out Bruns’s conclusions about direct depiction of characters (e.g., Polybius’s narrative Scipio) and indirect evaluation of characters that lie hidden within the narrative (e.g., Livy on Scipio) which can be traced back to Thucydides. Becker then takes these observations and guidelines for analyzing the manner in which persons act as protagonists in the framework of history writing (judgment by contemporaries, impact on contemporaries, and the person’s attributed speech) and applies it to Mark’s Gospel: where Jesus evokes judgment (Mark 8:27–29) and Jesus’s impact on others is through action and through speeches (1:18–34). From this perspective, Jesus’s personhood is evidence that he is the acting protagonist within a historiographical account.In ch. (pp. 130–53), the abstract concept of time and its relationship to historiography is assessed. Since memory gives access to the perception of time as well as structuring it, time becomes an object of interpretation that gives shape to identity (the “golden age” in Virgil, Ecl. 4.4–10). Becker analyzes the relation between memory, time, and history in considering the earliest Christian shape of history writing, its Hellenistic-Roman setting(s), and its impact on the construction and understanding of “Christian” time. Becker concludes that the motivating factor for Hellenistic and Roman history writing is the conceptualization of time. She holds that this is also true of Mark and Luke–Acts. More specifically, Luke participates in Mark’s conceptualization of time and motion—Mark 1:15 and Luke 21:8—yet perception of time in Luke–Acts differs from Mark: Mark and Luke–Acts are linear and causal, but the Markan concept of narrative temporality is not yet fully defined (p. 137). Mark’s readers are forced to look back to chs. 1–9, whereas Luke gives shape to a narrative that stresses temporal and historical progress toward the apostolic age.Eve-Marie Becker sifts through an extensive amount of research from primary and secondary sources to provide relevant comparative insights on the influence of Roman and Greek historiography on early Christian history writing. The nature of the topic requires an appreciation for theory and abstractions, but the author’s acute ability to gather, collate, and explain nuanced differences of genre and form within an overarching discourse of ancient history engages the reader and contributes to a better understanding of the historiographical approaches of Mark and Luke–Acts.

Gattungsgeschichte und ihr Gattungsbegriff am Beispiel der Novellen

Gattungsgeschichte und ihr Gattungsbegriff am Beispiel der Novellen

Como se narra a "História do Brasil" de frei Vicente do Salvador

Nas letras portuguesas e luso-brasileiras dos séculos XVI a XVIII, embora sejam consistentes a produção e a circulação de textos de história, as preceptivas específicas acerca do gênero histórico são escassas. Tendo em vista essa escassez normativa, este artigo propõe-se a discutir, brevemente, em que consiste a arte histórica entre o Quinhentos e o Setecentos. A partir dessa discussão de preceitos – em particular, dos retóricos referentes à ars narrandi –, analisa-se, então, como se narra a História do Brasil composta, na primeira metade do século XVII, por frei Vicente do Salvador.

The role of the Nizami Museum in the popularization of Azerbaijani culture abroad

In the article on the basis of sculptural samples the creation of museums and memorials outside the country is analyzed through the activity of the National Museum of Azerbaijan Literature named after Nizami Ganjavi. From the beginning of its creation, the museum has always provided close assistance to the creation, reconstruction and improvement of museums with a literary profile.The bringing of the tombstone of one of the founders of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic Alimardan bek Topchubashov to the country and replacing it with a new monument is considered as an object of research.The article also mentions the importance of the Mehdi Huseynzade Memorial Museum in Slovenia and the monument in the museum erected in his honor. Here we consider the classification of the public aspect of sculptural samples, as well as their functions as museum items. All the exhibits of Mehdi Huseynzade in his memorial museum are shown to the audience against the background of emotional impact. This merit of the Nizami Museum is propagandistic, it strengthens friendship and cooperation between countries and positively influences the establishment and development of cultural and political relations. The presentation of historical psychological themes through sculptural patterns shows the continuous development of the historical genre as a historical and artistic source.Key words: memorials, memorial museum, sculpture, museology.

Kinolab: A Digital Humanities Project for the Analysis of Film Language

This article describes Kinolab, a platform for the digital analysis of narrative film language. While the work of literary scholars has benefitted from the application of computational methodologies to text analysis for decades, researchers who work with moving images have faced technological and legal obstacles that hinder their ability to analyze large corpora of film and other media. Recent modifications to U.S. copyright law and technological advances in the annotation of moving images have created new opportunities to harness Digital Humanities methodologies for film and media research. Kinolab, which originated as a digital clip archive for Italian films and series set in Rome, has taken advantage of these advances to expand its collection beyond Italian film and media with the goal of building a platform for the analysis of film language that is broadly representative of diverse historical periods, cultures, and genres, thereby enabling researchers to gain a better understanding of how formal elements of narrative media relate over time and across geographical boundaries.

FINNO-UGRIC CONTEXTS OF THE RUSSIAN BYLINA

The relevance of the article is due to the ongoing discussion about the ethnic status of the Russian people and its state, which is expressed, in part, in the existence of two main concepts in Russian historiography - the Norman and anti-Norman ones. The epic, which reproduces the ethnic, historical and state views of an ethnos at the stage of its emergence and formation, was not sufficiently involved in addressing this issue or was considered unilaterally and with a Slavophil or Normanist bias. The article attempts to analyze epic plots, characters and ideas with the involvement of the Finno-Balt and Ugric contexts, for the Finns and the Balts, as evidenced by The Tale of Bygone Years, took part in the vocation for the reign of Rurik, Sineus and Truvor, with which it is customary to designate the beginning of Russian statehood. The geography of epic plots and characters points to the Novgorod principality, the lands of Chudi, Korela, Vesi, Mary, Sloven, Krivichi, - to the Russian North as the place of addition of heroic epic poetry. Heroic poetry is formed in the ethnogenetic core of the nationality, where there are ideological and social processes associated with the formation of its statehood. Consciousness of the Russian person is still looking for an answer to questions about who he is? From where? What is its purpose? Who are his ancestors? It is noteworthy that the relevance of these issues compared with the XII century, the time of creation of the “Tale of Bygone Years”, did not decrease, but increased. Hence the constant presence in the Russian literature of the historical genre, also trying to answer the indicated questions. In this study, the problem “...where did the Russian Land come from and is...” is examined with the help of epics, which have their own concept of the history of Russia.

Når den fortalte historie går op i limningen

Jonas Holst: “When the Historical Told Tale Falls Apart – On Peter Seeberg’s Literary Documentarism”
 The article offers a study of the ways in which the Danish author Peter Seeberg employs historical material and genres in his literary texts. Seeberg makes use of a variety of genres and anachronisms to create splits in historical time so that other forms of temporality come to the fore, especially humans’ own existentially experienced time as finite beings and eternal time on a cosmological scale.

La reconstruction des Grecs anciens chez Alma-Tadema : enjeux et résistances

This article addresses Alma-Tadema’s reconstructions of scenes set in ancient Greece. His Greek subjects raise issues pertaining to the transition in the contemporary pictorial context from history painting to historical genre. Alma-Tadema was influenced by the Flemish genre painters and by the French Néo-Grec movement and his reconstructions of Greek history are in fact everyday-life scenes. They privilege social experience over noble action and simple emotions over elevated sentiment, and so fitted the Victorian taste for genre. Yet perusal of the critical reception of his works shows that the commentators still established distinctions between Greek and Roman subjects—notably because Greece was still expected to conform to a number of aesthetic conventions as well as to gendered or racialist considerations. Moreover, because Alma-Tadema and a number of critics frequently established analogies between the ancients and Alma-Tadema’s contemporaries, the painter in fact held an ambiguous mirror up to his contemporaries. His reconstitutions of Greece tackle unorthodox sexual mores and depicted physical types that were perceived as inappropriate for the Greeks. They therefore went against the aesthetic codes that subsisted when representations of the Greeks were concerned, which raised aesthetic and ideological expectations that were less prominent in the case of Roman subjects.