Late 1840s Research Articles

Wordsworth’s Webs: Spinning the Ecological Elegy

ABSTRACT This article investigates two sites of Wordsworthian entanglement: the spider’s web across the abandoned well in “The Ruined Cottage” and the “web spun” in a neglected room in “The Brothers, A Pastoral Poem.” Both webs show Wordsworth’s attention to a theory of ecological entanglement that was emerging in the late 1790s, and more: Wordsworth’s experimental weaving of ecology and elegy. Wordsworth’s two surrogate elegists, the Pedlar and the Priest, use webs to track the subtle but active ways in which nature reacts to human grief and death. I show how both elegists develop distinct elegiac crafts to test different versions of the ecological elegy. Through their divergent poetics, they consider how elegy can incorporate ecological knowledge, how ecology reshapes past elegiac conventions, and how mourning itself becomes entangled in nature. Together their experiments allow Wordsworth to probe the close but precarious alliances between pathos, poetry, and ecology.

All Things in Common: A Canadian Family and Its Island Utopia by Ruth Compton Brouwer (review)

Reviewed by: All Things in Common: A Canadian Family and Its Island Utopia by Ruth Compton Brouwer Beth Moore Milroy Brouwer, Ruth Compton–All Things in Common: A Canadian Family and Its Island Utopia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. 207 p. Two exemplary contributions to Canadian social history stand out in Ruth Compton Brouwer’s All Things in Common. One is her illustration of how several research areas, such as family, religion, migration, land occupation, and rural life are connected to the utopian form of settlement, a type largely absent from Canadian historical research. Those connections are evident in the case she presents of a built utopia in Prince Edward Island (PEI), which incorporates all those areas. She argues for recognizing the relevance of utopian settlements to the country’s social history. Brouwer’s second contribution is to show how a utopian case can be explored sensitively yet dispassionately by a professional historian who is also a descendant of the family at the centre of the story. In this book, readers will find a richly documented and experientially grounded discussion of the Compton community because the author could use records and participants’ insights that would be unavailable to a non-family writer. Brouwer has published widely on Canadian social history. In this instance she uses both her formal training and personal experience to illuminate why and how one of the truly unusual settlements in this country came into being, and what it tells us about utopia and one corner of Canada. The book comprises two parts. Together, they give readers a penetrating history of this built utopia from the gradual articulation of its aim, through its implementation, to the settlement’s eventual dissolution in 1947. Part I provides necessary background starting with a family of Comptons arriving on the eastern seaboard of the United States in the early 1600s. The subsequent century of religious turmoil and revolutionary upheaval provoked a strand of the family to migrate to Atlantic Canada as part of the 1783 wave of United Empire Loyalists. Early on, a theme emerges that will run through the book. This is the resistance on the part of many Comptons to certain social norms related to religion, family, and the organization of labour. For example, unlike most of their relatives and neighbours living in New Jersey, the first Comptons to come to Canada chose not to support the revolutionary aspirations of the American states. Instead, William, Sarah, and their children became destitute refugees in New York and later in Atlantic Canada. Even when it might have served their financial interests to be a little more [End Page 198] conformist, they tenaciously held on to their beliefs in millenarianism and an old style of “godly” Christianity. These Comptons refrained from membership in any institutionalized Christian churches, which, in their view, had lost sight of true Christianity, offering merely a superficial, coddling “Churchianity,” as they called it. Their aim was to hold fast to their interpretation of early Christianity as found in bible passages, including this one: “‘And all that believed were together, and had all things in common’ (Acts 2:44)” (p. 100). When in the late 1820s, a successive generation of Comptons was putting down roots in PEI, they finally found the religious “home” they had long sought. William, Mary, and their children became followers of Donald McDonald, a pastor trained in Scotland who preached a kind of old Scottish Presbyterianism mixed with various idiosyncrasies and millenarianism. The mélange was so distinctive that his adherents were called McDonaldites. When McDonald died in 1867, some of the Compton clan decided to put together their own “unchurched” manner of worshipping God, inspired by their McDonaldite experiences and their own preferences. Throughout Part I, the author references the effects of imperialist practices regarding land and settlement, as well as how the fracturing of Christianity played out in the lives of generations of Comptons in North America. Part II describes the physical and social development of the Compton communal settlement, its maintenance, and evolution. The land they settled on was of questionable ownership with regard not only to the Indigenous Mi’kmaq who, prior to about 1800, used the whole island...

Notes on the State of Virginia: An Annotated Edition by Thomas Jefferson

Reviewed by: Notes on the State of Virginia: An Annotated Edition by Thomas Jefferson Cara Rogers Notes on the State of Virginia: An Annotated Edition. By Thomas Jefferson. Edited and with an introduction and notes by Robert Pierce Forbes. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2022. Pp. lx, 348. Paper, $20.00, ISBN 978-0-300-22687-4.) Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia will never attract as much attention as the Declaration of Independence, but it is nonetheless a monumental work for scholars of American political thought, science, literature, race, slavery, and more. This new edition of Notes, edited by Robert Pierce Forbes, is an important accomplishment because it is the first to thoroughly incorporate footnotes referencing Jefferson’s original manuscript, allowing readers to trace changes from that initial draft to the first printed edition of 1785. Notes had a complicated journey to publication, and Forbes’s introduction will aid readers in moving beyond Jefferson’s overly simplistic descriptions of his work to better understand its true complexity. Forbes’s work also sharply differs from previous scholarly editions of Notes by arguing that Jefferson deliberately “used Notes to revise the Declaration’s great truth that ‘all men are created equal,’” prompting a new and lasting wave of racism and strengthening the institution of slavery (p. lx). In a somewhat confusing account of Jefferson’s changing position on equality, Forbes claims that young Jefferson held antislavery views, but that he later “felt he had no other choice” but to “decouple” the “stirring pronouncements of the Declaration . . . from Virginia’s enslaved African Americans” (pp. xlv, xliv). According to Forbes, Jefferson made this choice partly to save himself from potential charges of hypocrisy, and partly because of the 1772 Somerset decision, in which an English judge ruled that “slavery was incompatible with natural law” (p. xlv). Although the Somerset case ultimately had no legal effect on slavery in the independent American republic, Forbes implies that [End Page 343] Jefferson needed to bolster his right to own human beings because of rising antislavery sentiment in Europe. Therefore, in the “Laws” chapter of the Notes, Jefferson rhetorically reduced Black Americans to the position of animals in order to subtly justify their continued enslavement. Moreover, Forbes asserts that Notes presented the “earliest plan for the removal and colonization of Black Americans” (p. xix). There are three problems with Forbes’s claims. First, earlier colonization plans included a 1773 proposal by four enslaved men in Massachusetts and another by the Rhode Island antislavery minister Samuel Hopkins (see Nicholas Guyatt, Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation [New York, 2016]). Second, there is evidence that Jefferson continued to oppose slavery during and after the publication of Notes—such as his authorship of an antislavery constitution for Virginia in 1783 and his ambitious (but never fully implemented) attempt to utilize tenant farming as a way to transition enslaved people to freedom in the late 1780s (see Cara Rogers, “The French Experiment: Thomas Jefferson and William Short Debate Slavery, 1785–1826,” American Political Thought 10 [Summer 2021]: 327–62). Finally, a careful comparison of the different versions of Notes suggests that Jefferson revised his remarks on race and slavery after receiving a prescient critique from fellow naturalist Charles Thomson, who commented that Notes “‘might seem to justify slavery’” (p. 298). Thomson suggested that Jefferson delete every remark on racial inferiority; Jefferson instead softened his conclusions, moving from statements of fact to speculation and adding several harsh condemnations of Virginians who owned enslaved people. Rather than using his Notes to alter the antislavery implications of the Declaration of Independence, then, Jefferson used the work to appeal to the sensibilities of racist Virginians, offering them the option of colonization while insisting that slavery was incompatible with republican government. After all, he asked, “can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God?” (p. 250). Scholars should continue to investigate the various iterations of Notes in order to provide further insight into Jefferson’s views; Forbes’s edition will aid in the...

The Night and Life on the Streets: Disorder in an Irish Town in the 1820s and 1830s

It is argued in this essay that the streets of Tralee in south-west Munster in the late 1820s and early 1830s were characterised by a protean, anarchic and often oppositional culture which was both diurnal and very frequently nocturnal in its context of enactment. Indeed, more often than not, darkness framed and enabled expressions of dissidence, resistance and criminality. Technology would, in due course, challenge the imperium of darkness.

A Map of Divergence and Connection: Voices from Nineteenth-century Nunavut and Aberdeen

This essay explores interactions between five people – Inuit, Scottish, and American – in Nunavut and Aberdeen, Scotland, between the late 1830s and the 1860s. The fact that these people all knew each other, or of each other, provides an opportunity to investigate a rich network of communication between them over a twenty-year period. The main primary sources investigated include the first biography of a young Inuk, written by a Scottish doctor; an American explorer’s tale of his Life with the Esquimaux; and the personal journal of a Scottish whaling captain’s wife. The investigation focuses on five subjects which occur persistently across these works: blood, mapping, tea, maktaaq and other country food, and the act of leave-taking. The topics form nodes, sometimes of incommensurability between Inuit and Qallunaat (an Inuktitut word designating non-Inuit, usually white, people) but they can also become areas through which misunderstanding and separation give way to understanding and close bonds. The fact that in these sources Inuit voices are ventriloquized by white Scottish and American writers greatly increases the risk that Inuit historical voices could be misrepresented and misheard. As a non-Inuit scholar, I am acutely aware that I may mishear or misunderstand these voices myself. In my analyses of the source material, I can bring the close attention of a scholar of nineteenth-century literature to attend to tone, ambiguity, the historical period, genre, and also to the occlusions and confusion in the writing that may obscure (often unconsciously) the redaction of veritable, if not entirely verifiable, Inuit voices from the nineteenth century. But I may be wrong, and this uncertainty is fundamental to my methodology. The expectation of scholarly writing in the academy is that it will be presented in an authoritative voice, but my methodology while listening for historical Inuit voices in the chosen sources must entail uncertainty. Research in the following essay is an open letter to other scholars, and especially to indigenous scholars and readers, who may agree or disagree with what I hear and interpret of Inuit voices in some lesser-known works of the mid-nineteenth-century historical record.

Seeing Things Anew: Hoffmann’s Don Juan: A Fabulous Incident Which Befell a Travelling Enthusiast and Gogol’s The Portrait

Established criticism argues that the influence of the German fantastic stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) on Nikolai Gogol’s Russian supernatural tales was short-lived. This article disagrees. Gogol (1809-1852) achieved literary success in the late 1830s, when the future course of Russian literature was strongly indebted to late German Romantic literary concepts. We trace the relationship of Hoffmann’s short story Don Juan: a Fabulous Incident which Befell a Travelling Enthusiast with the early and late versions of Gogol’s short story The Portrait, showing that Hoffmannesque elements are stronger in the later publication. Our close analysis uses two critical theories: Shlovsky’s concept of defamiliarisation, or ostranienie (Note 1), and Todorov’s theories of the fantastic, the one being apposite on account of its Russian perspective, and the other because of its insights into Gothic literature. We also support our argument by historical and biographical evidence, with the overarching aim of bringing new critical perspectives to the study of the short fiction of Hoffmann and Gogol.

The Boston Massacre: A Family History by Serena Zabin

Reviewed by: The Boston Massacre: A Family History by Serena Zabin Benjamin L. Carp (bio) Boston Massacre, American Revolution, Violence The Boston Massacre: A Family History. By Serena Zabin. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020. Pp. 296. Cloth, $30.00.) After a demonstration of Jacques Charles's hot air balloon in Paris in 1783, skeptical observers asked Benjamin Franklin what good the invention might do. "Eh!" Franklin supposedly replied. "Of what use is a new-born baby?" We might ask Serena Zabin a similar question about The Boston Massacre: A Family History: of what use is a family history of the Boston Massacre? Zabin takes a refreshing new look at the residents and relationships of late-colonial Boston as British troops arrived in autumn of 1768. With her rich knowledge of Boston's physical and social geography, she sets the scene in a small but tempestuous town of 16,000 people, where the arrival of "roughly 2,000 men, 380 women, and 500 children" made a difference (67). Zabin shows how they became sociable neighbors and amiable coworkers, how they formed young couples and made newborn babies. These stories are new, because we are accustomed to thinking of the years 1768–70 as a time of tension over a hostile troop presence. Then, on March 5, 1770, a brawl turned into a violent tragedy: the redcoats fired into a crowd, killing five civilians. Zabin offers us a different way of looking at the months preceding that night, and a world that was lost. Other historians emphasize colonial protests and parse the evidence about who provoked the shooting. Zabin's book, instead, concisely notes the politics of the Quartering Act or the machinations of higher officials, and then analyzes "Bostonians' ability to socialize across political hostilities" while hinting at the lessons we might learn (39). Samuel Adams, Crispus Attucks, and Christopher Monk recede from the story. Army wives like Jane Chambers and neighbors like Jane Crothers Whitehouse emerge. The clash over enforcing Parliament's customs duties may have been intractable. The violence was certainly shocking. And the mystery of blame may never be solved, however compelling. Regardless, Zabin asks us to set those questions aside and focus on what ought to matter more: the ways that marginalized people and quotidian exchanges offer a vital context for understanding the full tapestry of early-modern urban life. Soldiers often traveled with families. They courted and married local women. They weren't quite strangers, because they made connections with [End Page 168] townspeople, as did the women and children who arrived with them. They encountered not just radical Liberty Boys, but Boston's men, women, children, free and enslaved, many of whom valued sociability or economic exchange over the divisive issues of the day. Zabin uncovers their sympathy for flogged British soldiers, as civilians shielded deserters. Knowing better than to trust newspapers, Paul Revere's cartoon, or John Adams's self-serving memoirs, she uses warning-out records, church records, and court records to map the integration of army families into every neighborhood in town. And so, she argues, "general threats of violence went hand in hand with neighborly concern" (74). Bostonians wondered about the redcoats: "Should they be thought of as invading soldiers or as sons in law?" (101). The traditional narrative of the American Revolution casts them as the former, but Zabin treats them as the latter. Along the way we learn about sex and marriage, civil and military justice, social welfare, and desertion. Evidence of enmity between soldiers and civilians certainly emerges, but rebel propaganda overemphasized these disagreements. The truer world of Boston in the late 1760s was one of personal connections, including loving connections. In Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York (Philadelphia, 2009), Zabin similarly argues that the violence of the New York Conspiracy of 1741 (and its subsequent punishments) was less important than the wider Atlantic world of social relations that the trial records reveal. Zabin's focus on Boston necessitates some sacrifices. While she describes the British soldiers' previous experiences in Cork and Halifax, she makes no comparison to the equally controversial army presence in New York City, where family issues also became central. The Golden...

Historic Real Estate: Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States

Whitney Martinko's Historic Real Estate explores the intersection of multiple historiographic trends for the early republic, among them analysis of market revolution ambivalence, charting of the slow disentangling of “public” and “private,” examination of material culture, consideration of the built environment, and illuminating collective memory. Americans contested what to do with old buildings and landmarks—or whether to do away with them. Martinko examines these struggles over the difference between how, for a given site, Americans weighed its social value against its market value. Those differences could become complicated. From the 1780s, Martinko argues, promotion was more often linked to preservation, as an acceptable way to tout a property's attractiveness. However, by the late 1820s, attitudes toward such sites became more politicized. As an example, Martinko offers the Carpenters' Company, which, in 1829, kept Carpenters' Hall in Philadelphia, the first building where the Continental Congress met. The author notes that the company could be praised for maintaining the location, however, upkeep funding was raised by renting space in the building to an auctioneer—perhaps the personification of a crass market economy. Jacksonians, pressing for a morally regulated economy, could then turn their opprobrium toward what they portrayed as the snooty proprietors of private sites who surrendered to market pressures to tear down or sell houses that were architecturally or historically significant. By these standards, the owners of estates such as Thomas Jefferson's Monticello or Henry Clay's Ashland were saddled by the costs of upkeep and loss of privacy if they kept their properties intact but were excoriated when they tried to modify or sell such sites of public significance—even though neither states nor the federal government were willing to step in.

Machines in the Hands of Capitalists: Power and Profit in Late Eighteenth-Century Cornish Copper Mines

Abstract In the inaugural issue of Past and Present, Eric Hobsbawm cautioned historians against the assumption that a capitalist economy has an inherent tendency to cost-saving and technological innovation, emphasizing that ‘It has a bias only towards profit’. Inspired by Hobsbawm, this article shows how a history of profit can elucidate the economic and social history of machines. Beginning with miners’ protests at the stoppage of Boulton & Watt steam engines in Cornish copper mines in the late 1780s, it shows that these engines’ implications for the people who invested in, and worked, the mines were conditioned by a complex relationship between profit and power: mechanical power, which was crucial to the mining of copper and the costs of its production; imperial power, given fluctuating demand for copper from different parts of the British empire; and market power, since control over price setting on the British copper market was crucial for Cornish mining profits. Understanding what determined mines’ profits helps to account for capitalists’ decisions to stop their engines as well as copper miners’ protests at their actions. More generally, it suggests the potential of studying the economic and social history of new machines through the lens of profit.

Materialism, Lebenskraft and the limits of science: metaphysical vitalism in post-Kantian scenarios

Kant's legacy in the history of life sciences has notoriously included a critique of the use of soul and ‘vital force’ ( Lebenskraft ). In this paper I focus on a less-known side of this legacy, i.e. Kant's late critique of vital materialism and its impact on nineteenth-century German science and philosophy. I show that Kant considered materialism as a kind of metaphysical hypothesis since the 1760s and pointed out that it was empirically impossible to distinguish it from different kinds of hypotheses (such as monadology). I focus on Kant's late essay on Samuel Sömmering (1796), arguing that the critical rejection of materialism and the notion of Lebenskraft belonged to an anti-reductive program for life sciences. I maintain that Kant's views influenced Alexander von Humboldt's turn concerning vitalism in the late 1790s and the anti-metaphysical and physicalist epistemology of Hermann von Helmholtz. I follow this Kantian legacy in the works of Friedrich Lange, Emil du Bois-Reymond and Erich Adickes. Finally, I argue that this tradition provides a vantage point to reconsider contemporary debates over materialism and panpsychism.

The New Science and the Virtuoso Reader in Thomas Creech’s Lucretius

Thomas Creech’s 1682 translation of Lucretius, the first complete English version printed, earned its author praise from the likes of Aphra Behn, John Evelyn, and Nahum Tate. Creech’s work has recently attracted renewed attention from scholars of Lucretius’s reception, who have situated his translation within the context of Restoration intellectual culture. This article argues that Creech’s Lucretius cannot be understood without reference to the new science of the seventeenth century, particularly the experimentalism of Robert Boyle, which forms a more important context to the conception and reception of the translation than has previously been supposed. The first section following the introduction assembles information about Creech’s institutional context in the late 1670s and early 1680s, with a focus on the scientific interests that preoccupied his contemporaries at Wadham College, Oxford, and the Oxford Philosophical Society. The next section examines the Lucretius translation itself and the appended notes, demonstrating Creech’s close engagement with the Boyle-Hobbes controversy on the existence of vacua. The final section concludes that Creech addressed his translation especially to readers among the “virtuosi,” the fellows and fellow travelers of the Royal Society, and perhaps even more specifically to Boyle himself. Creech’s Lucretius is thus shown to offer an illuminating case study of the intersections of literature, classical scholarship, and science in Restoration England.

Dangerous or Goodly Passions: The Role of Emotion in Parliament and Politics

Dangerous or Goodly Passions: The Role of Emotion in Parliament and Politics

Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship

Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship

“In All Ages and All Churches”: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Antebellum Evangelicalism

“In All Ages and All Churches”: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Antebellum Evangelicalism

Вклады Шереметевых в Кирилло-Белозерский монастырь в XVI веке

The article studies gifts of the Sheremetev family to the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery in the 16th century. It draws on materials of the first Gift book (vkladnaya kniga) of the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery for 1559/60?1620s and on those of later gift inventory for 1618?40, Commemoration book (kormovaya kniga), acts, and other sources. The Gift book of the Kirillov Monastery 1559/60 ? 1620s was unknown to the author of a fundamental study on the Sheremetev family A. P. Barsukov and other researchers. Meanwhile, its materials clarify some data on the Sheremetevs’ gifts to the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery and biographies of the members of this family. The Sheremetevs started making their donations to the monastery in late 1540s, when their career at the court began. The first Gift book contains information on donations made “in commemoration of the soul” of Ivan Bolshoi, Grigory, Nikita, and Ivan Menshoi Vasilyevich Sheremetevs. All of them, as well as the son and daughter of Ivan Bolshoi Vasilyevich Sheremetev (Yeremey and Agafya), the son and grandson of Ivan Menshoi Vasilyevich Sheremetev (Fedor Ivanovich and Alexei Fedorovich) were buried in the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery. The Sheremetevs' donations to the Kirillov Monastery were very rich. Especially large gifts were made by the eldest brother, Ivan Bolshoi Vasilievich, amounting to more than 1,500 rubles. The Gift book provides most accurate information on time and circumstances of the Sheremetevs’ donations to the monastery in the 16th century (in comparison with the Commemoration book and other sources). For example, the materials of the Gift book clarify the date of death of Semen Vasilyevich Sheremetev (October 8, 1557) and that of tonsure of Ivan Bolshoi Vasilyevich Sheremetev in the Kirillov Monastery (shortly after June 6, 1571). The authors note that, despite their successful career and service, the Sheremetevs did not enjoy the favor of Tsar Ivan and were under his suspicion. Therefore, it is the Kirillov Monastery, located far from the political storms of the 16th century and enjoying great prestige as a spiritual center, that the Sheremetevs choose as their family monastery and burial place.

Daniel Gran und die Anfänge seines Schaffens in den böhmischen Ländern

Paintings by François Roëttiers (1685–1742) delivered in 1732 for the side altars of the Church of St John of Nepomuk in Krahulčí near Telč, whose builders and patrons were Count Franz Anton of Liechtenstein-Kastelkorn and his wife Marie Anna of Halleweil, are the unique contribution in the Czech Lands of this painter of Flemish origin, who later settled in Vienna. However, the artist of the original image on the high altar of the same church, St John of Nepomuk adoring the crucifix, now missing, is not this painter. The original Baroque painting was replaced in 1890 by the current painting by the academic painter and restorer Čeněk Neumann. Contemporary records of his painting refer to it as a copy of the original Baroque painting. However, the distinctive visages of St John of Nepomuk and the attending angels evoke strikingly the work of the famous Viennese painter Daniel Gran (1694–1757), whose first contacts with clients in the Czech Lands are documented in the late 1720s. Apart from several indirect indications, Gran's presumed authorship is significantly supported by the finding of a Baroque graphic sheet with the figure of John of Nepomuk adoring the crucifix, whose very specific rendered face evidently corresponds to the matching part of Neumann's copy of the Baroque original. Johann Ernst Mansfeld (1739–1796), the creator of the graphic transcript, identified Daniel Gran as the author of the original which was used.

ТИТУЛЬНАЯ ГЕРАЛЬДИКА МОСКОВСКОГО ЦАРСТВА И ЗАПАДНОЕВРОПЕЙСКАЯ ГЕРАЛЬДИЧЕСКАЯ ТРАДИЦИЯ

The article analyzes the history of the influence of the European heraldic tradition on the titular heraldry of the Moscow Tsardom of the 16th – 17th centuries. There are two stages of such influence with its own characteristic features for each. The first stage was associated with the formation of the first complex of titular coats of arms, which were presented on the Great Seal of Ivan IV, made in the late 1570s. Among the 24 titular coats of arms of the Great Seal, five coats of arms were borrowed from the heraldry of the Baltic States and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. They meant those territories that were annexed during the Livonian War or claimed by Ivan IV. Seals and even coins of that time acted as sources of heraldic images. From them images were transferred to the Great Seal without any changes. In other words, it was a direct borrowing of European coats of arms into the heraldry of Russia. The second stage is connected with the creation in 1672 of the tsar’s “Titulyarnik” (Titular Book), the first Russian compilation of coats of arms. Of the 33 coats of arms of the “Titulyarnik”, nine were directly borrowed from European heraldry (mainly from the heraldry of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth). However, the methods of borrowing were more diverse. In addition to the direct transfer of the armorial figures, the coats of arms were changed, Christian symbols was strengthened in them. On the other hand, coats of arms could be borrowed on the principle of belonging to a certain category of territories. Finally, another way was to borrow either individual armorial figures or heraldic compositions. Such a variety of ways of borrowing clearly testifies to the increased heraldic culture of the Muscovy by the end of the 17th century.

Gavriil Derzhavin’s logoaedic verse

The poetic works of Gavriil Romanovich Derzhavin (1743–1816) published from 1777 to 1790 demonstrate a rather limited set of meters — mostly iambic (iambic tetrameters, аlexandrines, free iambic verse); the presence of trochees (exclusively tetrameters) is modest, and ternary meters are completely absent. The year 1791 was a turning point. In that year, Derzhavin published his polymetric cantata “To a Patron of the Arts”, which, although predominantly iambic, contains two dactylic passages. After that year, the poet often used iambic trimeter as well as trochaic tetrameter, which was inspired by his sudden interest in anacreontics. A year later, Derzhavin published his first version of “The Swallow” in The Moscow Journal, written in ternary trimeters with variable anacrusis, which was apparently the first experiment of this kind in Russian poetry. Soon afterwards, Derzhavin began to experiment with the dactylic tetrameter, resembling similar work by N. P. Nikolev, I. I. Dmitriev and N. M. Karamzin beginning in the late 1780s. Like those poets, he initially omitted one syllable in the second foot, and then two syllables, which led to the emergence of logoaedic structures in his poems. He uses these meters in their pure form (“Snowbird”), and also combined them in stanzas with syllabo-tonic meters (“Spring”, “On Atheists”, “To the Publisher of My Songs”, “The Rainbow”). He also created “logoaedized dolniks”, irregularly combining logoaedic lines with syllabo-tonic ones (“On the capture of Warsaw”, the sixth stanza of “The Encounter of Orpheus with the Sun”, “Autumn”). In the poems “On G. Ozerov, Who Dedicated ʻOedipus’ to Me” and “To Polyhymnia”, Derzhavin loosened the principle of isometric stanzas. One of the sources of inspiration for these experiments was Derzhavin’s enthusiastic and rather vague conception of the great rhythmic diversity of ancient poetry (primarily of Sappho’s and Horace’s poems) compared to modern European lyric poetry.

БРИТАНСЬКО-ФРАНЦУЗЬКА БОРОТЬБА ЗА КАНАДУ (КІНЕЦЬ 1680-Х – ПОЧАТОК 1760-Х РР.)

The article is devoted to the four wars between Great Britain and France in the late 1680s and early 1760s, as a result of which it was determined who would own the territory of modern Canada: King William’s War or War of the League of Augsburg, Queen Anne’s War (or War of the Spanish Succession), King George’s War (War of the Austrian Succession) and the Seven Years’ War (Conquest). The purpose of the article is to consider the British-French wars of the 17th – 18th centuries on the territory of Canada, which determined its future. The research methodology is based on the principle of historicism and problem-chronological and complex approaches. Comparative and analytical methods made it possible to compare the starting positions of Great Britain and France in North America and the course and results of their armed struggle for Canada in the context of the wars of both empires on different continents. The scientific novelty of the study consists in an attempt to show the complexity, consistency and patterns of the British-French struggle for Canada. Its circumstances and main milestones are traced, which influenced not only the results of the struggle, but also laid the foundation for the development of Canada for the following centuries. This, as well as insufficient attention to the problem in Ukrainian Canadian studies, strengthens the relevance of this article. Conclusions. As a result of the British-French wars, Great Britain became the victor and the most powerful colonial and maritime empire. Instead, France ceded positions and possessions, in particular in North America. The first three wars began in Europe, and later hostilities also began in North America, involving mainly the colonists and their Native American allies. But the last, Seven Years’ War began precisely in North America. The British used regular troops in it. The British fleet also played a significant role, as well as the larger population and production capacity of their colonies compared to the French. If in the first three wars the French were able to compensate for these factors due to more effective mobilization and the involvement of Indians as allies, then in the fourth and last war they were defeated. The main consequence was the termination of the existence of New France and the consolidation of dominance in the region of Great Britain, which determined the further development of Canada as a colony, and later the dominion of Great Britain.

In the World Republic of Letters: Towards a Reconceptualisation of the Notion of Weltliteratur

The paper problematises the origins, characteristics, and implications of the term Weltliteratur, proffering critical insights into its interdisciplinary, transnational character and presuppositions about its discontinuous development. Having been initially conceptualised as a heretofore undeveloped research area, the domain of “world literature” is first eulogised as worthy of further scholarly attention by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the late 1820s – the time of political unrest and multiple socio-cultural changes. As such, the idea also seems to have been of paramount interest to the ancients (H. M. Posnett), in which sense it may be portrayed as borderline anachronistic. Conversely, it does possess and evoke great resonance in future writers, thinkers, and intellectuals alike, resulting in its many reconceptualisations, not only in the field of literary studies but also in numerous nascent or still-developing disciplines such as comparative literature, genology, translation criticism, hermeneutics, cultural studies; furthermore, it is equally relevant for a number of various thematic poetics. Engaging in a dialogue with Reinhart Koselleck’s “conceptual history” alongside its highly idiosyncratic theoretical apparatus, the present paper adapts and reappropriates Koselleck’s nomenclature with a view towards a preliminary systematisation of anticipatory mechanisms which influenced the reception of the category of Weltliteratur as much as they governed its subsequent re-development, be it in academia or in twentieth- and twenty-first-century public discourse. In this sense, Goethe’s prescient analysis of various national literatures as well as of the heterogeneity of artistic discourses of his time may be said to have laid the foundations for new comparative research methodologies, and, by extension, to what Pascale Casanova would eventually name as “the world republic of letters.”