Nineteenth-century Europe Research Articles

Civilised by Beasts: Animals and Urban Change in Nineteenth-Century Dublin

By focusing on Dublin's nonhuman inhabitants in the nineteenth century, Juliana Adelman offers a new and fascinating perspective on the city that also speaks to wider histories of human-animal relationships and development in the nineteenth century. What began as a book about “zoology in Dublin,” grew into five deeply researched and diverse chapters that explore many layers of Dublin's nineteenth-century human and animal life. “Historians of Dublin have ignored the city's beasts and in doing so they have missed much about urban life during the nineteenth century,” she writes (1). In Adelman's hands, the history of Dublin's nineteenth-century animal city is very much alive (and sometimes very much dead).There are parts of Dublin's animal history that are familiar across other urban animal histories in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth century: the establishment of Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; growing restrictions on livestock and animal industries downtown; and the development of zoos and domestic pet culture. Yet Adelman's Dublin also provides historians with distinction and nuance in thinking about urban change in nineteenth-century Europe and America.Civilised by Beasts is an expansive social history that engages with urban, political, environmental, and cultural history. In early chapters, the reader encounters the contemporaneous development of two prominent animal institutions: the Dublin Zoological Society (established in 1830) and the Dublin Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (DSPCA) (established in 1840). The Zoological Society thrived with its popular gardens, but the DSPCA struggled to gain a following. Here, Dublin seems to have a somewhat distinct place in the transnational Humane Movement, as many Dubliners saw the DSPCA as Anglo-Protestant and anti-Catholic, and therefore resisted its influence.In later sections, Adelman explores the class meanings of pig keeping and interconnected efforts at social control through the city's porcine residents. “Middle-class reformers used animals to help them identify what it was to be truly human and applied these ideas to efforts to reform the lives of the urban poor,” writes Adelman (64). Though many Dubliners had “rational economic reasons” for keeping pigs, the practice often became “an indictment of a person's moral and intellectual character” (78). Here Adelman expands on Catherine McNeur's “swinish multitudes” of Manhattan to suggest “a prejudice across Western societies against the character of the pig,” and the people who kept them (77). As in New York, reformers were successful; by the 1850s, Dublin authorities had significantly reduced urban pig populations.In later chapters, Adelman turns her attention to the Dublin Cattle Market and policing animals in the second half of the 1800s. A center of live cattle production and trade, Dublin faced growing reform efforts shaped by “hardening middle-class attitudes to the dangers of meat production” (95). Here again Dublin seems somewhat distinctive as a city that did not eliminate or conceal the cattle industry from the urban environment. Cattle and the Cattle Market were part of the city's identity, and “Dublin embraced its status as an urban cowtown, Ireland's market metropolis” (93). The city did institute new rules on livestock and slaughter (licenses and inspectors, for example) and new means of enforcement and inspection. But authorities did not profoundly reorder livestock space as we see in other cities at the same time. Adelman argues that the “net result” of these reforms was “conservative,” as “slaughterhouses tended to stay in the neighbourhoods where they had always been” (103). In Dublin, nineteenth-century reforms “did not inevitably result in the concealment of animal exploitation,” and in fact some reforms made cattle “more permanently embedded in the urban landscape” (119).Adelman's history of Dublin now joins a spate of single-city studies of animals and nineteenth-century urban environments, which includes compelling cases of Seattle, New York, London, and more. What happens when we assemble these histories into one frame? There is notable overlap and coincidence but also distinction and room for contrasts across American and European cities. How do we explain these areas of convergence and distinction? Adelman's valuable contribution helps address these questions and affirms that we can no longer write urban histories without paying attention to nonhuman inhabitants.Civilised by Beasts is quite spatial and geographic, and the book would have benefited from additional maps and visualizations. (There would certainly be excellent visual material for a companion website.) Adelman introduces the reader to the booming demand for pet portraits, for instance, but the reader does not have the enjoyment of seeing these images. “I want to give readers a fuller sense of what it was like to live in nineteenth-century Dublin and who its residents were,” Adelman writes (11). On that point—and many others—she has succeeded.

The Feminist Dimension of Niger River Exploration: Accounts of memorable confrontations between the African woman and the Nineteenth Century European Explorer Mungo Park

The exploration of West Africa through the tortuous search of the once elusive River Niger by Europeans is no doubt a popular theme in the history of West Africa. But very little has been written about the significant roles of the African woman in the overall process of the various expeditions by European explorers in search of the Niger. That there is therefore a lacuna in the presentation of the African woman in this aspect of West African history is a fact which needs to be addressed. In addressing this lacuna, the present study takes a look at the fundamental roles women played during the first expedition to the Niger by Mungo Park that profoundly assured his survival and subsequent success of the expedition. In doing this, the work re-enforces the concept of “Mother Africa” against the modern and often fanciful concept of feminism imposed from without. It shows that the African woman defined conceptually as “Mother” under traditional African historical setting has never seen herself in conflict with the men folk but rather sees her role as complimentary and often times decisive when the roles of the men folk fails to present the desired result. As a historical work, every aspect of its approach is predicated on historical methodology.

The Digital Ludeme Project: Combining archaeological and computational methods for the study of ancient board games

Archaeologists and computer scientists have both studied board games since the early days of their fields. Early archaeologists had an interest in identifying ways of playing the games of antiquity, and they applied diffusionist models fashionable at the time to trace the development of games from antiquity to the games played in nineteenth century Europe and North America. In time, a huge amount of data on ancient games was collected, and in the last thirty years archaeologists have studied games as they relate to social processes. In parallel to this, artificial intelligence (AI) research has utilized board games, primarily as testbeds for developing AI techniques, but also as an application domain. Archaeological and AI methods are combined in the Digital Ludeme Project, which documents the preserved knowledge of ancient games and uses computational techniques to evaluate research questions that can be addressed through AI playouts of proposed rulesets for games.

Amateur Science and Innovation in Fireworks in Nineteenth-Century Europe

The categories of “amateur” and “professional” remain central in studies on the sociology of nineteenth-century science. This article joins a growing body of literature that points out the complicated and intersecting connections between these two groups and how blurred the boundaries could be. This study focuses on pyrotechny, the art of fireworks, a field of far more obvious importance in the nineteenth century than it is today. Firework displays were mounted by artisan firework makers, who by the end of the century had become industrialists, and by military specialists, usually artillerymen. They had also become a common amateur pursuit. Across the nineteenth century, the art was transformed by the introduction of new materials, and the key discoveries were the work of enthusiasts who did not seek to profit financially from their discoveries. In this sense, they too were amateurs, although some had a scientific education. This article asks how they were able to make such major contributions to the field, and it situates them within networks that often crossed the boundaries between those who made fireworks for a living, or who studied them in military contexts, and those who were simple enthusiasts.

Lorca After Life by Noël Valis

Reviewed by: Lorca After Life by Noël Valis Salvatore Poeta Valis, Noël. Lorca After Life. Yale UP, 2022. Pp. 439. ISBN 978-0-300-25786-1. Lorca After Life proposes to complete what the author labels an “incompleteness” built into Lorca’s life and work (4). According to the book’s thesis Lorca’s work, homosexual identity, and murder left behind an unending transformative undercurrent, which the author labels Lorca’s afterlife with ties previous and posthumously to the Granadine’s life and work. The catalyst for this transformational process was Antonio Machado’s “El crimen fue en Granada,” the very first funeral elegy devoted to Lorca’s assassination by the right, memorialized by the republican left as a testimonial of the events. Notwithstanding the historical, cultural and literary scenarios leading to Spain’s civil war, the author argues, in contrast, that the seeds of much of Lorca’s afterlife were planted by the poet himself, driven by a conscious and deliberate motivation to self-fashion his historical and literary identity for posterity. This study attempts to recontextualize the specific events of García Lorca’s life and work within the larger literary, cultural, social and political framework of Spain, reaching as far back as the seventeenth century to present times. Following the “Introduction” (1–26), Lorca After Life is divided into two main thematic sections, with each section divided into three subsections: Part One, devoted to the murder (29–153), is subdivided as follows: 1. “Why Dead Poets Matter” (29–68), 2. “Lorca’s Grave” (69–98), 3. “The People’s Poet and the Right” (99–153). Part Two, equally subdivided into three sections, is devoted to Lorca’s gayness as follows: 4. “Fabulous Fag (I), or the Politics of Celebrity Murder” (157–85), 5. “Fabulous Fag (II), or the Celebrity of Sex” (186–230), 6. “Fabulous Fag (III), or the Face in the Crowd” (231–86). The book concludes with a “Postscript” (287–91), rather extensive and detailed “Notes” (293–361), and a considerable “Bibliography” (363–425). “Why Dead Poets Matter” presents Lorca as the culmination of what the author labels a “Dead Poets Society,” arguing that Lorca’s unfinished work due to his premature death, either for political intolerance or personal reasons—the right’s rejection of his gayness—have served to “postpone” the poet’s death. Moreover, beyond Lorca’s conversion to a civic poet of the people of Spain, the poet’s international stature and celebrity status, versus the national recognition of such figures as Conde de Villamediana, Garcilaso, Zorrilla, Bécquer, Antonio Machado, Miguel Hernández, and Cernuda, position the gay poet as a leader in this society of dead poets. Further, the countless failures to locate and exhume the body have served to perpetuate Lorca’s postponement of death, substituting the stone for what Valis terms Lorca’s “paper pantheon.” “Lorca’s Grave” contrasts the definitive death of Francisco Ayala, his Granadine compatriot, at 103 years of age, with Federico García Lorca’s unfinished death as a continuous arrival, as portrayed in the poet’s “Canción de jinete”; a future, unending death filled with the past. [End Page 155] “The People’s Poet and the Right” discusses how, if on the one hand, Lorca transformed himself as a poet of the people, thanks to his work with La Barraca and talks throughout Spain, Barcelona in particular, he was also used as a political football by the left as well as the right. Lorca did not associate himself officially with a particular party, but he had friends and mixed with individuals on both sides of the political spectrum; José Antonio Primo de Rivera among them. Particularly insidious was Roy Campbell’s accusation of Lorca as a rich señorito of the left while at the same time associating the poet with fascist views in Flowering Rifle. Part Two advances the theory that Lorca’s gayness was a contributing factor to his assassination. “Fabulous Fag (I), or the Politics of Celebrity Murder” contextualizes Lorca’s criticism for being a famous gay writer within the wider socio-cultural spectrum of seventeenth century Spain (Conde de Villamediana, Góngora), nineteenth century Europe (Wilde...

Postcolonial Realism and the Concept of the Political by Eli Park Sorensen

Reviewed by: Postcolonial Realism and the Concept of the Political by Eli Park Sorensen Ashwin Bajaj SORENSEN, ELI PARK. Postcolonial Realism and the Concept of the Political. New York: Routledge, 2021. 204 pp. $160.00 hardback; $48.95 paperback; $48.95 e-book. Eli Park Sorensen opens his new book, Postcolonial Realism and the Concept of the Political (2021), with the damning assessment that postcolonial studies emerged at an historical moment in which the "specifically political" in much of the West had become "anachronistic, irrelevant, dangerous, [and] politically incorrect" (4). As he elaborates in the book's first chapter, the enfeebled political horizon surrounding the rise of postcolonial literary studies—which, in Sorensen's view, the field has not vigorously challenged—meant that the radical political ambitions of a genre such as literary realism were either ignored in toto or dismissed as literary mouthpieces for a reified and politically defunct nationalism. Within the field, the failure of the political aspirations of nationalism led invariably to the conclusion that realism too was a thoroughly compromised genre. At best, this twin disillusionment with nationalism and realism was dispelled by postcolonial studies by recourse to "textual strategies of dismantling, subverting, disconnecting, and deconstructing" (7) and an avowal of tropes of plurality, hybridity, parody, carnival, and pastiche. Sorensen attributes the field's "anti-realist" impulse to its tendency to conflate the critique of representation with what Neil Lazarus calls postcolonialism's "struggle against representation itself." Lazarus's formulation signals how the critique of both colonialist (mis-)representation and the nationalist evasion of internal difference gradually devolved within the field into a blanket suspicion of any kind of representational practice, be it political or literary. As the latest counter-point to this field-wide equation of radical politics with anti-realism, Sorensen's book argues that postcolonial studies had actually failed to appreciate the political nuance of realist literature and even goes as far as to suggest that this deep-seated trend has inadvertently ensured the field's "exclusion of an engagement with the specifically political" (15). In his attempt to rescue literary realism from its marginalization within postcolonial studies, Sorensen traces its political impulse back to Lukács's account of the form's heyday [End Page 122] in nineteenth-century Europe amidst the revolutions of 1848. Chapter Three affirms the genre's significance by returning to the Hungarian Marxist's contentious though oft-cited theorizations and suggests that, for Lukács, realism is "a literary style that appears in those moments during which the political is at stake in a very fundamental sense, [and] when the discourse of the national has not yet been fully consolidated" (109). The return to Lukács rests on a complex move made in the preceding chapter wherein Sorensen invokes Foucault's concept of "historico-political discourse" to explicate the key elements which for him constitute the political stakes of the genre. For Sorensen, Foucault's coinage mobilizes both Carl Schmitt's concept of the specifically political, based on the absolute distinction between friend and enemy, as well as Benedict Anderson's notion of imagined community. The historico-political discourse serves to establish "a direct connection between force and truth, and...interprets force as a way of articulating a one-sided notion of truth, or a correction of the enemy's alleged falsifications of history" (63). According to Sorensen's reading of Foucault, the historico-political discourse enjoins us to think terms such as "I" or "we" as "perspectival voice[s]" not as neutral or reified but as open-ended and always-already in a process of being defined (63). Foucault's coinage is relevant since Sorensen proposes that the realist novel is able to put the historico-political discourse into literary practice. As a result, this literary form finds particularly fertile ground in worlds whose "ontological coordinates have not yet been fixed" (117). In this sense, Sorensen's study could be read as a contrastive parallel to Fredric Jameson's The Antinomies of Realism (2013) insofar as the latter claims that classical European realism is often said to have "a vested interest, an ontological stake, in the solidity of [bourgeois] social reality" (5). However, if we are...

Patriotism as a Political Religion: Its History, Its Ambiguities, and the Case of Hungary

The article discusses patriotism as a “political religion”, an ambiguous phenomenon that is both a substitute for former religious traditions and something that remains profoundly analogous with them. Special emphasis is laid on the origins of such political religions in the modern era and the role of the state in their emergence, which somewhat relativizes Böckenförde’s famous thesis on the rise of the state as a “process of secularization”. The article also follows the spread of religious patriotism in nineteenth-century Europe and how it contributed to the project of nation-building in different environments. This larger context helps to better explain such cases as that of Hungary, which has produced a variety of patriotic narratives, symbols, and rituals from its beginnings to the present day, raising doubts about the overarching validity of the secularization thesis. Methodologically, this approach involves the analysis of historical and contemporary texts, visual representations, and liturgical practices, while the conclusion suggests that, although the concept of “political religion” remains controversial, the enduring force of patriotism is better explained by the interaction of politics and religion than by a purely secular outlook.

A Case of Science and Playfulness

Nineteenth-century Europe was the stage of extraordinary scientific and technological developments. The inquisitive spirit of the time led to the study of human perception. The understanding of the mechanisms of human vision was no exception, and it was of particular relevance since scientific knowledge was based on what was observable. The invention of the stereoscope in 1832 had profound consequences in education, entertainment and medical practices. Undoubtedly, the attentive eyes of the early 20th-century artists were not indifferent to such developments as a new paradigm for art and aesthetics was due. Indeed, around the turn of that century, we see the adoption of technical language and the introduction of the poetic function, self-reference, interactivity and the multiplicity of readings in art. This paper attempts to draw links between 19th-century philosophical toys, medical therapies with binocular images, and the aesthetics of the 20th-century vanguards. A 1912 set of orthoptic cards used in the medical treatment of strabismus, among other cards and philosophical toys, are used to illustrate and establish these relations.&nbsp

:The Science and Myth of Galileo between the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Centuries in Europe

:<i>The Science and Myth of Galileo between the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Centuries in Europe</i>

Pygmalion and Medusa as Cixous’ writing women in InSEXts: ‘I Write Woman’

Abstract Set in nineteenth century Europe, InSEXts tells the story of Lady Bertram and Mariah, two women in a romantic relationship who can transform into insects in order to defend their nascent family. In the second arc of the series, The Necropolis, Lady Bertram, and Mariah are joined by Phoebe (a Black, transgender artist) whose friends are being transformed into art by members of the patriarchal art community, who value women only as silent and beautiful Muses. Allying with ‘Medusa’, a misidentified Javanese goddess who has been forcibly brought to Europe, Lady Bertram and Mariah thus enter a narrative replete with Greek and Roman mythology. In this paper, the author sets out to demonstrate that, through the receptions of Pygmalion and Medusa, InSEXts: The Necropolis effectively reflects Cixous’ ‘Laugh of the Medusa’, replicating the empowerment of female creativity which Cixous suggests. By mirroring these Ovidian intertexts and becoming ‘writing women’ themselves, comics creators Bennett and Kristantina allow their own characters to re-write and subvert traditional narratives, to tell their own stories that represent elements of Ovidian narrative to respond to and embody the kind of female creativity advocated by Cixous.

:The Science and Myth of Galileo between the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Centuries in Europe

:<i>The Science and Myth of Galileo between the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Centuries in Europe</i>

Geocultural power and the digital Silk Roads

Only a select group of countries have systematically surveyed and classified, written and exhibited the history, religion and culture of others. Today, through its Belt and Road Initiative, China begins to join this group. Proclamations to ‘revive’ the Silk Roads for the twenty-first century have triggered a profusion of cultural sector projects – led in part by the behemoths of China’s technology industries, Tencent, Baidu and Huawei – as part of the Belt and Road Initiative cooperation and diplomacy architecture. This paper argues that geocultural power arises from having the capacity to write and map geocultural histories, and that digitalisation and the new cultural economies it creates is fast emerging as a powerful means for achieving this. It demonstrates how Big Earth Data, crowdsourced imagery and VR technologies afford geocultural thinking, and parallels are drawn with nineteenth-century Europe to consider such developments.

Social Stratification and Career Choice Anxieties in Nineteenth-Century Central Europe

Abstract Central Europe around 1900 was marred with anxiety around the choice of career. This article weaves histories of education, labor, bureaucracy, and the social sciences to show how families reacted to changes in the labor market, including the opening of careers to talent and the mechanization of handicrafts. Parents found themselves unable to guide their children to a safe profession. Whereas previously, career choices were limited, changes in education and the labor market offered adolescents more options. Simultaneously, however, some occupations became endangered and others overcrowded. The erosion of labor stratification gave families the hope of social mobility but also upended their ontological security, as traditional roads to adulthood became impossible to follow. This article uses the discourse on career choice to write a history of this crisis. The discourse was born in early modern Europe to stop parents from forcing their children into a profession against the children’s wishes. In nineteenth-century Europe, however, parents and schools weaponized this discourse against each other to widen or narrow access to advanced education. Social scientists concerned with the industrial labor force joined the conversation by turning career choice into a matter of scientific expertise. Finally, the article shows how voluntary associations pioneered the provision of vocational guidance before state intervention after World War I. Thus, the article traces a significant transformation in the transition to adulthood and offers a prehistory of vocational guidance.

Marche Triomphale: A Forgotten Musical Tract in Qajar-European Encounters

AbstractThis article introduces Julius Heise’s Marche Triomphale which reveals a history that was eliminated during the nineteenth century race theory publications. Beginning with an account of Iranians’ encounters with European military music, this article provides a brief history of Iranian military bands in European style, or the bands of muzikānchiān. It then addresses racial motivations behind a short account on Iranian music in 1885 by Victor Advielle, a French administrator. Arthur de Gobineau’s race theories were fashionable in nineteenth century Europe, and Victor Advielle used his fellow Artesian, Alfred Lemaire, to prove their racial superiority. Through Advielle’s account, Lemaire became the main figure of European music in Iran in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The article proceeds with biographical information on two European musicians, Marco Brambilla (d.1867 in Tehran) and Julius Heise (d.1870 in Tehran), and uncovers the earliest known piece published for the bands of muzikānchiān: Marche Triomphale, À Sa Majesté Impériale Nassir-Ed-Din Shah Kadjar de Perse.

The Science and Myth of Galileo between the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Centuries in Europe, ed. Massimo Bucciantini

This volume, the tenth in the series Galilæana: Studies in Renaissance and Early Modern Science, contains the proceedings of a conference held in Florence in January 2020. It brings together thirty contributions in three different languages: about half the contributions are in English, two are in French and the rest are in Italian. Together, the contributions cover a period of four centuries, starting just after Galileo’s death and ending in the twentieth century (the volume thus goes beyond the scope set out in the title). They appear in roughly chronological order, thus presenting an overview of the long-term development of Galileo’s reception in Europe and beyond. Geographically speaking, most of the contributions concentrate on Italy, but there are several contributions on Galileo’s reception in other national contexts as well. Besides France and England, which have been studied in some detail before, Belgium, Spain and China are also covered in this volume. The volume achieves an admirable balance in terms of the temporal scope as well: while the nineteenth century is featured most prominently, readers whose interest lies with the seventeenth, eighteenth and twentieth centuries will not be disappointed.

Jacob Burckhardt und die französische Interpretation der »Renaissance«: Wandlungen des Begriffs von den frühen Tessin-Studien bis zum Cicerone

Abstract The popularisation of the term “Renaissance” in the German-speaking world owes much to Jacob Burckhardt. Until 1840, however, the use of this period term still reflected its French origins. Burckhardt himself, as a scholar still in his twenties, applied it (albeit with some reservations about the etymology) primarily to sixteenth-century architecture and ornamentation in France and in neighbouring regions. Only a decade later did he redefine the term and associate it enthusiastically with Italian art and architecture. Burckhardt’s early use of the word “Renaissance” conveys much of the fascination that the simultaneously hybrid and opulent French art of the decades around 1500 held in nineteenth-century Europe.

Gendered mortality of children and adolescents in nineteenth-century Denmark. Exploring patterns of sex ratios and mortality rates

ABSTRACT The relationship between gender and mortality in nineteenth-century Europe has been highly debated. In particular, historians disagree about the manner and degree to which gender discrimination affected the mortality risk of the female population. This article contributes by examining the evidence of gendered mortality differences among children and adolescents in nineteenth-century Denmark. It makes use of both child sex ratios and mortality rates to explore the prevalence of excess female mortality. We show that the female mortality rate in Denmark was higher than that of males starting from around age four and lasting until adulthood, for the majority of the nineteenth century. This mortality gap, while initially narrow, was systematic and most pronounced in rural areas and during late adolescence. The gap was produced by a faster mortality decline among males. This pattern is clear both in time, as the gap widened during the nineteenth century, and during the life course, as the male mortality rate declined faster and reached lower levels during late childhood and early adolescence. While it is possible that various forms of gender discrimination slowed the mortality decline of females, the aggregated nature of the data limits our interpretation. However, by comparing the two mortality measures employed, we argue that in a low child-mortality setting such as Denmark, sex ratios are not always sensitive enough to measure excess female mortality in childhood. Further, since sex ratios primarily excel at measuring ‘hidden’ or unregistered mortality, they may be a suboptimal measure of mortality differences in the presence of a thorough and reliable vital registration system.

Imagining the Nile: Knowledge-Power Nexus in the 19th Century Anthropocene

Abstract The Nile River has featured prominently in both nationalist memoirs and foreigners' travelogues. This paper explores human interventions in the Nile, not in the physical changes in the landscape but rather in the imagination, discourses and knowledge production of the nineteenth century European and Ottoman Empires. We show how the emergence of the 'modern river' was made possible by two crucial strains of Nile imaginaries and knowledge. The paper examines writings by European travellers and nationalist writing by Egypt's modernist, Alī Mubārak. Through our analysis we show how the Nile was co-constituted by two principal story-telling ventures: European travelogues and Egyptian modernist writing.

Characterization of Castellani nineteenth-century gold jewellery by in situ micro-XRF spectroscopy

The material characterization of nineteenth-century artifacts is of great interest, due both to the breakthrough technological advances and to the unprecedented spread of forgeries of antiquities which took place in that period. However, this type of artifacts has been largely overlooked in the past. In this paper we present the compositional analysis of gold jewels by the Castellani, one of the most important families of goldsmiths in nineteenth-century Europe. The use of a portable micro-XRF spectrometer, specifically developed for jewellery analysis at the Centro Nacional de Aceleradores (Seville), allowed us to analyse, in a completely non-invasive way, the alloys, joining techniques and surface treatments of the jewels of the Castellani collection at the National Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia in Rome. The addition to the spectrometer of a second X-rays detector with a zinc filter allowed us to check the possible presence of low amounts of cadmium, a metal added to gold soldering only from the nineteenth century and often used in authenticity studies. Moreover, the relative intensities of the Au X-ray lines were studied in order to check non-invasively the presence of surface enrichments in gold.

Style interminable: the auto-fictional object of the Humanities in works by Brigid Brophy and Ben Lerner

ABSTRACT Style emerged into discursive prominence in nineteenth century Europe at the same time as the classical symptoms of hysteria were given new impetus by neurologists and psychoanalysts. Later, when the Post-War architecture of late capitalism seemed to spell the end of style, ‘in the sense of the unique and the personal, the end of the individual brushstroke’ (Fredric Jameson), hysteria started to disappear as a psychiatric diagnosis. To explore how style’s structural affinity with hysteria remains current, even as the professionalisation of the Humanities ensures it is disavowed, this essay redeploys D. W. Winnicott’s idea of ‘transitional phenomena’. I describe the hysterical predicament of the Humanities scholar who is unable to make or find an object of knowledge sufficient to end the distress of their interests. The second part of the essay demonstrates how autobiographic fictions foreground the hysteria of style. Here I place Brigid Brophy, writing in the 1960s and 1970s, and Ben Lerner, writing in the first decades of this millennium, in genealogical relation. I observe how the historical swing from 1970s ‘metafiction’ to contemporary ‘autofiction’ registers the interminable predicament of style. Style displaces the object of literary study and preserves its vulnerability through a structure of communicative reticence.