Nineteenth-century Theory Research Articles

Partition and the politics of the joint family in nineteenth-century north India

Using nineteenth-century case law, legal and social theory, and ethnography, this essay will examine colonial attempts to coalesce complex relational identities into individual and collective ones, and to create ‘the Hindu joint family’ as a codified ritual and property-holding collective. Focussing on texts and court cases that considered the ‘joint family’ as a social unit under siege or a property collective at the point of dissolution, we can see how individuals were forced to privilege certain social and intimate bonds above others in establishing a clear identity before the state. The importance of the creation of alienable property rights and markets in land became a clear motive for supporting the North Indian Hindu joint family as a social norm across India. Courts felt free to assign identities and to codify customs when confronted with syncretic practices or blurred ‘traditions’ that had characterised eighteenth-century families.

THE “HARD FORM” OF SCULPTURE: MARBLE, MATTER AND SPIRIT IN EUROPEAN SCULPTURE FROM THE ENLIGHTENMENT THROUGH ROMANTICISM

The apparently distinct aesthetic values of naturalism (a fidelity to external appearance) and neoclassicism (with its focus on idealization and intangible essence) came together in creative tension and fusion in much late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century sculptural theory and practice. The hybrid styles that resulted suited the requirements of the European sculpture-buying public. Both aesthetics, however, created difficulties for the German Idealists who represented a particularly uncompromising strain of Romantic theory. In their view, naturalism was too closely bound to the observable, familiar world, while neoclassicism was too wedded to notions of clearly defined forms. This article explores sculptural practice and theory at this time as a site of complex debates around the medium's potential for specific concrete representation in a context of competing Romantic visions (ethereal, social and commercial) of modernity.

Victorian Precedents: Narrative Form, Law Reports and Stare Decisis

Victorian-era law reports are often choppy or truncated, miserly in detail, and utterly lacking in character descriptions, creating what I have identified as an “anti-narrative” style. This article shows how the law reports use narrative conventions — often in counter-intuitive ways — to manifest the tension between a concrete case and the abstract rule which is its potential precedent. Incorporating a discussion of nineteenth-century theories of legal precedent and the history of common law reporting with a formal analysis, I contend that the insular “anti-narrative” form of the reports enables the communal nature and goal of precedential reasoning: the creation of a common law, dating from “time immemorial.” It also reveals a legal doctrine — and a narrative genre — in crisis.

Hidden treasures: Turin's anatomy museum

Some controversial nineteenth-century theories about brain shape and human nature are revealed by an extensive collection of neuroscience memorabilia, reports Alison Abbott

Racial Duties: Toward a Pragmatist Ethic of Race in W. D. Howells's An Imperative Duty

Abstract William Dean Howells's 1891 novel of interracial marriage, An Imperative Duty, has recently received increasing critical attention because of its saturation with the language of contemporary scientific racism and its complex and apparently inconsistent approach to questions of race and identity. The novel's other major conceptual concern with questions of moral duty, clearly announced in its title, has generally been neglected in this discussion. This essay examines the crucial interplay between questions of race and ethics, arguing that Howells's novel undertakes an ethical critique of late-nineteenth-century scientific racism from a specifically Pragmatist philosophical perspective. Reasoning according to Pragmatist principles, and pursuing an inherently Pragmatist narrative form, the novel implicitly asks its readers to understand the “facts” of race in terms of their intersections with personal and social morality rather than in strict accord with the essentialist claims of ascendant nineteenth-century race theory. In its refusal of ontological absolutism and its embrace of an ethically pluralist and instrumentalist approach to questions of race, Howells's novel offers a Pragmatist challenge to the interlocking absolutisms of traditional ethics and contemporary scientific racism.

A Common Fund

George Eliot's reviews have typically been regarded as a mere prelude to her novels, which feature prominently in scholarship of nineteenth-century women's writing. Yet Eliot's most pointed statements about literary production and gender appear within the columns of the Westminster Review. In her early essays, Eliot describes the woman writer as not only a vital contributor to literary culture but as the originator and guardian of periodical criticism itself. By excavating the gender politics of Eliot's reviews in the light of nineteenth-century social theory, this article not only situates her as a forerunner to the modern feminist critic but also demonstrates the close lines of affiliation between the history of feminism and the prose tradition.

Paul Natorp and the emergence of anti-psychologism in the nineteenth century

This paper examines the anti-psychologism of Paul Natorp, a Marburg School Neo-Kantian. It identifies both Natorp’s principle argument against psychologism and the views underlying the argument that give it its force. Natorp’s argument depends for its success on his view that certain scientific laws constitute the intersubjective content of knowledge. That view in turn depends on Natorp’s conception of subjectivity, so it is only against the background of his conception of subjectivity that his reasons for rejecting psychologism make sense. This interpretation of Natorp suggests that attention paid to late nineteenth century theories of subjectivity and philosophy of psychology could improve our understanding of the emergence of anti-psychologism in that period.

Kin-Groups in the Homeric Epics

Nineteenth-century theories about the progression of primitive societies (including the Greeks) from a "social organization" made up of small kinship units (clans) and tribes to the "political organization" of the city-state were fundamentally disproved by the demonstration, in the 1970s, that the historical subdivisions of the polis were not derived from clans, phratries, and tribes, as anthropologists defined them, but were new groups that served new purposes. Walter Donlan's paper reexamines the reasons why evidence of supra-familial groups is negligible in the Homeric epics, although at the poet's time they must have existed, and what use the epic poet makes of concepts such as genos/geneē and phrētrē.

Scientific Change as Political Action

A theory is value-neutral when no constitutive values are part of its content. Nonneutral theories seem to lack objectivity because it is not clear how the constitutive values could be empirically confirmed. This article analyzes Franz Boas’s famous arguments against nineteenth-century evolutionary anthropology and racial theory. While he recognized that talk of “higher civilizations” encoded a constitutive, political value with consequences for slavery and colonialism, he argued against it on empirical and methodological grounds. Boas’s arguments thus provide a model of how, under the right conditions, scientific inquiry can provide empirically objective grounds for political critique.

"Painting of a sorrow": Visual Culture and the Performance of Stasis in David Garrick's Hamlet

This article spotlights the acclaimed Shakespearean actor David Garrick's notorious habit of striking dramatic "attitudes" or sustained poses on stage. While some critics derided them as unnatural caesuras in Shakespeare's verse, these moments of silent stasis generated thunderous applause from audiences as well as numerous tributes from artists, who found these frozen moments an ideal subject for their brush. This essay reads Garrick's fondness for tableaux-vivants as a response to the explosion of visual culture in eighteenth-century England. Garrick developed this style at a time when Shakespearean-themed paintings came into vogue and prints of actors, including Garrick himself, had become popular collectibles. The article then explores the surprising parallels between Garrick's acting and Japanese Kabuki, in which performers also adopt dramatic postures (mie) at moments of tension or revelation. Visual artists in Japan, like their English counterparts, sought to capture these extravagant attitudes, and woodblock prints of actors (known as yakusha-e) were extremely popular. Insofar as these frozen moments and prints externalize the actor's or character's psyche as spectacle, images of Garrick's Hamlet clash with the notion of an interior realm beyond representation-a within that passeth show. Ironically, however, the performance of stasis in Garrick's Hamlet and the ubiquity of prints may have underwritten nineteenth-century theories of the Prince's "paralysis" and Romantic conceptions of subjectivity in which the inside overwhelms or arrests the outside.

Genea-Logik: Generation, Tradition und Evolution zwischen Kultur- und Naturwissenschaften by Sigrid Weigel

550 Reviews his engagement with thewider world; a lengthypiece on non-European motifs in the literature of the nineteenth century, from Stifter to Fontane, proves how rewarding further treatment of all of the authors covered would be; and German accounts of encounters with 'natives' on thePacific island of Palau reveal how attitudes changed between the 'philosophical' travellers of the lateeighteenth century and thevisitors of the i86os whose clear design itwas topave theway forGerman colonial penetration. Most of the other chapters show less obvious connections to the overall theme as formulated in the titleof the collection. There are, however, discernible clusters of concern: two articles trace the influence of early Shakespeare criticism on Goethe's Gotz and his Shakespeare speech and the connections between Shakespeare and Schiller's aesthetics of cruelty; threearticles deal with the theme of death (inGleim's and C. E Meyer's writings, and in epitaphs for pets); two articles highlight prob lems of translation and redaction (the examples are some ofWalter Scott's Goethe translations and differentversions of B. Traven's stories). And then there are a few contributions which do not seem tobelong to any of the thematic groupings sketched above. Methodologically, most articles combine timely concerns with traditional ap proaches of philological meticulousness; all articles present rich insights and display stupendous knowledge; some intervene in general debates, some will be of interest only to a highly specialized readership. NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, MAYNOOTH FLORIAN KROBB Genea-Logik: Generation, Tradition und Evolution zwischen Kultur- und Naturwis senschaften. By SIGRID WEIGEL. Munich: Fink. 2oo6. 288 pp. ?29.90. ISBN 978-3-7705-4I73-7. Generation is one of themost widely used concepts in contemporary German dis course. On the one hand it is a convenient label fornewly self-styled social cohorts (such as 'generation.com' or 'Generation Golf'), on the other the concept seems to lend itself to a 'natural' way of categorizing and delimiting historical experience. It is precisely the concept's highly intuitive but undertheorized appeal that Sigrid Weigel analyses from a cultural-historical perspective. As Weigel's careful analysis of the complex semantic history of the term shows, the idea of generation is rooted in biological meaning, but at the same time it is used to regulate legal, social, and cul tural issues of affiliation.Mapping out the separation of the discourse of the natural sciences from thatof thehumanities, Weigel makes a case fornew formsof interdis ciplinary co-operation which would set epistemic differences between the disciplines in dialogue with one another. In thisway the book also offers amethodological per spective which attempts to bridge the ever widening gap between science discourse and thecultural disciplines. Cross-stitching thecultural and natural-science perspec tives in ten chapters, thebook offers a fascinating account of the career of the idea of generation since antiquity. Chapter i takes thecontemporary dream of immortality through geneticmanipula tion as a springboard for thehistorical analysis of the episteme 'genealogy'. It argues that our contemporary understanding of 'Erbschaft' in the two senses of heritage and inheritance is theproduct of the transferof the idea of genealogy from religious and biblical discourse tobiological discourse in the eighteenth century: while in the older paradigm genealogy regulated important issues of family inheritance, lineage, and heritage, the pre-molecular biology of the eighteenth century already incorpo rated the idea inside theorganism. The paradigm shift from the idea of preformation to that of epigenesis produced a new ambiguity: while all people are now equipped with the triumphal knowledge that theywill pass on a biological inheritance, this MLR, 102.2, 2007 551 triumph isundermined by the insight thateach of us is theproduct of a biological in heritance.Weigel takes thebiological discourse from theeighteenth century through nineteenth-century evolution theory and, finally,to contemporary debates on gene tics and information theory.Analysing themetaphors that are used to textualize the genetic code, she shows how the semantic ambiguity of the idea of generation has resurfaced in the language of information theory,where the term 'information' os cillates between a pure mathematical function and a semantically connoted meaning. The switching of perspective from the emergence of the nineteenth-century theory of evolution to the evolution of systems allows her todemonstrate thatcontemporary biological discourse...

The British development of the theory of invariants (1841–1895)

The two main British exponents of the theory of invariants, Arthur Cayley and James Joseph Sylvester, first encountered the idea of an “invariant” in an 1841 paper by George Boole. In the 1850s, Cayley, Sylvester, and the Irish mathematician, George Salmon, formulated the basic concepts, developed the key techniques, and set the research agenda for the field. As Cayley and Sylvester continued to extend the theory off and on through the 1880s, first Salmon in 1859 and later Edwin Bailey Elliott in 1895 codified it in high-level textbooks. This paper sketches the development of nineteenth-century invariant theory in British hands against a backdrop of personal, nationalistic, and internationalistic mathematical goals.

Thinking about Religion: An Historical Introduction to Theories of Religion (review)

General and Miscellaneous Thinking about Religion: An Historical Introduction to Theories of Religion. By Ivan Strenski. (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing. 2006. Pp. vi, 358. $34.95 paperback.) text is not focused on setting out how is practiced. Professor Strenski's interest here, rather, is to help undergraduate students to understand how came to be focus of theoretical interest. He attempts to set out here how, in various ways, became problematic and how scholars attempted to solve those problems. As he puts it: This book tells 'story' of important attempts to raise and solve many of chief problems of by inventing what we call 'theories' of (pp. 1-2). That 'story' is set out in three parts. In first section of this volume, The Prehistory of Study of Religion, Strenski accounts for emergence of a methodical study of as a response to doubts raised about it in intellectual ferment created by Protestant Reformation and discovery of new worlds that brought with it an encounter with other religions (chap. 1), and by effects of historical-critical study of Bible on traditional religious belief (chap. 2). These developments spurred on thinking about religion as such, which led, on one hand, to a quest for first or natural religion, and on other, to naturalistic study of scriptural texts. These enterprises, according to Strenski, constitute the beginnings of serious and open critical inquiry into nature of (p. 17)-an inquiry that was executed by some scholars in a religious vein and by others as a secular or naturalistic undertaking. In part two of text, Strenski treats Classic Nineteenth-Century Theorists of Study of Religion who he maintains were primarily concerned with question of origins of religion. Four major figures are treated here: Friedrich Max Muller (chap. 3) and William Robertson Smith (chap. 5) are presented as dealing with difficulties related to understanding of sacred texts, and E. B. Tylor (chap. 4) and J. G. Frazer (chap. 6) represent early anthropological approaches to understanding religions and religion. For Strenski, Muller, and Robertson Smith not only were students of but also advanced religious agendas-they were therefore both critics and caretakers of (p. 132).Tylor and Frazer, on other hand, are presented as antagonistic to religion. …

From Pink Lemonade To Salt River

Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, combined his beliefs in abolitionism, the free-soil movement, and a high protective tariff with Fourierism, a nineteenth-century utopian theory, to create a destabilizing effect on the second-party system, contributing to the formation of the Republican Party. This article illustrates Tribune partisanship in the 1840s and 1850s with references to editorials, Whig campaign documents, the correspondence of Greeley and associates William H. Seward and Thurlow Weed, and Association Discussed, a controversial series of exchanges with New York Times founder Henry Raymond. It reinterprets Greeley's contributions to the third-party system by demonstrating a developmental relationship between the penny press and antebellum party formation.

Evolutionism and North America's archaeological record

The archaeological record of North America has long been a laboratory for evolutionary studies. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, culture historians would regularly turn to evolutionism as a source of archaeological explanations. Sometimes the explanations were broadly Darwinian in nature, with reference to processes such as selection and genetic transmission, and other times they were based more on the evolutionism of the classic nineteenth-century culture theorists. The archaeological literature of the closing decades of the twentieth century and beyond suggests a heightened interest in employing Darwinian theory. No one, however, has suggested that Darwinism can solve all of archaeology's problems. Rather, advocates have pointed out that it might solve some of archaeology's historical – read evolutionary – problems. Despite the interest shown thus far, evolutionary archaeology needs to move beyond a narrow reading of Darwinism and become a more inclusive approach. Examples from North America underscore the point that studies of cultural transmission and human behavior are important components of an evolutionary archaeology.

Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism (review)

Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism. By Robert S. Cox. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. Pp. viii, 286. Illustrations. Cloth, $39.50.)Traditional accounts of Spiritualism begin in Hydesville, New York, in 1848 when mysterious sounds in John Fox's farmhouse were interpreted as messages from spirit communicating with Fox's teenage daughters, Margaret and Kate. When girls were taken to Rochester by their older sister, Leah Fox Fish, new movement began, one centered upon seances where entranced mediums served as brokers between worlds of living and dead. Although Robert S. Cox tells story of Foxes' contagious mediumship in Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism, he notes that it only one of multiple origins of Spiritualism, along with Andrew Jackson Davis's Harmonial philosophy and influences from other prophetic traditions. Given diversity of spiritualist thought and practice, Cox observes that most historians of movement have situated it amidst spiritual innovations in nineteenth century that helped Americans adjust to social change. Body and Soul, however, seeks to go beyond what Cox calls instrumentalist tinge (17) of these interpretations, which view spirit possession as challenge to power relations, by placing Spiritualism within broader history of emotions and reconstructing the conformation of sympathetic body and its relation to spirit society (4).Cox's study begins with an examination of somnambulism in early republic, revisiting conversations over nature of behavior to examine their implications for community, corporeality, and conduct (23). Here Cox provides lucid summary of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century theories of sensibility, before showing how somnambulism served as site of contest between different theories of social order. Examining career of Jane C. Rider, Springfield Somnambulist, he argues that sympathy opened broader mental world to women and other people of ordinary social status while raising cultural anxieties about submerged desires of an inner self that potentially could explode into violent loss of self-control. These concerns came to surface in trial of Albert Tirrell, who acquitted of murdering beautiful prostitute Maria Bickford in 1846 after his defense suggested that crime may have been committed in state of somnambulism.After showing how sleeping preacher Rachel Baker raised questions about division between material and spiritual, Cox examines how Americans turned to Spiritualist views, often through related discourses of phrenology, mesmerism, and somnambulism, but always in ways that were rooted in an individual's social experience. The resulting search for a transcendent community that annihilated boundaries of belief, party, and sect, and even of time and space (99), Cox argues, constitutes Spiritualist political economy based on emotion that brought all of creation into an organic unity that provided for progress in afterlife while motivating social action in this world.The most provocative chapters of Body and Soul concern spirit photography, visits from dead by important historical figures, and racial and ethnic components of Spiritualism. Cox relates popularity of spirit photography to larger questions about representations and social power, focusing less on legitimacy of these photographs than on how spirit photography was an assertion of centripetal force of familial and affective ties over and above centrifugal forces of social disruption, including forces of market (135) while, of course, being an extension of that marketplace. …

Nathalie Sarraute's Accent: The Poetry of Tropismes

This article explores the basis for Nathalie Sarraute's insistence that her work be classified as poetry rather than prose. The article shows that the roots of this preference can be found in her theoretical writings, which are put into practice in her creative works. Their ‘poetic’ quality is analysed using the tools of prosody, specifically on extracts from her collection of prose poems, Tropismes. This exercise throws up interesting theoretical resemblances between Sarraute and Proust: they share an extreme sensitivity to the aural aspect of written texts. The prosodic analysis also offers a new method of exploring the Sarrautean tropism, that is to say in terms of poetic accent: the nature of the tropism is reconsidered in the context of late nineteenth-century theories of speech rhythms, and compared with the notion of the ‘accent d'impulsion’.

Dominant Capital and the New Wars

The recent shift from ‘global villageism’ to the ‘new wars’ revealed a deep crisis in heterodox political economy. The popular belief in neoliberal globalization, peace dividends, fiscal conservatism and sound finance that dominated the 1980s and 1990s suddenly collapsed. The early 2000s brought rising xenophobia, growing military budgets and policy profligacy. Radicals were the first to identify this transition, but their attempts to explain it have been bogged down by two major hurdles: (1) most writers continue to apply nineteenth century theories and concepts to twenty-first century realities; and (2) few seem to bother with empirical analysis. This paper offers a radical alternative that is both theoretically new and empirically grounded. We use the ‘new wars’ as a stepping stone to understand a triple transformation that altered the nature of capital, the accumulation of capital and the unit of capital. Specifically, our argument builds on a power understanding of capital that emphasizes differential accumulation by dominant capital groups. Accumulation, we argue, has little to do with the amassment of material things measured in ‘utils’ or ‘abstract labor.’ Instead, accumu-lation, or ‘capitalization,’ represents a commodification of power by leading groups in society. Over the past century, this power has been restructured and concentrated through two distinct regimes of differential accumulation—‘breadth’ and ‘depth.’ A breadth regime relies on proletarianization, on green-field investment and, particularly, on mergers and acquisitions. A depth regime builds on redistribution through stagflation—that is, on differential inflation in the midst of stagnation. In contrast to breadth which presupposes some measure of growth and stability, depth thrives on ‘accumulation through crisis.’ The past twenty years were dominated by breadth, buttressed by neoliberal rhetoric, globalization and capital mobility. This regime started to run into mounting difficulties in the late 1990s, and eventually collapsed in 2000. For differential accumulation to continue, dominant capital now needs inflation, and inflation requires instability and social crisis. It is within this broader dynamics of power accumulation that the new wars need to be understood.

William Acton's Antipodean Disciples: A Colonial Perspective on His Theories of Male Sexual (Dys)function

This article explores the work of three Australian medical publicists who were influenced by nineteenth-century theories about the perils of male sexuality in particular by the writings of the English surgeon William Acton. Of the three only James Beaney set out to expound Acton’s theories of male sexual function and his recommendations for its control but the other two—Richard Arthur and William Chidley—were deeply influenced by Acton’s semi-popular book The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs first published in 1857. My interest in these authorities arose from research into the practice of routine male circumcision in Australia and from the thought that a review of colonial experiences might provide a fresh perspective on the old debate about Acton’s influence and typicality. This project took me back to the British home base and the ideas about male sexual function then dominant particularly the universal conviction that masturbation was the cause of many organic and mental maladies and the widespread belief that spermatorrhoea was a real disease. (excerpt)

The nurse of parasites: gender concepts in Patrick Manson's parasitological research.

Patrick Manson (1844-1922), the so-called father of tropical medicine, played a pivotal role in making that discipline into a specialty. During his early career in China he discovered that the mosquito was the intermediate host of the filarial parasite and he somewhat peculiarly called the mosquito the "nurse" of the filarial worm. The discovery contributed greatly to the intellectual foundation of modern parasitology. In this paper I situate Manson's nomenclature in the context of nineteenth-century biological research on reproductive mech-anisms and argue that Manson's concept of the "nurse" was derived from nineteenth-century theories of sexual division of labor in nature's economy. The way he framed the relation between the mosquito and the parasite, moreover, can be understood in the terms of the domestic arrangement of the colonial European household. Manson's research demonstrates the significant exchange between medical concerns over European women's procreative role in the tropics and biological studies of parasitic reproduction.