Reception In England Research Articles

Bach, Handel and Scarlatti: Reception in Britain 1750–1850 by Mark Kroll (review)

Bach, Handel and Scarlatti: Reception in Britain 1750–1850 by Mark Kroll (review)

Hellenic Language and Thought in Pre-Conquest England

Bede, reflecting on the success of the Canterbury school set up by Theodore of Tarsus remarked: “some of their students still alive today are as proficient in Latin and Greek as in their native tongue” [trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 335]. By the time we get to the court of Alfred two hundred years later, there had been a famous decline in learning from which Greek, as a language, had not yet recovered. However, there remained a strong interest in Greek as a sacred language in liturgies, prayers and magical charms, and later in hermeneutic poetry. Theodore’s influence was not limited to Greek Language, he also brought knowledge of Maximus the Confessor and Pseudo-Dionysius. The influence of Greek mystical theology would find fuller expression in the translations associated with the court of King Alfred via contact with the Carolingian court, but the seeds for this reception in England may already have been sown. This paper will outline the evidence for the use of Greek language in a variety of contexts, including a charm for the staunching of blood, and it will examine the extent of the influence of Greek patristic thinking in Old English texts including both clerical prose and secular poetry.

The consul vanishes? On using and not using Gregory the Great's Register in early medieval England

This article builds upon recent scholarship emphasizing the importance of Gregory the Great's Register as a key text of the Carolingian and post‐Carolingian library, exploring by contrast its peculiarly limited reception in England. It first surveys what little evidence we have for its citation by English ecclesiastics (post‐c.1000, mostly via Wulfstan); it then examines the single text in a pre‐Conquest manuscript usually catalogued as a letter from the Register, showing that this has been reworked as an anonymous admonitio to judges (probably bishops). It concludes by reflecting on the implications of this limited reception for our understanding of the later Anglo‐Saxon church – a community otherwise well‐invested in Gregory's memory.

‘An Oriental Holiday’: constructing Bosnia and Herzegovina as a destination in British tourist literature, c. 1890–1914

ABSTRACT This article challenges imagological historiography that contends Bosnia-Herzegovina represented a no-go zone for British tourists before the First World War because of its reputation for cultural backwardness and political instability. Through an analysis of published travelogues, travel guides, and travel journalism, as well as their reception in Britain, it places the evolution of images of Bosnia-Herzegovina in dialogue with British anxieties about the detrimental effects of industrial society. This article argues that the country (administered by Austria-Hungary from 1878 and annexed in 1908) became a popular destination for upper-class British tourists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as it was constructed as unspoiled by mechanical civilisation and free from lower-class tourists. Travel writers, most notably Henri Moser whose travel guide An Oriental Holiday (1895) will be closely examined, were imbricated with Austro-Hungarian authorities and regularly employed by the regime to promote this romantic image of Bosnia-Herzegovina to British audiences. This article concludes by demonstrating that the upsurge in touristic interest in Bosnia-Herzegovina was short-lived because of growing political tensions between Britain and Germany but provides a forceful counterpoint to imagological historiography that suggests the imagined geography of the region was defined in entirely negative terms.

Letting the Music ‘Speak For Itself’? Dvořák as Strategist

‘I only write music and let it speak for itself’ – such was Antonín Dvořák's attitude, according to Josef Kovařík, the composer's personal secretary in New York. Indeed, throughout his career, Dvořák seemed reluctant to share his views publicly. He did not contribute articles to Czech periodicals, his acquaintances were well aware of his dread of making public appearances and speeches, and contemporary critics often commented on his humble and unenterprising nature.Yet Dvořák was not as passive as his alleged statement to Kovařík would imply. While visiting England during the 1880s, he became particularly concerned about forging a certain kind of image for himself in the Czech lands. Not only did Dvořák take an interest in English reviews of his music, he also sent several of these critiques to his contacts at home with the request that they be reprinted in Czech translation in the newspapers and journals of Prague. He proved to be equally strategic in some of his other professional choices, including the surprising decision to dedicate his patriotic cantata Hymnus: Heirs of the White Mountain ‘to the English people’, which can be understood as a clever tactical ploy, meant to signal the composer's international credentials to audiences at home.Drawing upon various letters and the many excerpted English reviews that appeared in the Czech press, this article shows that Dvořák played an active part in determining which aspects of his reception in England would be relayed to the Czech public. More broadly, the article examines Dvořák's role as strategist – an aspect of the composer's career that has remained largely unexplored. Ultimately, Dvořák was mindful of what Michael Beckerman calls ‘the public-relations aspect of nationalism’, and the suggestion that he was content simply to let the music ‘speak for itself’ does not tell the whole story.

Повесть А.П. Чехова «Степь» в англоязычных переводах

Chekhov’s works have been actively translated into English for 130 years; however, these translations have scarcely been addressed systematically and remain understudied. This is especially relevant in case of his stories and novellas. This article focuses on the translations of Chekhov’s The Steppe - a novella that marked the writer’s transition from early stories to mature prose. The 20th and 21st centuries have seen five English translations of The Steppe, which mark five main stages of its reception. The novella was first introduced to the English-speaking reader by E.L. Kaye in 1916. Though highly criticized for literalism and unsuccessful methods of translating Russian realia, Kaye’s translation played an important role in the development of the creative dialogue between Chekhov and K. Mansfield, which clearly reflected the influence of Chekhov’s prose on the formation of modern English literature. The canonical translations by C. Garnett determined Chekhov’s reception in England and the United States from the 1920s to the 1950s. The translator introduced Chekhov to the English-speaking reader as an artist of Russian life, a master in depicting various types of characters, and as a thorough researcher of a person’s inner world. This vision determined a specific perspective in the 1919 translation of The Steppe, where Father Christopher is foregrounded as a collective image of the Russian clergy. In the new stage of perception in the 1970s-1980s, Chekhov, a foreign writer, was organically accepted by the English-speaking culture as “its own”. This stage brought about the translation of The Steppe by R. Hingley, who authored two monographs about Chekhov and was the editor of The Oxford Chekhov (1964-1980). Hingley considered Chekhov’s mature prose as the most valuable part of the writer’s literary legacy. For the first time, The Oxford Chekhov adequately describes The Steppe as Chekhov’s landmark work. The strategy of cultural appropriation in Hingley’s translation implied modernization of Chekhov’s language. The translations by R. Wilkes (2001) and R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky (2004) represent the latest stage in the English-language reception of The Steppe. They are associated with the general trend towards updating the corpus of translations of Russian classics into English in the 2000s. In their translation, Pevear and Volokhonsky use the strategy of estrangement, opposed to “smooth” translation, typical for English culture. The translators’ interest in the novella resulted from Chekhov’s genre innovation. All the translations of The Steppe are independent representations of the original, which demonstrate the productive reception of the novella in the English-language culture of the 20th and 21st centuries. Their comparative analysis has revealed that the biggest challenge in translation is the image of the steppe, which is associated with the main philosophical meanings of the work. This is evidenced by the significant transformations of the motifs of space and distance, which form the spatial dominant of the image in the original. In most translations, the semantically integral motifs of the original break into a number of components with weaker meanings. The research has shown that these transformations come from objective cultural and linguistic differences that limit the possibilities of a full-fledged translation, as well as from individual strategies of translators, who differently assess the role and meaning of these verbal motifs in the original text. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes ed. by Tom F. Wright

Reviewed by: Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes ed. by Tom F. Wright Gero Guttzeit Tom F. Wright, ed. Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. 312 pp. ISBN: 9781474426268 For the study of oratory, the long nineteenth century from the American Revolution to World War I is a particularly fruitful period, in which the expansion of democratic rights transformed the public sphere and emerging [End Page 470] print capitalism functioned as a catalyst for the distribution of the spoken word. Building on such collections as Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory, 1787–1900 1998 and Women at the Podium: Memorable Speeches in History 2000, Tom F. Wright’s anthology Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes presents a novel, multifaceted canon of speechmaking that enables its readers to construct a history of the momentous political, social, and cultural changes of the period. It stands out especially because of its methodological integration of transnational perspectives. Wright is well-known to scholars of the period because of two publications closely related to Transatlantic Rhetoric: his edited collection The Cosmopolitan Lyceum: Lecture Culture and the Globe in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013) and his monograph Lecturing the Atlantic: Speech, Print, and an Anglo-American Commons 1830- 1870 (Oxford University Press, 2017). The anthology continues this approach of the nineteenth-century practice of eloquence in its production, performance, and reception from a transatlantic viewpoint. Like its predecessors, the collection reframes comparisons between British and American eloquence and also extends to such issues as “the varying tone of Irish, Haitian and American nationalisms” and “the shared metaphors of abolition and the women’s movement” (10). For instance, it illustrates how the struggle for Irish Home Rule provoked a backlash in American nativist discourses against the Irish diaspora (219–228), and how the reception in Britain and France of Alexander Stephens’ white supremacist arguments for the Secession of the American South in his so-called “Cornerstone Speech” (1861) influenced Europe’s refusal to recognize the Confederacy as an independent state (260–263). Putting together a revisionist anthology such as this comes with particular challenges with regard to the length of the book and the necessity for selection. Wright’s departure from the ‘great speeches’ model is certainly commendable. In contrast to the latter, the chapter structure for his selection of seventy-three speeches in total is based on the “great ‘questions’ of the century” (2); for him, these are Nationalisms and Independence (ch. 1); Gender, Suffrage and Sexuality (ch. 2); Slavery and Race (ch. 3); Faith, Culture and Society (ch. 4); Empire and Manifest Destiny (ch. 5); and War and Peace (ch. 6). Speeches on what French and German call the ‘social question’ (question sociale, soziale Frage)—that is, issuer relating to class, poverty, and the proletariat—appear as a subsection of chapter four, called “Society and Class” (178–195). The selection includes what have become mainstays of speechmaking in the period, such as the two printed versions of Sojourner Truth’s “Speech to the Women’s Rights Convention” (1851), Frederick Douglass’s “What to the slave is July 4th?” (1852), and Emmeline Pankhurst’s “Freedom or Death” (1913). But it also ranges from Jean-Jacques Dessalineo “Haitian Declaration of Independence” (1804) and Nanye’hi and others’ “Cherokee Women Address Their Nation” (1817) to Swami Vivekananda’s “Address at the World’s Parliament of Religions (1893). Overall, the focus is quite clearly on political speech, although the collection also touches on other [End Page 471] issues popular on the nineteenth-century lecture circuits, such as education and literature. What makes Wright’s anthology stand out from among its peers is the detailed editorial matter, which proposes an argument of its own about the period in question. Each of the six chapters features an introduction, contextualizing headnotes for the speeches or excerpts, and explanatory annotations. Taken together with the introduction to the volume, the illustrations, the suggestions for further reading, and the index, these elements make Wright’s book an important contribution to research on public speaking in the long nineteenth century. Wright argues that “the antique...

Bureaucracy across Borders: Administering Cosmopolitan Hospitality at the English P.E.N., 1930–1945

From its inception, hospitality was inscribed in the vision of the English P.E.N., one of its stipulated aims being to provide a ‘vehicle for friendliness and hospitality’. Yet several writers who took leading administrative and representational roles during the 1930s and 1940s – Storm Jameson, E. M. Forster and J. B. Priestley, for example – were uncomfortable with the kinds of hospitality the P.E.N. sometimes purported to offer. They were concerned about the wartime propriety of elaborate lunches, dinners and parties. At the same time, this was an organisation that also tirelessly advocated for more substantial forms of refuge for displaced writers. Drawing on extensive archival material, this essay will examine some of the ambiguities embedded in the P.E.N.’s conception of hospitality during this period: the perceived clash between a social etiquette of hospitality (expressed through P.E.N. social gatherings) and a wider politics of hospitality (expressed in its drive to facilitate refugee reception in Britain).

Pandemic: An opportunity for implementing early years pedagogy beyond reception in England

The Covid-19 pandemic confronted practitioners with many challenges. For those of us working in early years and key stage 1, it also provided opportunities to sustain child-centred and play-based approaches to learning for longer than is usually the case. This reflective article draws on direct experience to argue for the importance of such approaches to learning, and to advocate their value in year 1 (and beyond) as well as in reception.

Pandemic: An opportunity for implementing early years pedagogy beyond reception in England

Pandemic: An opportunity for implementing early years pedagogy beyond reception in England

Another journey

This verse-essay takes the form of a dramatic monologue imagined as spoken by a political refugee from a country torn by civil strife since its deliverance from British colonial rule. His reflections range over history, politics, his family’s sufferings during that enforced flight, and their hostile reception in Britain. He also talks about his highly ambivalent, or drastically polarized, attitude to British culture, especially the university education in English Literature and cultural theory that the speaker has received and that fills him, now, with a mixture of pride, shame, and a resolve to turn it back against his literary mentors. Most prominent of them is T.S. Eliot who stands for everything he finds most repulsive in that culture along with everything most subtly alluring. Eliot’s popular ‘Journey of the Magi’ comes in here as a prominent intertext and a source of numerous ironic contrasts with the speaker’s current situation.

Stephanie L. Derrick, The Fame of C.S. Lewis: A Controversialist's Reception in Britain and America

Stephanie L. Derrick, <i>The Fame of C.S. Lewis: A Controversialist's Reception in Britain and America</i>

Stephanie L. Derrick, The Fame of C.S. Lewis: A Controversialist's Reception in Britain and America

Stephanie L. Derrick, <i>The Fame of C.S. Lewis: A Controversialist's Reception in Britain and America</i>

La décadence à l'ère numérique: Paul Verlaine et les périodiques victoriens

Using a keyword search across two periodical databases, this article explores Paul Verlaine’s reception in Britain during the 1890s. Drawing on work by Bob Nicholson, it argues that digital research can help to transform ‘top-down’ approaches to literary history and change our understanding of movements such as Decadence. Responses to Verlaine as a Decadent poet were more widely distributed than scholars have previously acknowledged, both in social and geographical terms.

Rōrensu Sutān no Sekai [The World of Laurence Sterne] ed. by Takeshi Sakamoto

Reviewed by: Rōrensu Sutān no Sekai [The World of Laurence Sterne] ed. by Takeshi Sakamoto Kaz Oishi Rōrensu Sutān no Sekai [The World of Laurence Sterne], ed. Takeshi Sakamoto. Tokyo: Kaibunsha, 2018. Pp. 381. ¥3,000. In 1897, just before his two-year stay in the United Kingdom, the Japanese novelist Natsume Sōseki (known then as Natsume Kin'nosuke) published an article on Tristram Shandy in the literary journal Kōko Bungaku. This was the first time that Sterne and his works were properly introduced to the Japanese public. Sōseki describes Sterne's life and character and the traits of his writings succinctly and expresses his particular admiration of the singular qualities that Tristram Shandy holds in terms of structure, language, and plot: "The morbidly neurotic author 'Sterne' has been best known to later generations through the eccentric, licentious, and morbidly neurotic novel Tristram Shandy." He observed, "No other novel makes fun of human beings, plays the fool, or makes people laugh and cry so well." As Kazuki Ochiai emphasizes in his chapter on the Japanese receptions of Sterne, it is extraordinary that a Japanese intellectual could appreciate the humor and satirical language of an eighteenth-century English novel at the end of the nineteenth century. Moreover, Sōseki incorporates both Shandean wit and satire in his own novels, which he began to write a few years after his return to Japan. Consciously or not, all the essays in the collection share, or are rather possessed by, the wonder Sōseki felt at Sterne's works. Written in Japanese, the essays provide a perfect introduction to Sterne for Japanese students and will provoke renewed interest in him and eighteenth-century literature more generally by demonstrating their significance in today's [End Page 229] Japan. Masaru Uchida's introduction offers a historical overview of Sterne criticism, from the contemporary reception in Britain and Europe, to early twentieth-century acclaim by Mikhail Bakhtin and Virginia Woolf, to scholarly works since the 1950s by well-known authors such as Traugott, Frye, New, and Keymer. The first two chapters by Sakamoto present concise, yet insightful pictures of "A Political Romance" and Tristram Shandy. Sōseki's viewpoint is echoed in Sakamoto's comment that "a music of human sorrow runs at the bottom of the comic world of the novel Tristram Shandy." The chapters that follow cover a range of Sterne's other works including Sentimental Journey and the sermons, examined in the context of the eighteenth century's literary and publishing environment, while also tracing their reception and reverberation in Japan. There are several useful collections of essays for beginning readers of Sterne, but Sakamoto's collection makes an invaluable addition, offering Japanese readers accessible discussions of Sterne and his works. The most perceptive and original readings of Sterne's novels are offered by Masaaki Takeda's "Laurence Sterne's Poetics" and Masashi Suzuki's "The Power of the Moon: Lunacy in Blake and Sterne." Takeda establishes Sterne's fiction in the tradition of "deceptive" literature. He contrasts Sterne's fictive language with that of Swift's, arguing that while A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels register the author's sharp, rigorous observation of reality, Sterne embraces "the deceptive nature of reality" by playing the fool both in person and in his novels. "His vivacity and cheerfulness are produced when he exposes himself to deceptive and illusionary reality. For this reason, he can laugh at physical frailties." Unlike Swift, Sterne fully accepts the distance between language and reality, Takeda argues. Sterne is keenly aware that the more he writes the further reality recedes; hence, the narrative procrastination of Tristram Shandy. For Sterne, the act of writing is an endorsement of our linguistic inability to capture reality, demonstrating language's deceptive nature while expressing genial sympathy toward those imprisoned in the world of perceptions and sentiments. Sterne's fictive language thus establishes the modern poetics of Zweideutigkeit, a quality Nietzsche found in Sterne, the joining of mirth and sorrow, making readers feel as if they are floating in a world of existential instability. Suzuki provides another new reading of Tristram Shandy by explicating the hitherto...

The Blue Notes: South African jazz and the limits of avant-garde solidarities in late 1960s London

ABSTRACTFor the Blue Notes, an ensemble comprised of South African jazz musicians living in Britain, 1968 was pivotal. After 3 years on the margins of the London jazz scene, their debut album Very Urgent was released in May that year to positive acclaim. Very Urgent was understood as an important statement of the British jazz avant-garde movement that captured the spirit of 1968, infused with the Blue Notes’ musical South Africanisms. In this article, I explore how shifting understandings of jazz in the 1960s aided and undermined the Blue Notes’ musical identities: as mbaqanga, hard bop, and free jazz musicians. I argue that Very Urgent and, to an extent, the Blue Notes cannot be understood solely in the terms favored by their early reception in Britain. Rather, both represent a complex matrix of personal, musical, and political relations that constituted British and South African jazz art worlds in the 1960s.

The Whitehaven commission: context and form in Chillida’s 1990s public sculpture

This article focuses on an unrealized commission for a large public sculpture by Chillida for the town of Whitehaven in Cumbria on Britain’s north-west coast. The article draws from the archives of Visual Arts UK at Northumbria University and analyses the background and detail of this little-known project, planned during the 1990s when Chillida had already produced many significant international commissioned works in the public realm. Addressing Chillida’s production and self-presentation in the 1990s, the article also opens up the wider contexts for this particular project: the resonances of seaside settings for Chillida’s work, the artist’s relationship with and reception in Britain, and the difficulties of transposing cultural identity through public work.

‘Five goals, no boots’: an interrogation of the politics, play and racialised athleticism of late colonial football tours to England, 1949–1959

ABSTRACTThis essay explores a series of football tours from Britain's colonies in Africa and the Caribbean to Britain between the years 1949 and 1959. It examines the different desired political and diplomatic functions of the visits from a variety of perspectives, as well as considering the importance of sporting performance and football in particular in fulfilling these functions. Utilising academic work on body cultures as well as critical race theory, it interrogates the coverage and analysis of such tours in multiple outlets of the British media, with particular reference to the different racialisations players from these territories were subject to throughout the period, as well as how racial perceptions were projected, solidified and reconstructed through play and the existing technologies of reception in Britain. Finally, it stresses the importance of localised, seemingly innocuous settings (such as the lower league football stadium) in formulating meaning and signifying identity during the period.

Ancient Egypt and the geological antiquity of man, 1847-1863.

The 1850s through early 60s was a transformative period for nascent studies of the remote human past in Britain, across many disciplines. Naturalists and scholars with Egyptological knowledge fashioned themselves as authorities to contend with this divisive topic. In a characteristic case of long-distance fieldwork, British geologist Leonard Horner employed Turkish-born, English-educated, Cairo-based engineer Joseph Hekekyan to measure Nile silt deposits around pharaonic monuments in Egypt to address the chronological gap between the earliest historical and latest geological time. Their conclusion in 1858 that humans had existed in Egypt for exactly 13,371 years was the earliest attempt to apply geological stratigraphy to absolute human dates. The geochronology was particularly threatening to biblical orthodoxy, and the work raised private and public concerns about chronological expertise and methodology, scriptural and scientific authority, and the credibility of Egyptian informants. This essay traces these geo-archaeological investigations; including the movement of paper records, Hekekyan's role as a go-between, and the publication's reception in Britain. The diverse reactions to the Egyptian research reveal competing ways of knowing the prehistoric past and highlights mid-Victorian attempts to reshape the porous boundaries between scholarly studies of human antiquity.

“Oscar Wilde's Book”: Early American Reviews of The Picture of Dorian Gray

Oscar wilde's only novel, the picture of dorian gray, first appeared in the july 1890 issue of the american periodical lippin- cott's Monthly Magazine? While the sometimes acrimonious reception of the novel in Britain has been routinely noted, less scholarly attention has been paid to the reception of Dorian Gray in the United States. Even when scholars allude to the reaction of the press there, they do so almost always as an afterthought—as a way of juxtaposing the novel's censorious reception in Britain with its supposedly more positive reception across the Atlantic. Thus, in the introduction to his definitive edition of Dorian Gray for Oxford University Press, Joseph Bristow comments in a footnote that he has “found no evidence of outright hostility towards The Picture of Dorian Gray in the American press,” before outlining “the trouncing that Wilde … experienced” in Britain“ (ln101). Similarly, in his general introduction to the ”uncensored“ Dorian Gray for Harvard University Press, Nicholas Frankel notes of the novel, ”To be sure, appreciative and sensitive reviews appeared in Britain and America, but a significant segment of the British press reacted with outright hostility, condemning the novel as ‘vulgar,’ ‘unclean,’ ‘poisonous,’ ‘discreditable,’ and ‘a sham’“ (5). In her contribution on Wilde in the series Bloom's How to Write about Literature, Amy Watkin is even more Manichaean: ”Americans loved it,“ she declares. ”English reviewers did not“ (129).