Republic Of Letters Research Articles

SPACES OF ART CULTURE ORGANIZATION CREATED BY WOMEN INTELLECTUALS OF THE 17TH CENTURY

Background. The concepts of cultural space and cultural space were analyzed by A.Ya. Flier, L.P. Repina and others. In Western European culture of the 17th century, the problem of the place and role of a woman creator became more acute. The beginning of the present of women’s creativity originates in those times. Women's intellectual culture is a mental and verbal foundation created by creative women of a specific historical era and a specific country. The relevance of the study of women's intellectual culture of the 17th century is associated with the revival of the awareness of women creators of the past and the destruction of stereotypes in relation to women's creativity. The article analyzes the aspect of the organization of women's intellectual culture of the 17th century in order to identify the spaces in which women creators created works of art. Methods. While analyzing cultural institutions, an axiological approach is used with the inclusion of an anthropological component. While analyzing the space of art culture organization, methods such as analysis of the physical characteristics of the space, its internal structure, functions, values, place and role of creators in it and the results of their creative activity are used. Results. Creative women in the 17th century create their own spaces for the production of artistic cultural objects. Such spaces are monastery, female academy, salon, and Women’s Republic of Letters. Conclusion. The closed spaces for the organization of women's intellectual culture were monastery and female academy, where works of art were created within the framework of tradition. The open space was the salon, which created favorable conditions for creative innovation. In the space of Women’s Republic of Letters the new principles of upbringing and education were worked out.

Introduction

Introduction

Katrina O’Loughlin. Women, Writing, and Travel in the Eighteenth Century.

Katrina O’Loughlin. <i>Women, Writing, and Travel in the Eighteenth Century</i>.

Criticism and Confession. The Bible in the Seventeenth Century Republic of Letters, by Nicholas Hardy

Criticism and Confession. The Bible in the Seventeenth Century Republic of Letters, by Nicholas Hardy

Cosmopolitanism and Planetary Studies: Paradigms for Rewriting the Past

This paper discusses recent models of world literature rewriting in light of the 2018 Romanian Literature as World Literature, which remaps some of the most representative Romanian authors and movements according to the intersectional frameworks advanced by Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systemstheory, Pascale Casanova’s world republic of letters, and others. In their plea for what the book’s editors call planetary, cosmopolitan studies, the sixteen contributors reread canonical Romanian texts and advocate for a new literary world order, within which Romanian literature is regarded in a less hierarchical/dichotomic fashion, as a literature of the world. This initiative seeks to reposition Romanian literature as a diverse, active, and dynamic partner in the world’s cultural dialogue. My essay addresses a paradox which is very much at the centre of the book: how can one promote intercultural, non-hegemonic models of dialogue when translation and marketability still restrict the participation of “marginal” cultures in the planetary, cosmopolitan exchange of ideas?

Vâlâ Nureddin’s Comic Materialism and the Sexual Revolution: Writing across Turkey and the Soviet Union

Abstract Focusing on the life and work of the Turkish novelist and translator Vâlâ Nureddin (1901–67), this article provides a historical overview of Turkish and Soviet literary entanglement in the early twentieth century. A collaborator of the globally acclaimed Turkish communist poet Nâzım Hikmet, Vâlâ was educated at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East from 1922 to 1924. Returning to Turkey in 1925, he launched his career in the daily Akşam (Evening), bringing Soviet and Turkish literature into conversation in his serialized translations and literary adaptations of Soviet erotic fiction. In reading Vâlâ’s neglected 1928 erotic historical comedy Baltacı ile Katerina (Baltacı and Catherine), unique among Vâlâ’s writings in its direct and explicit imagination and specification of an entangled revolution, this article suggests, by way of specific attention to this work’s comedic elements, that Vâlâ imagined the collapse of both Russian and Ottoman imperial sovereignty in terms of sexual revolution. It argues that a study of this unjustifiably neglected erotic comedy not only deepens our knowledge of early republican Turkish literature and culture, but provides a more nuanced understanding of the Moscow-centered transnational literary space produced in the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution, or what scholars in Slavic studies have called the “Soviet republic of letters.”

The ‘province’ of the Dutch Republic in the international Republic of Letters

The ‘province’ of the Dutch Republic in the international Republic of Letters

The Israeli "Republic of Letters" between Neo-Zionism and Post-Zionism

The Israeli "Republic of Letters" between Neo-Zionism and Post-Zionism

A New Order of Medicine: The Rise of Physicians in Reformation Nuremberg by Hannah Murphy

Reviewed by: A New Order of Medicine: The Rise of Physicians in Reformation Nuremberg by Hannah Murphy Mary Lindemann Hannah Murphy. A New Order of Medicine: The Rise of Physicians in Reformation Nuremberg. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019. x + 262 pp. Ill. $50.00 (978-0-8229-4560-4). The Reformation has never been as easy to integrate into the history of medicine as the Renaissance. Fielding Garrison’s venerable classic devotes a chapter to the period now usually termed “early modern,” but has precious little to say about the Reformation. The far more recent multiple-authored Western Medical Tradition sees “the union of Reform and the Word . . . [as] a powerful one . . . what happened in religion found echoes in medicine,” but the discussion is also brief.1 Of course, there was always the quixotic Paracelsus about whom a great deal (and some of it nonsense) has been written. Hannah Murphy’s elegant, intelligent, and original book takes a very different approach to reformation by refuting the idea that religious reformation triggered or shaped medical reforms. Rather, she reframes “reformation” as a “multivalent [term] . . . used to refer far more expansively to a notion of renewal, or ordering, or formation” (p. 9). Reformatio was, therefore, an essentially political and civic concept that involved experts of all kinds, including physicians, in a reworking of sixteenth-century urban government in Nuremberg. This often unseen and protracted revolution “worked out,” she argues, “behind [the] closed doors” (p. 9) of city council chambers and in the studies (place and activity) of physicians. Thus, not the bombast of political pamphleteering, papal bulls, and Imperial bans but “a common focus on new forms of writing in the construction and maintenance of expertise” (p. 10) characterized this less overt but nonetheless transformative reformatio. Murphy directs attention to writing in its many forms, [End Page 118] analyzing not only published texts and manuscripts but also correspondence and marginalia. In the physical activity of writing, physicians explored an incredible range of approaches to contemporary problems of medical practice and laid the groundwork for the acceptance of an expertise that ranged beyond medicine to shape civic culture and political life. Although Murphy arranges most chapters around a single figure, this strategy produces not “great man” history but rather a sophisticated investigation of the individual, eclectic practices of Nuremberg’s physicians. Some of these overwhelmingly Galenic physicians enjoyed considerable fame, such as the anatomist Volcher Coiter. Others, like Georg Palma and Joachim Camerarius the Younger, were less prominent; the latter nonetheless led Nuremberg’s medical community and directed a European-wide epistolatory network. The world Murphy sensitively and vividly portrays rests primarily on these scriptural encounters. Together these figures sustained something like a sixteenth-century “republic of letters,” even if their concerns remained essentially municipal and engaged in quotidian practice. Murphy’s detailed descriptions of these networks and her analysis of the material, personal, and intellectual contacts involved in writing are nothing short of glorious. She demonstrates not only how networks developed. She roots them in needs of civic medicine while emphasizing the materiality and tactility of anatomy, recipes, pharmacopeia, bibliophilia, notes, glosses, letter writing, and even scribbles. Murphy has deftly crafted a rich, and realistic, portrait of how urban polities worked, how experts came to assert their place in that milieu, and what “writing” meant in a variety of situations. If Murphy’s sensitivity to broader contexts most strikingly defines this important book, the author’s meticulous investigations also lead her to some perhaps startling revisions of long-accepted interpretations. Certainly, she contributes to the ongoing reevaluation of Paracelsus in medicine and religion.2 Moreover, Murphy’s extended analysis of the works her physicians composed and commented on reveals the unexpected wellsprings of empiricism in medicine. These Galenic physicians recognized the high stakes of practice at the bedside for asserting their authority and thus valued empiricism. A New Order of Medicine adds substantially and innovatively to our knowledge of the triumph of expertise, the in-and-outs of political life, and the meandering paths that intellectual and medical exchanges followed. Murphy focuses on Nuremberg, but her story bears greater relevance. Particularly attractive and important is the methodology she employs in evaluating...

A field day with Fritz: introduction to the Symposium

AbstractThe Status of Law begins with the suspicion ‘that “law” might have become the problem rather than the solution, and this problem requires further analysis’. Given that law is a social construct, Kratochwil invites us to turn to the sites where this construction takes place. To bring the many constitutions and contestations of law to the fore, he conjures theoretical sparring partners to engage in nine meditations. The genius of this Symposium consists of inviting nine colleagues, each engaging with a different meditation, and inviting a tenth colleague to add this introduction as a way to engage the engagement. By doing practice on practice the Symposium does full justice Kratochwil's move towards looking at the practice ‘in the middle of things’. The resulting field day with Fritz is a piece of intellectual mastery compiled by ‘spirited members of the republic of letters’ that carries the reader along on a journey that reveals and addresses Kratochwil's suspicions about the problem with law. In the end, we know more through sharing the problem and partaking in the joy of addressing it.

A Field Day With Fritz: Introduction to the Symposium

The Status of Law begins with the suspicion ‘that “law” might have become the problem rather than the solution, and this problem requires further analysis.’ Given that law is a social construct, Kratochwil invites us to turn to the sites where this construction takes place. To bring the many constitutions and contestations of law to the fore, he conjures theoretical sparring partners to engage in nine meditations. The genius of this Symposium consists in inviting nine colleagues, each engaging with a different meditation, and inviting a tenth colleague to add this introduction as a way to engage the engagement. By doing practice on practice the Symposium does full justice Kratochwil’s move towards looking at the practice ‘in the middle of things.’ The resulting field day with Fritz is a piece of intellectual mastery compiled by ‘spirited members of the republic of letters’ that carries the reader along on a journey that reveals and addresses Kratochwil’s suspicions about the problem with law. In the end, we know more through sharing the problem and partaking in the joy of addressing it. In a nutshell, the Status of Law engages in a series of mediations that invite us to engage with that predicament by using our academic tools as best as we can (no need to get anxious). The Symposium’s engagements show precisely that: the ability and readiness to actually hear what Kratochwil is saying. By engaging with the engagements, the readership of this Symposium will draw their own conclusions about the promises of international law (and the discipline of International Law) despite the predicaments that Kratochwil addressed so wisely and carefully. Yet, they must engage themselves to get to the bottom of it all. Indeed, ‘Kratochwil is too smart to show us “the way” but he gives us tools to assess our journey and options — perhaps also by comparing our itineraries.’ And for that, the invitation is to start in the middle. That plunge must be taken individually. By offering their respective academic practice of embracing or eschewing the ‘midst’ which lies at the centre of Kratochwil’s grounding engagement with (legal) norms through critical pragmatism, this Symposium nicely sketches the ‘site’ where to do precisely that: generate knowledge through engagement with others.

España como caleidoscopio. Observaciones de intelectuales argentinos sobre la comunidad letrada hispanoamericana, siglo XIX

El artículo estudia las impresiones de intelectuales argentinos acerca de España entre 1880 y los primeros años del siglo XX. El principal problema estudiado es si España era, o no, una referencia intelectual positiva o negativa para Hispanoamérica. Se analizan las ideas y tradiciones que fundamentaron cada una de esas posiciones. Y cabe destacar que los intelectuales y autores elegidos no han sido estudiados hasta el momento desde la perspectiva panorámica propuesta en este artículo. El trabajo muestra que conceptos tales como hispanismo, iberoamericanismo o hispanoamericanismo fueron más heterogéneos de lo que usualmente se piensa, y menos monolíticos. La noción de caleidoscopio como metáfora ha sido elegida, precisamente, para mostrar que no hubo una mirada estática sobre España a lo largo de todo este período.

Samuel Beckett and the World Republic of Letters

Abstract In Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution, Pascale Casanova explores the formal and the historical elements of Beckett’s works to establish how the bilingual writer masters the art of “abstractification” in his pioneering venture of testing the limits of language. Casanova closely investigates the cosmopolitan space of Paris in particular in order to explain the socio-political field from which Beckett’s bilingual works stemmed. As this article argues, it is this early search for a literary field with Beckett’s autonomous writing at its core that leads Casanova to her critically acclaimed and contentious notion of the world republic of letters.

Ḥusayn b. ʿAbd al-Ṣamad al-ʿĀmilī's draft letter to his teacher: The culture of scholarly correspondence and the Islamic republic of letters in the sixteenth century

AbstractThis study focuses on a draft letter by Ḥusayn b. ʿAbd al-Ṣamad al-ʿĀmilī (d. 984/1576) for his teacher Zayn al-Dīn al-ʿĀmilī (d. 965/1558); both were prominent Twelver Shiite jurists from the region of Jabal ʿĀmil in what is now Lebanon. Yūsuf Ṭabājah, who first published the text, argued that Ḥusayn wrote the letter while he was in Iraq c. 957/1550 and that it describes Zayn al-Dīn's legal work al-Rawḍah al-bahiyyah. It is argued here that the book in question is more likely Zayn al-Dīn's work Tamhīd al-qawāʿid, on legal and grammatical maxims, and that the letter dates to c. 958/1551. The text provides insight into the relationship between Ḥusayn and Zayn al-Dīn and the culture of scholarly correspondence.

Dispatches from Cairo to India: Editors, Publishing Houses, and a Republic of Letters

Abstract This article documents the existence of a vibrant republic of letters stretching from Cairo to Karachi in the middle of the twentieth century. On the basis of private letters, memoirs, and modern editions of classical texts, this article recreates the scholarly and personal commitments of a new class of professional editors (muḥaqqiqūn). These editors were responsible for the emergence of some of the most influential publishing houses in the Islamic world, and their contribution to the production and circulation of pre-modern texts has had a profound impact on the intellectual development of Islam in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They believed that cultivating a republic of letters was necessary because it served the world of learning and scholarship. In this way was fashioned a virtual community, separated by national and political borders, but united by visions of history and a shared sense of moral and intellectual duty.

The Republic of Letters, by Marc Fumaroli &amp; Erasmus and the Renaissance Republic of Letters, by Stephen Ryle (ed.)

The Republic of Letters, by Marc Fumaroli &amp; Erasmus and the Renaissance Republic of Letters, by Stephen Ryle (ed.)

Rifah-e Aam Club, Lucknow: Public sphere and public space in urban India

Public space comes under threat, is contested as much as shared, an arena for power and hegemony, leaving little hope for interaction across social divides. At the same time, each reincarnation of our fragmented public sphere necessarily builds on historical precedent, inadvertently inscribing public space with fresh hope as it expands the scope of the term’s original promise. Over time, this process creates iconic infrastructure such as the Rifah-e Aam Club, the “Club for the public good” in Lucknow, North India. From the initial stirrings of associational culture under British colonialism through key moments of the national movement down to today’s goonda raj, or rule of thugs, this unruly space came to host the most unlikely republic of letters, reuniting a public across time and space that often seems irredeemably fragmented. It is when buildings like this acquire a life of their own that cities realise their creative promise.

A New Republic of Women’s Letters

A New Republic of Women’s Letters Michelle Levy (bio) It is the assumption of this essay that literary study surrendered some of its most powerful interpretive tools when it allowed textual criticism and bibliography to be regarded as “preliminary” rather than integral to the study of literary work. —Jerome J. McGann (1988)1 This article seeks to probe mcgann’s extensive considerations of materiality, textuality, bibliography, and digital remediation as a means of resituating women within what he has termed “a new republic of letters.”2 It does so not by addressing McGann’s substantial body of work on individual women writers—on Felicia Hemans, L. E. L., Mary Robinson, Ann Batten Cristall, and Christina Rossetti—but rather by extending McGann’s powerful insights into a consideration of how we as scholars can participate in the material transformation of the archive, in this case, the archive of women’s writing. Calling for a full implementation of McGann’s understanding that textual criticism and bibliography are “conceptually fundamental rather than preliminary to the study of literature,”3 this article seeks to establish that scholarly attention to female literary production, transmission, and preservation is imperative for the study of women’s literature. Although McGann’s comments are presented in gender-neutral terms, it is arguable that our attention to women writers is disproportionately impacted by the devaluing of textual studies and bibliography. McGann’s reorientation of attention from text to artifact, from linguistic to bibliographical codes, from product to process, from canon to archive, and from literary to book history provides a necessary foundation for resituating women within a new republic of letters. McGann’s theoretical interventions as they relate to female authors have perhaps been most strongly felt by Early Modern textual scholars of women writers. Largely, this is because feminist scholars of this earlier period have [End Page 519] had to contend with complex and messy textual artifacts, mediated practices of authorship, and collaborative models of production and circulation, for which McGann’s theories of social textuality (also known as the “new textualism”) have been immensely useful. In the later eighteenth century, when many more women began to print their writing, it might seem that we have more transparent and traceable methods of textual dissemination. But, as we are learning, the history of the circulation of women’s writing appears to be as complicated for women of our own period, given the wide variety of print and nonprint publication venues available to them. This essay asks how McGann’s theories of materiality can help us to understand the ways in which gender has shaped both the surviving archive of women’s writing and the scholarly uses of their archives, in the practices of bibliography and textual editing. Canon and Archive In “Philology in a New Key,” McGann draws upon Aleida Assmann’s distinction between two forms of cultural memory, canon and archive (see Figure 1).4 For Assmann, canon and archive provide two means of remembering, with the canon reflecting the cultural repository of “actively circulated memory” and the archive being home to “passively stored memory.”5 Assmann notes that “the archive may be recovered and reclaimed for the canon,” but she cautions that the canon necessarily occupies a finite cultural space.6 Feminist literary scholars, who have spent the last fifty years seeking to migrate women from archive to canon, have been all too aware of this finitude. One measure of the limits placed on canonicity is authorial selections in student anthologies like the Norton Anthology of English Literature. We know that the Norton, over its sixty years of existence, has increased its representation of Romantic women writers: the percentage of pages devoted to female authors of the Romantic period began, in 1962, at zero percent, and has risen, by 2012, to twenty-two percent, an increase in page numbers from zero to two hundred.7 However, the entirety of this increase is due to more pages being added to the anthology as whole; furthermore, over the same period of time, the number of pages devoted to male writers has also increased, from just under six-hundred pages to [End Page 520] seven-hundred. In other words...

The Zone of Freedom? Differential Censorship in the Post-Stalin-Era People's Republic of Letters

The Zone of Freedom? Differential Censorship in the Post-Stalin-Era People's Republic of Letters

Transatlantic Address: Washington Allston and the Limits of Romanticism

Transatlantic Address: Washington Allston and the Limits of Romanticism Meredith L. McGill (bio) One of the most interesting phases of jerome mcgann’s career has been his recent turn to writing about nineteenth-century American literature. One might say this turn isn’t altogether recent: his 1993 book on “The Visible Language of Modernism” takes its title from Stephen Crane’s Black Riders and Other Lines (1895) and includes a sustained meditation on Emily Dickinson’s investment in the visual aspect of her writing.1 But since 2014, when he published two books—A New Republic of Letters, which includes substantial chapters on Edgar Allan Poe and James Fenimore Cooper, and The Poet Edgar Allan Poe—the pendulum of McGann’s attention has swung decisively in a transatlantic direction.2 This shift is particularly welcome to those who study nineteenth-century American literature—and especially American poetry—within a transatlantic context. A prominent Romanticist’s fascination with American texts and cultural formations does much to counter asymmetries in prestige and in critical attention that have long structured the transatlantic literary field. Admittedly, most students of nineteenth-century literature on both sides of the Atlantic have been content to write national histories that rarely, if ever, intersect with one another. Critics have addressed the great themes of Atlantic history, recognizing the importance of transatlantic trade and the transformative effects of the forced and voluntary migration of peoples, but they have done so largely from within the confines of nationally framed literary traditions. Indeed, as I noted over a decade ago in The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange (2008), it would be difficult to underestimate the sway of the idea of a national literature over the discipline of literary study, structuring as it still does undergraduate [End Page 475] instruction, graduate training, and professional formation.3 A tacit or explicit literary nationalism continues to organize departments of English despite the fact that complexly intertwining histories of language and culture, publication, and literary form tug against the often unquestioned binary division of the field into British and American literatures. While specialists in nineteenth-century Anglophone literature share an atavistic, nationalist commitment to our materials of study, asymmetries of attention rooted in Romantic-era hierarchies of value continue to ensure that, while Americanists must grapple with British literary precedent and evaluate the literature they study against the backdrop of the dominant tradition, Romanticists and Victorianists are free to ignore contemporaneous literary production in Great Britain’s former American colonies. Even important recent scholarship that boldly reconceives nineteenth-century British literature in transnational terms repeats this omission: Manu Samriti Chander’s Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century (2017) and Jason R. Rudy’s Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies (2017) track the colonial uptake of British poetic forms and poetic ideals in India, British Guiana, Australia, Canada, and South Africa, but omit Britain’s former colony, the newly independent United States, from their field of vision.4 In Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature (2016), Daniel Hack examines the complexity of African American writers’ engagement with a broad range of British texts, but treats African American literature largely in isolation from larger trends in American literary history.5 The rising prestige of the American novel in the twentieth century has ensured that numerous comparative studies embrace the work of writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, and James,6 but the exclusion of [End Page 476] nineteenth-century American poetry from serious transnational consideration—outside of the work of our two proto-modernists, Whitman and Dickinson—is striking.7 One can easily lay the blame for this omission at the feet of Americanist critics who tend to regard Americanness in poetry as discernible only in a break with British poetic norms. We have only recently begun to develop a critical language nuanced and flexible enough to describe the heady mix of cosmopolitanism and provinciality, originality and imitation, postcoloniality, and national and imperial ambition that characterizes metrically regular, formally recognizable American verse. Americanists tend to be embarrassed by the bombastic claims made by nineteenth-century poets and critics who proclaimed the virtues of now-obscure...