Simone Weil's Political Theology

This article suggests that Simone Weil's political theology is characterized by the idea of labor and the event of laboring. I begin by arguing that her thinking is shaped by a materialist reading of Christianity that employs Marx's concepts — labor, capital and alienation — to examine the political implications of three theological ideas, fall, slavery and sin. Next, I suggest that although laboring should be understood as a creative endeavor, Weil argues that it is always conditioned and constrained by a force she terms social matter. This constraint produces what Marx called alienation and Weil will refer to as enslavement (and even sin). Finally, I contend that Weil's idea of labor — and its call for a minimization of constraint — provides a counter-force to social matter. I conclude by suggesting that Weil's labor provides a different way of conceptualizing not just the political subject, but political theology itself.     

José Zorrilla in Mexico: Transatlantic Romanticism and the Question of Artistic Labour

This article explores the strategic use of literary form in the Mexican writings of José Zorrilla. The article focuses on México y los mexicanos (1856), a letter Zorrilla wrote to his fellow Spanish Romantic playwright, Ángel de Saavedra, the Duke of Rivas. Zorrilla’s México y los mexicanos is a rare piece of epistolary writing in Spanish Romanticism as well as one of the first literary histories of Mexico. Often overlooked in the letter, however, is Zorrilla’s economic critique of the precarious condition of artists in both Mexico and Spain. A conservative moderado, Zorrilla could not air his concerns publicly without the threat of retribution from his fellow conservative colleagues in Spain. Zorrilla thus used the epistolary form, the article argues, in order to surreptitiously introduce the economic plight of artists into mainstream Spanish as well as Mexican political discourse. Read in this context, Zorrilla’s letter makes visible the fundamental role a transatlantic Romantic vision of labour played in shaping nineteenth-century political discourse in both the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America.     

From Domus to Polis: Hybrid Identities in Southey’s Letters from England (1807) and Blanco White’s Letters from Spain (1822)

ABSTRACT

Robert Southey’s fictive travelogue, Letters from England, by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella (1807), inspired several imitators, most importantly José María Blanco White with his Letters from Spain (1822). These works rejuvenate a fictional device popularised by Montesquieu’s Persian Letters—the “familiar stranger”—at a crucial juncture when British involvement in the affairs of Europe provoked a reassessment of pre-Revolutionary cosmopolitanism. The stranger as home-interpreter calls attention to an emerging emphasis in European Romantic thought on the contingency of freedom with hybrid, mobile identities, prefiguring the psycho-social-historical terrain in which Jean-François Lyotard and Dean MacCannell link modernity with travel and tourism. This essay argues that the Romantic figure of the foreign traveller expresses a condition of travel, reflecting Lyotard’s critique of human contingency in his essay “Domus and the Megalopolis.” Southey’s sympathetic stranger modulates a conversation with Wordsworth about the nature of modern subjectivity, historically contingent yet paradoxically liberated from historical particulars. Blanco White’s Letters from Spain demonstrates how displacement, emigration, and expatriation become refigured as conditions of the modern psyche, especially visible in moments of political crisis, when the cosmopolitan polis is immobilised by the myth of the domus.     

Prologus/epilogus est,non legitur

Donald Shaw and Monroe Z. Hafter have argued that in writing Ramiro, conde de Lucena Rafael Húmara y Salamanca was attempting to reconcile the tension between conflicting political and worldviews that was prevalent in early nineteenth-century Spanish discourse. In this article, I argue that one way in which Húmara explores and contains the tension between the traditional Catholic and the emerging Romantic worldviews, as well as between the conservative and liberal views of the Spanish nation, is through his depiction of Muslim Spain. Throughout the novel, Húmara presents Muslim Spain as a place of unrestrained passion and anarchy that should be avoided because it presents a threat to Christian virtues. Simultaneously, however, Muslim Spain provides a respite from the repressiveness of the Christian world and provides a space where man is governed by an arbitrary destiny instead of a benevolent God, and human love, whatever its consequences, has been elevated to an absolute value. As I hope to demonstrate, although Húmara attempts to draw distinctions between Muslim and Christian Spain, and, in turn, the Romantic and Enlightenment worldview, these distinctions become less clear as the novel progresses.     

The Case of Beatrice Brooke: Fictions of Law and Marriage in Caroline Norton's Lost and Saved (1863)

In comparison with her influential political essays on matters of child custody, divorce and marital property settlements, the novels of Caroline Norton remain relatively under-studied. The purpose of this article is to revisit one of these novels, Lost and Saved, published in 1863, and to do so more particularly as an exercise in literary jurisprudence. It argues that the story of Beatrice Brooke, the unfortunate heroine of the novel, is shaped in considerable part by the law; first, by the peculiar terms of a probate settlement which serves to preclude her marriage to her ultimately duplicitous lover Montagu Treherne, and then second, by the broader terms of matrimonial law in nineteenth-century England, the construction of which serves to delude Beatrice into thinking that an ‘irregular’ marriage to Treherne enjoys some residual legal force. Though the medium is very different, the critique of marriage presented in Lost and Saved is just as urgent as that engaged in Norton's more famous political essays.     

Between Utopia and Tradition: William Morris’s A Dream of John Ball

ABSTRACT

William Morris, author of the famous nineteenth-century utopian novel News from Nowhere, thought it both possible and desirable to develop a utopian vision that could be affirmed by many individuals. However, Morris also recognised that achieving such utopian unity was not easy. There is, at least potentially, something personal about utopian visions; they are shaped by idiosyncratic desires that cannot be shared. Through a reading of Morris’s A Dream of John Ball, I argue that Morris offers a temporal solution to the problem of utopian unity. The central characters in the text, medieval priest John Ball and a nineteenth-century socialist agitator, come to recognise their shared adherence to the same image of a new society. This is achieved through the mediation of tradition: Ball and the agitator overcome their differences by committing themselves to disappointed hopes elaborated in past struggles that have been handed down to the present. Morris’s articulation of utopia and tradition—the sense that visions of the future can be made shareable through reference to the past—offers the possibility of a transtemporal solidarity of utopians and the bringing together of the dreams of a plurality of individuals.     

Dancing for the King of Congo from Early Modern Central Africa to Slavery-Era Brazil

Breathtaking parades of black kings and their courts enlivened the streets of cities in Europe and the Americas between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Sumptuously dressed queens and kings and their resplendent attendants processed to the sound of music, lifted, temporarily, from the grim the life of enslavement or institutionalized inferiority many of them lived in the age of Atlantic slavery. Drawing from a recent analysis of a prominent ritual performance from the central African kingdom of Kongo called sangamento, this article offers a new interpretation of the black kings festivals, beyond their interpretation as carnivalesque pomp emulating and destabilizing European rule. On both shores of the Atlantic, the performances combined African and European regalia and pageantry to express and enact central African collective identity, political power, and social unity. Restaging performances and reshaping ideas honed in the Kongo, enslaved central Africans not only preserved the memory of their region of origins, but also crafted empowered responses to enslavement and the colonial system at large.     

Imagining Britain: reconstructing history and writing national identity in Englands Heroicall Epistles

ABSTRACT

The idea that in the Tudor era the English people became proudly conscious of their national language and history, has been challenged by critical interventions that suggest how England as a nation had to be “written”: the act of writing can construct imagined boundaries, both to appropriate and exclude. In Englands Heroicall Epistles, Drayton replaces Ovid’s mythological figures in the Heroides with specific well-known English historical personas who provide, through their letters, different perspectives on English history. I will contend that Drayton’s assertion of national identity and patriotism is done verbally and semantically, while his allegiance to oppositionist politics is rendered generically and subversively by a remarkable manipulation of the genre of historical poetry in the Heroicall Epistles: this in turn reflects his deep engagement with ideas of history and the construction of national consciousness in early modern England.     

The Deleterious Dominance of The Times in Nineteenth-Century Scholarship

The Times was a mid-nineteenth-century newspaper phenomenon, defeating rival London newspapers through its skilful management, advanced technology, greater editorial resources and access to powerful politicians. Its authority enabled it to make and break governments. However, the uniqueness of The Times limits its usefulness as a historical source. This article begins with a brief history of The Times, before analysing how the newspaper remains centre stage in the historiography of journalism and of nineteenth-century culture more broadly, despite the digitization of provincial and other London papers. Over-dependence on The Times, it argues, has exaggerated the significance of London daily newspapers and underplayed the importance of weekly papers, particularly those published outside London. The Times was unusual because it was a metropolitan rather than provincial paper, with a focus on political news and a dearth of lighter, broader content, or news of events around the UK. Using quantitative analysis of recent scholarship, the article demonstrates that unwarranted conclusions are still drawn from over-use of this source and from a wider view that it was representative of nineteenth-century newspapers in general. The conclusion urges a more geographically and culturally nuanced approach to Victorian newspapers, beyond a metropolitan-focused political and cultural history.     

Nineteenth-century Irish Anacreontics: the literary relationship of James Clarence Mangan and Thomas Moore

The odes of the ancient Greek poet Anacreon, celebrating wine, women and song, were made newly popular in the nineteenth century through the efforts of Thomas Moore, a writer whose first volume of verse, a loose translation of the Odes of Anacreon, published in 1800, marks him out today as a poet of Romantic sociability par excellence. I argue that the Anacreontic ode popularised by Moore continued to resonate through nineteenth-century Ireland – albeit in a heavily mediated form – in the work of the poet's successor, James Clarence Mangan, who picked up the cup in the series of drinking songs he wrote periodically throughout the 1830s and 1840s, the decades during which Mangan sank into alcoholism and emotional estrangement. The easy charm of Moore's Anacreontic song mutates in Mangan's verse into a more complex, often allusive and fragmented form, a perverse Anacreontics, which corresponds both to the poet's psychic trauma (his alcoholism and self-alienation) and to a broader cultural and political dislocation experienced by Ireland under British rule. This discomfort is registered in Mangan's verse in the playful refusal of a single authorial voice and in the poet's tendency both to ventriloquise and to distort influence – not just that of Moore but also of the British Romantics, notably Byron and Coleridge.     

Jane Eyre's ‘Arabian Tales’: Reading and Remembering the Arabian Nights

This article considers the significance of the Arabian Nights in nineteenth-century memoirs and accounts of childhood. Taking Jane Eyre (1847) as my chief example, I investigate the nature of the childhood encounter with the stories and the intensity of the child's emotional and sensory engagement with the work. I then consider how these stories and books function not only as childhood souvenirs, but also as stand-ins for childhood itself in the construction of an autobiographical subject. Finally, I offer a reading of the presence of the Arabian Nights within the narrative of Jane Eyre and its role in structuring the memories of its eponymous heroine.     

The Bang Beggars of Derry city: borough policing in Londonderry,c.1832–70

Was Derry's independent city police force wholly inadequate, was it just inefficient for the suppression of riots; or was it the demonstration of politico-religious partisanship that ensured the force's abolition in 1870? This paper will attempt to explore and answer these three questions. It will also look at the borough force in some detail, examining issues with regard to the force's pay, discipline, its duties and conditions of service. It will not attempt to analyse Derry's nineteenth-century riots or the political and sectarian issues surrounding these riots, except where aspects of these directly affected the borough police.     

The Clubmen of the West Riding of Yorkshire During the First Civil War: “Bradford Club-Law”

Abstract

The Luddite machine-breaking outbreaks in 1812 were not solely an urban or industrial phenomenon. Using a case study of the Horbury district in the West Riding, this article shows that Luddism, and especially popular fear of Luddism, was heightened by ancillary activities, both criminal and customary, occurring on the semi-rural peripheries of urban-industrial areas. Incendiarism was a common feature of social conflict in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. This article also demonstrates how the environment and landscape of the industrialising Pennines shaped the disturbances of 1812. Luddites were defending their customary 'task-scapes' that were increasingly being enclosed by aggrandising landlords and manufacturers. Luddism can only be understood within a longer and more holistic context of regional social tensions and customary practices of resistance.     

‘Realpoetik’: Revolution by Other Means in European Romantic Restoration Thought

Summary

This essay speculates about the degree to which a counter-image of Europe imagined by Romantic period writers showed them to be transforming an inherited idea of the republic of letters for political purposes. While Anglophone romanticists recognise that the French Revolution is an indisputable agent in shaping the contemporary English literary imagination, they then usually ignore the role played by the Restoration which followed. Romantic criticism can perhaps learn an appropriate sensitivity here from the work of critics of English Restoration writing of the seventeenth century. That epochal uncertainty, when the regicides beheaded the King and then wondered what to do politically, was succeeded in the Restoration by a kind of Dissenting determination to continue under or memorialise that uncertainty, not as a dilemma but as the experience of political opportunity. A similar pattern of pursuing revolution by other means is visible in the political revisionism and literary experimentation of post-Revolutionary Romantic radicals. In my picture, then, the Romantic transformation of the republic of letters recovers an older literary republicanism. In what is here dubbed Realpoetik the battle for what is to be political reality is fought on a rhetorical field whose free speech is exemplary of what politics should be like.     

Justo Sierra O’Reilly and John L. Stephens: Translation,History, and Transnational Romanticisms in the Americas

In this article, I explore the crossroads that unite two important nineteenth-century travel writers from the Americas: John L. Stephens who traveled south from the U.S. to the Yucatán peninsula, and Justo Sierra O’Reilly who traveled north from the Yucatán to Washington D.C. By focusing on two writers from the Americas, my goal is to examine how Romantic aesthetics and ideologies took on new shapes through cultural exchange within the region. More specifically, I study how these two travel writers articulated and came to terms with what Stephen Bann has identified as two fundamental aspects of the Romantic period. The first is the ‘remarkable enhancement of the consciousness of history’ (Bann 1995 Bann, Stephen. 1995. Romanticism and the Rise of History. New York: Twayne. [Google Scholar], 4) evident in the importance of popular literary genres like the historical novel. The second is a new accessibility to texts and information that incorporated large groups of readers and made historical information more available. While Stephens demonstrates an at times romantic fascination with indigenous history constructed through the analysis of the ruins he visits, Sierra O’Reilly’s translation, at every turn, critically engages Stephens's historical conclusions, revealing interlocking and contested notions of history in the Americas.     

Ordinary Writing and Scribal Culture in Nineteenth-Century Spain: Memory Books

This article is a study of the survival of scribal culture in nineteenth-century Spain in the form of the so-called ‘memory books’ (libros de memorias). I analyse their relationship with the educational developments of the period, as well as the material characteristics and the content of these texts, in order to define their typical features. These texts were the products of hybrid writing practices, in the sense that several elements were frequently superimposed on one another: economic news, personal, family and social events and even historical details. Hence the similarity between the memory books and other genres such as account books (libros de cuentas) and family books (libros de familia). Lastly, I will examine some nineteenth-century examples as epigones of a writing genre which had its origins in the later Middle Ages and Early Modern period.

“One morning, while tidying up the bedroom, Rosa opened the drawer in the trunk where Cholo kept his papers. There she found the papers about the property and, in a corner, together with the Family Book and the social security booklet, the papers from the bank […]. And she was about to put it away when it occurred to her to take off the elastic band around the big folder which Cholo had kept from his time in Switzerland. There were things, names and so on that she didn’t understand, but in the middle there were also some of the cards she had sent from Aran.”1 1.?Manuel Rivas, En salvaje compañía (1994) (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1998), 100–101. View all notes     

The religious and romantic origins of psychoanalysis

The Religious and Romantic Origins of Psychoanalysis. By Suzanne Kirschner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 212 pp., $27.95 cloth, $15.95 paper.     

Pedestrian perils on the road to Irish identity in Joyce and Bowen

This article identifies and explores some major facets of an important theme in the works of James Joyce and Elizabeth Bowen that adds to our understanding of the complex ways in which both writers construed Irishness. Striving to acknowledge what they saw as the value of walking without embracing its English nationalist or Romantic associations, these modernists depict walking in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland as a beneficial means of expressing and experimenting with different permutations of Irish identity, largely because of the opportunity it presented to negotiate a variety of dangers. By emphasising walking’s taxing and often perilous material realities, Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses and Bowen in Seven Winters and The Last September recast the idealised English Romantic view of walking as a darker and more menacing activity that nevertheless offers a useful strategy for articulating fluctuating conceptions of Irishness during the tumultuous period lasting roughly from the death of Parnell through to the Irish War of Independence.