This article examines gift-giving during Ottoman Sultan Abdul Aziz’s State visit to Britain in July 1867. An exceptional occasion in itself – for an Ottoman Sultan had never left his Empire in peacetime or ever would again –, the visit offers an interesting case for nuancing the generally accepted idea that gifts between equals (here rulers) are “free gifts”. The article makes a case for gift-giving in that particular context being a long and vexed process resulting from negotiations, as Queen Victoria did not originally want to entertain the Sultan, nor did she originally want to invest him with the Order of the Garter, or accept his counter-gift in the form of Arabian horses. Examining relevant diplomatic and private sources reveals the final arrangements to avoid a series of diplomatic faux-pas and show how they reflect a transcultural understanding that would help both sides refine their gift-giving protocols.
The purpose of research is to reveal the key features of the Canadian civilization formed in the Modern history on the North American continent. The significance of this scientific research is that for the first time in Russian historiography, presents the key features of the Canadian civilization, which the author considers a special socio-cultural community. The article emphasizes that the Canadian civilization is distinguished by a number of specific features that differ from the traditional understanding of North American civilization as a whole. To achieve the result in his work, the author uses a comparative historical method and an interdisciplinary approach. When writing the article, the author relies on the achievements of domestic and foreign Canadian studies, as well as a source base illustrating the authors conclusions. In the course of writing the work, the author analyzes the election programs of Canadian political parties, the British North America Act and other important sources. A positive role for the author in the process of writing his article was played by his familiarization with the existing theories of civilizations. The results of the study led to the conclusion that the Canadian civilization is distinguished by the long-term coexistence within its framework of two nations: French-Canadian and Anglo-Canadian, close ties with the political traditions of Great Britain, the USA and France, as well as its northernness. Emphasizes that the Canadian civilization differs from the traditional Anglo-Saxon one precisely by the presence of the Roman factor, i.e. the presence of the French-Canadian question. The latter for a long time determines the origins of the existence of the Canadian civilization and forms its key features at the present stage of development. To achieve the result in his work, the author uses a comparative historical method and an interdisciplinary approach.
Brexit shattered the ambiguity that had long sustained the unique construct that is the United Kingdom. As an assertion of British sovereignty, Brexit overrode the will of the people of Scotland and Northern Ireland. That broke the long tradition of territorial management of the United Kingdom, latterly formalised in a measure of self-government for the three smaller territories through devolution of substantial powers from 1999. But devolution had not resolved the existing challenges to the Union which were now reinforced by Brexit. The UK government’s response has oscillated between a hardline ‘muscular’ unionism and a more emollient ‘reasonableness’ agenda. This has left the Union in a state of unstable equilibrium, with considerable bodies of opinion in the three smaller territories dissatisfied with the status quo and with growing indifference to the future of the Union in England. Brexit has further undermined what was already a Union under pressure, leaving its future survival a more uncertain prospect.
This paper examines the poetry of John Henry Newman (1801–1890) in the context of the revival movement in the Victorian era. Although poetry does not make up the bulk of his writings, it can still be a vehicle for a return to distant literary sources in the interests of revival. This is particularly true of the poetic dream in The Dream of Gerontius, which borrows characteristics from both the anonymous Old English poem The Dream of the Rood and Dante’s Divine Comedy. This creative recourse to old literary and aesthetic sources as an inspiration is marked by porosity, hybridity, and subversion when the mutation of the character takes place in a gradual process from de-personification to kenosis. The poetic journey as well as the passage from life to death are addressed in renewed forms, figures and motifs.
While the New Woman was often mocked and caricatured as a mannish and destructive figure in the late Victorian press, New Woman writers also used humour to attack the status quo and parry ridicule with ridicule. A case in point is the non-canonical New Woman novel, Une Culotte; or a New Woman, An Impossible Story of Modern Oxford (1894), by Horace William Bleackley. This essay explores the fundamental contradictions of humour in Une Culotte by looking at how Bleackley situates his New Women heroines within the context of nineteenth-century British feminism. First I suggest that humour is generated in the novel by the New Woman protagonist’s comic attacks of the rigid construction of gender differences. Then I examine how as a male New Woman writer Bleackley successfully uses female cross-dressing to humorous effect in order to empower the New Woman with opportunities that extend beyond the parameters of home. Bleackley incorporates comic mockery to expose the gender pretensions of the period and ultimately celebrates the New Woman’s control of their bodies. In Une Culotte, the New Women fight back against the mockery of the deeply-rooted culture of contempt for progressive women whilst revealing the comic dimension of cross-dressing and its threat to a dichotomous culture of gender and sexuality.
The article presents information about the V International scientific conference “Military history of Russia: problems, search, solutions” held in Volgograd on September 11–12, 2020, dedicated to the 75th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War. The conference was held at Volgograd State University. The conference was informative and representative in its composition: more than 220 representatives of scientific institutions of the Russian Academy of Sciences, civil and military universities and centers, archives, museums and libraries in 48 cities of Russia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Great Britain, Kazakhstan, USA, Turkmenistan and Ukraine. Among the participants of the conference there was a corresponding member of RAE, 39 doctors and 82 candidates of sciences. Along with professors and associate professors, the conference was attended by young scientists: assistant lecturers, postgraduate students, master students, students and schoolchildren. The article analyzes the work of the plenary session, sections, round tables and the discussion platform. The mainstream sections were the following: “Patriotic War: history and modernity”, “National economy of the USSR during the Great Patriotic War”, “Social history of the Great Patriotic War”, “Lower Volga and the Don during the Great Patriotic War”, “Source base for the study of the Great Patriotic War”, “Problems of historiography of the Great Patriotic War”. The permanent sections presented reports on military history in ancient times, the middle ages, modern and contemporary times, social protection of the population in wartime, and international aspects of the Battle of Stalingrad. The round tables discussed issues of military and political security of society and the state, problems of military memorial tourism in the Russian Federation, and international aspects of military conflicts. The discussion platform was dedicated to patriotic education of children and youth.
History of Russia. Soviet Union. Former Soviet Republics, International relations
This essay explores the interconnections between the discourses on animals, the Empire and women, three domains in which the confidence of the late-Victorian male was being tested at the end of the nineteenth century. It focuses on the South African novelist and essayist Olive Schreiner, whose allegorical turn of mind and intimate knowledge of the Veld predisposed her to look towards animals as conveyors of argumentative meaning. It contextualizes her first novel, The Story of an African Farm (1883), within the ostrich boom and the feather trade of the 1880s and 1890s. It examines how the ostrich participates in an aesthetic of relations, which ranges from Schreiner’s allegorical practice to the reader’s method of interpreting the novel.
This article analyses Jim Sheridan’s film In America (2002), arguing that the American location reflects back imaginary images of Ireland to its Irish audience, in a manner similar to the mechanism described in Lacan’s discussion of his experiment of the inverted bouquet, which he uses to illustrate the three registers of the human psyche. It explores imaginary, symbolic and real dimensions of identity as they are articulated in the film, showing that, as in Lacan’s experiment, the symbolic dimension, which equates with the position of the human subject as social being, is the most powerful structuring force. In Sheridan’s film, this dimension is embodied in Steven Spielberg’s film ET, a fictional narrative that allows Johnny, the father of the family, to articulate his grief and begin a new life. Further, Sheridan’s film suggests that America is the imaginary locus of contemporary Irish identity, and that it can be understood as analogous to the spherical mirror of Lacan’s experiment.
This paper tries to explore the poetic dimension of Hardy's prose, by showing how the poetic voice proceeds from various voices that are heard in the diegesis. For a prose text to become poetic, the dimension of automaton must be at work, with the repetition of equivalent units, but the dimension of tuché must also come into play—the encounter with an unsymbolizable Real. In The Mayor of Casterbridge, it is the signifier « ring » which commemorates the traumatic moment when Henchard sold his wife on a fair (when she flung her wedding-ring in his face), a punctum effect (in the acoustic field) whose recurrence punctuates the text and produces all sorts of reverberations—repeated letters, alliterations, acoustic debris and fragments—whereby something of the « voice qua object » is overheard. Once Henchard is fallen, his roaring voice is heard no more, but he lends an ear to the « voice of desolation », the inhuman voice of the river which invites him to take his own life, while Lucetta is killed by the destructive voice of the « skimmity-ride ». The tragic characters are « riveted to the matter » (to Das Ding), but the poetic voice is pacifying because it brings about that flicker of meaning which makes it impossible to take language literally. It puts a bar between words and things, and thus prohibits tragic jouissance.
Thomas Hardy is a figure of transition caught between a classic type of mimetic aesthetic and a modern type of aesthetic. Just like Turner, he did manage to disrupt the aesthetics of classic realism when he gave up writing novels and wrote The Dynasts. The term « modernism » surfaced in Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) when the narrator complains about the creeping industrial « ache of modernism ». Modernity stands for an aesthetic of change, experimentation, ephemerality and insecurity. Hardy’s works do belong to the condemnatory, apocalyptic and despairing trend that will culminate with T. S. Eliot or W. B. Yeats. If Joyce did manage to create new myths, in Jude the Obscure Hardy chose blasphemy. Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) used Einstein’s ideas of space-time to coin the term « chronotope » to refer to his theory of the distinctive use of topology in particular genres of fiction. Hardy’s Wessex is a poetic creation that generates a new sort of time and space. Some of Hardy’s narratives do not belong to this modern conception of time : when time means loss in Hardy’s fiction, it refers to thermodynamics and to the loss of energy, that is to say time as degradation and no longer time as poetic creation embodied in Hardy’s Wessex.