History of concepts: comparative perspectives

Although vastly influential in German-speaking Europe, conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte) has until now received little attention in English. This genre of intellectual history differs from both the French history of mentalités and the Anglophone history of discourses by positing the concept - the key occupier of significant syntactical space - as the object of historical investigation. Contributions by distinguished practitioners and critics of conceptual history from Europe and America illustrate both the distinctiveness and diversity of the genre. The first part of the book is devoted to the origins and identity of the field, as well as methodological issues. Part two presents exemplary studies focusing either on a particular concept (such as Maurizio Viroli's 'Reason of the State') or a particular approach to conceptual history (e.g. Bernard Scholz for literary criticism and Terence Ball for political science). The final, most innovative section of the book looks at concepts and art - high, bourgeois and demotic. Here Bram Kempers discusses the conceptual history of Raphael's frescos in the Stanza della Segnatura of the Vatican; Eddy de Jongh examines the linguistic character of much Dutch genre painting; and Rolf Reichardt considers the conceptual structure implicit in card games of the French Revolution, used to induct those on the margins of literacy into the new revolutionary world-view

Models and Modelling between Digital and Humanities: A Multidisciplinary Perspective

This Supplement of Historical Social Research stems from the contributions on the topic of modelling presented at the workshop “Thinking in Practice”, held at Wahn Manor House in Cologne on January 19-20, 2017. With Digital Humanities as starting point, practical examples of model building from different disciplines are considered, with the aim of contributing to the dialogue on modelling from several perspectives. Combined with theoretical considerations, this collection illustrates how the process of modelling is one of coming to know, in which the purpose of each modelling activity and the form in which models are expressed has to be taken into consideration in tandem. The modelling processes presented in this volume belong to specific traditions of scholarly and practical thinking as well as to specific contexts of production and use of models. The claim that supported the project workshop was indeed that establishing connections between different traditions of and approaches toward modelling is vital, whether these connections are complementary or intersectional. The workshop proceedings address an underpinning goal of the research project itself, namely that of examining the nature of the epistemological questions in the different traditions and how they relate to the nature of the modelled objects and the models being created. This collection is an attempt to move beyond simple representational views on modelling in order to understand modelling processes as scholarly and cultural phenomena as such

Discourses of Purity in Transcultural Perspective (300–1600)

This volume comprises fifteen articles on the differing functions that purity, impurity, pollution and related categories could fulfil in Asian and European religions and societies of the 3rd to 17th century c.E. They focus processes of religious demarcation and transfer.; Readership: All interested in processes of interaction between societies and inidividuals of different creeds and cultures: historians, anthropologists, theologians

Rhapsodic Objects

Circulation and imitation of cultural products are key factors in shaping the material world.The contributions explore how technical knowledge, immaterial desires, and political agendas impacted the production and consumption of visual and material culture in different times and places. They map a new a multidirectional market for cultural goods in which the source countries can be positioned at the center

Myths of empire, evil, and the body in Zola's Rougon-Macquart

This thesis examines how Zola’s use of myth in his Rougon-Macquart elucidates the immorality of Napoleon III’s Second Empire (1852–70). Focusing on seven novels, it uncovers the political and economic corruption which originates from the moral degeneration of the political body and the bourgeoisie. Using myth as a critical tool, Zola demonstrates that the immorality becomes so extreme that a state of evil has been reached. The corruption is figured as material evil which traverses the Empire in various forms, always denoting death and degeneracy. Zola invokes the myth of original sin — Christianity’s definition of evil — but rejects its metaphysical nature by naturalising it as the fêlure. The secular fêlure provides Zola with a meaningful way of expressing corruption in the modern age because it lies within the human world. Expressed as illness and as a material presence, the fêlure, for Zola, must overturn Christianity’s metaphysical original sin as the paradigm for human morality. Redemption, or the resolution of evil, is similarly a humanist concept for Zola, and represents the triumph of life over death, and secular justice and hope for the individual and the nation. Chapter 1 compares Zola’s La Débâcle (1892) with Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1892) which linked the body, society, and morality, so that Zola portrays immorality as an illness and natural evil emanating from the emperor’s political body. In chapter 2, the degeneracy of the Empire becomes a spatial concept. The ‘underground’ of modern Paris becomes the space of the fêlure which stigmatises the poor. Chapter 3 examines the devastating effects of economic excess in which bourgeois women visibly suffer from degenerative illness and natural evil. Redemption occurs in chapter 4 when the Rougon-Macquart family fêlure dissipates through naturalist means, a seam of evil which transmutes into an illness that can be cured

Powerful Prose

What makes a reading experience »powerful«? This volume brings together literary scholars, linguists, and empirical researchers to elucidate the effects and reader responses to investigate just that. The thirteen contributions theorize this widely-used, but to date insufficiently studied notion, and provide insights into the therefore still mysterious-seeming power of literary fiction. The collection investigates a variety of stylistic as well as readerly and psychological features responsible for short- and long-term effects - topics of great interest to those interested or specialized in literary studies and narratology, (cognitive) stylistics, empirical literary studies and reader response theory

Discourses of Purity in Transcultural Perspective (300–1600)

This volume comprises fifteen articles on the differing functions that purity, impurity, pollution and related categories could fulfil in Asian and European religions and societies of the 3rd to 17th century c.E. They focus processes of religious demarcation and transfer.; Readership: All interested in processes of interaction between societies and inidividuals of different creeds and cultures: historians, anthropologists, theologians

Rhapsodic Objects

Circulation and imitation of cultural products are key factors in shaping the material world.The contributions explore how technical knowledge, immaterial desires, and political agendas impacted the production and consumption of visual and material culture in different times and places. They map a new a multidirectional market for cultural goods in which the source countries can be positioned at the center

Metafiction and Masculinities in Abe Kazushige's 90s Fiction

Eclectic in style and elusive in genre, Abe Kazushige’s 90s fiction defies categorization. My dissertation situates the author’s novels and short stories published until 1999 within what it considers to be a global field of postmodernist poetics and politics since the late 1970s. It uses the term écriture to indicate the deconstructionist narrative discourse of the texts as an experimental ‘writing’. Abe’s fiction describes the worlds of men. All the same, research on the author has not analyzed his novels and short stories from a perspective of masculinities studies yet. My dissertation fills this gap; I argue that the metafiction of Abe’s early novels and short stories provides a literary counter-discourse to cultural narratives on shifting male identities in post-bubble Japan by evoking conflicting images. On the one hand, the protagonists, who struggle to come of age as flexible workers in mid-1990s Japan, resort to physical violence in order to affirm archaic images of embodied masculinities to counteract their subordinate male status. On the other hand, this affirmation is queered, as the men are not able to form heterosexual relationships and instead obsess over homosocial bonds with peers. Moreover, Abe’s early novels and short stories as well as his media appearances can be considered nodal points of larger avant-garde debates that challenged established assumptions of how literature was supposed to be written in Japan at the time. In fact, Abe was at the centre of a ‘90s generation’ of writers emerging during the decade. During a marketing campaign labelled ‘J-Bungaku’ (J-Literature), launched in 1998, these writers positioned themselves as a new group within the literary field (sezon-kei) in order to initiate a public discussion about outworn hegemonies of high literature. In the first monograph-length analysis of these important cultural discussions surrounding Abe’s fiction and his public persona in the mid-1990s, I highlight Abe Kazushige’s crucial role as both public face and main facilitator of this literary movement. I further reframe the 1990s in Japan as a formative phase for what some call the literature of global modernity. In the very first monograph-length study on Abe Kazushige, I introduce an under-translated author and his works into the global canon of World Literature