Men and Masks

Originally published in 1963. Molière's plays rank among the great comic achievements in the history of the stage. Yet few attempts have been made to understand them as expressing the historical context of the author's time. Most frequently they have been interpreted from the point of view of purely literary history, while the characters have been seen as universal comic types. Lionel Gossman reappraises Molière's comedy in the light of historical experience and interprets it in terms of the conditions from which it emerged. He brings it into the mainstream of seventeenth-century French literature and shows that Molière was concerned with the same things that concerned Descartes, Corneille, Racine, or Pascal. Five comedies (Amphitryon, Dom Juan, Le Misanthrope, Le Tartuffe, and George Dandin) are studied in the first part of the book. A number of basic structures are found to be common to all of them, and these give the author his point of departure for the second part of the book. In the second part, Gossman examines Molière's position with respect to other major seventeenth-century French writers. The comic vision of Molière, Gossman argues, no less than the tragic vision of Pascal or of Racine, expresses a particular relation to the social structure of the time. The subject matter of Molière's comedy is thus, in the author's view, not universal human nature but the men and women of the society in which Molière lived. Indeed, Gossman goes on to argue that the development of society after Molière made it difficult, and in the end impossible, for later writers to see the world in the comic light that illuminated Molière's writing. Even in certain of Molière's own works, in fact, the comic vision shades into something close to Romantic irony

Title and Contents- Winter 1981

Great Plains Quarterly WINTER 1981 VOL. 1 NO.1 Contents AN EDITORIAL NOTE Frederick C. Luebke CHINOOK CLIMATES AND PLAINS PEOPLE Reid A. Bryson TOWARD A HISTORY OF PLAINS ARCHEOLOGY Waldo R. Wedel THE JOHN EVANS 1796-97 MAP OF THE MISSOURI RIVER W. Raymond Wood TWO AUTHORS AND A HERO: NEIHARDT, SANDOZ, AND CRAZY HORSE Helen Stauffer BOOK REVIEWS The Ioway Indians The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-60 Women and Men on the Overland Trail Frederic Remington and the West: With the Eye of the Mind The Dust Bowl Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s Trees, Prairies, and People: A History of Tree Planting in the Plains States Western Movies NOTES & NEW

Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment

Originally published in 1968. The contribution of eighteenth-century Englishmen to the study of medieval life and literature is fairly well known, but it is commonly assumed that in France, the center of Enlightenment, no one—with the exception of a few obscure antiquarians—was seriously interested in the Middle Ages. Gossman argues that the Enlightenment gave great impetus to medieval studies in France and altered their orientation, removing them from the realm of legal and ecclesiastical dispute and bringing them into a new framework of general history. Concentrating his investigation of Enlightenment medievalists on the most influential of them, La Curne de Sainte-Palaye, Gossman describes Sainte-Palaye's social and intellectual milieu and follows him in his relations with scholars and philosophes in France and abroad. Voltaire, Montesquieu, Gibbon, Walpole, Muratori, and Herder are some of the figures whose paths crossed that of Sainte-Palaye. Far from being opposed to philosophie, the medievalists were, Gossman argues, nourished at the same intellectual sources and shared many of the values of the philosophes. The existence of a close connection between medievalism and the Enlightenment is substantiated by the author's detailed analyses of Sainte-Palaye's work in the history, literature, and language of the French Middle Ages.Although Sainte-Palaye had a surprising influence on the literature and historiography of both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—in France, England, and Germany—eighteenth-century medievalism, Gossman argues, is best understood not as anticipation of things to come but as part of a complex of ideas and feelings peculiar to the Enlightenment itself

Thomas Annan of Glasgow

In the wake of Glasgow’s transformation in the nineteenth-century into an industrial powerhouse, the "Second City of the Empire,” a substantial part of the old town of Adam Smith degenerated into an overcrowded and disease-ridden slum. The Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow, Thomas Annan’s photographic record of this central section of the city prior to its demolition in accordance with the City of Glasgow Improvements Act of 1866, is widely recognized as a classic of nineteenth-century documentary photography. Annan’s achievement as a photographer of paintings and a portrait and landscape photographer is less widely known. Thomas Annan: Photographer of Victorian Scotland offers a handy, comprehensive and copiously illustrated overview of the full range of the photographer’s work. The book opens with a brief account of the immediate context of Annan’s career as a photographer: the astonishing florescence of photography in Victorian Scotland. Successive chapters deal with each of the main fields of his activity, touching along the way on issues such as the nineteenth-century debate over the status of photography — a mechanical practice or an artistic one? — and the still ongoing controversies surrounding the documentary photograph in particular. While the text itself is intended for the general reader, extensive endnotes amplify particular themes and offer guidance to readers interested in pursuing these themes further

Brownshirt Princess

Princess Marie Adelheid of Lippe-Biesterfeld was a rebellious young writer who became a fervent Nazi. Heinrich Vogeler was a well-regarded artist who was to join the German Communist Party. Ludwig Roselius was a successful businessman who had made a fortune from his invention of decaffeinated coffee. What was it about the revolutionary climate following World War I that induced three such different personalities to collaborate in the production of a slim volume of poetry—entitled Gott in Mir—about the indwelling of the divine within the human? Gossman's study situates the poem in the ideological context that made the collaboration possible: pantheism, Darwinism, disillusionment with traditional liberal values, theosophy and völkisch religions, and Lebensreform. The study outlines the subsequent life of the Princess who, until her death in 1993, continued to support and celebrate the ideals and heroes of National Socialism. Brownshirt Princess provides deep insight into the sources and character of the "Nazi Conscience", and is invaluable reading for anybody interested in understanding German society during the inter-war and Nazi periods. The University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Princeton University, has generously contributed towards the publication of this volume

Brownshirt Princess

Princess Marie Adelheid of Lippe-Biesterfeld was a rebellious young writer who became a fervent Nazi. Heinrich Vogeler was a well-regarded artist who was to join the German Communist Party. Ludwig Roselius was a successful businessman who had made a fortune from his invention of decaffeinated coffee. What was it about the revolutionary climate following World War I that induced three such different personalities to collaborate in the production of a slim volume of poetry—entitled Gott in Mir—about the indwelling of the divine within the human? Gossman's study situates the poem in the ideological context that made the collaboration possible: pantheism, Darwinism, disillusionment with traditional liberal values, theosophy and völkisch religions, and Lebensreform. The study outlines the subsequent life of the Princess who, until her death in 1993, continued to support and celebrate the ideals and heroes of National Socialism. Brownshirt Princess provides deep insight into the sources and character of the "Nazi Conscience", and is invaluable reading for anybody interested in understanding German society during the inter-war and Nazi periods. The University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Princeton University, has generously contributed towards the publication of this volume

1. The Title

The Princess’s poem is presented in three typologically distinct parts. In the first of these – twenty-one pages of loosely connected verse, printed on very high quality paper in large-font Fraktur or traditional German rather than Roman lettering – the text is divided into sections of uneven length (anywhere from four to seventeen lines) each of which, even the shortest, has a page to itself and can be read either as an untitled individual poem in a collection or as an integral part of a loo..

15. Jewish Organizations

″Kaiser′s Spy,″ urbane man of the world, self-satisfied member of the German upper class, dedicated archaeologist and scholar of the ancient Middle East, sympathetic student of Muslim peoples and cultures, and in all situations and at all times undeviating German patriot, Max von Oppenheim resists easy characterization. It might be tempting to interpret his disregard of the Jewish element in his family background—to the point of actively collaborating with the National Socialist regime—in ter..

Introduction

The name of Max, Freiherr von Oppenheim (1860–1946) still rings a bell in two fields of scholarly specialization. Among archaeologists and ethnographers working on ancient Near and Middle Eastern civilizations, he is well known as the discoverer of Tell Halaf, a rich treasure trove of artefacts, some dating from prehistoric times, some from around 1,000 B.C., in Northern Syria, and as an attentive and sympathetic observer and analyst of the customs and social structure of the Bedouins. In the..