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not Captain Sutherland who is awkward. He returned from York this morning—quite altered, delighted with Mr Gray . Glad A– had put the business into his hands, and apologised handsomely for what he (Captain S–) had said to A—yesterday. It was Mrs S– not he who refused A– the keeping of the books—he told Mrs S– she was illiberal. So he has got right with A –. Mr Gray said the books did not belong to either sister, but should of right be kept for the benefit of both by some indifferent [disinterested] person. S– handsomely said A– was the proper person to keep them
’. 12 Stendhal's writing doesn't merely describe a place, then: it produces Italy as a utopian site through an imaginative rendering of geography, culture, politics, history and art; his version of Italy animates the liberal political and aesthetic sensibilities that Stendhal valued (and that he believed were under threat from illiberal regimes). And descriptions of experiences of being overwhelmed are crucial to Stendhal's performative theory of Italy and to his aspirational version of an aesthetically and politically responsive subject
This essay explores the vexed matters of race and Empire in Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming-Pool Library, tracing the lines of connection between colonial and contemporary constructions of otherness upon which the novel dwells. In presenting the protagonist's libidinous pursuit of black sexual partners in 1980s' London as recycling some of the exploitative behaviours of colonial desire, the novel probes the possibility of opening up a critical space where an alternative rendering of race might be sourced amidst the cross-racial sexual encounters that seem driven by older, illiberal attitudes. Rather than support the view that the novel is fully complicit with familiar forms of racialisation, this essay suggests that a different, more liberal view of race relations can be glimpsed and is empowered by Hollinghurst's engagement with a counter-hegemonic tradition of gay writing that includes figures such as E. M. Forster and especially Ronald Firbank.
thought and political traditions from the colonial period to the present. 6 The importation of slaves, beginning in 1658, was the first instance of an illiberal policy that would initiate the liberal and ‘enlightened’ challenges to Dutch East India Company rule and later to slavery itself. 7 This is the foundation from which this chapter proposes to launch an argument about the history of protest literature in South Africa. Contrary to popular belief and perception, protest literature did not begin in the 1960s but is actually a long-standing tradition of South
the photograph ‘because of Molly’, whose mischievous spirit will be betrayed (Am, p. 75), rather than because of a moral abhorrence of illiberal motives. Halliday’s motives are additionally tainted, of course, by the possibility of a personal vendetta against Garmony, a hated love rival. Most important, however, is the impossibility of either character achieving a position of moral disinterestedness in relation to the photographs: the very act of putting a case is ethically flawed for both of them. In Halliday’s self-justification, the vein of satirical humour
-simplification, I suggest a common element in these strategies: it was simply too hard, and generally unpalatable, in the nineteenth-century English cultural climate to credit the ‘Father of English poetry’ with a sincere medieval Catholicism. To identify Chaucer as an adult Catholic with a strong religious allegiance would have meant for most readers branding him as fundamentally un-‘English’ – subservient, superstitious and illiberal, rather than the manly, sensible, tolerant fellow most of them desired. The problem was not simply fear of the Church as ‘a totalitarian, foreign
into this regrettable incident!’20 Angus Wilson has described ‘The Army of a Dream’ as an example of Kipling’s philo-Semitic ‘respect for the Jewish contribution to Western civilization’ which, if true, implies a low opinion of Kipling’s ‘respect’ (‘scuppered by Jew-boys’). Wilson argues that the use of ‘Jew-boys’ is slang common to the whole Victorian and Edwardian age but, as we will see, this term of abuse is quite specific to Kipling’s self-consciously illiberal and racialised vocabulary and cannot be assimilated to the language of tolerant liberal reasoning
, Arabella, these transitions are FRANKLIN 9781526134370 PRINT.indd 31 20/12/2018 10:47 32 Hartly House not to be avoided, on a spot, where vivacity and dignity of mind is transient, and a low ebb of both the one and the other, the consequence of languor not to be resisted, and of gusts of heat not to be described. I am, Yours, as usual, S.G. s Letter VIII How prophetic were my words, Arabella, where I mention my apprehensions of the refusals I should be called upon to make!—A painful task to a feeling, and not illiberal mind; but we must all submit to our destiny
Act. The Act made use of the same system of tribunals as the previous Derby scheme, but it was not until the summer of 1916 that proper guidelines for the hearings of conscientious objectors were issued by the War Office. By then, the 2,086 tribunals had already had to deal with almost six thousand objectors, many of whom were now in military hands. To Russell, the whole issue of compulsory military service ‘was the epitome of illiberalism’ and as such, became the main focus of his anti-war Bertrand Russell and Cambridge 65 work from the spring of 1916. He
society. The presumption of holding a “monopoly of the truth” destroys all systems of liberty and is conducive to the revival of tribalism’ (p. 133); the idea that there is, or can be, a ‘privileged’ source of knowledge ‘always violates the egalitarian theory of rationality, and this always produces illiberal social systems’ (p. 144). Infantino sums up the political consequences of ignorance as follows: The difficult struggle man has been involved in since the time of ancient Athens is among those who consider themselves ignorant and fallible