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-evaluated as an aesthetic object, decoupled from the conditions of its reception. Ultimately it calls for more sustained attention to the conditions under which any television drama considered a ‘failure’ in its historical moment might be granted (or denied) a ‘second life’. John 's arrival in 2007 also coincided with a debate in television studies regarding the proper place of aesthetic evaluation within the field. Amid a burgeoning interest in the study of HBO-era US ‘quality’ TV, a number of scholars working under the aegis of
the story-telling ones, or they have used the texts as examples of philistine or plainly wrong criticism. For instance, Julia Thomas thinks that one critic made a ‘mistake’ by imagining a graveyard in the background of William Holman Hunt’s Awakening Conscience (1853, Tate Britain, London), Richard Dorment finds the reception of James McNeill Whistler’s Woman in White (now known as Symphony
and ‘welfare’) – and today’s theoretical doldrums. Many sociologists used Michel Foucault’s ideas to supplement, and then replace, the left-structuralist consensus of the 1970s and 1980s, and, we will suggest, his reception and adaptation over this period allowed for the transition from one perspective to another to be achieved in an apparently less haphazard manner. Foucault, for thinkers like Stuart Hall, complemented and later superseded the works of Althusser and Gramsci, while for others (e.g. Silverman, 1985), his perspective bridged the structure
159 9 Abandonment, reception and infant mortality Foundling hospitals and their attempts at rescuing illegitimate children can be said to have rested on three axioms. The first was that bastards, though subject to prejudice and social disapproval, had a right to life, both temporal and eternal, and that their murder was a heinous crime. The second was that, although the honour of a single mother and her family could not justify murder or exposure, it did justify the separation of base-born children from their blood parents, even from those who had the means to
2 Reception, internment and repatriation, 1939–40 The Spanish republicans had their own name for the mass exodus of 1939: ‘la retirada’. Literally translated as ‘the retreat’, it refers to the Republican army’s rearguard action and the civilians’ flight from Catalonia. The term ‘retreat’ offers a different perspective to defeat. It embodies a transitory quality and the absence of conclusion: la retirada signalled an intention to return. In effect, both the refugees and French authorities perceived la retirada as the start of an intervening and temporary phase
Fascination with Egyptian mummies continues to endure, linked no doubt to their recurring presence in popular culture, which in turn prompts a focus on mummified human remains in museums. This chapter consider the basic polarities in attitudes to mummies – from rapture to revulsion – and considers the idea that each encounter can represent a contradictory response to, and appropriation of, Pharaonic funerary culture. Perhaps the most enduring ‘discovery’ is that the historic and pervasive longing to know the people behind the images and funerary objects of ancient Egypt is in fact a reflection of our own modern concern with life and death, and the fascinations and fears of what is after life.
11 Chaucer as Catholic child in nineteenth-century English reception Andrew Lynch ‘A Catholic, but not very keen’ In The Poet Chaucer, first published in 1949, Nevill Coghill applied to Chaucer’s religious outlook something once said to him by ‘a Swiss cathedral organist’: ‘“Oui, je suis catholique, mais pas très aigu”’ (‘Yes, I’m a Catholic, but not very keen’).1 Coghill’s comment may be said to reflect the mainstream view of Chaucer’s religion in critical reception throughout much of the twentieth century, picking up a mood that had been established by 1900
This article charts and discusses the reasons for various significant shifts and developments during the nineteenth century of the reception of the Reformation amongst different denominations and groups within British Protestantism. Attitudes towards Foxes ‘Book of Martyrs’ are explored as but one among several litmus tests of the breakdown of an earlier fragile consensus based on anti-Catholicism as a unifying principle, with the Oxford Movement and the intra-Protestant reaction to it identified as a crucial factor. The selfidentity of the various British Protestant,denominations, notably the various Nonconformist bodies as well as the established Church and evangelicalism per se was at stake in the process of ‘reception’. Moreover, the emergence of more secular Protestant understandings of the significance of the Reformation as an essential stage in the emergence of modernity and liberty, often at odds with nineteenth-century evangelical theological interpretations of its meaning and legacy, are also highlighted. The result is an attempt to transcend the traditional focus on Protestant-Catholic disputes over the Reformation in narrowly bipolar terms.
produce new, contestatory and specifically local ‘codes of reception’ of this culture rather than just passively imitate it (Appadurai, 1996 : 32). López, for example, has noted how early Latin American cinéastes sought to ‘indigenize’ the film vistas that came to them from Europe and the US by producing their own specifically Latin American styles and views (2001: 52). El automóvil gris figures as one such example of the
des songes (1951). The lengthy list of Carné’s incomplete films also emphasises that, despite his successes, his career was not free from obstacles, whether financial or censorial. One of the ways that his trajectory contained highs and lows was through the changing critical reception of his work. While his films were initially highly acclaimed by the French critical establishment, his reputation was badly damaged in the 1950s by the