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and their makers are linked with one of the most significant social and political upheavals of the century. In March 1917, after years of servitude and impoverishment, the mass of the Russian people overthrew the Tsar and established a liberal provisional government led by Alexander Kerensky and supported by Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary factions. However, dissatisfaction with the new government’s policies
This essay examines the Gothic trope of monstrosity in a range of literary and historical works, from writings on the French Revolution to Mary Shelleys Frankenstein to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I argue that, in the various versions of the Frankenstein myth, what has ultimately come to seem most monstrous is the uncanny coupling of literary and political discourse. Beginning with Jacobin and anti-Jacobin discourse, this essay traces the tendency of literary tropes to turn into political tropes. In Frankenstein and in the Victorian rewritings of Shelley‘s novel, the trope of monstrosity functions, with remarkable consistency, as a mechanism which enables the unstable and often revolutionary turns between aesthetic and ideological discourse. Because the trope of monstrosity at the heart of Frankenstein exists on the border between literary and political discourse that trope has emerged as one of the most crucial forces in current critical theoretical debates about the relationship between aesthetics and ideology.
6 Trotskyism and the revolutionary self Trotskyist men and women faced greater continuation of political culture between student and adult life than did their counterparts on the ‘non-aligned’ Left. In IS and the IMG the upsurge of union militancy and industrial strife that flourished during 1969 –72 confirmed the leadership in its ambitions for building the revolutionary party. Politics focused on external sites of struggle, and the masculine militant culture that had characterised the VSC continued to prevail. However, activists remained emotional, gendered
5 Revolutionary politics à la plume: the public on education and politics Jules Michelet described the spring of 1789 as the “true era of the birth of the people. It called the whole nation to the exercise of its rights. They could at least write their complaints, their wishes, and choose the electors.”1 While historians have been quick to note the distance that separated the representatives in Versailles and the people who had elected them, Michelet’s point is worth remembering. The citizens could write. And write they did. They built upon the precedent of the
Disabled Great War pensioners receiving in-patient treatment became unfortunate fatalities of the conflict. William McGrath, who lost an arm fighting for the Leinster Regiment during the First World War, was one accidental victim hit by a stray bullet fired by British forces in Cork, providing a tragic metaphor for the circumstances in which disabled British ex-servicemen now found themselves. 54 There were eleven separate incidents of damage to Ministry property or staff across Ireland during the revolutionary period
Revolutionary bodies traces a style of homoerotic writing in twentieth-century and contemporary Irish fiction. As this study demonstrates, writers in that tradition explored a broad spectrum of cultural and political concerns, while experimenting with the conventions of literary realism. We witness how, in these various works, the longing for the male body is insistently associated with utopian political desire. Developing a series of innovative readings, the argument proceeds through three author-centred chapters (Brendan Behan; John Broderick; Colm Tóibín) followed by two chapters on Irish gay fiction and ‘Celtic Tiger’ fiction. The latter two chapters focus on work by Keith Ridgway, Jamie O’Neill, Micheál Ó Conghaile and Barry McCrea, among others. Revolutionary Bodies prompts us to reconsider the relationship between aesthetics, literature and sexual liberation.
Lewis Namier was one of the most important historians of the twentieth century. His work on the politics of the 1760s, based on the ‘scientific’ analysis of a mass of contemporary documents, and emphasising the material and psychological elements of human motivation, was seen by contemporaries as ’revolutionary’ and remains controversial. It gave a new word to the English language: to Namierise. Moreover, Namier played a major role in public affairs, in the Foreign Office, 1915–20, and in the Zionist Organisation in the 1930s, and was close to many of the leading figures of his day. This is the first biography of Namier for half a century, and the first to integrate all aspects of his life and thought. Based on a comprehensive range of sources, including the entire corpus of Namier’s writings, it provides a full account of his background, examines his role in politics and reconstructs his work as a historian, showing the origins and development of his ideas about the past, and the subjects which preoccupied him: nationalism, empire, and the psychology of individuals and groups. Namier’s life and writings illuminate many of the key events of the twentieth century, his belief in the power of nationalism and the importance of national territory, foreshadowing problems which still beset our own world.
Between 9 August and 9 October 1793, the French city of Lyon was besieged by military forces of the central authority in Paris. Earlier that year, the Jacobin municipality at Lyon had been overthrown by a counter-revolutionary insurrection. Subsequently, the ville rebelle was besieged by the National Convention in Paris and ultimately defeated. The Hôtel-Dieu hospital at Lyon was reduced to ruins in the battle. Three years later, in 1796, Antoine Petit, a surgeon who was present during the siege, gave an account of that disturbing episode in
The fame culture of the nineteenth century was not circumscribed by national boundaries. This chapter explores the transnational nature of the nineteenth-century public sphere by exploring the celebration in the United Kingdom of two European revolutionaries: the Hungarian Lajos (often Anglicised as ‘Louis’) Kossuth, and the Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi. These men provide excellent case studies of foreign politicians who became wildly popular in Britain within a very short space of time, and whose reputations and political and cultural significance were
O N 20 A PRIL 1792, after months of intense debate, the deputies of the French National Assembly declared war on Austria. Over twenty-three years later, the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo on 18 June 1815 finally brought an end to the French Revolutionary-Napoleonic Wars. Between these two dates lay over two decades of almost constant warfare, with Revolutionary and