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Author: Emilio Gentile
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313072116
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
During the 20th century, Italy experienced some regrettable political developments. It was the first European nation after World War I in which a mass militia-party of revolutionary nationalism achieved power and abolished parliamentary democracy with the goal of building a totalitarian state. It was also the first in Europe to institutionalize the sacralization of politics and to celebrate officially the cult of the leader as a demi-God. These achievements were not accidents. Since the beginning of the 20th century, Italian nationalist movements, from the national radicalism of La Voce to futurist nationalism and fascism, fostered one of the strongest waves of European right-wing radicalism. The confrontation between nationalism and modernity is one of the main keys to understanding to the permutations of Italian radical nationalism from modernist avant-gardes up to the fascist regime. This book analyzes the ideological undercurrents and cultural myths that unite all these movements. Looking at Italian nationalism from its risorgimento roots to the neo-fascist heritage, Gentile considers the relationship between myth and organization in the making of the fascist state, the role of the party, the liturgy of mass politics in Italy, the fascist organizations abroad, and the attitude of fascist culture toward the United States.
Author: Emilio Gentile
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313072116
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
During the 20th century, Italy experienced some regrettable political developments. It was the first European nation after World War I in which a mass militia-party of revolutionary nationalism achieved power and abolished parliamentary democracy with the goal of building a totalitarian state. It was also the first in Europe to institutionalize the sacralization of politics and to celebrate officially the cult of the leader as a demi-God. These achievements were not accidents. Since the beginning of the 20th century, Italian nationalist movements, from the national radicalism of La Voce to futurist nationalism and fascism, fostered one of the strongest waves of European right-wing radicalism. The confrontation between nationalism and modernity is one of the main keys to understanding to the permutations of Italian radical nationalism from modernist avant-gardes up to the fascist regime. This book analyzes the ideological undercurrents and cultural myths that unite all these movements. Looking at Italian nationalism from its risorgimento roots to the neo-fascist heritage, Gentile considers the relationship between myth and organization in the making of the fascist state, the role of the party, the liturgy of mass politics in Italy, the fascist organizations abroad, and the attitude of fascist culture toward the United States.
Author: Donald B. Kraybill
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 9780874516845
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
A distinctive American subculture responds to the forces of social change
Author: Diana Yeh
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9888208179
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
"Try Something Different. Something Really Chinese" The Happy Hsiungs recovers the lost histories of Shih-I and Dymia Hsiung, two once highly visible, but now largely forgotten Chinese writers in Britain, who sought to represent China and Chineseness to the rest of the world. Shih-I shot to worldwide fame with his play Lady Precious Stream in the 1930s and became known as the first Chinese director to work in the West End and on Broadway. Dymia was the first Chinese woman in Britain to publish a fictional autobiography in English. Diana Yeh traces the Hsiungs' lives from their childhood in Qing dynasty China and youth amid the radical May Fourth era to Britain and the USA, where they rubbed shoulders with George Bernard Shaw, James M. Barrie, H. G. Wells, Pearl Buck, Lin Yutang, Anna May Wong and Paul Robeson. In recounting the Hsiungs' rise to fame, Yeh focuses on the challenges they faced in becoming accepted as modern subjects, as knowledge of China and the Chinese was persistently framed by colonial legacies and Orientalist discourses, which often determined how their works were shaped and understood. She also shows how Shih-I and Dymia, in negotiating acceptance, "'performed" not only specific forms of Chineseness but identities that conformed to modern ideals of class, gender and sexuality, defined by the heteronormative nuclear family. Though fêted as 'The Happy Hsiungs', their lives ultimately highlight a bitter struggle in attempts to become modern. "In the 1930s, China became briefly fashionable again, after decades of Fu Manchu-style demonising. This switch coincided with the rise of anti-fascism in the West and a new visibility of Chinese art. In a path-breaking contribution to the study of artistic production by British Chinese, Yeh recovers the Hsiungs' forgotten history, their role in this new China wave, and their struggle against hostile stereotyping. Shedding light on a history few can have expected, the book shows high narrative skill and the author's strong empathetic imagination brings everything to life." —Gregor Benton, author of Chinese Migrants and Internationalism and The Chinese in Britain "Through the riveting story of a successful couple of British Chinese artists, the Hsiungs, this book contributes to our understanding of the real struggles involved in the acceptance of 'Chineseness' not as a fixed identity governed by unchanging tradition (as Western Orientalism would have it), but as a resolutely modern performative invention shaped by a confluence of globally circulating hybrid ideas, concepts and images." —Ien Ang, author of On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West "Thanks to the phenomenal success of his play Lady Precious Stream, Shih-I Hsiung was a household name in the US and UK during the 1930s. Diana Yeh explores the Hsiungs' role in representing China and Chineseness to the rest of the world forcing us to rethink our vision of the British Chinese as invisible and insular, with little social, cultural or political impact on wider society." —Anne Witchard, author of Lao She in London and Thomas Burke's Dark Chinoiserie "The story of Shih-I and Dymia Hsiung fills a gap in our understanding of the Chinese experience in England—and highlights how very different it is from that in America. Yeh does a remarkable job in unravelling the relationship between the Hsiungs, the couple who landed in London in the 1930s, and the Hsiungs as personas, constructs designed to suit as well as to subvert British tastes for and preconceptions of Chineseness." —Ronald Egan, Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Stanford University
Author: Vassos Argyrou
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521560950
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
The subject of Vassos Argyrou's study is modernisation, as reflected in the changing nature of wedding celebrations in Cyprus over two generations from the 1930s to the present day. He argues that modernisation is not a secular, progressive process, that remodels the life of a society, ironing out local differences. Rather, it is a legitimising discourse. It is an idiom which Greek Cypriots employ to represent, and contest, relationships between social classes, old and young, men and women, city folk and villagers. At the same time, by involving modernisation, they are submitting to foreign standards, and accepting the symbolic domination of Europe.
Author: John de la Mothe
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292758960
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 266
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Book Description
The condition of modernity springs from that tension between science and the humanities that had its roots in the Enlightenment but reached its full flowering with the rise of twentieth-century technology. It manifests itself most notably in the crisis of individuality that is generated by the nexus of science, literature, and politics, one that challenges each of us to find a way of balancing our personal identities between our public and private selves in an otherwise estranging world. This challenge, which can only be expressed as "the struggle of modernity," perhaps finds no better expression than in C. P. Snow. In his career as novelist, scientist, and civil servant, C. P. Snow (1905-1980) attempted to bridge the disparate worlds of modern science and the humanities. While Snow is often regarded as a late-Victorian liberal who has little to say about the modernist period in which he lived and wrote, de la Mothe challenges this judgment, reassessing Snow's place in twentieth-century thought. He argues that Snow's life and writings—most notably his Strangers and Brothers sequence of novels and his provocative thesis in The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution—reflect a persistent struggle with the nature of modernity. They manifest Snow's belief that science and technology were at the center of modern life.
Author: Loyd Grossman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781858946412
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
At the time of his death in 1820, Benjamin West was the most famous artist in the English-speaking world, and much admired throughout Europe. From humble beginnings in Pennsylvania, he had become the first American artist to study in Italy, and within a few short years of his arrival in London, was instrumental in the foundation of the Royal Academy of Arts (he succeeded Sir Joshua Reynolds to become its second President) and became history painter to King George III. In his lifetime, West's meteoric rise to prominence and the great pleasure he took in his success attracted criticism, and his posthumous reputation took a savage mauling from Victorian critics, one of whom dubbed him 'The Monarch of Mediocrity'. But even at his critical nadir, West's most celebrated work, The Death of General Wolfe, commemorating the British victory at the Battle of Quebec in 1759 and first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1771, continued to fascinate. Although it was not, as is sometimes claimed, the first history painting to feature contemporary costume, it was the first picture in such a vein to become a critical and popular success in Britain. West remains today the most neglected and misunderstood of Britain's great eighteenth-century artists, lacking the social bite of Hogarth, the bravura of Reynolds or the easy elegance of Gainsborough. Nor was he a forceful writer (unlike Hogarth and Reynolds), and he did not possess the intellectual credentials to which so many of his fellow artists aspired. And yet, as Loyd Grossman asserts in his new book, West was extraordinarily in tune with the artistic and intellectual currents that swirled through his turbulent times. He was in the vanguard of both Neoclassicism and Romanticism, and among the very first artists to give visual expression to the exciting and heroic qualities of contemporary events, as opposed to episodes dredged up from the biblical, classical or mythological past, which had long enjoyed the highest artistic status. West's Wolfe was painted at a time when Europeans were just beginning to abandon the tendency to look backwards. Men and women of letters, philosophers and historians were increasingly convinced that modernity could equal and even surpass the achievements of the ancient Greeks and Romans. This new-found ability to believe in the value of the present and to look forward to a progressive future is very much the foundation of the 'modern' attitude that has affected the way we live and think ever since. While acknowledging that West's reputation is still precarious, Grossman explains why Wolfe was such an instant success and why this thrilling work of art continues to exercise such a strong grip on our imaginations nearly 250 years after it was first shown to the public. He situates West in the midst of Enlightenment thinking about history and modernity, and seeks to demolish some of the prejudices about the talent and intentions of the young man from the Pennsylvania frontier who attained such eminence at the British court.
Author: Daniel H. Nexon
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 140083080X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372
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Book Description
Scholars have long argued over whether the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ended more than a century of religious conflict arising from the Protestant Reformations, inaugurated the modern sovereign-state system. But they largely ignore a more fundamental question: why did the emergence of new forms of religious heterodoxy during the Reformations spark such violent upheaval and nearly topple the old political order? In this book, Daniel Nexon demonstrates that the answer lies in understanding how the mobilization of transnational religious movements intersects with--and can destabilize--imperial forms of rule. Taking a fresh look at the pivotal events of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--including the Schmalkaldic War, the Dutch Revolt, and the Thirty Years' War--Nexon argues that early modern "composite" political communities had more in common with empires than with modern states, and introduces a theory of imperial dynamics that explains how religious movements altered Europe's balance of power. He shows how the Reformations gave rise to crosscutting religious networks that undermined the ability of early modern European rulers to divide and contain local resistance to their authority. In doing so, the Reformations produced a series of crises in the European order and crippled the Habsburg bid for hegemony. Nexon's account of these processes provides a theoretical and analytic framework that not only challenges the way international relations scholars think about state formation and international change, but enables us to better understand global politics today.
Author: Rana Mitter
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 9780192806055
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388
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Book Description
China is now poised to take a key role on the world stage, but in the early twentieth century the situation could not have been more different. Rana Mitter goes back to this pivotal moment in Chinese history to uncover the origins of the painful transition from a premodern past into a modern world. By the 1920s the seemingly civilized world shaped over the last two thousand years by the legacy of the great philosopher Confucius was falling apart in the face of western imperialism and internal warfare. Chinese cities still bore the imprints of its ancient past with narrow, lanes and temples to long-worshipped gods, but these were starting to change with the influx of foreign traders, teachers, and missionaries, all eager to shape China's ancient past into a modern present. Mitter takes us through the resulting social turmoil and political promise, the devastating war against Japan in the 1940s, Communism and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and the new era of hope in the 1980s ended by the Tian'anmen uprising. He reveals the impetus behind the dramatic changes in Chinese culture and politics as being China's "New Culture" - a strain of thought which celebrated youth, individualism, and the heady mixture of strange and seductive new cultures from places as far apart as America, India, and Japan.
Author: Frank Ninkovich
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226586502
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 448
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Book Description
Modernity and Power provides a fresh conceptual overview of twentieth-century United States foreign policy, from the Roosevelt and Taft administrations through the presidencies of Kennedy and Johnson. Beginning with Woodrow Wilson, American leaders gradually abandoned the idea of international relations as a game of geopolitical interplays, basing their diplomacy instead on a symbolic opposition between "world public opinion" and the forces of destruction and chaos. Frank Ninkovich provocatively links this policy shift to the rise of a distinctly modernist view of history. To emphasize the central role of symbolism and ideological assumptions in twentieth-century American statesmanship, Ninkovich focuses on the domino theory—a theory that departed radically from classic principles of political realism by sanctioning intervention in world regions with few financial or geographic claims on the national interest. Ninkovich insightfully traces the development of this global strategy from its first appearance early in the century through the Vietnam war. Throughout the book, Ninkovich draws on primary sources to recover the worldview of the policy makers. He carefully assesses the coherence of their views rather than judge their actions against "objective" realities. Offering a new alternative to realpolitic and economic explanations of foreign policy, Modernity and Power will change the way we think about the history of U.S. international relations.
Author: Harry Van Dyke
Publisher: Lexham Press
ISBN: 1683593219
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 237
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Book Description
God's word illumines the darkness of society. Dutch politician and historian Groen van Prinsterer's Unbelief and Revolution is a foundational work addressing the inherent tension between the church and secular society. Writing at the onset of modernity in Western culture, Groen saw with amazing clarity the dire implications of abandoning God's created order for human life in society. Groen's work served as an inspiration for many contemporary theologians, and he had a profound impact on Abraham Kuyper's famous public theology. In Challenging the Spirit of Modernity, Harry Van Dyke places this seminal work into historical context, revealing how this vital contribution still speaks into the fractured relationship between religion and society. A deeper understanding of the roots of modern secularism and Groen's strong, faithful response to it gives us a better grasp of the same conflict today.
