Knowledge Dissemination in the Long Nineteenth Century

Knowledge Dissemination in the Long Nineteenth Century Knowledge Dissemination in the Long Nineteenth Century: European and Transatlantic Perspectives Edited by Marina Dossena and Stefano Rosso Knowledge Dissemination in the Long Nineteenth Century: European and Transatlantic Perspectives Edited by Marina Dossena and Stefano Rosso This book first published 2016 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2016 by Marina Dossena, Stefano Rosso and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-8984-9 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-8984-1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Marina Dossena and Stefano Rosso American Artists Look West ....................................................................... 9 Bruno Cartosio The Winning of the Western: Early Dissemination of a Literary Genre ................................................... 27 Stefano Rosso America through the Eyes of Nineteenth-century Scots: The Case of Ego Documents and Popular Culture .................................... 45 Marina Dossena Irish Traditional Music Dissemination at the End of the Long Nineteenth Century: Francis O’Neill’s Music of Ireland (1903) and the City of Chicago ............................................................................. 65 Aileen Dillane Fanny Fern and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture .................................... 89 Sonia Di Loreto Victorian and Postmodern Hybrid “Language Games”: Reading Tolstoy’s On the Significance of Science and Art ..................... 105 Angela Locatelli Doing Battle for the Truth: Stevenson’s Struggles with Communicating Knowledge ............................................................ 123 Robert-Louis Abrahamson Reporting the United States of America in the Liverpool Mercury (1812) ............................................................. 137 Nicholas Brownlees vi Table of Contents Antiquarian, Academic, or Practical? Geologic Knowledge in Nineteenth-century Ireland ............................... 155 William H. Mulligan, Jr. Strategies of Knowledge Transmission and Dissemination of Values in Nineteenth-century Letter-writing Guides ........................................... 169 Polina Shvanyukova Letters from “Somewhere in France”: Reconstructing Knowledge of Life in the Trenches through Epistolary Discourse ............................. 191 Kirsten Lawson Contributors ............................................................................................. 217 Name index .............................................................................................. 221 Subject index ........................................................................................... 225 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Preliminary versions of several contributions in this volume were first discussed at a workshop held at the University of Bergamo in October 2014: for this reason, we would like to express our gratitude to the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cultures, to members of the Scientific and Organizing Committee, and to all the participants, for their important contribution to the event. Special thanks are due to the editorial staff of Cambridge Scholars. Bergamo, 26th January 2016 INTRODUCTION MARINA DOSSENA AND STEFANO ROSSO Our Starting Points Humans interact in many ways and in so doing they always exchange/ share information. All communicative events happen socially, across boundaries, languages, cultures. Besides, they take place at all levels, often in unpredictable ways and regardless of the educational attainments or social standing of the individuals or groups involved. For these reasons any discussion of how knowledge is disseminated cannot be restricted to analyses of popularization strategies in scientific communication, although that has been, and obviously so, a privileged field of investigation. As everyday experience shows, knowledge also circulates outside scientific (or anyway specialized) networks, giving rise to complex phenomena enacted by different subjects, whose competence may be equivalent or asymmetrical, but who share the same interests. In such cases, a study of knowledge dissemination patterns and strategies requires a broader approach, in which different text types should be taken into consideration in order to achieve a more complete picture. This book aims to take this more encompassing approach while centring its attention on both European and American texts pertaining to the “long” nineteenth century. More specifically, we intend to shed light on interdisciplinary aspects concerning knowledge dissemination by offering studies dealing with literary, cultural, and linguistic history. The aim is to highlight the features that are actually shared by their different approaches, in an attempt to enhance research by offering new insights into phenomena which appear to have been underinvestigated so far, such as the role played by popular culture, music, literary debate, and the arts in the circulation of information, in the construction of popular taste, and even in scientific popularization on both sides of the Atlantic. Our choice to focus on the nineteenth century is dictated by various reasons. First of all, its significance in literary history is indisputable and also in relation to language over the last fifteen years Late Modern English has found the place it had always deserved in studies of English historical 2 Marina Dossena and Stefano Rosso linguistics.1 As for our adoption of the qualifier “long” in relation to the nineteenth century, this bears witness to our belief that temporal demarcations are rarely viable per se: phenomena have long lives, develop in ways that encompass the achievements of previous decades and, in turn, have an impact on later times. In the case of the nineteenth century, while it can be debated whether the American and French revolutions started it, there can be little doubt that the First World War was a more significant turning point than the fin de siècle. Another very significant aspect, the impact of which on knowledge dissemination mechanisms is hardly negligible, is that – throughout the nineteenth century, from the Napoleonic Wars to the great transatlantic migrations (and of course excluding the forced deportations from Africa to America) – more people were on the move than ever before, with lasting consequences on the social frameworks within which they operated. Also, it is in the “long” nineteenth century that, for the first time in history, scientific, technological, and social developments accelerated simultaneously, and this is witnessed in linguistic change: statistical data in the website of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) show that – particularly in the second half of the century – more new lexical items or meanings are recorded than at any other point in the history of English. Finally, disciplines evolved and new ones actually began to develop: it is the case, for instance, of palaeontology, the name of which was first recorded in the OED in 1836, of sociology, which the OED first records in 1842, and of psychiatry, another item first recorded in the OED in 1828. In addition, the impact of Karl Marx’s and Charles Darwin’s theories needs no discussion here. It is therefore important to see how such new knowledge was circulated among ever growing audiences. Within this framework, however, it should be borne in mind that knowledge dissemination is never a neutral process. Before contents are circulated, they are (more or less implicitly) evaluated and selected: as a result, knowledge dissemination is inherently subjective, and may imply ideological choices concerning both the quantity and type of information to be spread and the type and breadth of audiences that may be addressed. Knowledge dissemination may also have different aims, which in turn inform and influence the kind of choices we have just mentioned. 1 See, among others, the studies listed in Dossena (2015). The increasing interest in this field is seen also in the new developments that have occurred in specific branches of the discipline: for instance, this is the case of historical pragmatics and historical sociolinguistics (see Fairman 2003, Elspaß 2012, and, most recently, Auer et al. 2015). Introduction 3 Providing information is seldom an end in itself: it is generally meant to elicit or prevent action and/or reinforce or undermine beliefs. It can also be (self-)promotional, suggesting erudition and consequently enhancing prestige. In this sense, then, knowledge dissemination acquires an important interactional (though paradoxical) value, in which the power imbalance implicit in asymmetrical knowledge functions as a distancing tool even at a time when attempts are made to redress this asymmetry. In this volume we discuss the phenomena at hand from a transatlantic perspective, in the belief that this may provide more insights into them on account of the close relationship that has always existed between Europe and

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