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Abstracts
The second generation of post-restoration monarchs, who acceded to the throne in the late 1830s, were often affected by the cultural climate of Romanticism and of Romantic Nationalism, with Ludwig I of Bavaria as an early prototype. They combined a post-Napoleonic return to monarchical rule with a romanticized appeal to the glamour and purportedly trans-political allure of the monarchy and its traditions and dynastic historicism. This repositioning of the monarchy was often aligned with invocations of a spectral but ill-defined ideology referred to as Reichpatriotismus., now taken to signify how the monarchy unites the patriotic and demotic self-identification of the people with the symbolism and constitutional order of the realm. This article looks at the particularly important but disregarded symbolical function of women on the throne to provide restoration monarchies with Romantic, even fairy-tale glamour, sentimental allure and “soft power”. The article highlights the personalities and roles of Louise of Prussia, Victoria of the United Kingdom, and Elisabeth of Austria/Hungary, with some side comments on Elisabeth of Romania (“Carmen Sylva”) and Ludwig II of Bavaria.
Abstract
To which extent is ‘nature’ a cultural or discursive construct? The question seems paradoxical and intractable since ‘nature’ by definition opposes the very notion of constructedness or historicity; yet there are indications that each literary generation re-invents its own cultural horizon by re-interpreting a sense of non-culture and nature. In order to clarify this historical and conceptual paradox, the idea and literary treatment of nature and rusticity are sketchily surveyed from classical primitivism to the present day. The conclusion that suggests itself is that ‘nature’ is one of the strongest and most invariant topics in the Western imagination, exhibiting a good deal of consistency through changing periods and literary fashions. If there is anything paradoxical about the link between nature and contemporary (‘postmodern’) literary culture, it lies largely in the fact that this follows after a period (Modernism) which was unusually averse to a celebration of nature and rusticity.
Abstract
Food provision and diet belong to the fundamental cultural patterns that mark a society, and are often foregrounded as salient experiences in intercultural encounters. This is also the case in one of the most long-standing intercultural confrontations in European history: that between Ireland and England. Some discursive thematizations of Irish diet (whisky, dairy, potatoes, famine) are traced in this article, both in their historical context and in their rhetorical function.