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political power with which their author had to reckon. As we know, the political ambience to which the New Atlantis refers is hardly a revolutionary one. We might, however, speculate that, had Bacon been writing in the 1650s, he would have adjusted his tale to the political circumstances of the English Republic. At a later date his text might also have addressed educational reformers of the Comenian or Hartlibian stamp.22 In the 1620s, when Bacon was writing the New Atlantis, Price_03_Ch3 54 14/10/02, 9:21 am Persuasions to science 55 political reality and the
postnationalism is as good a framework as any other, but also demonstrates that the fractured narrative makes a range of interpretations possible. The emphasis on personal responses and emotions could be seen as an attempt to ground the political content in individual experiences instead of constructing overarching narratives or myths. The main criticism directed against the novel, however, is that the characters fail to engage, which ultimately means that their search for identity becomes less interesting and weakens the political power of the text. The absence of linear
conquest’, thereby acting as a form of imperial propaganda that encourages colonial expansion with ‘the southern hemisphere offer[ing] the space lacking in a crowded homeland’. 36 This myth-making of Australia as a land of boundless space returns us to Hiatt’s notion of the Antipodes as a ‘blank’ and ties the idea of the Antipodes to that of terra nullius . 37 Punch ’s participation, here, in the legacy of booster literature to the goldfields nonetheless also hints at the potential reversal of pecuniary and political power between colony and metropole, with a sense
, Midnight’s Children (London: Cape, 1981), p. 406. See also Rajeswari Sunder Rajan’s analysis of how gender articulates with female political power – of Indira Gandhi in particular – in Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 103–28. 15 See Ahmad, In Theory, p. 50. 16 Nalini Natarajan, ‘Woman, nation, and narration in Midnight’s Children’, in Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (eds), Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp
authority have been conceptualised predominantly in stereotypical ‘good mother-bad mother’ terms.13 (This widely prevalent tendency is, incidentally, as Sunder Rajan recognises, exacerbated across the world by the relative lack of an adequate gender theory of political power for women.) As is clear from this sampling, to Third World women as well as to historically dispossessed women in the west, issues of at once identification with, yet exclusion from, a nationalist tradition of masculinised self-assertion speak with particular urgency. Women encounter the strong need to
and the civilian ‘keep’ or compound, women play several roles relative to the new nation, not only as ‘mothers of the struggle’ and providers, but as political activists, agents of history.3 The Zimbabwean example is apt in this context considering that women writers, like feminist critics of women’s writing, appear to encounter a particular difficulty in envisaging roles and spaces through which women might mobilise political power outside of conventional structures, such as that of the nation-state.4 Given existing hierarchies of privilege, the question is whether
political and social struggle between the ‘Liberal Commons and the Tory Lords’.41 He also adopts, in places, the language of destruction and fragmentation (especially when quoting aristocrats like the Duke of Northumberland on democracy, for whom the placing of political power in the hands of the many was anathema). But Cannadine dates the struggle, in its most bitter manifestations, both earlier, to the Liberal victory in 1880, at which point Frederick Calvert warned that ‘all our institutions are on trial’, and later, to the final ‘emasculation’ of the Lords in 1910
richly signifying work. On the international level, the ecclesiastical reform movement initiated by Pope Gregory VII did not die when Gregory did in 1085, but intensified as the Catholic Church strove to increase its political power, social influence and wealth, especially vis-à-vis the secular state. To those ends it campaigned to purify the lives of its ministers. Homosexuality per se was not a major focus of the reform movement: simony and clerical marriage were the main targets. Nonetheless, Boswell suggests that from the mid-eleventh century, two orientations
often called upon to do in history – reconcile the warring parties. Marriage brings about a peaceful countryside and happy lovers, although in actual practice marriages were supposed to be arranged by parents and guardians, who saw marriage ‘as a way of augmenting and consolidating their lands and rising in political power and influence … [and ensuring] heirs to whom the inheritance would pass and who would safeguard it for future generations’.18 According to May McKisack, ‘failure of heirs constituted by far the most serious threat to baronial stability … [and
part of the first generation to grow up with the new faith and its attendant technology of alphabetic literacy. 3 Taken under Buzacott’s wing, Kiro was aligned with the political power of the LMS mission in Rarotonga, and while on board the missionary ship that conveyed him to England he would have been understood as doing the Lord’s work. 4 Indeed, the most senior member of the Cook Islands mission, Charles Pitman, had raised objections to Buzacott overseeing the final stage of the translation of the Bible in England on the grounds of an insufficient knowledge of