Rethinking Historical Distance

268 Pages·2013·3.188 MB·English

by  Mark Salber Phillips, Barbara Caine, Julia Adeney Thomas (eds.)

Rethinking Historical Distance
Re-Enactment History
Previous titles in the series:
Settler and Creole Re-Enactment, Edited by Vanessa Agnew and Jonathan Lamb (2009)
Historical Reenactment: From Realism to the Affective Turn, Edited by Iain McCalman and
Paul A. Pickering (2010)
Rethinking Historical
Distance
Edited by
Mark Salber Phillips
Professor of History, Carleton University, Canada
Barbara Caine
Professor of History and Head of School, University of Sydney, Australia
and
Julia Adeney Thomas
Associate Professor of History, University of Notre Dame, USA
Editorial matter, selection, introduction and chapters 4 and 9 © Mark Salber
Phillips, Barbara Caine and Julia Adeney Thomas 2013
Remaining chapters © respective authors 2013
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-0-230-28408-1
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First published 2013 by
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DOI 10.1057/9781137312945
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Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Notes on Contributors viii
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction: Rethinking Historical Distance 1
Mark Salber Phillips
Part I Theoretical Perspectives
1 A Short History of Distance 21
Peter Burke
2 Historical Distance, Historical Judgment 34
Ivan Gaskell
3 The Travels of Fiction: Literature, Distance,
and the Representation of the Past 45
Jürgen Pieters
Part II Biographies and Psychoanalysis
4 Biography and the Question of Historical Distance 67
Barbara Caine
5 Close-Ups 84
Adam Phillips
Part III Theatre and Its Distances
6 ‘Time Has Rendered These Allusions Natural’:
Re-enacting the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1789 95
Matthew Lauzon
7 Parody and Re-enactment in the Comic Operas of
Gilbert and Sullivan 113
Carolyn Williams
v
vi Contents
Part IV Visual Studies:
Sculpture, Photography, and Fashion
8 Sir Francis Chantrey: Sculpture, History, and Geology 139
M. G. Sullivan
9 Photographic Calculations: Intimate Trauma
and Cool Distance in Postwar Japan 158
Julia Adeney Thomas
10 Fashion, Microcosm, and Romantic Historical Distance 180
Timothy Campbell
Part V Distance and Postcolonial Perspectives
11 ‘Distance’ and Settler Australia’s Black History 207
Bain Attwood
12 Closing the Distance: Time, Historicity,
and Contemporary Indigenous Art 224
Ruth B. Phillips
Select Bibliography 246
Index 253
List of Illustrations
7.1 Family portraits from various historical ages come to life 123
7.2 Revival in the Picture Gallery of Ruddigore Castle 124
7.3 Exhibitions at the Japanese Village, Knightsbridge 127
7.4 Lady Sophy ‘finishing’ the two younger Utopian
princesses (Utopia, Limited) 129
7.5 King Paramount in native Utopian garb (Utopia, Limited) 130
7.6 First Utopian drawing-room (Utopia, Limited) 131
7.7 Lancers on Airs from Utopia, Limited. Sheet music cover
depicting the Cabinet Council in the style of the Christy
Minstrels (Utopia, Limited) 132
8.1 Francis Chantrey, monument to Lieutenant Colonel Cadogan 143
8.2 Francis Chantrey, monument to Major General Bernard Bowes 144
8.3 Francis Chantrey, bust of Sir Walter Scott 145
8.4 Scene in basement of Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, of
heads of statues decapitated in 1939 153
9.1 ‘Near Yūrakuchō Station’ by Kimura Ihei (1950) and
‘Waiting for a Delayed Bus’ by Domon Ken (1950) 163
9.2 Domon Ken, ‘Shōnen’ (1957) 168
9.3 Domon Ken, ‘Shiga Naoya’ (1954) 173
10.1 George Cruikshank, Monstrosities of 1824 182
10.2 ‘The Contrast, or the Different Dresses of 1745 and 1772’,
Oxford Magazine 191
10.3 F. Patton, after L.P. Boitard, Taste a-la-Mode, 1745 192
10.4 Henry Bunbury, Anglers of 1611 193
10.5 ‘The Queen’s Palace. St. James Park’, from the
Microcosm of London 197
12.1 Kent Monkman, The Academy (2008) 229
12.2 Rebecca Belmore, Rising to the Occasion (1987–91) 232
12.3 Rosalie Favell, Ann E. Visits Emily (2005) 235
12.4 Welcome Panel, First Peoples Hall, Canadian
Museum of Civilization (2003) 238
12.5 Entrance mural, South Florida People and Environments
(2002), Florida Museum of Natural History 239
vii
Notes on Contributors
Bain Attwood is Professor of History at Monash University. He is the author
of Rights for Aborigines (2003), Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History (2005),
and Possession: Batman’s Treaty and the Matter of History (2009).
Peter Burke was Professor of Cultural History, University of Cambridge until
his retirement and remains a Fellow of Emmanuel College. He is a Fellow of
the British Academy and a member of Academia Europea. His 25 books
include studies of historiography, the Renaissance, popular culture, and the
social history of knowledge.
Barbara Caine is Professor of History and Head of the School of Philosophical
and Historical Inquiry at the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on
the history of feminism and on the relationship between biography and his-
tory. Her recent books include From Bombay to Bloomsbury: A Biography of the
Stracheys (2005) and Biography and History (2010).
Timothy Campbell is Assistant Professor of English at the University of
Chicago. His current book project, Historical Style, examines the distinctive
and generative alignment between consumer commerce, historical thought,
and forms of literature and fashion in Britain between 1740 and 1820.
Ivan Gaskell is Professor of Cultural History and of Museum Studies at the
Bard Graduate Center, New York. He mobilizes material culture to address
intersections among history, art history, anthropology, and philosophy. He
works on the philosophical plane of second-order questioning, as well as
writing case studies on topics ranging from seventeenth-century Dutch and
Flemish paintings to Roman baroque sculpture, Native American baskets
and Congo textiles. Gaskell is the author, editor, or co-editor of 11 books,
and has contributed to numerous journals and edited volumes in history, art
history, and philosophy.
Matthew Lauzon is Associate Professor of History at the University of Hawaii
at Manoa. He has published on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
European intellectual history. He is currently working on gender and French
diplomacy under Louis XIV and on European drama and historical represen-
tation at the end of the eighteenth century. He is the author of Signs of Light:
French and British Theories of Linguistic Communication 1648–1789 (2010).
Jürgen Pieters is Professor of Literary Theory at Ghent University. He is the
author of, among others, Moments of Negotiation: The New Historicism of
Stephen Greenblatt (2011) and Speaking with the Dead: Reflections on Literature
viii
Notes on Contributors ix
and History (2005). He has edited scholarly collections on the work of Roland
Barthes and Catherine Belsey and on the sublime.
Adam Phillips is a British child psychotherapist, literary critic, and essayist.
He is known for his books dealing with topics related to psychoanalysis,
including On Kissing, Being Bored and Going Sane. His book of essays, Side
Effects, explores the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis.
Phillips is also the general editor of the second Penguin edition of the
selected works of Sigmund Freud and a contributor to the London Review of
Books.
Mark Salber Phillips teaches History at Carleton University in Ottawa. He is
the author of a number of studies on distance and historical representation,
including On Historical Distance (2013) and Society and Sentiment: Genres of
Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (2000). Earlier publications include
Questions of Tradition (2004, with Gordon Schochet), The Memoir of Marco
Parenti: A Life in Renaissance Florence (1987), and Francesco Guicciardini: The
Historian’s Craft (1974).
Ruth B. Phillips holds a Canada Research Chair and is Professor of Art
History at Carleton University, Ottawa. Her research focuses on the indige-
nous arts of North American and critical museology. Her books include
Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums (2011), Trading
Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast (1998),
and Representing Woman: Sande Masquerades of the Mende of Sierra Leone
(1995). She has served as director of the University of British Columbia
Museum of Anthropology and president of the International Committee on
the History of Art. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
M. G. Sullivan was Chantrey Fellow and Curator of Sculpture at the Ashmolean
Museum 2006–09, and is editor of the Online Biographical Dictionary of
Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851 (2009). His PhD thesis on ‘Historiography and
Visual Culture in Britain 1660–1783’ was completed at the University of
Leeds in 1998, and he has written on historical culture in Britain for the
History of European Ideas and for Le culte des grands hommes 1750–1850, edited
by Thomas Gaehtgens and Gregor Wedekind (2010). He is now Curator of
British Art 1750–1830 at Tate Britain.
Julia Adeney Thomas, Associate Professor of History at the University of
Notre Dame, writes about photography, the environment, and historiogra-
phy in Japan. Her books include Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in
Japanese Political Ideology (winner of the 2002 John K. Fairbank prize from the
American Historical Association) and Japan at Nature’s Edge, co-edited with
Brett Walker and Ian Miller. Her essays on photography have appeared in The
American Historical Review, History and Theory, The Journal of Asian Studies,