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Interdisciplinary scholars, stressing the lack of firm disciplinary boundaries for British science in much of the nineteenth century, have pointed to evidence of mutual influence between the discourses of 'mental science', or psychology, and imaginative literature. This article treats Chapters on Mental Physiology (1852) by the English physician Henry Holland as a case study of heightened concern over the competing cultural authority implied by such mutual influence, and specifically over the inclusion of references to dramatic and lyrical works in early Victorian mental theory. It examines the medical author's self-conscious attempts to separate the developing profession of psychology from a tradition in philosophical discourse of enlisting imaginative writing for illustration and support. It further explores the way Holland strives to marginalise his text's occasional, paradoxical slips back into citing poetry by relegating this material to subordinate paratexts. How to safely deploy literature in service of science thus emerges as a key epistemological and rhetorical issue that Henry Holland, representing the consolidating field of British psychology at large, grapples with in his mid-century study of the mind.

For more than one hundred years texts of rabbinical prose were the only model of educated style. With the arrival of new literary genres imported from Western Europe towards the middle of the nineteenth century, Sephardi authors and translators promoted a change in their style of writing. This article compares syntactic structures in two texts from the second half of the nineteenth century. They belong to the same literary genre and share the same subject, but are anchored in different discoursive traditions trying to exemplify the different styles of Sephardic prose that coexisted at that time.

This article examines the beginning and development of the shipbuilding industry in the Urals in the nineteenth century. It studies in detail the process of technology transfer from Britain to the Urals and highlights the important role that engineers and mechanics from Britain played in the development of the Russian shipbuilding industry, particularly the technology of shipbuilding.

This article examines some of Langlois's major works on nineteenth-century French Catholicism, which taken together suggest a vision langloisienne defined by three central, intimately interrelated insights. First, for Langlois a chronology of French Catholicism based on an assumption of an ineluctable process of dechristianization needs to be replaced by a more nuanced and contingent understanding of the evolution of belief and practice. Second, a revised chronology illuminates important sectors of creative vitality within Catholicism, particularly with regard to female religious congregations. Third, historians of religion must be willing to use a variety of methods in exploring their subject; social scientific approaches are crucial, but they complement rather than replace traditional narrative, biography, and a close reading of literary texts. The article concludes with reflections on the normative posture that is implicit in Langlois's historical writing, a position based on his commitment to the values of toleration and equality.

This article examines the ways in which the Finnish liberals described themselves as national liberals and how they were labeled by their opponents as supporters of foreign doctrines and cosmopolitanism in the late nineteenth century. It will be shown that the rhetoric of liberalism was entangled in an inflamed issue between the advocates of Finnish and Swedish languages in Finland. Ultimately, this contest dealt with the concept of nation. Furthermore, the article discusses the uses of other countries' political life as exemplary cases, thus bringing a transnational perspective into the analysis. The contested character of the concept of liberalism and its compound form, national liberalism (nationell liberalism, kansallinen liberalismi), will be highlighted by paying attention to the semantic differences between Swedish-language and Finnish-language uses of the concept. The article closes with an interpretation of the weak role that the concept of liberalism has played in nineteenth-century Finnish political culture.

This essay traces the process of naturalization of Shakespeare on the Continent and especially in nineteenth-century Germany with the consistent recurrence of his oscillation between the Protestant and Catholic poles in the biographical studies by Shakespeare scholars up to the twentieth century. In the second half of the eighteenth century, when German poets and critics discovered Shakespeare and chose his dramas as their literary models, they were not chiefly interested in his biography, character, and religious belief. Instead, his German admirers, especially of the school of Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) and the early Romanticists, concentrated on coming to terms with his dramatic art and defining his poetological position.