/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.6109620]

What are your favorite subcategories of history? E.g., military, political, religious, philosophical, scientific, medical, music, art, biographical, etc.

[Anonymous No.6110538]

H-historiography?
>tfw google definition contains "in a nutshell" as a preface to "the history of history"

[Anonymous No.6110550]

>>6109620
Culinary (mainly tea, beer and Japanese food) and book history. I read a lot of Japanese art histories as well.

Currently reading pic related, among other things.

[Anonymous No.6110570]

>>6110550
Do you have anything on the opium war from the perspective of tea? I don't know if it exists as a book yet, but I want it.

[Anonymous No.6110583]

>>6110570
>from the perspective of tea

h-huh?

Arthur Waley, the Sinophile who did a lot of Chinese lit translations, did a book called The Opium War Through Chinese Eyes. Might appeal to you?

[Anonymous No.6110595]

Philosophy/epistemology of history, social scientific (Annales-ish) history

I'm really holding out for a major paradigm shift to overturn the previous generation's obsession with vindicating the untold story of the little guy, which has degenerated into this generation's capacity to fill fucking libraries with touristic cultural history whose entire raison d'être is that some inane story COULD technically be told (and sold). Save that shit for Oprah's book club.

[Anonymous No.6110612]

>>6110583
>England starts trade with china for tea
>China says 'okay you pay silver'
>England starts running out of silver because tea is the bomb
>England gets China addicted to opium so something of a competition with tea being awesome can be made in the market
>Opium Wars
What I want is something which doesn't focus on the last part and Hong Kong or Jardin et al but the tea market. Most of them focus on making an opium market to compete, but I want to know what happened to tea (especially outside of China and the UK if possible). I'll keep looking but thanks.

[Anonymous No.6110615]

Literary history.
This and "The Autumn of the Middle Ages."
"The Discarded Image" was also pretty good though a little less critical.

[Anonymous No.6110626]

>>6110615
Huizinga/Lewis, right? Could you rattle off some more recommendations at random? I'm studying a related area and people with peculiar interests are a good way to get niche bibliographies with stuff you might not have found otherwise.

[Anonymous No.6110628]

>>6109620

Philosophy of history all the way

[Anonymous No.6110647]

>>6110615
So, what exactly are you trying to get from this? Are you trying to learn about the changing perception of the Middle Ages, the perception of Huizinga and his contemporaries, or do you just enjoy his work an sich for the literary merrits, because it's obviously ''bad'' as a proper history book. (I can't actually phrase this without sounding like a knob, but I'm not trying to be, I'm actually interested)

[Anonymous No.6110674]

>>6109620
Social, sexual, political and literary. I basically want to try and understand what it means to be human, so other categories are welcome.

[Anonymous No.6110691]

Intellectual history.

[Anonymous No.6110696]

Philosophical and religious. I find it much more important to study the development of human thought rather than a lot of boring namecalling that history comes down to far too often. It's also the subject of my major.

[Anonymous No.6110752]

Military history. I know I'm a pleb but if nobody's getting rekt I just find it boring.

[Anonymous No.6110771]

>>6110691
>>6110691
Mah Nigga

[Anonymous No.6110816]

>>6110626
Yep.
Gustave le Bon, Hippolyte Taine, Emil Durkheim, Fustel de Coulanges, J J Bachofen, George Sansom, Walter Pater, Ronald Syme, Ezra Pound('s critical prose,) T.S Eliot('s critical prose,) and Friedrich Nietzsche. There were also some writers of the late 19th century who I found via references in Pound and Eliot, like George Wyndham and some other fellow who wrote about leonine rhyme. I guess J K Huysmans also counts.

>>6110647
I'm a kind of formalist. I'm interested in literature as an interrelated system, especially as a kind of memetic nation descended from a few memetic Adams. I'm interested in family resemblances between authors and how simple dispositions in source texts can become vast neuroses in descendent literature. The final end of all this study is to discover how to make the best use of my heritage and how to make the most impact on future generations - not through gradiosity, but micromanagement of sentiment and imagery, by being embryonic rather than colossal. I want future centuries to look at my work and say: "This is where it started."

[Anonymous No.6110836]

>>6110816
You might want to check out Hulme also for critical prose around the modern poetry point.

[Anonymous No.6110990]

>>6110836
His name rings a bell. I've just downloaded his "Speculations."

I have mixed feelings about the Modernists. They had all the tools they needed at their disposal, but were unable to get past colourful experimentation. They're poets' poets, really, mainly of technical and critical interest, too Romantic at heart to take their own studied, conscious constructions seriously. They saw their poems as collages and were too "honest" to forge them into a new metre, and so presented them uncooked. That's my intuition, anyway.

Milton, another scholarly formalist, did not have this problem: he robbed shamelessly. His line "Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme" was a plagiarism. That's how unconcerned he was with "authenticity." I admire that, though I'm not going to go his colossal route.

[Anonymous No.6111144]

>>6110990
Milton's prose is also unwieldy as fuck.

>And although somtimes for shame, and when it comes to thir owne grievances, of purse especially, they would seeme good Patriots, and side with the better cause, yet when others for the deliverance of thir Countrie, endu'd with fortitude and Heroick vertue to feare nothing but the curse writt'n against those That doe the worke of the Lord negligently, would goe on to remove, not only the calamities and thraldoms of a People, but the roots and causes whence they spring, streight these men, and sure helpers at need, as if they hated only the miseries but not the mischiefs, after they have juggl'd and palter'd with the world, bandied and born armes against thir King, devested him, disannointed him, nay curs'd him all over in thir Pulpits and thir Pamphlets, to the ingaging of sincere and real men, beyond what is possible or honest to retreat from, not only turne revolters from those principles, which only could at first move them, but lay the staine of disloyaltie, and worse, on those proceedings, which are the necessary consequences of thir own former actions; nor dislik'd by themselves, were they manag'd to the intire advantages of thir own Faction; not considering the while that he toward whom they boasted thir new fidelitie, counted them accessory; and by those Statutes and Lawes which they so impotently brandish against others, would have doom'd them to a Traytors death, for what they have don alreadie.

[Anonymous No.6111158]

I like military the best in theory but it tends to be a really dry read, so in practice I guess my favorite is political

[Anonymous No.6111182]

>>6109620
class struggle
uprisings
revolutions

I came when I read some parts of Hugo's Miserables.

[Anonymous No.6111252]

>>6109620
_Labour_

[Anonymous No.6111329]

>>6111252

[Anonymous No.6111769]

>>6110595
>the untold story of the little guy
I didn't know that was dominant
and I doubt it, tbh

[Anonymous No.6111821]

>>6109620
Evolutionary neuroscience - basically what made (in reference to other animals and our ancestors) us human from a biological perspective (but I guess it's not considered to be in the realm of history but rather in the anthropological; not that it would matter though).
Then also religious and societal (etc) history from this (biologically oriented) point of view.
And the mythological/symbolic/religious realm from a Jungian archetypic point of view.

Mostly however societal transformations from a technology-based point of view (as with the underlying biological for human collective interactions & organization; and partly as in historical materialism). I'm quite rarely interested in historic developments that aren't highly related to either the present situation in some significant way or the road ahead. A main example would be the history of human societal organization with P2P technology now arising. If anyone's interested in fictional books of that kind (and on military history) I'd suggest Daniel Suarez btw.

And aside of that cultural movements (art being a subcategory of that, philosophy as well to some extend) and phenomena - saying the expressions of people's mindsets of different times, being influenced by various factors whose respective ties/contexts are the main point of interest (rather than simply the outcomes themselves as in simply apposing/chaining the outputs of the various visual arts movements). Here also a main interest are the visions/notions of the future through time (even though mostly the later ones from 30s modernity to late-cyberpunk).

Some thing that keeps baffling me is the large amount of people that study history from an end-of-history stance, who look into the past without actually mustering it for the patterns that spilled to where we are now and the potentials ahead. I guess people require major wars or the world on the brink of nuclear war to realize themselves moving in the midst of a greatly dynamic, pre-archaic, open world.

[Anonymous No.6111947]

>>6111769
Cultural history is a reaction against history from below which was a perversion of CPGB Historians Group style labour history.

Now you know. What began as a the story of our class's march to power, became the story of workers being kicked in the teeth, has become a travelogue of boots used for teeth kicking.

[Anonymous No.6112386]

>>6111947
>our class
>workers

get laid mang

[Anonymous No.6112497]

>>6112386
I do. It doesn't break the value relationship or let me live without offering my labour for sale for a wage.