Behind the ancient artifacts displayed in our museums lies a secret history—of travel, desire, the quest for knowledge, and even theft. Such is the case with the objects of Mesoamerican culture so avidly collected by the Victorians. Informal Empire reveals how such objects and the cultures they embodied were incorporated into museum collections, panoramas, freak shows, adventure novels, and records of imperial administrators. With its original insights, Informal Empire points to a new way of thinking about British imperialism and, more generally, about the styles and forms of imperialism itself.
Brenda Assael, The Circus and Victorian Society (U of Virginia P, 2005).
It was during the Victorian era that the circus, whose origins lay in the fairground world, emerged as a commercialised entertainment that we would recognise today. This development was tied to a widespread demand for circus acts by a broad range of classes. In The Circus and Victorian Society, Brenda Assael examines this interest in the circus as an artistic form within the context of a vibrant, and sometimes not so respectable, consumer market. In doing so, she provides not only the first scholarly history of the Victorian circus, but also contributes to recent debates about the role of popular culture.
What kind of property is art? Is it property at all? Bailkin's The Culture of Property offers a new historical response to these questions, examining ownership disputes over art objects and artifacts during the crisis of liberalism in the United Kingdom. From the 1870s to the 1920s, Britons fought over prized objects from ancient gold ornaments dug up in an Irish field to a Holbein portrait at the National Gallery in London. They fought to keep these objects in Britain, to repatriate them to their points of origin, and even to destroy them. Bailkin explores these disputes in order to illuminate the relationship between property and citizenship, which has constituted the heart of liberal politics as well as its greatest weakness.
This book examines the relationship between the 'Holy Land' as a pivotal metaphor in English Protestant culture and the 'Holy Land' as a geographical space in the Middle East, in the context of nineteenth-century imperial and cultural politics. Drawing on a wide array of popular sources, this new cultural history of the Victorian fascination with Palestine demonstrates that by exploring sources that go beyond the highbrow, the academic, or the official, we can begin to grasp the limited currency of the Orientalist discourse and the multiple meanings it could hold in the metropolitan centre.
The character of the Creole woman—the descendant of settlers or slaves brought up on the colonial frontier—is a familiar one in nineteenth-century literature. This book examines its use in such canonical novels as Jane Eyre, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Indiana, as well as in the antislavery discourse of the period. Creole Crossings reveals how racial, sexual, and moral boundaries continually shifted as the century's writers reflected on slavery, empire, and the home front. Focusing on a neglected social classification, Berman establishes the crucial importance of the Creole character as a marker of sexual norms and national belonging.
The last three decades have witnessed a great surge of interest in Victorian women poets, but until recently it has been assumed that a significant body of working-class poetry by Victorian women has not been preserved. This anthology will present a wide range of poets in order to indicate something of the breadth of material available. It is divided into four sections: "The Rural Poets," "Janet Hamilton," "The Factory Poets," and "Lyricists and Feminists"; and supplementary materials include maps, photographs, interviews, memoirs and other writings by the poets whose work is anthologized, and a bibliography of other Victorian working-class women poets.
Alison Booth's How to Make It as a Woman rediscovers over 900 collections of women’s biographies published in Britain, the U.S., and elsewhere 1830-1940. These popular illustrated albums challenge assumptions about the traditional restriction of history and biography to masculine, individual subjects. Catalogues of queens, saints, and courtesans made room for newly celebrated examples, from reformers to assassins, offering wider latitude than fiction or conduct literature. Featuring such biographers as Anna Jameson and subjects such as Queen Victoria, Booth suggests that prosopographies, or series of personae, model communities and subjects today as in the Victorian period.
This book focuses on the unique characteristic of the Victorian periodical press--its development of encounters between and among readers, editors, and authors. Encounters promoted dialogue among diverse publics, differing by class, gender, professional and political interests, and ethnicity. Through encounters, the press emerged to become a central public space for debates about society, politics, culture, public order, and foreign and imperial affairs. This book captures the richness of these interactions, voices and opinions. Part of Palgrave Series, Studies in 19th-Century Writing and Culture, ed. Joseph Bristow
This book examines the nineteenth-century British novel's role as discursive forerunner to modern cultural anthropology. Buzard shows how English Victorian novels appropriated and anglicized an autoethnographic mode of fiction developed early in the century by the Irish authors of the National Tale and by Walter Scott. While the fiction of these non-English subjects described and defended (but also invented) the cultural autonomy of peripheral regions, the English novels that followed them imagined limited, mappable versions of English or British culture, at a time when Britain's very successes in commercial and imperial expansion threatened to evacuate the nation of any cultural distinctiveness.
Forthcoming: James Buzard, Joseph Childers, and Eileen Gillooly, eds., Victorian Prism: Refractions of the Crystal Palace (U of Virginia P, 2006).
Few historical phenomena can rival the Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition of 1851 for their colossal centrality; in the middle of the nineteenth century, at the heart of the world's metropolis, building and event were instantly accorded special status as signs of their modern times. But like modernity itself, the Exhibition has too often been thought to disclose one coherent message. The essays collected in this volume "refract" this supposed singularity, exploring the conflict of interpretations, the unsynthesizable narratives, the multiple modernities that flowed into and out of Joseph Paxton's glorified greenhouse, down to our own times.Forthcoming: Laura Callanan, Deciphering Race: White Anxiety, Racial Conflict, and the Turn to Fiction in Mid-Victorian English Prose (Ohio State UP, December 2005).
Deciphering Race traces a pattern in Victorian racial narratives by authors such as Harriet Martineau, Robert Knox, Charles Dickens, and James Grant in which a white English author or character turns to the aesthetic in order to assuage a sense of anxiety produced by a confrontation with racial otherness. White characters or narrators confront the limitations of preconceived ideologies or the interlacing of oppressions, and subsequently falter. Deciphering Race unpacks this narrative turn to the aesthetic in writings by white English individuals and thus reveals the instability at the heart of cultural understanding of race and racial tropes at mid-century.
William Michael Rossetti often bemoaned his brother's untimely "avuncularism" and helpfully defines the term for modern readers as "recourse to a pawnbroker." Borrowing his term and definition, this book argues that the figure of the uncle in nineteenthy-century literature and culture represents a radical schism in both the father-centered family and paternalist philosophy. In providing an alternative banking mechanism for those on the economic fringes of society, "My Uncle" offered a socially liberating denial of origins by undoing the organizing motif of Victorian culture: the parent-child relationship.
Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism is the first book of critical essays devoted to Scottish writing between 1745 and 1830. The volume undertakes a collective rethinking of the national and period categories that have structured British literary history across the vexed divide between a Scottish Enlightenment and a presumptively English Romanticism. Contributors: Alyson Bardsley, John Barrell, Adriana Craciun, Cairns Craig, Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, Ina Ferris, Penny Fielding, Peter Manning, Susan Manning, Jerome McGann, Ann Wierda Rowland, James Watt.
In Friendship's Bonds (August, 2004), Richard Dellamora revisits the classical and Victorian dream that a just society would be one governed by friends. In the actual struggles concerning citizenship, however, the ideal of fraternity was troubled by anxieties about the commingling of populations and the possible conversion of male intimacy into sexual anarchy. Focusing on the writings of Benjamin Disraeli and his rival, William Gladstone, the book examines works as various as Karl Marx's essay on the Jewish Question, Victorian Bible commentaries, and Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband, as well as novels by Dickens, George Eliot, Trollope, and Henry James.
Dennis Denisoff, The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Short Stories (Broadview, 2004).
The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Short Stories, edited by Dennis Denisoff, is "a ground-breaking contribution to teaching and research, with a wide-ranging and original selection of stories" (Elaine Showalter). Aimed at the undergraduate classroom, it includes an extensive introduction, critical essays on the subject by Poe, Dickens, Oliphant and others, and 26 stories (including gothic works; adventure stories; colonial works, science fiction, children's tales; New Woman writing; and Irish yarns). It includes stories by Shelley, Dickens, De Quincey, Collins, Gaskell, Trollope, Braddon, Swinburne, Carroll, Hardy, Stevenson, Kipling, Wilde, Conan Doyle, Egerton, Leverson, Wells, Zangwill, and others.
Carolyn Dever, Skeptical Feminism: Activist Theory, Activist Practice (U of Minnesota P, 2004).
Skeptical Feminism considers the ambivalence many feminists feel toward theory, arguing that a resistance to abstraction has been vital to the development of the movement. Dever analyzes the politics of feminist theory by looking at its popular, activist, and academic modes, from the liberation movements of the 1970s to gender and queer studies now. Using key moments in the history of modern feminism, Dever outlines heated debates over psychoanalysis, sexuality, and activism. Carolyn Dever (Vanderbilt University) is the author of Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud (1998) and coeditor of The Literary Channel (2002).
Christine DeVine, ed. Collected Works of George Gissing on Charles Dickens , Vol. 3, Forster's Life of Dickens (Graywood Press, 2005).
The third and last volume of the Collected Works of George Gissing on Charles Dickens is Gissing's abridgement of Forster's three-volume Life of Dickens . When first published in 1902 the book caused some controversy as a few reviewers accused Gissing of tampering with a well-loved text and trying to enhance his reputation by associating his name with that of Forster. However, the more perceptive reviewers realized the difficulties of his task and acknowledged that he had completed an intelligent and sensitive abridgement in an effort to reach a wider audience. This edition includes detailed Introduction, Afterword by James A. Davies, extensive Notes and Appendices.
Forthcoming: Christine DeVine, Class in Turn-of-the-Century Novels of Gissing, James, Hardy and Wells (Ashgate, Dec. 2005).
This book examines how Gissing, James, Hardy and Wells disrupted traditional novel conventions, revealing the ideology of the historical moment in which those conventions obtained, thereby questioning the "naturalness" of social class assumed by earlier middle-class Victorian writers. Offering a historical contextualizing of the work of these late-century writers with reference to relevant maps, journalism, artwork or photography and specific historical events, Class in Turn-of-the-Century Novels allows the twenty-first century critic and student to understand the important class issues at stake in Victorian fiction, and to recognize powerful present-day vestiges of this social class system.
First-Person Anonymous revises previous histories of Victorian women's writing by examining the importance of both anonymous periodical journalism and signed book authorship in women’s literary careers. Easley demonstrates how women writers capitalized on the publishing conventions associated with signed and unsigned print media in order to create their own spaces of agency and meaning within a male-dominated publishing industry. Easley provides new insight into the careers of Christian Johnstone, Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Christina Rossetti, and recovers a large, anonymous body of periodical writing through which their better known careers emerged into public visibility.
This volume considers how Victorian texts often construct Romantic nervousness at odds with Victorian self-restraint and stolidity. This nervousness, both about and of the Romantics, is an as yet unaddressed concern in Victorian responses to Romantic texts. The volume’s essays explore a variety of discursive modes and genres, and authors both inside and outside the category of "Victorian Romanticism": the Brownings, Carlyle, Sara Coleridge and her father, De Quincey, Eliot, Gaskell, Keats, Lampman, Mill, the Shelleys, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth.
No study has explored the reason why such contending claims were made for poetry in the nineteenth century: that it is a panacea for the ills of the age and that it is a pandemic at the heart of the social order. The former position was originally associated particularly with Scott's poetry; the latter with Byron's, while Tennyson assumed a position between the two. In exploring the logic behind these attributions, Perversity brings to light a host of previously unexplored medical and historical material while arguing that the medical rhetoric associated with all three authors served to undercut the surprising influence of these poets on the emergent mass market, on political ceremony, and on revolutionary radicalism.
Classical political economy, this book shows, was not a mechanical ideology but a form of 19th-century organicism, which put the body and its feelings at the center of its theories, and neo-classical economics built itself even more self-consciously on physiological premises. The book explains how these shared views of life, death, and sensation helped shape and were modified by the two most important Victorian novelists: Dickens and George Eliot. It also reveals how political economists interacted with the 19th-century life sciences to make the intellectual world in which not only George Eliot's realism but also turn-of-the-century literary modernism could thrive.
This book explores how medical and social maps helped shape modern perceptions of space. The cholera epidemics that plagued London in the nineteenth century were a turning point in the science of epidemiology and public health, and the use of maps to pinpoint the source of the disease initiated an explosion of medical and social mapping not only in London but throughout the British Empire as well. Mapping the Victorian Social Body explores the impact of such maps on Victorian and, ultimately, present-day perceptions of space. The volume addresses perceptions of space both in metropolitan London and in British India.
Susan Griffin analyzes the neglected body of anti-Catholic fiction written between the 1830s and the turn of the century in both Britain and the U.S. Her examination reveals how Anglo-American anti-Catholic sentiment was distilled to provide Victorians with a set of political, cultural and literary "truths" through which they defined themselves as Protestant and, therefore, "normative". This book will be essential reading for scholars working on British Victorian literature as well as nineteenth-century American literature and will also interest scholars of literary, cultural and religious studies.
Daniel Hack, The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel (U of Virginia P, September 2005).
Hack argues that the significance and interaction of the physical, economic, and linguistic aspects of writing now conjured by the term materiality were a major concern of Victorian fiction and the Victorian discourse on authorship. Combining formalist and historicist critical methods, Hack reads novels by Thackeray, Dickens, Collins, and Eliot as explorations of their own simultaneous status as texts, books, and commodities. Given urgency by the genre’s proximity to such debased forms of writing as advertisements and begging letters, these explorations called into question the nature of authorship and such basic novelistic properties as sympathetic identification and fictionality itself.
The seamstress occupied a unique place in the history of the nineteenth century, appearing frequently in debates about women's work and education, and the condition of the working classes. These fifteen essays address the seamstress's appearance as a 'real' figure in the changing economies of nineteenth-century Britain, America, and France, and as an important cultural icon in the art and literature of the period. They treat many different types of needlewomen in the nineteenth century—from skilled milliners and dressmakers (some of whom owned their own businesses) to women who were forced into the lowest end of paid needlework.
Ann Heilmann, New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird (Manchester UP, 2004).
This book focuses on the diverse strategies and revisionist aesthetics of three of the key exponents of New Woman fiction, paying close attention to the gaps, shifts, inconsistencies, and performative acts which marked their ideological and textual self-positionings. The emphasis on spiritualism offered alternative discourses which accommodated the needs of a female counter-culture and whose neo-religious language and rhetorical appeal leant itself to feminist encodings of the socially committed female artist. Seeking to revise authoritative cultural and aesthetic discourses, each writer drew on, mimicked, feminised, and ultimately transformed traditional literary and cultural paradigms: femininity (Grand), allegory (Schreiner), and mythology (Caird).
Structured around four themes, this book explores the diversity of meanings ascribed to the New Woman in the context of cultural debates across a wide range of national frameworks. Hybridities examines the instabilities of New Woman identities in relation to national/ethnic contexts; 'Through the Looking Glass' is concerned with the periodical press production and circulation of New Woman images; 'Communities of Women' interrogates feminist efforts to shape this process; 'Race and the New Woman' inspects white New Women's investment in hegemonic racial discourses, looking at the ways in which black and non-Western women inserted liberationist discourses into the New Woman debates.
The five novels in this anthology (Eliza Lynn Linton's The Rebel of the Family, Walter Besant's The Revolt of Man, Arabella Kenealy's Dr Janet of Harley Street, C.E. Raimond's (Elizabeth Robins') George Mandeville's Husband, and Grant Allen's The Type-Writer Girl) offer a variety of narrative plots and strategies which explore central fin-de-siècle anxieties about shifting gender relations. Troubled female anti-feminism (Linton, Kenealy) and punitive male anti-feminism (Besant) is juxtaposed with anti/feminist ventriloquism, whose radical instability is reflected in its authorial cross-dressing (Robins speaking in the voice of an oppressed husband and Allen in that of a boisterous New Woman).
In 1870, Dante Gabriel Rossetti published the first version of his sonnet sequence 'The House of Life'. The next thirty years saw the greatest flourishing of the sonnet sequence since the 1590s. John Holmes's carefully researched and eloquent study illuminates how leading sonneteers, including the Rossettis, John Addington Symonds, Augusta Webster, Wilfrid Blunt and Rosa Newmarch, addressed the urgent questions of selfhood, religious belief and doubt, and sexual and national identity which troubled late Victorian England. Drawing on the heritage of the sonnet sequence, the poetic self-portraits they created are unsurpassed in their subtlety, complexity, courage, and honesty.
NAVSA members who have paid 2005 dues receive a 30% discount on this book. If you have not been informed of the discount code, e-mail Dino Franco Felluga at felluga@purdue.edu
Graham R. traces the complex life of the fin-de-siècle poet, art and literary critic, and journalist known as Graham R. Tomson and, after a second divorce, as Rosamund Marriott Watson. Part of a vital London literary network, she enjoyed important relationships with Thomas Hardy, Andrew Lang, Alice Meynell, and Oscar Wilde. As a poet she participated in aestheticism and decadence, New Woman poetry, and anticipations of literary modernism. In all, Tomson/Watson's literary history and her uncommon experience of marriage and divorce reveal the limits and opportunities faced by an unconventional, ambitious, and talented woman at the turn of the century.
The poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins was among the most innovative writing of the Victorian period. Hopkins was an experimental and idiosyncratic writer whose work remains important for any student of Victorian literature. This volume offers unabridged texts of twenty-nine of Hopkins’s most important poems, with detailed annotations, in addition to extensive introductory comment on the contexts, critical history and interpretations of his work; annotated extracts from key contextual documents, reviews, and critical works; cross-references between documents and sections of the guide; and suggestions for further reading.
Empathy and the Novel presents a comprehensive account of the relationships among novel reading, empathy, and altruism. Though readers' and authors' empathy contribute to the emotional resonance of fiction and its success in the marketplace, Keen finds the case for altruistic consequences of novel-reading inconclusive. Keen offers a series of hypotheses about literary empathy, including narrative techniques inviting empathetic response. Drawing on narrative theory, literary history, philosophy, and contemporary scholarship in psychology, Keen brings together resources and questions for the literary study of empathy. VICTORIA-L members feature in the chapter on readers' empathy, offering testimony about their empathetic reading experiences.
Forthcoming: Ivan Kreilkamp, Voice and the Victorian Storyteller (Cambridge UP, December 2005).
The nineteenth-century novel has always been regarded as a literary form pre-eminently occupied with the written word, but Ivan Kreilkamp shows it was deeply marked by and engaged with vocal performances and the preservation and representation of speech. Through readings of Charlotte Brontë, Browning, Carlyle, Conrad, Dickens, Disraeli and Gaskell, as well as of Walter Benjamin and other 20th-century critics and theorists, Kreilkamp reevaluates critical assumptions about the cultural meanings of storytelling, and shows that the figure of the oral storyteller, rather than disappearing among readers' preference for printed texts, persisted as a character and a function within the novel.
This edition of Martineau’s history consists primarily of the History of the Peace: Being a History of England from 1816 to 1854, as well as the introductory History of England, AD 1800 to 1815. Martineau’s work thus encompasses British history from the turn of the nineteenth century through the Crimean War. Along with extensive annotations, this edition features a comprehensive introduction discussing Martineau’s life and work, her role as a historian, her pioneering contributions to the emerging discipline of historiography as well as the work’s reception history. Also included in this edition is Martineau’s England and Her Soldiers and the unpublished correspondence between Martineau and Florence Nightingale.
One of the earliest examples of social problem writing, Illustrations of Political Economy (1832-34) established the journalist (and novelist) Harriet Martineau as a pioneer in the field of practical political economy and as an insightful commentator on the expanding British Empire. The four tales from Illustrations of Political Economy featured in this Broadview Edition are Weal and Woe in Garveloch, A Manchester Strike, Cousin Marshall, and Sowers not Reapers. This edition also includes a critical introduction and a wide selection of primary documents that situate the tales within their literary, social, and historical contexts.
This set focuses on Harriet Martineau's writings on imperialism. The selected texts are introduced and annotated, thus providing a substantial historical and social context through which to measure the worth of her participation in this discourse. The edition will be of interest to scholars of colonialism, women’s writing, Victorian studies, sociology and journalism. Included are Illustrations of Political Economy tales; Eastern Life, Present & Past; Letters from Ireland and Endowed Schools of Ireland; History of British India and Suggestions...India; and periodical articles on the East India Company and China.
Jerome McGann and Charles L. Sligh present a generous sampling of Swinburne’s poetry and prose. This wide-ranging collection satisfies a long need for a comprehensive selection of Swinburne’s work. It includes all of Atalanta, all of Tristram of Lyonesse, plus large selections from the huge corpus of uncollected and unpublished work, prose and verse both. It is accompanied by learned and critically incisive commentaries and notes.
Journalist, suffragist, antivivisectionist, theologian, essayist and activist Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904) has never been the subject of a full-length biography. Long before the term New Woman was invented, she was an independent professional woman who staked out her own moral and intellectual positions, earned an adequate income, traveled alone both at home and abroad, and lived with another independent woman as her beloved friend. Using new sources that include letters, anonymous journalism, and materials in family hands, this narrative biography traces Cobbe's life in the context of Victorian political and social debates.
Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin Danahay, ed., Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations in Literature and Culture (Ashgate 2006).
Victorian Animal Dreams builds upon both Victorian studies and the burgeoning field of "animal studies." As these thirteen essays make clear, human dominion over animals included imaginative possession in the realms of fiction, performance, and visual art, as well as the rule of physical force manifested in hunting, killing, vivisection, and zookeeping. In multiple and complicated ways, the Victorian period also registered the beginning of a debate on the status of animals that continues in the present in critiques of the posthuman and of "speciesism."
This book explores the discrepancy between the representation and reality of children's experiences within welfare institutions in Victorian London--a discrepancy that arose from conflicts over middle- and working-class notions of citizenship. Reformers portrayed institutionalized children as either orphaned or abandoned by unworthy parents, much like Oliver Twist. Yet most children in London charities and poor law schools had at least one living parent, and many parents struggled to maintain contact with their children. As they worked to fashion model citizens, reformers' efforts to care for children took on an increasingly imperial cast that would continue into the twentieth century.
NAVSA members who have paid 2005 dues receive a 30% discount on this book. If you have not been informed of the discount code, e-mail Dino Franco Felluga at felluga@purdue.edu
Subjects on Display explores a paradoxical figure at the heart of many nineteenth-century English novels: the conspicuously self-effacing woman. Beth Newman draws upon both psychoanalytic theory and recent work in social history to argue that this figure appears in response to a changing socioeconomic landscape, one in which the ideal of the modest woman was outliving its usefulness as a class signifier even as it continued to exert moral authority. The psychical dimensions of display—the desires, pleasures, and anxieties associated with being the object of the look—further complicated its meanings. Newman explores the experience of offering oneself to be seen in works by C. Brontë, Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry James. Shifting the emphasis from the spectator or observer to the “subject of display,” she reopens the question of the gaze and its relation to subjectivity.
This book traces the rhetorical connection between secrecy and democracy in Victorian England by showing how often attempts to secure more equitable representation were met by accusations of conspiracy. Borrowing from the fearsome reputation of the Thugs, the Jesuits, the Fenians, the Carbonari and others, such denunciations were deployed to represent reformers as dangerously "unEnglish." Using close readings of a range of primary texts, both literary and nonliterary, the book examines the ways in which this exclusionary rhetoric was often complicated, if not frustrated altogether, by the contemporary culture's tacit attraction to practices of secrecy.
This is the first book to examine the British empire’s direct impact on Britain’s domestic society and culture in the 19th century, in context and without pre-assumptions. The conclusions it comes to are radically different from some current orthodoxies, especially those of certain cultural scholars. In a nutshell, ‘imperialism’ was a very minority and marginal discourse in British culture; which tells us far more both about that culture and about imperialism than do the traces that the latter left on the former.
Modern American foreign policy is often criticised—or in some cases celebrated—as ‘imperialism’, and compared with the British 19th-century kind. This book will explore this comparison in depth, in ways that should greatly illuminate both phenomena.
Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell, eds. Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture (Ashgate P, 2005).
Secretaries are the hidden technicians of much literary (and non-literary) writing; they also figure as characters in modern literature, film, and even literary criticism. Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture brings together secretaries' role in the production and consumption of culture with interpretations of their function in literature and film from Chaucer to Heidegger, by way of Dickens, Dracula, and Erle Stanley Gardner. These essays probe the relation of office practice to literary theory, asking what changes when literary texts represent, address, or acknowledge the human copyist or the mechanical writing machine. Topics range from copyright law to voice recognition software, from New Women to haunted typewriters and from the history of technology to the future of information management.
In Detecting the Nation Reitz argues that detective fiction was essential to acclimating the population to the larger venture of the British Empire. In doing so, Reitz challenges literary-historical assumptions that detective fiction is a minor domestic genre that reinforces a distinction between metropolitan center and imperial periphery. Rather, Reitz argues, nineteenth-century detective fiction helped transform the concept of an island kingdom to that of a sprawling empire; detective fiction placed imperialism at the center of English identity by recasting what had been the suspiciously un-English figure of the turn-of-the-century detective as the very embodiment of both English principles and imperial authority.
Frederick S. Roden, ed., Palgrave Advances in Oscar Wilde Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
Palgrave Advances in Oscar Wilde Studies is a comprehensive guide to recent critical approaches. Topics covered include Gay Studies, Feminist Criticism, Material Culture, Religion, Philosophy, Performance Studies, Aestheticism, Biography, Textual Studies and Postcolonial Theory. The book is designed to acquaint readers of all levels with the history of scholarship in a range of fields and suggest ways that Wilde's work offer new areas for research. The collection also provides a chronology and detailed bibliography.
Harry E. Shaw, Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot (Cornell UP, 2005).
"Narrating Reality generates an original and affirmative account about nineteenth-century realism . . . targeted very effectively against the dominant critical positions on realism of our times. Shaw incorporates the most important texts on realism written over the past hundred years, while also ranging broadly over philosophical and theoretical works. . . . All in all, Shaw's analysis is more rigorous and more clarifying than anything I have read on the subject in the last ten or fifteen years. It is without question the most original defense of realism I have come across in a long time."--John Kucich, University of Michigan
Linda M. Shires, ed., Tess of the d'Urbervilles (New Riverside Editions, Houghton Mifflin, 2005).
This New Riverside Edition of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles is the 1920 imprint of the 1912 Wessex Edition. The volume includes an Introduction, glossary, notes, chronology and further reading list, alongside Hardy's prefaces to the first and later editions, the poem "Tess's Lament," a map of Wessex, and the short story "On the Western Circuit." The volume notably features other Victorian materials: on gothic style by John Ruskin, on sexual selection by Charles Darwin, and on marriage and the status of women by Mona Caird. Twentieth-century essays included are by Penny Boumelha, John Goode, and Peter Widdowson.
This book considers Wellington's spectacular funeral pageant in the fall of 1852—an unprecedented event that attracted one and a half million spectators to London—as a threshold-event against which the life of the soldier-hero could be reviewed and represented. Wellington's military and political career came to be comprehended as the consumation of a national destiny intimately bound up with Englishness itself. Canvassing a profuse and dramatically proliferating Wellingtoniana, this book examines the various assumptions behind, and implications of, the Times's celebrated claim that the Irish-born Wellington "was the very type and model of an Englishman."
This highly readable survey brings together a wide range of research into women's lives in England between 1760 and 1914. Using diaries, letters, and memoirs, as well as social and statistical research, it looks at sex, marriage, childbirth, and work inside and outside the home, for all classes of women. It considers the influence of religion, education, and politics, especially the advent of organised feminism and the suffragette movement. It looks, too, at the huge role played by women in the British Empire: how imperialism shaped English women's lives and how women also moulded the Empire.
Margaret D. Stetz, Gender and the London Theatre, 1880-1920 (Rivendale P, 2004).
At the turn of the last century, London was a city filled with theatres. Meanwhile, the visual imagery of that theatrical world circulated everywhere, and it knew no geographical boundaries. Much of that imagery highlighted the subject of gender. The theatre was both the center of social transformation and its mirror—the place where, quite literally, new roles for women and men were being enacted and a site that reflected shifts occurring in the larger political environment. This volume explores the links between changing notions of gender and sexuality and changes in the London theatre. It draws its material from the vast print culture that surrounded the stage: playbills, reviews, posters, photographs, drawings, advertisements, books, serial publications, printed ephemera, and postcards.
The Victorians since 1901 provides a much-needed survey of trends in the modern historiography of nineteenth-century Britain. Bringing together a group of international scholars from the disciplines of history, English literature, art history and cultural studies, it identifies and assesses the principal influences on twentieth-century attitudes towards the Victorians. Developments in academia, popular culture, public history and the internet are covered in this important and stimulating collection, and the final chapters anticipate future global trends in interpretations of the Victorian era, making an essential volume for students of Victorian Studies.
Mid-Victorian liberals such as George Eliot, John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold championed an idea of individual "many-sided" agency. Cultivating Victorians explicates that vision and shows how it went on to define key aspects of Victorian aestheticism, as artists and writers increasingly claimed for art a special kind of self-reflecting power. Cases span diverse cultural contexts, from the agential rhetoric of John Ruskin and the bizarre sensation of the Tichborne Claimant to Dante Gabriel Rossetti's practice of reproducing his artworks. In addition to its redemptive account of several liberal intellectual premises, the study also critiques contemporary anti-liberalist argumentation.
For the most part the statues that stand in British cities honour men of established rank and influence; Contested Sites focuses on a lesser known form of commemoration—the use of monuments to create an oppositional memory in public spaces. The essays describe attempts to raise memorials in honour of reform movements, campaigns and individual 'trouble-makers'— from the Scottish Martyrs of the1790s and Tom Paine to anti-slavery campaigners, teetotallers and Chartists. Despite bitter opposition by conservatives, over the last two hundred years Britain has been endowed with sites of memory that breach the barriers of class, politics, gender and race.
Tamara Wagner, Longing: Narratives of Nostalgia in the British Novel, 1740-1890 (Bucknell UP, 2004).
Nostalgia formed an important cultural force in the nineteenth century that significantly shaped the novel genre, while fiction at once reflected and influenced the changing definition of nostalgia as an emotion and way of remembering. Both were significant for a new understanding of personal feeling. This study shows how nostalgia was transformed from a clinical condition into an emotional experience in late-eighteenth-century novels of sensibility, ridiculed after the genre's heyday, and became treated as a disconcertingly, though powerfully revealing, memory in mid-Victorian fiction before it had to be defended against new pathologies of both longing and memory at the fin-de-siècle .
Forthcoming: Arlene Young, ed. and intro., The Girl Behind the Keys by Tom Gallon (Broadview P, Fall 2005).
First published in 1903, The Girl Behind the Keys is a delightful but seemingly inconsequential example of early detective fiction that relates the adventures of a typist who becomes an amateur sleuth. The story unites a host of cultural and literary motifs that mark a particular historical moment—the Victorian era is giving way to modernity, and technological and scientific advances are countered by popular fascination with spiritualism. The themes of intrigue and suspicion that run through the text reflect the undercurrent of late-Victorian alarm over and even fear of new knowledge and new technologies.