Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton UP, 2006).
How do the ways we argue represent a practical philosophy or a way of life? Are concepts of character and ethos pertinent to our understanding of academic debate? In this book, Amanda Anderson analyzes arguments in literary, cultural, and political theory, with special attention to the ways in which theorists understand ideals of critical distance, forms of subjective experience, and the determinants of belief and practice. Drawing on the resources of the liberal and rationalist tradition, Anderson promotes a revitalized culture of argument through a richer understanding of the ways critical reason is practiced at the individual, collective, and institutional levels.
Suzy Anger, Victorian Interpretation (Cornell UP, 2006).
Suzy Anger investigates the relationship of Victorian interpretation to the ways in which literary criticism is practiced today. Her primary focus is literary interpretation, but she also considers fields such as legal theory, psychology, history, and the natural sciences in order to establish the pervasiveness of hermeneutic thought in Victorian culture. AngerÕs book demonstrates that much current thought on interpretation has its antecedents in the Victorians, who were already deeply engaged with the problems of interpretation that concern literary theorists today.
In this book, Mary Ellen Bellanca offers the first critical study of the nature diary as a genre of empirical knowledge-seeking and aesthetic exploration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A mélange of fact, narrative, and imaginative re-creation, nature diaries played a crucial role in the era’s cultural dialogue of literature and science. Examining the journals of Gilbert White, Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Shore, George Eliot, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, as well as those of lesser-known figures, Daybooks of Discovery shows how journal writing enabled and mediated these writers’ work as naturalists and authors and helped to constitute nineteenth-century discourses of natural history.
Through carefully nuanced discussions of a variety of Victorian novelists, journalists, and sociological investigators (some well known, like Dickens, and others less well known, like Masterman and Greenwood), the book offers new insight into the role played by the imagination of the urban poor in the construction of Victorian middle-class masculinity. Whereas many scholars have discussed the feminization of the poor, virtually no one has addressed how the poor have served as a site at which middle-class men fashioned their own class and gender identity.
Andrea Broomfield, Food and Cooking in Victorian England: A History (Praeger Publishers, 2007).
Nine recipes serve as entry points for detailing the history of food production, cooking, and diet throughout Queen Victoria's reign in England. More than that, however, Broomfield offers an introduction to the world of everyday dining and food preparation during one of the most interesting periods of English history. Food procurement, kitchen duties, and dining conventions were almost always dictated by one's socioeconomic status and one's gender, but questions still remain. Who was most likely to dine out? Who was most likely to be in charge of the family flatware and fine china? Who washed the dishes? Who could afford a fine piece of meat once a week, once a month, or never? All these questions and more are answered in this illuminating history of food and cooking in Victorian England.
Last year a series of conferences in New York, Santa Cruz, and London commemorated the 150th anniversary of the Crystal Palace, the architectural breakthrough at the Great Exhibition of 1851 that symbolized the quintessence of British industrial and technological progress. Gathered here are the best of the papers from those conferences by a number of leading scholars in their fields. Each essay makes an important new contribution to thinking about the place occupied both materially and discursively by the Crystal Palace and other 19th- and 20th-century exhibitions in the struggle to come to meaningful terms with the modern world. With essays from cultural and social historians, literary critics, and art historians, the collection as a whole focuses on how these exhibitions, in attempting to define the cultures of their day, incorporated a range of conflicting ideologies and agendas, in fact compromising their ability to convey a unified message about modernity. The volume also addresses the ways in which the cultural processes and tendencies brought together in these exhibitions have been refracted down to the present, thus informing and complicating our own relationship to modernity and postmodernity.
Based on a rich range of primary sources and manuscripts, A Rossetti Family Chronology breaks exciting new ground. Focusing on Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Chronology demonstrates the interconnectedness of their friendships and creativity, giving information about literary composition and artistic output, publication and exhibition, reviews, finances, relationships, health and detailing literary and artistic influences. Drawing on many unpublished sources, including family letters and diaries, this new volume in the Author Chronologies series will be of value to all students and scholars of the Rossettis.
This book makes the claim that Victorian novels do not simply reflect professional ideology; they also scrutinize its dilemmas, contradictions, and limitations. In this volume, innovative readings of canonical texts accompany groundbreaking work on less familiar novels and nonfiction to illuminate the Victorians’ own struggles with the emerging professional ideology. The Victorians’ engagement with fundamental ideas of professional identity—such as autonomy, meritocracy, and the service ethic—reveal professionalism’s dual basis in materialist and idealist rationalities, a duality often not recognized by contemporary theorists of historical professionalism.
Charismatic, highly intelligent, and splendidly talented, Fanny Kemble (1809-93) was a Victorian celebrity, known on both sides of the Atlantic as an actress and member of the famous Kemble theatrical dynasty, as a fierce opponent of slavery despite her marriage to a wealthy slave owner, as a brilliantly successful solo performer of Shakespeare, and as the author of journals about her career and life on her husband's Georgia plantations. Always highly theatrical, Kemble appropriated and subverted nineteenth-century prescriptions for women's lives. Hers was truly a performed life, and in the first Kemble biography in twenty-five years to examine that life in its entirety, Deirdre David presents it in all its richness and complexity.
The book explores the nineteenth-century roots of the modern "information state," especially the roles of investigative projects and official reports in embedding the state in print culture and in refashioning the politics of representation. Performing, printing, and then circulating studies of labor in British factories and mines or of the conditions of native tribes in the American West, government established an economy of exchange with its diverse constituencies. In this medium, which Frankel terms "print statism," not only knowledge but also tangible objects such as reports and books changed hands. As participants, citizens assumed the standing of informants and readers.
The Ideas in Things explores apparently inconsequential objects in popular Victorian texts to make contact with their fugitive meanings. Building her case around objects from three well-known Victorian novels—the mahogany furniture in Jane Eyre, the calico curtains in Mary Barton, and “Negro head” tobacco in Great Expectations—Elaine Freedgood argues that these things are connected to histories of slavery, genocide, deforestation, de-industrialization and famine that are not narrated in these novels, but are nonetheless contained by them. These histories hide in plain sight—in the things that have been so little read in the history of reading Victorian fiction.
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.
Forthcoming: Pamela K. Gilbert, The Citizen's Body: Desire, Health, and the Social in Victorian England (Ohio State UP, August 2007).
The management of the social body through discourses of health became the principal means of negotiating new questions of citizenship and the Condition of England. The Citizen’s Body traces the construction of citizenship through the figure of the healthy body, in parliamentary debates on the franchise, in sanitary and housing publications, and in novels. The rhetoric of the healthy body as the ground of civic participation permeated the discourse of the novel, as shown in the work of Dickens, Oliphant, Disraeli, Eliot, and Gaskell.
Forthcoming: Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn, eds., The Collected Stories of George Moore: Gender and Genre. 5 vols. (Pickering and Chatto, 2007).
George Moore (1852-1933) was one of the most influential and versatile writers of the turn of the century. His writing always crossed boundaries: generically (between autobiography, fiction and folklore), thematically, psychologically and conceptually. This five-volume reset critical edition addresses current scholarly interest in Moore’s short fiction and novella collections (1: Celibates, 2. Other Short Stories, 3. The Untilled Field, 4. A Story-Teller’s Holiday, 5. In Single Strictness). Each volume contains an extensive introduction, a bibliographic note on the text, editorial notes, textual variants, appendices, and contemporary reviews.
Based on the exploits of John Sheppard, a thief who was executed in 1724 after a series of prison escapes that made him a folk hero, Jack Sheppard was blamed for inciting working-class crime and vagrancy for decades after its publication. Rendering an eighteenth-century London underworld typified by Newgate Prison and the Bedlam Hospital, Ainsworth’s fast-paced narrative of Sheppard’s struggles against the evil thief-catcher Jonathan Wild was immensely popular, as well as controversial, in its own time, and is now for the first time available in an annotated edition that includes the original George Cruikshank illustrations.
A wide-ranging study of literature, science and the idea of space in the first half of the nineteenth century, as burgeoning mass access to print culture combined with rapid scientific development to create a crisis in managing knowledge. Contemporary writers tried to solve this crisis by rethinking the nature of space. Both literature and science wrestled with the same central political and intellectual concerns – regulating access to knowledge, organizing knowledge in productive ways, and formulating the relationships of old and new knowledges. This book provides a rich new picture of the early nineteenth century’s understanding of its own culture.
In chapters on Collins, Trollope, and Meredith, Jones examines novels that both narrate and invite problematic reading as part of their theorizing of cultural production. Problem Novels demonstrates that these works posit a culturally imbedded, sensationally susceptible reader and, at the same time, present a methodology for critical engagement with cultural texts. Thus, the novels theorize a reader who is both unconsciously interpellated and critically empowered. This paradoxical construction of the unconscious/critical subject re-emerges in the theoretical paradigms of Victorian cultural studies scholarship. Indeed, as Problem Novels shows, Victorianists' attachments to critical "detective work" closely resemble the sensational attachments that we assume shaped Victorian novel readers.
Lost Causes shows that Victorian writers frequently appear to have a more supple and interesting understanding of the relationship between history, causality, and narrative than the one typically offered by readers who are burdened by the new historicism. As a return to these writers emphasizes, the press of modern historicism deforms Victorian novels, encouraging us to read deviations from strict historical accuracy as ideological bad faith. By contrast, Jason B. Jones argues through readings of works ranging from The French Revolution to Middlemarch that literature's engagement with history has to be read otherwise. Part of the Victorian Critical Interventions series edited by Donald Hall.
Few writers have captured the essence of 19th-century London the way Charles Dickens has. A master of extreme situations, Dickens is known for his colorful and often seedy characters and the elaborate settings of his works. This volume from the new Bloom's Classic Critical Views series features a remarkable collection of critical essays from the 19th and early 20th centuries that paint a clear historical portrait of this legendary writer.
This volume demarcates the distinctly paederastic elements within a series of highly nuanced, Uranian texts. Chapter one considers recent engagements of Hopkins’s eroticism; chapter two considers Hopkins’s unique problematics; chapter three is a close reading of Hopkins’s ‘Epithalamion’; chapter four considers the pederastic pedagogy advocated by Pater in Marius the Epicurean; chapter five considers the breach between Pater and Wilde facilitated by Pater’s review of Dorian Gray. The conclusion considers the Uranian continuum stretching from William Johnson to Guy Davenport. This volume is available in a printed edition and an identical open-access (PDF) e-version at www.mmkaylor.com.
Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (Oxford UP, 2007).
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 in paperback: Amy M. King, Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel (Oxford UP, 2003, paperback August 2007).
Bringing together novelistic courtships and the botanical systems of Linnaeus and his followers, King offers a striking account of the way in which the language of "bloom" enabled a licit, yet sexualized, representation of maturation and marriage for novelists from Jane Austen to George Eliot and Henry James. The girl in bloom—the girl at her social and sexual peak—is a subject plotted through the language of botany. Through a fusion of literary and scientific history, King reevokes a world of the botanical vernacular: the world in which the “marriages of plants” and the marriages of humans helped explain each other. Bloom's readings offer us an understanding of all that botanical culture could express through those evanescent flowerings.
John Kucich, Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class (Princeton UP, 2006).
In Imperial Masochism, Kucich reveals the central role masochistic forms of voluntary suffering played in late-nineteenth-century British thinking about imperial politics and class identity. Placing the colonial writers Robert Louis Stevenson, Olive Schreiner, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad in their cultural context, Kucich shows how the ideological and psychological dynamics of empire, particularly its reorganization of class identities at the colonial periphery, depended on figurations of masochism. The first full-length study of masochism in British colonial fiction, Imperial Masochism puts forth new readings of this literature and shows the continued relevance of psychoanalysis to historicist studies of literature and culture.
This is the first book-length study of Tennyson's record of publication in Victorian periodicals. Despite Tennyson's supposed hostility to periodicals, Ledbetter shows that he made a career-long habit of contributing to them and in the process revealed not only his willingness to promote his career but also his status as a highly valued commodity. Ledbetter explores the ironies and tensions created by Tennyson's attitudes toward publishing in Victorian periodicals and the undeniable benefits to his career. Her book enriches not only our understanding of Tennyson's relationship to periodical culture but the textual implications of a poem's relationship with other texts on a periodical page and the meanings available to specific groups of readers targeted by individual periodicals.
Carolyn Lesjak, Working Fictions: A Genealogy of the Victorian Novel (Duke UP, October 2006).
Working Fictions interrogates the relationship between labor and pleasure, two concepts that Lesjak argues were central to the Victorian imagination and the literary output of the era. Through the creation of a genealogy of the "labor novel," Lesjak challenges the prevailing assumption about the portrayal of work in Victorian fiction, namely that it disappears with the fall from prominence of the industrial novel. She proposes that the "problematic of labor" persists throughout the nineteenth century and continues to animate texts as diverse as Gaskell's Mary Barton, Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Dickens's Great Expectations, and the essayistic and literary work of Morris and Wilde.
Instead of claiming to represent Darwin's thought and life, as they have too often been represented, this book uses Darwin as major evidence for an argument that enchantment, regarded by Weber as possible only in a world imagined as teleologically and divinely directed, is possible in the form of a humane secularity, what William Connolly calls "secular enchantment." Without minimizing the austerity of Darwin's arguments,it finds a model of such enchantment in Darwin himself, in his science, in his prose, in aspects of his life and in his romantic way of thinking.
Despite Martineau's controversial dictum that her correspondents destroy her letters, approximately 2,000 letters survive to offer revealing perspectives on her life and work. Featuring correspondents from America, Great Britain, and Europe, Martineau's Collected Letters reads like a Who's Who of 19th-century western culture. While the Autobiography was the officially sanctioned account, it fails to cover the last 21 years of her life, a period covered by the Letters. Most of the letters offered in this set have not been published previously. The fully annotated edition offers an introduction, an extensive biographical directory, and a comprehensive index.
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss. Oliver Lovesey, ed. (Broadview, 2007).
This classic Victorian novel tells the story of Maggie Tulliver, whose passionate ambition conflicts with provincial society's narrow view of women. George Eliot's most autobiographical novel, The Mill on the Floss remains one of her most popular and influential works. This edition includes a critical introduction and extensive contextualizing notes as well as a broad range of appendices drawn from contemporary documents dealing with issues such as nineteenth-century views of disability, education, and the Woman Question.
The Dangerous Lover takes seriously the ubiquity of the brooding romantic hero—his dark past, his remorseful and rebellious exile from comfortable everyday living. Deborah Lutz traces the recent history of this figure, through the melancholy iconoclasm of the Romantics, the lost soul redeemed by love of the Brontës, and the tormented individualism of twentieth-century love narratives. Arguing for this character’s central influence not only in literature but also in the history of ideas, this book places the dangerous lover firmly within the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, the Modernism of Georg Lukács, and Roland Barthes's theories on love and longing. Canonical authors such as Dickens, George Eliot, and Oscar Wilde are considered alongside non-canonical texts such as popular romance.
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles. 2nd. edition. Sarah Maier, ed. (Broadview, 2007).
This classic novel tells the story of how a poor rural couple becomes convinced that they are descended from the ancient family of d’Urbervilles. This is a revised, updated, and expanded Broadview edition that highlights a feminist interpretation of the novel in an extensive introduction. The range of historical appendices (including contemporary articles, letters, maps, news stories, and reviews) will greatly enhance a reader’s understanding of the text.
Jill L. Matus, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell (Cambridge UP, Feb. 2007).
In the last few decades, Elizabeth Gaskell has become a figure of growing importance in the field of Victorian literary studies. Critics are increasingly coming to acknowledge that her work is neither artless nor transparent. They are also granting growing recognition to her intellectuality, her familiarity with matters of scientific, economic, and theological enquiry, and her narrative sophistication. This Companion features chapters on individual novels as well as more general topics (Gaskell, gender and the family; Gaskell and social transformation; Gaskell and the Unitarian context). Edited by Jill Matus, with contributions from well-known scholars such as Patsy Stoneman, John Chapple, Linda K. Hughes, Audrey Jaffe, Susan Hamilton, Nancy Henry, Linda H. Peterson, Nancy S. Weyant, Marion Shaw, and Deirdre d’Albertis.
Forthcoming: Richard Menke, Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (Stanford UP, October 2007).
This study examines Victorian fiction as part of an emerging era of new media technologies and information exchange, from the postage stamp and electric telegraph to wireless. Dickens, Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Trollope, Henry James, and Kipling emerge as the contemporaries of Rowland Hill, Charles Babbage, George Boole, William Cook and Charles Wheatstone, William Henry Fox Talbot, and Guglielmo Marconi. And by placing fiction in dialogue with media history, Menke argues that Victorian realism was print culture's sophisticated response to the possibilities and dilemmas of a world of media innovations and information flows.
Elsa Michie, ed., Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre: A Casebook (Oxford, February 2006).
Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre: A Casebook (Oxford, February 2006), edited by Elsie B. Michie, is a collection of essays reflecting recent scholarship on the novel. It includes work by Carol Bock, Heather Glen, Cora Kaplan, Helena Michie, Beth Newman, Joyce Carol Oates, Jenny Sharpe, Sally Shuttleworth, Patsy Stoneman, and Ron Thomas on topics ranging from the reception of the novel to its historical background.
The Victorian period witnessed the beginning of a debate on the status of animals that continues today. This volume explicitly acknowledges the way twenty-first-century deliberations about animal rights and the fact of past and prospective animal extinction haunt the discussion of the Victorians' obsession with animals. Combining close attention to historical detail with a sophisticated analytical framework, the contributors examine the various forms of human dominion over animals, including imaginative possession of animals in the realms of fiction, performance, and the visual arts, as well as physical control as manifest in hunting, killing, vivisection and zookeeping. The diverse range of topics, analyzed from a contemporary perspective, makes the volume a significant contribution to Victorian studies. Harriet Ritvo's conclusion points toward future studies of animals in the Victorian period.
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.
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights. Beth Newman, ed. (Broadview, 2007).
Over a hundred and fifty years after its initial publication, Emily Brontë’s turbulent portrayal of the Earnshaws and the Lintons, two northern English households nearly destroyed by violent passions in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, continues to provoke and fascinate readers. The introduction and appendices to this Broadview edition explore the impact of industrialization on the people of Yorkshire, consider the novel’s representation of gender, and survey the ways contemporary scholarship has sought to account for Heathcliff.
Often, the rhetorical tropes and narrative structures of the Gothic were used to argue that both Catholicism and sexual difference were fundamentally alien and threatening to British Protestant culture. Ultimately, however, the Gothic also provides an imaginative space in which writers from Newman to Wilde could articulate an alternative vision of British culture. O'Malley charts these developments from the eighteenth-century origins of the Gothic novel through the mid-nineteenth-century sensation novel, and to the end of the Victorian Gothic, foregrounding the continuing importance of the Gothic as a genre through which British authors defined their culture and what was outside it.
What made Emily Dickinson the reclusive woman she was and the dynamic poet she became? A Wounded Deer concludes that Emily Dickinson’s enigmatic poetry originated from her personal exposure to incest, and examines how she used her craft to make the transition from victim to survivor at a time when the medical profession failed to acknowledge any damage related to this event. Writing was Dickinson’s way of identifying the nature of her trauma, coming to terms with its impact, breaking the silence to inspire future women writers, and reconstructing a new persona, albeit from the sanctuary of her self-imposed isolation.
Attending especially to what, how, and why women read, Reading Women brings together a rich array of subjects that sheds light on the defining role the woman reader has played in the formation, not only of literary history, but also of British and American culture. The contributors break new ground by focusing on the impact representations of women readers have had on understandings of literacy and certain reading practices, the development of books and print culture, and the categorization of texts into high and low cultural forms.
This edition of the Autobiography reproduces the original 1877 text, which Martineau composed in 1855 and had printed in anticipation of her death. It includes illustrations of the author and her homes; excerpts from the "Memorials," added by her editor Maria Chapman; and reviews that praise and critique Martineau's method as an autobiographer and achievement as a Victorian woman of letters.
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.
Cultural concerns about gender and empire converge in striking and unexpected ways in two popular novel forms of late-Victorian Great Britain. In the 1880s and 1890s, feminist New Woman fiction and colonial adventure stories competed for the sympathies of their readers. While one form questions a system that proclaims male superiority and the right to dominate others, the second celebrates British male victories over "savage" landscapes, animals, and people. Despite their differences, however, the two subgenres engage in an implicit dialogue, and they intersect on topics of pressing cultural debates—Irish Home Rule, women's suffrage, the expanding empire, and a growing human rights movement—in ways that upend gender stereotypes and often produce hybrid forms.
This new volume of essays examines the relationship between Catholicism and homosexuality. Why did so many literary Modernists embrace Catholicism? What is their relationship between historical homophobia and contemporary struggles between the Church and the homosexual? Moving from the Gothic to the late Twentieth-century, from Britain to America and France, Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives interrogates what is queer about Catholicism and what is modern about homosexuality. The result is a radical revision of the sacred—in life and art, the body and devotion.
The English middle class in the late nineteenth century enjoyed an increase in the availability and variety of material goods. With that, the visual markers of class membership and manly behavior underwent a radical change. In The Cut of His Coat, Brent Shannon examines familiar novels by authors such as George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hughes, and H. G. Wells, as well as previously unexamined etiquette manuals, period advertisements, and fashion monthlies, to trace how new ideologies emerged as mass-produced clothes, sartorial markers, and consumer culture began to change. While Victorian literature traditionally portrayed women as having sole control of class representations through dress and manners, Shannon argues that middle-class men participated vigorously in fashion. Public displays of their newly acquired mannerisms, hairstyles, clothing, and consumer goods redefined masculinity and class status for the Victorian era and beyond. The Cut of His Coat probes the Victorian disavowal of men’s interest in fashion and shopping to recover men’s significant role in the representation of class through self-presentation and consumer practices.
Peter W. Sinnema, The Wake of Wellington: Englishness in 1852 (Ohio UP, 2006).
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."
Jonathan Smith, Charles Darwin and Visual Culture, (Cambridge UP, 2006).
Although The Origin of Species contained just a single visual illustration, Charles Darwin's other books were copiously illustrated by well-known artists and engravers. Jonathan Smith explains how Darwin managed to illustrate the unillustratable - his theories of natural and sexual selection - by manipulating and modifying the visual conventions of natural history. Moreover, Smith looks outward to analyze the relationships between Darwin's illustrations and Victorian visual culture, especially the effort to promote Darwin's evolutionary explanation of beauty and John Ruskin's resistance to it.
Antony Simpson, ed.
Forthcoming: W. T. Stead,The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon. Antony Simpson, ed. (Lambertville, NJ: The True Bill P, Sept. 2007).
Includes the full text of Stead's influential report, originally serialized in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1885 and never before reprinted in its entirety. Annotations clarify many of Stead's references. A lengthy introductory essay places the report, and the legislation it was designed to support, in the context of a sixty-year battle to control organized prostitution through the substance and application of the law.
Antony Simpson, ed.
Forthcoming: Antony Simpson, ed., Witnesses to the Scaffold; English Literary Figures as Observers of Public Executions: Pierce Egan, Thackeray, Dickens, Alexander Smith, G.A. Sala, Orwell. (Lambertville, NJ: The True Bill P, December 2007).
Accounts of the executions written by these six authors are reprinted in full. Each is accompanied by an essay addressing the context of the execution and the author's attitude to it and to the general question of capital punishment. These essays and accounts are preceded by a detailed overview of the structure and functions of capital punishment in England in late Georgian and Victorian England.
Margaret D. Stetz and Cheryl A. Wilson, eds., Michael Field and Their World. (Rivendale, 2007).
Writing as “Michael Field,” Katharine Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913), the British aunt and niece lesbian couple, produced an enormous and distinguished body of plays and poetry. Long neglected, they now appear frequently in anthologies of Victorian literature, queer literature, and literature by women. This is the first collection of essays to be devoted to their lives, works, relations with contemporaries, and influential legacies, as well as to the critical and theoretical questions raised by their collaboration. The contributors to this volume are some of today’s most prominent scholars of Victorian studies and gender studies from several continents.
This lavishly-illustrated volume offers a new interpretation of the significance of the portrait image during the final decades of the nineteenth century in Britain, using materials drawn from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection at the University of Delaware. This study highlights the connections between the images of writers' and artists' faces that circulated through the British periodical press, through exhibition spaces in London, and through book publishing, and such late-Victorian cultural obsessions as defining "genius," masculinity, femininity, and class status. It examines, too, the relationship between the circulation of portraits and notions of modernity created through advertising, public relations, and commodification.
The essays in this collection demonstrate how late-Victorian and Edwardian neurology and fiction shared common philosophical concerns and rhetorical strategies. Between 1860 and 1920, neurologists like Silas Weir Mitchell and Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote moving literature, while novelists like H.G. Wells and Wilkie Collins used fiction to dramatize neurological discoveries and their consequences. These six decades witnessed unprecedented interdisciplinary collaboration between scientists and artists, who found common ground in their shared ambivalence towards the prevailing intellectual climate of biological determinism.
Integrating historical and archival research with authorship and collaboration theory, this collection goes beyond static concepts of the writing "couple" to explore literary couplings created by writers, and their readers, critics, and publishers from the early modern to the postmodern period. Partnerships treated include those of Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Wollstonecraft and Godwin, Samuel and Sara Coleridge, the Brownings, Sir Richard and Isabel Burton, Oscar Wilde, and Plath and Hughes, among others. Jill Matus, Chris Keep, Alison Hickey, Ann Wallace, Gerard Goggin, Marjorie Stone and Corinne Davies are contributors for the essays on nineteenth-century writers in the collection.
Between 1840 and 1910, many best-selling English novels reveal a fascination with the listening audience, musical ensemble, and mass-music movement. This pioneering new book argues that these popular narratives share a perception of musical performance as participating in larger cultural forces, such as ideas about nation. Looking at these cultural thematics also links literature that is not usually discussed together: Charlotte Brontë’s Villette is shown to head up a tradition that includes works of fiction by George Meredith, Samuel Butler, George Bernard Shaw, Vernon Lee, and E.M. Forster. An original and fascinating study examining the theme of the ‘musical crowd’ alongside Victorian social, political, and scientific theories.
This is the first book examining Ruskin's writing on theater of all kinds, which he used throughout his life to illustrate points about social justice, aesthetics, ontology, and epistemology. Performing the Victorian also interprets recent plays portraying Ruskin as prude or pedophile (The Invention of Love, The Countess, Modern Painters), comparing them to concurrent plays about Oscar Wilde (Gross Indecency, The Judas Kiss). Like Ruskin, Wilde is misrepresented on the fin-de-millennial stage anachronistically, as icon of homosexual identity. These static identity labels constrain contemporary audiences more rigidly than the mercurial selves conjured in the prose of either Ruskin or Wilde.
Drawing upon extensive archival work in the British Library, Sarah Willburn analyzes seance accounts, novels about mediumship, and metaphysical treatises, to formulate a new conception of individualism that offers a fresh look at Victorian subjectivity. She presents the theories of compelling characters such as Newton Crosland and Lois Waisbrooker and provides exciting new readings of well-known texts by Charlotte Brontë, Eliot, Martineau, and Corelli.
Thomas Hardy Reappraised brings together new articles by fifteen of the world’s most eminent Hardy scholars in honour of Michael Millgate, University Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto. These essays address questions of biblical and literary allusiveness, cultural, historical, and philosophical context, narrative and poetic theory and practice, as well as Hardy’s place in the modern world and his influence on younger writers. The contributors offer collectively one of the most significant reappraisals of Hardy’s work to have appeared since Michael Millgate helped to transform Hardy studies. Contributors include Pamela Dalziel, Marjorie Garson, Simon Gatrell, Barbara Hardy, Samuel Hynes, W. J. Keith, U.C. Knoepflmacher, George Levine, J. Hillis Miller, William W. Morgan, Norman Page, Mary Rimmer, Jeremy V. Steele, Dennis Taylor, and Ruth Bernard Yeazell.
This study focuses on the way nineteenth-century Irish writers wrote about India, showing how their own experience of colonial subjection and unfulfilled national aspirations informed their work. Their writings express sympathy with the colonised or oppressed people of India in order to unsettle nineteenth-century imperialist stereotypes, and demonstrate their own opposition to the idea and reality of empire. Drawing on Enlightenment philosophy, studies of nationalism, and postcolonial theory, this study examines fiction by Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan, gothic tales by Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde, poetry by Thomas Moore and others, as well as a wide array of non-fiction prose.
Focusing on non-canonical writers (such as Thelwall, Godwin and the novelists of the 1790s), or placing authors such as Wordsworth and Byron in a non-canonical context, these essays explore the psychic and social politics of genre from a variety of theoretical perspectives, while the introduction looks at how genre itself was rethought by Romantic criticism. Contributors include, in addition to the editors, Jon Klancher, Kevin Gilmartin, Gary Handwerk, Ina Ferris, Don Bialostosky, Judith Thompson, Jerrold E. Hogle, Mary Jacobus, and Jerome McGann. New in paperback.
Forthcoming: Julia M. Wright, ed., Irish Literature, 1750-1900: An Anthology. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007).
This anthology includes nearly forty authors and, with very few exceptions, full-text editions of plays, poems, and short fiction. Non-fiction prose also appears in either substantial excerpts or full texts. Among the Victorian-era authors represented in the anthology are William Carleton, the Banim brothers, James Clarence Mangan, Samuel Ferguson, J. Sheridan LeFanu, Jane Wilde, Dion Boucicault, William Allingham, Julia Kavanagh, Oscar Wilde, and Dora Sigerson. Editorial apparatus includes an introduction, suggestions for further reading, and a chronology of historical events and major Irish novels.