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.
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.
Carolyn Vellenga Berman, Creole Crossings: Domestic Fiction and the Reform of Colonial Slavery (Cornell UP, December 2005).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Leigh Hunt and the London Literary Scene reassesses Hunt's substantial contributions to several different genres and to offer an account of their significant impact on audiences during the Romantic period. It analyzes the intricate relationship between Hunt's literary efforts and his social and political environment, particularly as expressed in contemporary reviews. This book examines the political and literary importance of Leigh Hunt, a key, yet underrated figure of the Romantic period. Works considered include Critical Essays on the Performers of the London Theatres, The Feast of the Poets, The Story of Rimini, The Liberal, and Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries.
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.
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.
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.
Linda K. Hughes, Graham R.: Rosamund Marriott Watson, Woman of Letters (Ohio UP, July 2005).
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.
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, organising 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.
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.
Forthcoming: Michael M. Kaylor, Secreted Desires: The Major Uranians: Hopkins, Pater, and Wilde (Masaryk UP, October 2006)
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 paederastic 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 will be available in both a print and an identical E-version (Adobe PDF; open-access; available for free download).
Forthcoming: Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (Oxford UP, 2006).
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.
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.
Forthcoming: 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.
Martineau’s 1864 edition of her History of the Peace 1816-1846, published in the U.S. by Walker & Wise, is the only edition to include the Introduction, covering the Peninsular Wars, and the period from 1846 through the Crimean War. This reset and fully annotated edition of the 1864 History features introductions outlining Martineau’s contributions to Victorian historiography and nursing reform. Volume six includes England and her Soldiers and collected periodical writings representing Martineau’s extensive collaboration with Florence Nightingale promoting sanitary reform in the military and the public sectors. The set features a comprehensive index.
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.
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.
This examination of Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and its reinterpretations presents interviews with novelists Emma Tennant and Valerie Martin and playwright David Edgar, framed by analysis of their works. Its survey of Jekyll’s history reveals that these late twentieth-century writers react against the tradition of reinterpretations and recover Stevenson’s structure. Arguing that their returns to a Victorian text are motivated by contemporary concerns about class and gender politics that find an apt vehicle for exploration in Stevenson’s story, this book identifies a trend of neo-Victorianism.
The book’s preface is by Elaine Showalter.
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.
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.
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 dialog, 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.
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.
Susie Steinbach, Women in England 1760-1914: A Social History (Hard back: London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004. Paperback: London: Phoenix, September 2005. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, forthcoming.)
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.
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.
In Cammy Thomas's poems we are immediately thrust into the ice-crack of family legacy, guided by Thomas's chilling unsurprise in the face of violence or violent austerity. The simplicity of her language suggests that this austerity is fundamental, irrevocable, and yet something in Thomas's fierceness also suggests it can be faced down. Cathedral of Wish won the 2006 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America.
G. B. Tennyson has written of this edition: "The scholarship that has gone into this edition is superior beyond all question. Indeed, it is quite staggering, from the introduction to the notes, to establishment of text and all supporting apparatus. It is, in short, the definitive edition of . . . a work that both summarized nineteenth-century concern over the nature of the contemporary world and set the tone for and approach to that concern for the rest of the century."
Sharon Aronofsky Weltman
Ruskin radically destabilizes categories of identity such as gender, race, and species though his concerns with actual and metaphorical performance. No one has before analyzed Ruskin's writing on theater, which he attended voraciously and often used to illustrate points about social justice in his writings on art, science, and girls' education. Predating Wilde (who is anachronistically misrepresented on the fin-de-millennial stage as an icon of homosexuality while Ruskin is inaccurately depicted as a mere prude or pedophile), Ruskin's reluctant recognition of identity as performed rather than innate reveals an incipiently post-modern sensibility that calls into question our own identity categories.
Using shoplifting and fraud trial records, advertisements, newspaper reports, literature, and popular ballads, it analyses the rise, criticism, and entrenchment of consumerism in the period 1800-1880. This work argues that the dazzling new world of consumption had beginnings that predate the later English, French and American department store cultures. It also challenges the view that women were helpless consumers manipulated by merchants into making excessive purchases, or even driven by their desires into acts of theft.
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.
In 1900 Mrs. Humphry Ward was the best-selling novelist in the English language: this book helps us remember why. Ward's desire to be in the thick of her times, writing to the political moment and to the mass audience, positioned her in defense of the status quo, "behind her times" in both senses of the phrase: but since she kept redefining the status quo as "transition time," she kept advancing as well. This first full critical treatment of Ward in sixty years reads eight of her novels as they romance the high melodramas of science and religion, aristocracy and socialism, suffrage and war.
This international collection of essays examines the ways in which diverse kinds of confinement intersect with Western ideologies of subjectivity, investigating the modern nation-state?s reliance on captivity as a means of consolidating notions of individual and national sovereignty. Contributions include essays on Russian serf narratives, slave narratives, Barbary captivity narratives, Major Arthur Griffiths? writings on prisons around the world, Victorian prisoners? autobiographies, and works by political prisoners such as suffragette Constance Lytton and United Irishman Charles Hamilton Teeling.
This study focuses on the diverse ways in which nineteenth-century Irish writers wrote about India, showing how their own experience of colonial subjection and unfulfilled national aspirations informed their work. Drawing on Enlightenment philosophy, studies of nationalism, and postcolonial theory, it examines fiction by Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan, gothic tales by Charles Robert Maturin, Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde, poetry by William Drennan, Thomas Moore, Denis Florence MacCarthy and others, as well as a wide array of non-fiction prose.