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Michelle Allen-Emerson, Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London (Ohio UP, 2008).
Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London examines the 19th-century movement for sanitary reform in Britain, a movement that encompassed engineering projects, public health legislation, scientific research, and literature. While the study takes as its starting point the importance of sanitary reform to Victorian society and culture, it draws sustained attention to what we might call the untold story of the sanitary movement: that is, expressions of ambivalence and even resistance to sanitary measures that were in most cases welcomed. Ultimately, the study sheds light on the divergent experiences and ideas of the city under pressure of sanitary modernization.
This book examines the emergence of mass reproduction and the origins of modern visual culture in the illustrated journalism of the 1890s. It looks in detail at the illustrators, photographers, editors, publishers, wood engravers, and reproduction firms who commissioned, originated, and produced images in popular illustrated magazines. The book demonstrates that photomechanical reproduction was central to an explosion of hybrid hand drawn and photographic imagery that provided readers with a meaningful picture of the surfaces of everyday modernity.
The extracts from the autobiographies of fifty-two nineteenth-century British women published in these two volumes are organized by a major stage or aspect of their lives. Whether raised in the aristocracy or sent out to work at the age of eight, educated at a university or self-taught, the women reveal what was expected of women and how these expectations shifted over the course of the century. During the nineteenth century women were chained within the boundaries of their society and simultaneously shaking those chains through their writings whether they overtly protested their role in society or not.
This eight-volume reset edition consolidates the recent shift in emphasis from Mary Robinson's salacious life to her considerable literary achievements as both a novelist and poet. And recent interest in Robinson's work is fast awarding her a place of importance within the canon of British Romantic Literature. Her association with key romantic figures such as William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and the thematic comparisons between Robinson's work and that of her contemporary Charlotte Smith, make her a serious figure for scholarly research.With a keen eye for cultural and social critique her works expose the moral shortcomings of high society in Georgian England: the misogynistic treatment of women and the fetishistic obsession with wealth and social status receive particular attention. But more than social critique, these works identify Robinson as an avatar of subversive politics. Her well documented sympathy for the French Revolution evinces her political radicalism. And her unconventional treatment of gender and sexuality is emphasised by representations of transvestism and incest.This critical edition presents all seven of Robinson's novels for the first time. Also included is the unpublished play Nobody, a satirical afterpiece which sheds new light on Robinson's wider oeuvre.
Political economy is defined in this volume as collective state or corporate support for art and architecture in the public sphere intended to be accessible to the widest possible public, raising questions about the relationship of the state to cultural production and consumption. This collection of essays explores the political economy of art from the perspective of the artist or from analysis of art's production and consumption, emphasizing the art side of the relationship between art and state. This volume explores art as public good, a central issue in political economy. Essays examine specific cultural spaces as points of struggle between economic and cultural processes. Essays focus on three areas of conflict: theories of political economy put into practices of state cultural production, sculptural and architectural monuments commissioned by state and corporate entities, and conflicts and critiques of state investments in culture by artists and the public.
William A. Cohen, Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses (U of Minnesota P, 2008).
What does it mean to be human? British writers in the Victorian period found a surprising answer to this question. What is human, they discovered, is nothing more or less than the human body itself. In literature of the period, as well as in scientific writing and journalism, the notion of an interior human essence came to be identified with the material existence of the body. The organs of sensory perception were understood as crucial routes of exchange between the interior and the external worlds. Anatomizing Victorian ideas of the human, William A. Cohen considers the meaning of sensory encounters in works by writers including Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Rather than regarding the bodily exterior as the primary location in which identity categories—such as gender, sexuality, race, and disability—are expressed, he focuses on the interior experience of sensation, whereby these politics come to be felt.
Dennis Denisoff, ed. The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture (Ashgate, 2008).
This diverse collection addresses the roles assigned to children in the context of nineteenth-century consumer culture. At the same time, it remains steadfast in recognizing that the young did not simply exist within adult-articulated cultural contexts but were agents in their formation. Topics include toys and middle-class childhood; boyhood and toy theater; child performers on the Victorian stage; gender, sexuality and consumerism; imperialism in adventure fiction; the idealization of childhood as a form of adult entertainment and self-flattery; the commercialization of orphans; and the economics behind formulations of child poverty. Together, the essays demonstrate the rising investment both children and adults made in commodities as sources of identity and human worth.
Ella Dzelzainis and Cora Kaplan, eds.
Vehement in her reforming economic liberalism, Harriet Martineau (1802-76) was a contentious figure both in her own time and since. For over fifty years she wrote innovatively and indefatigably in a range of genres — didactic fiction, travel writing, translation, journalism, autobiography, history, and letters — producing work that straddles current academic boundaries. This edited collection brings together a distinguished team of scholars to consider the making of individual, sociopolitical and imperial identities across the range of her writing. Contributors include Isobel Armstrong, Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Catherine Hall, Tamara Ketabgian, Deborah A. Logan and Linda H. Peterson.
Julie Donovan, Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, and the Politics of Style (Academica P, 2009).
Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan and the Politics of Style represents a significant contribution to growing scholarly interest in an important Irish literary figure of the nineteenth century. In this work, Dr. Julie Donovan contextualizes Owenson's emblematic Irishness, which was often dismissed as excessive showmanship. The study includes an extensive discussion of Owenson's often-overlooked personal papers and artifacts housed in the National Library of Ireland and the Royal Irish Academy. No previous study has fully considered this crucial archival material and its implications. In addition, Owenson's unpublished and hitherto unexamined letters from various university collections including Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, Trinity College, Princeton, and Penn State are analyzed as part of this original research monograph.
Ian Duncan, Scott's Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton UP, 2007).
Winner of the 2008 Saltire Society/National Library of Scotland Research Book of the Year Award.
Ian Duncan traces the rise of a cultural nationalist ideology and the ascendancy of Scott's Waverley novels in the years after Waterloo. He argues that the key to Scott's achievement and its unprecedented impact was the actualization of a realist aesthetic of fiction, one that offered a socializing model of the imagination as first theorized by Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume. This aesthetic, Duncan contends, provides a powerful novelistic alternative to the Kantian-Coleridgean account of the imagination that has been taken as normative for British Romanticism since the early twentieth century. Duncan goes on to examine in detail how other Scottish writers inspired by Scott's innovations--James Hogg and John Galt in particular--produced in their own novels and tales rival accounts of regional, national, and imperial history.
Masking The Text, recently published in Rivendale Press's "1890s Print Culture" series (www.rivendalepress.com/newpub.html) takes its cue from Oscar Wilde's essay "The Truth of Masks" to show that prominent writers and artists of the 1890s conceptualized literature not as a straightforwardly expressive, representational, or even remotely "truthful" mode of discourse but as a form of mask or masquerade. Language was a visible, perceptible entity, and knowledge was inseparable from beauty. For this reason, the work of the illustrator or graphic designer assumed paramount importance in a book's publication and reception; and the "text" was a collaborative, hybrid entity, irreducible to simply "literary" or "artistic" elements. Even works that spurned decoration, or that circulated in media other than that of the printed book, exploited the visual and material dimensions of those media with a self-consciousness that was as provocative as it was rigorous. Frankel's book includes groundbreaking new discussions of work by Oscar Wilde, Michael Field, George Meredith, the Rhymers' Club and William Morris, Aubrey Beardsley, Charles Ricketts, and James McNeill Whistler, as well as discussions of the textual implications of illustration, typography, forgery, collecting, and typewriting. Numerous black and white illustrations accompany Frankel's text.
Jill Galvan
Forthcoming: Jill Galvan, The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult, and Communication Technologies, 1859-1919 (Cornell UP, 2009).
The nineteenth century saw the emergence of several spectacular kinds of at-a-distance, human-mediated dialogue. Telegraphic, telephonic, typed, and spiritualistic (séance) exchanges all required operators or go-betweens. This study analyzes communications mediation as a general vocation that took many specific forms and that had become feminized by the turn of the century. Various literary modes—from realism to the late-Victorian Gothic, detective fiction to the sensationalistic medical case study—reveal the female medium as a distinctive cultural figure: an (ideally) unconscious yet sympathetic agent of transmission. Examining this malleable trope allows us a revealing vantage point onto then-current ideas of femininity as well as modernizing concepts of communication and knowledge transfer.
Dierdre David & Eileen Gillooly, eds. Contemporary Dickens (Ohio State UP, 2009).
A stimulating collection of essays by a group of distinguished literary scholars, Contemporary Dickens presents some of the most intriguing work being undertaken in Dickens studies today. Through an emphasis on the nineteenth-century origins of our current critical preoccupations and ways of knowing, the essays reveal Dickens to be our contemporary. The contributors argue that such issues as gender and sexuality, environmentalism, and the construction of national identity, were frequently explored and sometimes problematically resolved by Dickens himself. They also illuminate the importance of Dickens's place in our current re-assessment of critical methodologies. Drawing freely upon a variety of reading strategies (materialist, deconstructive, new historical, psychoanalytic, feminist), the essays disclose new aspects of Dickens's engagements with a number of Victorian concerns—moral philosophy, the psychology of the emotions, and life-writing among them—that have once again emerged as significant objects of study in early twenty-first century criticism. Looking at such familiar topics from fresh perspectives, Contemporary Dickens is an original and challenging contribution to Dickens studies and Victorian criticism in general.
Melissa Gregory and Melisa Klimaszewski, Charles Dickens (Brief Lives) (Hesperus, 2008).
Born in Portsmouth in 1812, Dickens rose to fame within his lifetime and, to the present day, has never been out of print. In this highly accessible biography, Dickens scholars Melissa Valiska Gregory and Melisa Klimaszewski examine the fascinating life of this hugely popular literary figure, exploring such classics as Great Expectations and David Copperfield against the backdrop of Victorian England.
Marah Gubar. Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children's Literature (Oxford UP, 2009).
Artful Dodgers contends that Golden Age children's literature and the infamous "cult of the child" must be reconceived to reflect the fact that many of the artists who participated in these intertwined phenomena were deeply ambivalent about the Romantic ideal of innocence. In the process of tracing how a fascination with precocity clashes with a commitment to natural purity in the work of authors such as Lewis Carroll and J. M. Barrie, Marah Gubar offers a new account of the rise of the child narrator, the vogue for child actors, and the emergence of English children's theatre.
Nancy Henry, The Cambridge Introduction to George Eliot (Cambridge UP, 2008).
Part of the Cambridge Introductions to Literature series, this book provides students, instructors and general readers with the biographical, religious, political, scientific and literary contexts they need to understand the works of George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), one of the Victorian Period's most influential authors. Henry devotes a separate section to each novel (as well as to essays and poetry) and surveys a range of critical and theoretical responses to Eliot's work.
In recent years, historians and literary critics have begun to take innovative, interdisciplinary approaches to investigating the complex cultures that developed around and within the nineteenth-century financial system. The essays collected in this volume address topics such as financial journalism, limited liability, life insurance, and the financial plots of Victorian fiction within the contexts of Victorian imperialism, class and gender. Contributors include Timothy Alborn, Ian Baucom, Martin Daunton, Nancy Henry, David Itzkowitz, Audrey Jaffe, Mary Poovey, George Robb, and Cannon Schmitt.
Spanning three decades, E. M. Forster's radio broadcasts for the BBC were a major contribution to British cultural history, reaching in their day a larger audience than his fiction. As a broadcaster Forster was a public intellectual, literary historian and critic, political activist, advocate of India, and wary yet cooperative ally of a colonialist government during World War II. Of particular interest to Victorianists among the seventy annotated broadcasts gathered here are those on Austen, Wordsworth, Arnold, Hardy, and Kipling, and over thirty broadcasts to India—often about contemporary Indian writers—that make available significant new materials for postcolonial analysis.
Treating nineteenth-century London and New York as case studies, Lisa Keller examines the critical development of sanctioned free speech, controlled public assembly, new urban regulations, and the quelling of riots, all in the name of a proper regard for order. Drawing on rich archival sources that include the unpublished correspondence of government officials and ordinary citizens, Keller paints an intimate portrait of daily life in these two cities and the intricacies of their emerging bureaucracies. She finds that New York eventually settled on a policy of preempting disruption before it occurred, while London chose a path of greater tolerance toward street activities. Dividing her history into five categories—cities, police and militia, the public, free speech and assembly, and the law—Keller concludes with an assessment of freedom in these cities today and asks whether the scales have been tipped too strongly on the side of order and control.
The Indian-born novelist Isa Blagden (1816-73) held a unique place in the Brownings' circle by virtue of her intimacy with both poets. No other friend saw as much of them during their married life in Florence, and, according to one contemporary, no other friend was "admitted into the mysteries of their inner thoughts." Florentine Friends presents the 232 letters the Brownings wrote to Isa over a twelve-year period. EBB's letters, which constitute the greater share of this correspondence, reveal her intellectual and emotional commitment to the Risorgimento, Italy's struggle to become an independent nation.
Ivan Kreilkamp, Voice and the Victorian Storyteller (Cambridge UP, 2005, 2009 [paper]).
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. He offers a detailed account of the many ways Victorian literature and culture represented the human voice, from political speeches, governesses' tales, shorthand manuals, and staged authorial performances in the early- and mid-century, to mechanically reproducible voice at the end of the century. Through readings of Charlotte Brontë, Browning, Carlyle, Conrad, Dickens, Disraeli and Gaskell, Kreilkamp re-evaluates 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 innovative study will change the way readers consider the Victorian novel and its many ways of telling stories.
Mark Samuels Lasner, The Bookplates of Aubrey Beardsley (Rivendale, 2008).
Highly decorative in contrasting black and white, small in scale, and executed with an eye towards reproduction, the celebrated drawings of Aubrey Beardsley (1872-98) are ideally suited for use as bookplates. This informative book describes and illustrates for the first time forty plates made from his works. These include the three bookplates the artist actually designed for the purpose—for the physician and scholar John Lumsden Propert, for his patron Herbert Charles Pollitt, and for the poet Olive Custance, who married Oscar Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. Bookplates adapted from Beardsley illustrations have been made for a surprising variety of people, not only collectors, but also a Texas professor, a prolific London journalist, an eminent lawyer, the mother of a famous British publisher, the President of the Royal Academy, a Hungarian composer, and the author and occultist Aleister Crowley.
This book brings to life the growth of the socialist movement among men and women artists and writers in late nineteenth-century Britain. For these campaigners, socialism was inseparable from desire for a new beauty of life; beauty that also, for many, required a rejection of the sexual conventions of the Victorian era. Livesey uncovers the lasting influence of socialist writers of the 1880s on the emergence of British literary modernism and by tracing the lives and works of neglected writers and activists such as Clementina Black and Dollie Radford, as well Morris, Carpenter and Shaw, she provides a vivid evocation of an era in which revolution seemed imminent and the arts a vital route to that future.
This series reproduces in facsimile carefully selected extracts from rare biographies, memoirs, articles, pamphlets, letters, private diaries and other ephemera. Contemporaries often took more partisan views than later historians, as they wrote with no knowledge of their subjects' later careers. The use of these documents permits a new biographical approach.
Victorian intellectual work on the concept of culture engaged in a constant dialogue with beliefs about non-culture. This study argues that Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and Edward Tylor all shared a common preoccupation with the condition of primitive life as exemplifying this state and used it as a springboard to launch their own claims about the value and specific nature of culture. The essence of this imaginary condition was a psychological form of global self-projection called "primitive fetishism," a concept whose currency peaked following the publication of Auguste Comte's Positive Philosophy. Ultimately, the study argues that the modern culture concept needs to be understood as in part a product of the prehistory of fetishism. Recovering the role of the primitive in foundational writing on culture thus contributes to the ongoing discussion of categorical problems in the uses of culture as an analytical tool.
Chris Louttit, Dickens's Secular Gospel: Work, Gender, and Personality Studies (Routledge, 2009).
This book challenges a critical oversimplification: that Dickens's attitude towards work reflects expressions of Victorian earnestness of the sort attributed to Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and Samuel Smiles. Instead, by analyzing Dickens's writings in the light of new biographical and historical research, this study shows that Dickens is not interested in work as an abstract, positive value, or even in cataloguing it in concrete detail. What he explores instead is the human dimension of work. His writing about work is, as a result, best viewed not merely as a quasi-religious Gospel of Work but rather as a "secular gospel."
Examining works by Christina Rossetti, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, George Eliot, and Michael Field, as well as the suffragette newspaper Votes for Women, Krista Lysack in this important new work challenges the dominant construction of Victorian femininity as characterized by self-renunciation and the regulation of appetite. Come Buy, Come Buy provides a reappraisal of the female shopper in women's writing of Victorian England and demonstrates how women's shopping practices are materialized as forms of narrative, poetic, and cultural inscription. Lysack considers a variety of archival sources (shopping guides, women's fashion magazines, household management guides, newspapers, and advertisements) and cultural practices (department store shopping, shoplifting and kleptomania, domestic economy, and suffragette shopkeeping), tracing a genealogy of the woman shopper from dissident domestic spender to aesthetic connoisseur, from curious shop-gazer to political radical.
Sara Malton, Forgery in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Palgrave, 2009).
In Forgery in Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture, Sara Malton insists that we more fully account for the prominence of forgery—as a financial crime of some severity—in the nineteenth-century cultural imagination. In doing so, she examines social and legal history and a range of nineteenth-century works from Dickens to Wilde as she considers the shifting representation of the crime and its perpetrator across the century. Distinct in its historical attentiveness, Forgery in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture illuminates the breadth of cultural issues to which this "crime of the first magnitude" is linked.
The Mighty Scot turns a spotlight on the Victorian love affair with Scotland. Examining influential representations of Scottishness in nineteenth-century novels, paintings, deer-stalking memoirs, poetry, historical documents, cartoons, and more, it investigates the discovery of Scotland as an imagined wellspring of fierce primal masculinity. How and why did the mystique of Scottish masculinity arise? What role did it play in English national identity? And how did it impact Scots' own sense of national identity and masculinity? Exploring these questions, The Mighty Scot shows the intricate interconnections between masculinity and nation, and contributes to a deeper understanding of the complex ideological function of Scotland within Britain.
In some moods, or for some people, the desire to improve can seem so natural as to be banal. The impulse drives forward so much in our culture that it can color our thoughts without being much noticed. But in other moods, or for other people, this strenuous desire becomes all too noticeable, and its demands crushing. It can then drive a sleepless attention to ourselves, a desolate evaluation of what we have been and what we are. Evoking and analyzing this desire, The Burdens of Perfection reads essayists, poets and especially novelists, while providing an extensive response to the moral perfectionism of Stanley Cavell. In the process, Andrew H. Miller offers a fresh way to perceive the Victorians and the lingering traces their quests for improvement have left on readers.
Framed examines literature and film of the fin de siècle era—roughly 1880 to 1914—to uncover the unique social role of the glamorous female criminal in popular British crime narrative. Drawing upon magazine culture, early cinema, and literary crime genres, Framed considers the figure of the "New Woman Criminal" in light of suffrage-era feminism, consumerism, a newly visual media sphere, and radical political movements of the dynamite era. The New Woman Criminal embodies ambivalent cultural fantasies about modern feminine identity: she appeals to desire for feminine power and liberation, but promotes consumption and image as means to this end.
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.
Bringing together established critics and exciting new voices, The Politics of Gender in Anthony Trollope's Novels offers original readings of Trollope that recognize and repay his importance as source material for scholars working in diverse fields of literary and cultural studies. As the editors observe in their provocative introduction, Trollope more than any of his contemporaries is studied by scholars from disciplines outside literary studies. The contributors here draw together work from economics, colonialism and ethnicity, gender studies, new historicism, liberalism, legal studies, and politics that convincingly argues for the eminence of Trollope's writings as a vehicle for the theoretical explorations of Victorian culture that currently predominate. The essays variously examine imperial and postcolonial themes in the context of economic, cultural, aesthetic, and demographic influences; show how gender-sensitive readings expose Trollope's critique of capitalism's influence; address Trollope and sexuality in the context of queer studies, the law, archetypal constructions, and classical feminism; and offer new approaches to narrative theory through examination of Victorian understandings of male and female psychology. Regenia Gagnier's concluding chapter revisits the collection's critical strands and reflects on the implications for future studies of Trollope.
This collection of essays sets out to challenge the dominant narrative about Victorian theatre by placing the practices and products of the Victorian theatre in relation to Victorian visual culture, through the lens of the concept of 'Ruskinian theatre,' an approach to theatre which values its educative purpose as well as its aesthetic expression. This book brings together original research in theatre and the visual arts, around the common object of a revaluation of the intersections of the theatre and visual culture. Contributors are drawn from a stimulating mix of highly-esteemed and established scholars (such as Shearer West, Jim Davis, Richard Foulkes and David Mayer) and new scholars.
Daniel Novak, Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge UP, 2008).
This radically new account of the relationship between photography and literary realism in Victorian Britain draws on detailed readings of photographs, writings about photography, and fiction by Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Oscar Wilde. While other critics have argued that photography defined what would be 'real' for literary fiction, Daniel A. Novak demonstrates that photography itself was associated with the unreal—with fiction and the literary imagination. Once we acknowledge that manipulation was essential rather than incidental to the project of nineteenth-century realism, our understanding of the relationship between photography and fiction changes in important ways.
Ellen O'Brien, Crime in Verse: The Poetics of Murder in the Victorian Era (Ohio State UP, 2008).
Crime in Verse considers the cultural engagements of poetry while historicizing murder's entanglement in legal fictions, punitive practices, medical theories, class conflicts, and gender codes. Individual chapters examine the classed politics of crime and punishment in the broadside ballad, the epistemological tensions of homicidal lunacy and criminal responsibility in the dramatic monologue, and the legal and ideological frictions of domestic violence in the verse novel and verse drama. Developing focused analyses of generic and discursive meanings, the study traces a poetics of murder that aligned problems of legal and literary interpretation in provocative, disruptive, and innovative ways.
Forthcoming: Sharrona Pearl, About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain. (Harvard UP, Feb. 2010).
When nineteenth-century Londoners looked at each other, what did they see, and how did they want to be seen? Sharrona Pearl reveals the way that physiognomy, the study of facial features and their relationship to character, shaped the way that people understood one another and presented themselves. Moving through a wide range of media, Pearl shows how physiognomical notions rested on instinct and honed a kind of shared subjectivity. She looks at the stakes for framing physiognomy—a practice with a long history—as a science in the nineteenth century.
Situating Tennyson among a wide range of Victorian poets, politicians, theologians, and theorists, Tennyson's Rapture explores this poet's representation of rapture as a radical mechanism of transformation—social, political, and personal—and as a figure for critical processes in his own poetics. Tennyson's fascination with transformation is figured formally in the genre of the dramatic monologue, and this book offers a new approach to reading all Victorian dramatic monologues, arguing against a critical tradition that sees speakers as unintentionally self-revealing and ignorant of the implications of their speech. Tennyson's Rapture probes the complex aims of these discursive performances, and explores the comprehensive engagement of seemingly apolitical monologues with the rise of democracy over the course of Tennyson's influential career.
Becoming a Woman of Letters traces the emergence of the professional woman of letters and her increasing prominence in the 19th-century literary field. In six case studies it analyzes the careers of groundbreaking women as they constructed new images of the woman author and devised myths of women's writing to negotiate trends in print culture. These "facts of the market" include the rise and proliferation of periodicals; the rise (and demise) of literary annuals; the emergence of serialized fiction, the triple-decker novel, periodical poetry, and the high-culture essay; the practices of publishers and editors with whom authors negotiated contracts and payment; and the role of reviewers who estimated authors' achievements.
The papers collected in this volume address the complex issue of stage adaptation. The essays enquire into the processes involved in theatrical adaptation, highlighting the multi-layering, hybridity and palimpsestous character of onstage adaptations. They attend to a wide spectrum of problems which include issues of classification, the question of media and generic transpositions as well as the intra- and intertextuality of onstage adaptations. Various papers also address the processes and problems of transculturation and indigenization. This collection, therefore, offers a platform for a positive reconsideration of stage plays and live theatre in adaptation studies. In reverse, the study of adaptation also proves vital to the field of contemporary theatre and drama studies as it helps to deconstruct problematic notions of fidelity and originality, emphasizing instead the complexity of adaptive processes on the stage and beyond.
Patricia Pulham, Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee's Supernatural Tales (Ashgate, 2008).
Vernon Lee's definition of the supernatural in the preface to Hauntings: Fantastic Stories (1890) questions the nature of the 'genuine ghost', and argues that this figure is to be found in our own psyches where it functions as a mediator between past and present. Using D. W. Winnicott's 'transitional object' theory, which maintains that adults transfer their childhood engagement with toys to art and cultural artifacts, Patricia Pulham argues that the art objects that often function as 'ghosts' in Lee's supernatural fiction held complex meanings that allowed her to explore alternative identities and permitted the expression of transgressive sexualities.
At her death in 1937, Wharton left behind a fascinating collection of unpublished work written throughout her lifetime.This is the first scholarly edition of this body of work. Largely unfinished, these unknown works include a dazzling novella penned when Wharton was only fourteen, two abandoned novels, three stage-plays, and frank life writings drafted late in her career. Several texts are works-in-progress for later, more renowned writings. The plays in particular open up a hitherto unexplored field of Wharton studies and allow scholars to adjust their assessment of her as a novelist. Copy texts are carefully chosen. Where more than one draft exists, the most advanced version will be printed and textual variants are recorded in the endnotes. The edition also benefits from a lengthy general introduction, background essays to each genre section, headnotes and endnotes.The edition will be essential for scholars and students of Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Literature, American Literature, Women's Writing and the History of the Novel.
In 1815, amidst the decline of George III, the scandals of the Regency, and the defeat of Napoleon, a 26-year-old Bostonian businessman, Joseph Ballard, toured England and left a complete record of his impressions of British society and culture. Ballard was eager to get a closer look at "mother" England and found himself in the midst of Regency excesses, in the months surrounding Waterloo. Ballard's lively narrative is full of period detail, and offers fascinating insights into British and American society during a critical era for both nations. This edition presents this unique journal in its entirety, along with a comprehensive introduction and supplementary materials that provide invaluable historical and cultural contexts. The journal (and the notes) provides a wonderful introduction and overview not merely to Regency culture, but to Victorian society and values which, as Rauch observes throughout, emerged from this period.
This Norton Critical Edition is based on the 1854 Fifth Edition, the last edition corrected by the author. In addition to a critical Preface, explanatory notes, Chronology, and comprehensive Bibliography, the edition includes a rich Contexts section that includes ten contemporary reviews, letters to and by Gaskell in relation to the writing and reception of Mary Barton, documentary material from Engels and Faucher, Gaskell's short story "Libbie Marsh's Three Eras" from her three short story set called "Life in Manchester," Dion Boucicault's 1863 dramatic adaptation called "The Long Strike," and fifteen illustrations from editions published from 1880 through 1907 that serve as a mini visual history of late Victorian book illustration styles. The Criticism section includes pieces by Kathleen Tillotson, Raymond Williams, Richard D. Altick, Graham Handley, John Lucas, Rosemarie Bodenheimer, Catherine Gallagher, Patsy Stoneman, Hilary M. Schor, Deborah Epstein Nord, Josephine M. Guy, Dierdre d'Albertis, Susan Zlotnick, Jonathan H. Grossman, Amy Mae King, and Liam Corely.
Forthcoming: Thomas Recchio, Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford: A Publishing History (Ashgate, November 2009).
Tracing the publishing history of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford from its initial 1851-53 serialization in Dickens's Household Words through its numerous editions and adaptations, Thomas Recchio focuses especially on how the text has been deployed to support ideas related to nation and national identity. Recchio maps Cranford's nineteenth-century reception in Britain and the United States, illustrated editions in England and the United States dating from 1864, US school editions in the first two decades of the twentieth-century, dramatic adaptations from 1899 to 2007, and Anglo-American literary criticism in the latter half of the twentieth-century. Making extensive use of primary materials, Recchio considers Cranford within the context of the Victorian periodical press, contemporary reviews, theories of text and word relationships in illustrated books, community theater, and digital media. In addition to being a detailed publishing history that emphasizes the material forms of the book and its adaptations, Recchio's book is a narrative of Cranford's evolution from an auto-ethnography of a receding mid-Victorian English way of life to a novel that was deployed as a maternal model to define an American sensibility for early twentieth-century Mediterranean and Eastern European immigrants. While focusing on one novel, Recchio offers a convincing micro-history of the way English literature was positioned in England and the United States to support an Anglo-centric cultural project, to resist the emergence of multicultural societies, and to ensure an unchanging notion of a stable English culture on both sides of the Atlantic.
Kimberly Rhodes's interdisciplinary book is the first to explore fully the complicated representational history of Shakespeare's Ophelia during the Victorian period. In nineteenth-century Britain, the shape, function and representation of women's bodies were typically regulated and interpreted by public and private institutions, while emblematic fictional female figures like Ophelia functioned as idealized templates of Victorian womanhood. Rhodes examines the widely disseminated representations of Ophelia, from works by visual artists and writers, to interpretations of her character in contemporary productions of Hamlet, revealing her as a nexus of the struggle for the female body's subjugation.
This new edition prints two texts of Frankenstein, both based on the Draft: the first prints all of Percy Shelley's words in italics [so the reader can see his hand in the text]; the second purges Percy's words from the Draft and restores all of the words that Mary Shelley originally wrote, revealing her more colloquial voice. Both texts reproduce the original 2-volume novel in 33 chapters that read much more quickly than the 23 chapters in the first edition in 3 volumes. No one has studied the aesthetic implications of that radical restructuring of the chapters by the Shelleys when they fair copied the Draft in April/May 1817.
Meri-Jane Rochelson, A Jew in the Public Arena: The Career of Isaac Zangwill (Wayne State UP, 2008).
After winning an international audience with his 1892 novel Children of the Ghetto, Israel Zangwill went on to write numerous short stories, four additional novels, and several plays, including The Melting Pot (1908). Meri-Jane Rochelson examines his career from its beginnings in the 1890s to the performance of his last play, We Moderns, in 1924, to trace how Zangwill became the best-known Jewish writer in Britain and America, a leading spokesperson on Jewish affairs throughout the world, and an activist in the British women's suffrage movement as well as Zionism and Territorialism. A Jew in the Public Arena examines Zangwill's published writings alongside a wealth of primary materials, including letters, diaries, manuscripts, and press cuttings, to demonstrate how understanding Zangwill's career illuminates his era and the modern Jewish experience in Europe and America.
Forthcoming: Matthew Rubery, The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction After the Invention of News (Oxford UP, July 2009).
Rapid industrialization and new advances in technology marked the Victorian period as one of prodigious socio-cultural change. Chief among the many transformations of quotidian life was the swift and widespread dissemination of information made possible by the emergence of the daily newspaper, an unprecedented new media. The changes it wrought in politics, history, and advertising of the age have all been well-documented. But its influence on one area remains overlooked: the Victorian novel. Redressing this oversight, The Novelty of Newspapers highlights the variety of ways the changing world of nineteenth-century journalism shaped the period's most popular literary form.
Jason R. Rudy, Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics (Ohio State UP, 2009).
Victorian poetry shocks with the physicality of its formal effects, linking the rhythms of the human body to the natural pulsation of the universe. Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics connects formal poetic innovations to developments in the electrical and physiological sciences, arguing that the electrical sciences and bodily poetics cannot be separated, and that they came together with special force in the years between the 1830s, which witnessed the invention of the electric telegraph, and the 1870s, when James Clerk Maxwell's electric field theory transformed the study of electrodynamics.
In Darwin and the Memory of the Human, Cannon Schmitt shows how Darwin and other Victorian naturalists transformed their encounters with the South American continent and its indigenous peoples into influential accounts of biological change, race, and the origins of humanity. In doing so, Schmitt reshapes our understanding of Victorian imperialism, revisits the implications of Darwinian theory, and demonstrates the pertinence of nineteenth-century biological thought to current theorizations of memory.
The first printing of a 'lost' Victorian political satire from 1850, featuring a new twist on the stockmarket bubble of the 1840s, the revolutions of 1848, a Great Exhibition of the Souls of All Nations, a newspaper strike, and the introduction of universal suffrage for the British Parliament. The introduction sketches the career of the author, the elusive William North (1825-1854), who is also the subject of a special issue of Victorian Newsletter, no 115 (May 2009).
Forthcoming: Linda M. Shires, Perspectives: Modes of Viewing and Knowing in Nineteenth-Century England (Ohio State UP, Aug. 2009).
Perspectives reopens the question of classical perspective and its vicissitudes in aesthetic practice from the 1830s through the1870s. Linda M. Shires demonstrates why and how artists and writers across media experimented with techniques of dissolution, combination, and multiple viewpoints much earlier in the century than intellectual historians generally assume. In chapters on: visual and verbal art and a waning theocentrism; D.G. Rossetti; Henry Peach Robinson and Lady Clementina Hawarden; and Robert Browning, Wilkie Collins, and George Eliot, Shires revitalizes the currently available scholarship on connections among nineteenth-century art forms.
Essays by five literary figures who witnessed public executions in Britain are presented in the context of the debate over this spectacle, which continued through the 19th century until its abolition in 1868. The essays also present a setting for related developments, including the reform of the penal law and the law of criminal procedure and, most of all, the movement for the total abolition of capital punishment, which acquired considerable strength mid-century. An additional essay by Orwell, who witnessed an execution in Burma in the 1920s, provides an additional perspective on the nature and effects of this form of punishment.
Wilde wrote at a pivotal moment between the Victorian period and modernism, and his work is sometimes considered prescient of the postmodern age. He is now taught in a variety of university courses: in literature, theater, criticism, Irish studies, cultural studies, gender studies, and gay studies. This volume suggests editions, resources, and criticism, both in print and online, that may be useful for the teacher. It also contains twenty-five essays that discuss Wilde's stories, fairy tales, poetry, plays, essays, letters, and life—from the perspective of a wide range of disciplines.
Rebecca Stern, Home Economics: Domestic Fraud in Victorian England (Ohio State UP, 2008).
Home Economics: Domestic Fraud in Victorian England establishes fraud as a basic component of the Victorian popular imagination, key to its intimate, as well as corporate, systems of exchange. Alongside the multiplication of joint-stock corporations and the rise of a credit-based economy, which dramatically increased fraud in the Victorian money market, the threat of swindling affected both actual household commerce and popular conceptions of ostensibly private, more emotive forms of exchange. Working with diverse primary material, including literature, legal cases, newspaper columns, illustrations, ballads, and pamphlets, Home Economics not only provides a history of cases and categories of domestic deceit, but also illustrates the diverse means by which Victorian culture represented and consumed swindling in familial and other household relationships.
Forthcoming: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Selected Poems. Ed. Marjorie Stone and Beverly Taylor. (Broadview P, July 15, 2009).
Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Selected Poems, edited by Marjorie Stone and Beverly Taylor, has been published by Broadview Press, June, 2009. Linda K. Hughes, Addie Levy Professor of Literature, Texas Christian University, comments, "With this superb annotated edition—both a teaching text and an original contribution to scholarship—the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning at last has the presentation it has long deserved." Simon Avery, University of Westminster, comments, "This is the edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poetry that we have been waiting for," offering "a wide selection of Barrett Browning's works taken from across her long career."
Herbert F. Tucker, Epic: Britain's Heroic Muse 1790-1910 (Oxford UP, 2008).
This book is the first to provide a connected history of epic poetry in Britain between the French Revolution and the First World War. Although epic is widely held to have been shouldered aside by the novel, if not invalidated in advance by modernity, in fact the genre was practiced without interruption across the long nineteenth century by nearly every prominent Romantic and Victorian poet, and shoals of ambitious poetasters into the bargain. Poets kept the epic alive by revising its conventions to meet an overlapping series of changing realities: insurgent democracy, Napoleonic war, the rise of class consciousness and repeated reform of the franchise, challenges posed by scientific advance to religious belief and cherished notions of the human, the evolution of a postnationalist and eventually imperialist identity for Britain as the world's superpower. Each of these developments called on nineteenth-century epic to do what the genre had always done: affirm the unity of its sponsoring culture through a large utterance that both acknowledged the distinctive flowering of the modern and affirmed its rootedness in tradition. The best writers answered this call by figuring Britain's self-renewal and the genre's as versions of one another. In passing Herbert Tucker notices scores of mediocre congeners (and worse), so as to show where the challenge of a given decade fell and suggest what lay at stake. The background these lesser works provide throws into relief what the book stresses in extended discussions of several dozen major works: an unbroken history of daring experimentation in which circumspect, inventive, worried epoists engaged because the genre and the age alike demanded it.
Literary critics often pursue analyses of music or painting and literature as 'sister arts,' yet this is the first full-length study of the treatment of social dance in literature. Including analyses of works by Jane Austen, W. M. Thackeray, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope, as well as extensive material from nineteenth-century dance manuals, Literature and Dance in Nineteenth-Century Britain shows how dance provided a vehicle through which writers could convey social commentary and cultural critique on issues such as gender, social mobility, and nationalism.
Keith Wilson, ed. A Companion to Thomas Hardy (Blackwell, 2009).
A Companion to Thomas Hardy brings together new essays on all aspects of Hardy's work by thirty of the world's most distinguished Hardy scholars. Essays consider his complexity as a biographical subject, probe his ideas and attitudes in relation to their socio-cultural, scientific, and philosophical contexts, analyze his distinctive achievements in the remarkable variety of genres in which he worked, and assess his legacy for subsequent modernist writers. Comprehensive and authoritative, A Companion to Thomas Hardy offers an unparalleled range of contemporary scholarship on an author whose transitional position between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries renders him central to the study of both. Contributors: Tim Armstrong, Penny Boumelha, J. B. Bullen, Pamela Dalziel, Tim Dolin, Roger Ebbatson, Simon Gatrell, William Greenslade, Margaret R. Higonnet, Michael Irwin, George Levine, Charles Lock, Phillip Mallett, J. Hillis Miller, Michael Millgate, William W. Morgan, Richard Nemesvari, Ralph Pite, Andrew Radford, Stephen Regan, Angelique Richardson, Mary Rimmer, Claire Seymour, Dennis Taylor, Jane Thomas, G. Glen Wickens, Peter Widdowson, Keith Wilson, Julian Wolfreys, Terry R. Wright.
This volume examines nineteenth-century visual culture as European culture redefined itself, embracing political and social change yet expressing tensions and anxieties about modernity. Scholars of history, art, the history of science, architecture, and literature explore the anxiety-producing effects of rapid and constant change, and how the visual functioned as the means of expressing and allaying that anxiety through constant efforts to process and integrate the centrifugal experience of industrial capitalism. Through multidisciplinary case studies, we see how visual culture developed into forms distinguished by hybridity, the reinvention and transformation of genres, and the creative crossing of traditional boundaries.
Julia M. Wright, ed., Irish Literature, 1750-1900: An Anthology (Blackwell, 2008).
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.
This volume contains primary materials and introductory essays on the historical, critical and theoretical study of "national literature," focusing on the years 1550—1850. Part One is an anthology of primary materials from various English-speaking nations, including political essays, poetry, religious writing, and literary theory by major authors and thinkers. Parts Two and Three contain critical essays by leading scholars in the field: Part Two is a series of historically focussed essays that introduce and contextualize the primary material; Part III addresses contemporary issues such as canon-formation and globalization.
Realist novels are celebrated for their detailed attention to ordinary life. But two hundred years before the rise of literary realism, Dutch painters had already made an art of the everyday—pictures that served as a compelling model for the novelists who followed. Why were writers in Britain and France drawn to this art of the past? What does this tell us about the nature of realism? In this beautifully illustrated and elegantly written book, Ruth Yeazell explores the nineteenth century’s fascination with Dutch painting, as well as its doubts about an art that had long challenged traditional values.
Paul Young, Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order (Palgrave, 2009).
Gathering together industrial products from around the world, and placing them on view in Joseph Paxton's astonishing Crystal Palace, the Great Exhibition of 1851 was seen by many Victorian observers to have mapped out a pacific and progressive new world order. By critically evaluating the Exhibition and the commentary it inspired, Globalization and the Great Exhibition argues that the display was a decisive moment in the formation of a capitalist world picture which became durably embedded in Victorian society, which was transmitted throughout the nineteenth-century world, and which continues to exert a strong hold over global politics and culture today.
The addict's life narrative is all too familiar—the fall from grace, compulsion and despair, recovery and hope—but what about the cultural history of this story? Inventing the Addict shows how addiction became an available identity when a modernizing medical establishment and burgeoning culture of consumption updated the temperance icon of the sinful drunkard. Susan Zieger traces nineteenth-century metaphors of addiction such as exile, self-enslavement, and disease through texts such as De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.