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Artful Experiments: Ways of Knowing in Victorian Literature and Science

Philipp Erchinger

What is the connection between Victorian writing and experiment? Artful Experiments seeks to answer this question by approaching the field of literature and science in a way that is not so much ... More

What is the connection between Victorian writing and experiment? Artful Experiments seeks to answer this question by approaching the field of literature and science in a way that is not so much centred on discourses of established knowledge as it is on practices of investigating what is no longer or not yet knowledge. The book assembles various modes of writing, from poetry and sensation fiction to natural history and philosophical debate, reading them as ways of knowing or structures in the making, rather than as containers of accomplished arguments or story worlds. Offering innovative interpretations of works by George Eliot, Robert Browning, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and others, alongside in-depth studies of philosophical and scientific texts by writers such as John S. Mill, Thomas H. Huxley, George H. Lewes and F. Max Müller, Artful Experiments explicates and re-conceives the relations between the arts and the sciences, experience and language as well as practice and theory. For many Victorians, the book argues, experimentation was just as integral to the making of literature as writing was integral to the making of science.Less

Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism

Deaglan O Donghaile

This book examines types of political and literary disruption. Between 1880 and 1915, a range of writers exploited terrorism's political shocks for their own artistic ends. Drawing on late-Victorian ... More

This book examines types of political and literary disruption. Between 1880 and 1915, a range of writers exploited terrorism's political shocks for their own artistic ends. Drawing on late-Victorian ‘dynamite novels’ by authors including Robert Louis Stevenson, Tom Greer and Robert Thynne, radical journals and papers, such as The Irish People, The Torch, Anarchy and Freiheit, and modernist writing from H. G. Wells and Joseph Conrad to the compulsively militant modernism of Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists, the book maps the political and aesthetic connections that bind the shilling shocker closely to modernism.Less

British India and Victorian Literary Culture

Máire ní Fhlathúin

The book traces the development of British Indian literature from the early days of the nineteenth century to the end of the Victorian period. Previously unstudied poems and essays drawn from the ... More

The book traces the development of British Indian literature from the early days of the nineteenth century to the end of the Victorian period. Previously unstudied poems and essays drawn from the thriving periodicals culture of British India are examined alongside novels and travel-writing by authors including Philip Meadows Taylor, Emma Roberts and Rudyard Kipling, and the historical narratives of James Tod. Opening with an overview and discussion of the literary marketplace of the early nineteenth century, it moves on to the analysis of key moments, events and concerns of Victorian India, including the legacy of the Hastings impeachment, the Indian ‘Mutiny’, the sati controversy, and the rise of Bengal nationalism. These are re-assessed within their literary and political contexts, emphasising the engagement of British writers with canonical British literature (Scott, Byron) as well as the mythology and historiography of India and their own responses to their immediate surroundings. The book examines representations of the experience of being in India, in chapters on the poetry and prose of exile, and the dynamics of consumption. It also analyses colonial representations of the landscape and societies of India itself, in chapters on the figure of the bandit / hero, female agency and self-sacrifice, and the use of historiography to enlist indigenous narratives in the project of Empire.Less

The Case of Sherlock Holmes: Secrets and Lies in Conan Doyle's Detective Fiction

Andrew Glazzard

The Case of Sherlock Holmes uncovers what is untold, partly told, wrongly told or deliberately concealed in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes saga. This engaging study uses a scholarly approach, ... More

The Case of Sherlock Holmes uncovers what is untold, partly told, wrongly told or deliberately concealed in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes saga. This engaging study uses a scholarly approach, combining close reading with historicism, to read the stories afresh, sceptically probing Dr Watson’s narratives and Holmes’s often barely credible solutions. Drawing on Victorian and Edwardian history, Conan Doyle’s life and works, and Doyle’s literary sources, the book offers new insights into the Holmes stories and reveals what they say about money, class, family, sex, race, war and secrecy.Less

Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century

Matthew Ingleby and Matthew P. M. Kerr (eds)

Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century examines the importance of the coastline in the nineteenth-century British imagination. The years between the naval blockade of 1775, which began the ... More

Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century examines the importance of the coastline in the nineteenth-century British imagination. The years between the naval blockade of 1775, which began the American War, and the start of the First World War in 1914 witnessed a dramatic, varied flourishing in uses for and understandings of the coast on both sides of the Atlantic. Prior to the second half of the eighteenth century, coasts were often thought of as unhealthy, dangerous places. Developments in both medicine and aesthetics changed this. Increasingly, the coast could seem at once a space of clarity or of misty distance, a terminus or a place of embarkation – a place of solitude and exhilaration, of uselessness and instrumentality. Coastal Cultures takes as its subject this diverse set of meanings, using them to interrogate questions of space, place and cultural production. Outlining a broad range of coastal imaginings and engagements with the seaside, the book highlights the multivalent or even contradictory dimensions of these spaces. Spanning the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, and including interdisciplinary discussions of coastal spaces relevant to literary criticism, art history, museum studies and cultural geography, these essays from major figures in the cutting-edge field of maritime studies speak across traditional period and disciplinary boundaries.Less

Commemorating Peterloo: Violence, Resilience, and Claim-making during the Romantic Era

Michael Demson and Regina Hewitt (eds)

Two hundred years after the massacre of peaceful protestors who had gathered in St Peter's Field, Manchester, to hear 'Orator' Henry Hunt speak for Parliamentary Reform, this volume brings together ... More

Two hundred years after the massacre of peaceful protestors who had gathered in St Peter's Field, Manchester, to hear 'Orator' Henry Hunt speak for Parliamentary Reform, this volume brings together scholars of the Romantic Era to assess the implications of such state violence in England, Scotland, Ireland and North America. Chapters explore how attitudes toward violence and the claims of 'the people' to participate in government were reflected and revised in the works of figures such as P. B. Shelley, John Keats, Walter Scott, Sydney Owenson, John Cahuac and J.M.W. Turner. Their analyses provide fresh insights into cultural engagement as a means of resisting oppression and as a sign of the resilience of humanity in facing threats and force. On the whole, the book advances the hypothesis that 'Peterloo', as the event was termed to evoke the British military victory at Waterloo, was most of all a conflict over the perceived and aspirational identities of the participants and observers and that the conflict manifested the identity of 'the people' as claimants on government. Recognizing popular claim-making was crucial for the passage of Reform. Though Peterloo resulted in an immediate backlash of repression, it contributed in the longer term to the change in attitude enabling Reform. The book concludes that state violence ultimately proved ineffective against popular participation, though it also uncovers the ways in which repressive measures function as a subtle and hidden kind of violence that discourages civic activism and continues to call forth cultural resistance.Less

Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman: A Transatlantic Perspective

Gunter Leypoldt

This book deals with narratives of cultural legitimation in nineteenth-century US literature, in a transatlantic context. Exploring how literary professionalism shapes romantic and modern cultural ... More

This book deals with narratives of cultural legitimation in nineteenth-century US literature, in a transatlantic context. Exploring how literary professionalism shapes romantic and modern cultural space, the author traces the nineteenth-century fusion of poetic radicalism with cultural nationalism from its beginnings in transatlantic early romanticism, to the poetry and poetics of Walt Whitman, and Whitman's modernist reinvention as an icon of a native avant-garde. Whitman made cultural nationalism compatible with the rhetorical needs of professional authorship by trying to hold national authenticity and literary authority in a single poetic vision. Yet the notion that his ‘language experiment’ transformed essential democratic experience into a genuine American aesthetics also owes much to Whitman's retrospective canonization. What the author calls Whitmanian authority is thus a transatlantic and transhistorical discursive construct that can be approached from four angles. The book begins with an overview of transatlantic contexts such as the nineteenth-century literary field (Bourdieu) and the romantic turn to expressivism (Taylor). The author gives a detailed analysis of how Whitman's positions develop from the intellectual habitus, a cultural criticism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and locates Whitmanian authority within three conceptual fields that function as contact zones for European and American theories of culture – romantic notions of national style as a kind of music. The book provides place-centred concepts of national aesthetics and traditional ideas about the aesthetic effects of democratic institutions. The final section, on Whitman's reinvention between the 1870s and the 1940s, discusses how the heterogeneous nineteenth-century perceptions of Whitman's work were streamlined into a modernist version of Whitman's nationalist program.Less

Dark Paradise: Pacific Islands in the Nineteenth-Century British Imagination

Jennifer Fuller

The discovery of the Pacific islands amplified the qualities of mystery and exoticism already associated with “foreign” islands. Their “savage” peoples, their isolation, and their sheer beauty ... More

The discovery of the Pacific islands amplified the qualities of mystery and exoticism already associated with “foreign” islands. Their “savage” peoples, their isolation, and their sheer beauty fascinated British visitors. This monograph examines British depictions of the smaller islands of the Pacific across the long nineteenth century and argues that while the British originally believed the islands to be commercial paradises or perfect sites for missionary endeavours, as the century progressed their optimistic vision transformed to portray darker realities. The books argues that these islands act as a “breaking point” for British theories of imperialism, colonialism, and identity, and traces in these narratives changing British attitudes towards imperial settlement as the early view of “island as paradise” eventually gives way to a fear of the hostile islanders. This revelation undermined a key tenet of British imperialism in the Pacific – that they were the “superior” or “civilized” islanders.Less

Dickens and Demolition: Literary Afterlives and Mid-Nineteenth Century Urban Development

Joanna Hofer-Robinson

Dickens and Demolition is the first study to trace and measure the material impact of Charles Dickens’s fiction in London’s built environment. The book analyses debates surrounding large-scale ... More

Dickens and Demolition is the first study to trace and measure the material impact of Charles Dickens’s fiction in London’s built environment. The book analyses debates surrounding large-scale metropolitan demolitions, modernisation or reform projects in the mid-nineteenth century and tracks a Dickensian vocabulary in these discussions across multiple media and fora, including written commentaries, parliamentary debates, theatre and the visual arts. It argues that tropes, characters and extracts from his fiction were repeatedly remediated to articulate and negotiate contemporary anxieties about the urban environment and linked social problems. In so doing, it poses the questions: what cultural work is performed by literary afterlives? And can we trace their material effects in the spaces we inhabit?Less

The Edinburgh Companion to Fin de Siècle Literature, Culture and the Arts

Josephine M. Guy (ed.)

The 22 newly commissioned essays in this volume re-examine some of the key concepts taken to define the British fin se siècle while also introducing hitherto overlooked cultural phenomena, such as ... More

The 22 newly commissioned essays in this volume re-examine some of the key concepts taken to define the British fin se siècle while also introducing hitherto overlooked cultural phenomena, such as humanitarianism. The impact of research into material culture is explored; specifically, how the history of the book and of performance culture is changing our understanding of this period. A wide range of activities is discussed, from participation in avant-garde theatre to interior decoration, and from the publishing of poetry to forms of political and religious activism. Attention is also given to how the meaning of the fin de siècle is impacted by place, including the significance of cultural exchanges between Britain and countries such as Russia and Italy; the distinctiveness of the Irish and Scottish fin de siècles; as well as activities within different regions of England, such as in the Midlands cities of Birmingham and Nottingham. In contrast to recent research exploring the global or transnational dimensions of the fin de siècle, this volume focuses on micro- rather than macro-cultural issues, the research underpinning these essays highlighting a diversity of practices that developed along different timelines and in different geographical locations, and which do not cohere into any simple pattern. Nor is there any obvious point of their intersection which might be said to mark a cultural turning point. A question the volume as a whole thus aims to pose is whether there is anything to be gained by distinguishing all, of any, of these practices as ‘fin-de-siècle’?Less

Exploring Victorian Travel Literature: Disease, Race and Climate

Jessica Howell

This interdisciplinary study explores both the personal and political significance of climate in the Victorian imagination. It analyses foreboding imagery of miasma, sludge and rot in travel ... More

This interdisciplinary study explores both the personal and political significance of climate in the Victorian imagination. It analyses foreboding imagery of miasma, sludge and rot in travel narratives, speeches, private journals and medical advice tracts. Authors such as Joseph Conrad are placed in dialogue with minority writers such as Mary Seacole and Africanus Horton in order to understand their different approaches to representing white illness abroad. The project also considers postcolonial texts such as Wilson Harris’s Palace of the Peacock to demonstrate that authors continue to ‘write back’ to the legacies of colonialism by reinterpreting imagery of tropical climates.Less

Gender, Technology and the New Woman

Lena Wånggren

This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the ... More

This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siècle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the ‘crisis in gender’ or ‘sexual anarchy’ of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine. This book explores the interlinking of gender and technology in writings by overlooked authors such as Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, H. G. Wells, Margaret Todd and Mathias McDonnell Bodkin. As the book demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in a technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation.Less

Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture

Michele Mendelssohn

This book, a sustained reading of Henry James's and Oscar Wilde's relationship, reveals why the antagonisms between these authors are symptomatic of the cultural oppositions within Aestheticism ... More

This book, a sustained reading of Henry James's and Oscar Wilde's relationship, reveals why the antagonisms between these authors are symptomatic of the cultural oppositions within Aestheticism itself. The book also shows how these conflicting energies animated the late nineteenth century's most exciting transatlantic cultural enterprise. Richly illustrated and historically detailed, this study of James's and Wilde's intricate, decades-long relationship brings to light Aestheticism's truly transatlantic nature through close readings of both authors' works, as well as nineteenth-century art, periodicals, rare manuscripts and previously unpublished letters. As this book shows, both nineteenth-century authors were deeply influenced by the visual and decorative arts, and by contemporary artists such as George Du Maurier and James McNeill Whistler. This book offers a nuanced reading of a complex relationship that promises to transform the way in which we imagine late nineteenth-century British and American literary culture.Less

In Lady Audley's Shadow: Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Victorian Literary Genres

Saverio Tomaiuolo

This book is devoted to Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s complex relationship with the three main Victorian literary genres: the Gothic, the Detective and the Realist novel. Using Braddon’s bestselling ... More

This book is devoted to Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s complex relationship with the three main Victorian literary genres: the Gothic, the Detective and the Realist novel. Using Braddon’s bestselling sensation fiction Lady Audley’s Secret as a paradigmatic novel and as a ‘haunting’ textual presence across her literary career, it provides a critical reading of a wide range of Braddon’s novels and short stories. Through an analysis of Braddon’s negotiations with Victorian narrative, ideological and cultural issues, this monograph offers readers a refreshing view of gender, female identity and subjectivity, the treatment of insanity, questions related to technology and progress, the impact of evolutionism and Darwinism, the intersemiotic dialogue between pictorial art and novel-writing, the role of the (female) writer in the new literary market and the changing notion of capital in an increasingly fluid social context. Braddon’s manipulation of Victorian literary codes and conventions proves that she was something more than a mere sensation writer and that her primary role in the nineteenth-century literary scene has to be reaffirmed. Drawing on a wide range of textual materials and literary sources, it foregrounds Braddon’s constant and sometimes ambivalent dialogue with her times, and with ours as well.Less

Jane Morris: The Burden of History

Wendy Parkins

Jane Morris, the wife of William Morris and the muse of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, became the most identifiable face of Pre-Raphaelite art but has received little scholarly attention in her own right. ... More

Jane Morris, the wife of William Morris and the muse of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, became the most identifiable face of Pre-Raphaelite art but has received little scholarly attention in her own right. This book argues that the enduring myth of Jane Morris – as a passive invalid, femme fatale and melancholy beauty – has derived from the continued circulation of selective anecdotes and recollections by contemporaries that reduced a complex historical figure to a limited set of traits and failed to acknowledge the significance of class mobility in her life. Examining textual representations – letters, diaries, memoirs and biographies – as well as handiwork and other material objects, this book shows how the myth of Jane Morris has disguised or occluded her agency and capacity for creative collaboration. Drawing on recent understandings of class and gender in subject formation, together with theorisations of myth, narrative and character in life-writing, this book offers a radical re-interpretation of Jane Morris that attends closely to the contradictions of class and gender in Victorian modernity.Less

The Late-Victorian Little Magazine

Koenraad Claes

Fed up with the commercial and moral restrictions of the mainstream press of the late Victorian era, the diverse avant-garde groups of authors and artists of the Aesthetic Movement developed a new ... More

Fed up with the commercial and moral restrictions of the mainstream press of the late Victorian era, the diverse avant-garde groups of authors and artists of the Aesthetic Movement developed a new genre of periodicals in which to propagate their principles and circulate their work. Such periodicals are known as ‘little magazines’ for their small-scale production and their circulation among limited audiences, and during the late Victorian period they were often conceptualized as integrated design project or ‘Total Works of Art’ in order to visually and materially represent the ideals of their producers. Little magazines like the Pre-Raphaelite Germ, the Arts & Crafts Hobby Horse and the Decadent Yellow Book launched the careers of innovative authors and artists and provided a site for debate between minor contributors and visiting grandees from Matthew Arnold to Oscar Wilde. This book offers detailed discussions of the background to thirteen little magazines of the Victorian Fin de Siècle, situating these within the periodical press of their day and providing interpretations of representative content items. In doing so, it outlines the earliest history of this enduring publication genre, and of the Aesthetic Movement that developed along with it.Less

Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 1817-1858

Megan Coyer

In the early nineteenth century, Edinburgh was the leading centre of medical education and research in Britain. It also laid claim to a thriving periodical culture. Literature and Medicine in the ... More

In the early nineteenth century, Edinburgh was the leading centre of medical education and research in Britain. It also laid claim to a thriving periodical culture. Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press investigates how Romantic periodicals cultivated innovative literary forms, ideologies and discourses that reflected and shaped medical culture in the nineteenth century. It examines several medically-trained contributors to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, the most influential literary periodical of the time, and draws upon extensive archival and bibliographical research to reclaim these previously neglected medico-literary figures. Situating their work in relation to developments in medical and periodical culture, the book advances our understanding of how the nineteenth-century periodical press cross-fertilised medical and literary ideas. In the case of Blackwood’s, it is argued that the magazine’s distinctive Romantic ideology and experimental form enabled the development of an overtly ‘literary’ and humanistic popular medical culture, which participated in a wider critique of liberal Whig ideology in post-Enlightenment Scotland.Less

Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field

Walter Scott

Ainsley McIntosh (ed.)

Marmion (1808) is the second of Walter Scott’s grand historical narrative poems. Its sixteenth-century romance tale is framed within six conversation poems, each addressed to one of Scott’s friends, ... More

Marmion (1808) is the second of Walter Scott’s grand historical narrative poems. Its sixteenth-century romance tale is framed within six conversation poems, each addressed to one of Scott’s friends, and supplemented by substantial ethnographical and antiquarian notes. Scott here features as a topical poet, commemorating both national events and occasions, as well as the work of his contemporaries. His relations with aristocratic patrons, artists, and statesmen are also amply reflected in the dedicatory epistles. It was with the overwhelming success of Marmion (four editions and over 11,000 copies were produced in 1808 alone) that Scott’s poetic reputation was indisputably established, his entry in the world of commercial publishing confirmed, and his commitment to a literary life fully determined. This is the first scholarly edition of Marmion. Based on new archival research it provides critically edited text that incorporates lines omitted from previous editions of the poem and extensive annotations. The critical apparatus in this volume includes a detailed essay on the development of the text, a Historical Note, Explanatory Notes and a full glossary of Scots, foreign and archaic words.Less

Meat Markets: The Cultural History of Bloody London

Ted Geier

Meat Markets articulates the emergent ‘nonhuman thought’ developed across literatures of the long nineteenth century and inflecting recent critical theories of abject life and animality. It presents ... More

Meat Markets articulates the emergent ‘nonhuman thought’ developed across literatures of the long nineteenth century and inflecting recent critical theories of abject life and animality. It presents important connections between meat and popular serial press industries, the intersections of criminals and public readership, and the long history of bloody spectacle at London’s Smithfield Market including public executions, criminal escapades, death and horror tales, and the fungible ‘penny press’ forms of mass consumption. Through analysis of subjection, address, and narration in canonical and penny literatures, this book reveals the mutual forces of concern and consumption that afflict objects of a weird cultural history of bloody London across the long nineteenth century. Players include butchers, Smithfield, Parliament, Dickens, Romantics, Sweeney Todd, cattle, and a strange, impossible London.Less

Roomscape: Women Writers in the British Museum from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf

Susan David Bernstein

Drawing on archival materials around the Reading Room of the British Museum, this book integrates documentary, theoretical, historical, and literary sources to examine the significance of this public ... More

Drawing on archival materials around the Reading Room of the British Museum, this book integrates documentary, theoretical, historical, and literary sources to examine the significance of this public interior space for women writers and their treatment of reading and writing spaces in literary texts. It challenges an assessment of the Reading Room as a bastion of class and gender privilege, an image firmly established by Virginia Woolf's 1929 A Room of One's Own and the legions of feminist scholarship that upholds this spatial conceit. The book argues not only that the British Museum Reading Room facilitated various practices of women's literary traditions, she also questions the overdetermined value of privacy and autonomy in constructions of female authorship, a principle generated from Woolf's feminist manifesto. Rather than viewing reading and writing as solitary, individual events, the book considers the meaning of exteriority and the public and social and gendered dimensions of literary production.Less