Biblical Wisdom and the Victorian Literary Imagination by Denae Dyck (review)

Examining the creative thought that arose in response to nineteenth-century religious controversies, this book also shows that the pressures exerted by historical methods of biblical scholarship prompted a range of writers to undertake an imaginative recovery of wisdom literature. During the Victorian period, new approaches to the interpretation of sacred texts led to a widespread re-evaluation of Christian discourse; however, what resulted from these findings was not the death of God but the revision of particular master narratives. Using a series of case studies, it demonstrates that Victorian intellectuals from a variety of belief positions used wisdom literature to reframe their experiences of doubt and uncertainty, focusing on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George MacDonald, George Eliot, John Ruskin, and Olive Schreiner. In doing so, it contributes to the reassessment of historical and contemporary narratives of secularization by calling attention to an important strain of Victorian religious discourse that has often been eclipsed or overshadowed by a focus on prophecy.

MLR, .,   (p. ). e references to the ‘nagging question of identity and nationality’, for example (p. ); or the suggestion that Browning’s ‘polyphonic, arabesque-like’, and multilingual style anticipates aspects of modernist literary practice (p. ), could have received further elaboration with reference to recent work on Victorian literature’s ‘global’ aesthetics, and translational writing more generally. Jaouad’s book will, however, prove a useful resource to students, scholars, and admirers of Browning’s poetry, and indeed to anyone interested in the manifold networks of cultural affiliation and response evidenced by Victorian literature. Its range of reference and scholarship will undoubtedly lead to the satisfaction of Jaouad’s desire to ‘excite further interest in Browning’s life-long fascination with Eastern religion, culture, and literature’ (p. ). B C, O J H Adulthood and Other Fictions: American Literature and the Unmaking of Age. By S E. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . xii+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. Sari Edelstein’s Adulthood and Other Fictions is a refreshing, thought-provoking excavation of age as an o-overlooked political tool that rose to power in nineteenthcentury US culture. Rather than treating age as a stand-alone discourse, Edelstein shows how age has been instrumental in the enforcement of social hierarchies, including race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability. e book considers an archive of visual culture, interviews, and writings, but it centres on imaginative literature’s varied history of, on one hand, supporting and disseminating conventional notions of age and, on the other, exposing, challenging, and reimagining them. e nineteenth-century novel proves a fruitful site for Edelstein’s investigation of age owing to its structural reliance on linear development. However, unlike a large portion of literary scholarship interested in age, which focuses on childhood and the Bildungsroman, Adulthood and Other Fictions attends to middle and old age, showing all life stages to be narrative constructs—fictions that nineteenth-century writers such as Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Louisa May Alcott , Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Henry James have reimagined to question the normative life course prescribed by capitalism, heterosexuality, patriarchy, and white supremacy. In the first chapter, Edelstein argues that Melville’s ‘anti-coming of age novel’ (p. ), Redburn, exposes the nation’s call to grow up as a capitalist demand and nationalist project; Redburn’s refusal to mature (and Bartleby’s refusal to move) challenges the agenda of white, male coming of age that ‘is contingent not only upon oppressing oneself but upon exploiting others’ (p. ). Chapter  demonstrates, however, that age categories also functioned by exclusion: slavery weaponized age by denying enslaved people the privileges of adulthood while simultaneously corrupting childhood. Edelstein reads slave narratives by Douglass and Jacobs alongside interviews with formerly enslaved people who made claims of extraordinary longevity, showing how they seized and challenged the discourse of  Reviews ageing. e third chapter notes, without claiming a direct comparison to slavery, how the discourse of ageing also infantilized and marked the economic value of free white women. Edelstein shows how Alcott’s Little Women exposes age as ‘a core disciplinary idiom’ that women were expected to perform (p. ), while Alcott’s Work reimagines how numerical age could support a ‘female life course that does not peak in girlhood or conclude with marriage’ (p. ). Chapter  highlights the protest against a monolithic conception of old age as decline in the short fiction of Freeman and Jewett; Freeman contests this ‘pathologization of old age’ (p. ) with her contented elderly characters and Jewett theorizes a ‘temporality of old age’ (p. ) that is ‘inherently oppositional to the demands of power, capitalism, and gender’ (p. ). In the final chapter, Edelstein revisits the fiction of James, oen considered ‘the only mature American novelist’ (p. ), and shows how his work denaturalizes the association of adulthood with independence, instead registering interdependence and caregiving as forms of unacknowledged maturity. Adulthood and Other Fictions has much to offer the fields of age studies and nineteenth-century American literature but also queer theory, feminism, and disability studies. Edelstein’s intersectional approach reveals age as a missing link that invigorates established arguments about discipline and power in these fields. Furthermore, the book pushes scholars to examine our emphasis on youth (for example, the...

Victorian Ecocriticism: The Politics of Place and Early Environmental Justice aims to take up the challenge that Lawrence Buell lays out in The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (2005). Buell decries: “For in order to bring ‘environmental justice into ecocriticism,’ a few more articles or conference sessions won’t suffice. There must be ‘a fundamental rethinking and reworking of the field as a whole’” (Buell 113). While discussions about nature conservation and preservation have been important within the context of ecocriticism, Buell asserts that the holy grail for the field is actually how literary critics engage in discourse about questions of place as space humanized for the purpose of tracing, disclosing, and advancing the important issue of environmental justice—as it applies to human beings, animals, and plants. The “fundamental reworking” or shift in the field of Victorian Studies really has to do with the dearth of ecocritical publishing about seminal authors and literary texts. Victorian Ecocriticism aims to participate in filling that vacuum, lack, or lacuna by featuring current research about the Victorian era from an ecocritical perspective. Victorian Ecocriticism hopes to identify, establish, and organize its content based on six themes: Ecocrisis, Ecofeminism, Ecogothicism, Ecohistoricism, Ecotheology, and Ecological Interdependence. The edited collection, thus, has two aims. First, selected places among others featured in the edition will provide environmental contexts, often with political implications: American rural landscape (e.g., Walden Pond), Australian mines, British hill-country, metropolis, mill towns, the sea, and the woods. Second, the edition includes discussions about various instances of early environmental justice evident during the mid-nineteenth century such as, but not limited to: anti-railway campaigns, biological egalitarianism, labor disputes due to adverse working conditions, patterns of displacement, reactions to Victorian scientism, resistance to enclosure, and working class education. Victorian Ecocriticism is an interdisciplinary edition. It focuses on Victorian literature as the foundational discipline linked to various disciplines such as ecology, evolutionary biology, natural history, and soil science. The topics are wide-ranging, significant, and contemporary discussing the politics of place as well as early environmental justice.

Reviewed by: Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature Patrick R. O'Malley (bio) Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature by Maureen Moran; pp. 324. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2007. $99.76. Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a significant constellation of books devoted to the place of Catholicism in nineteenth-century British literature and culture. Among those with strong literary allegiances, there have been (to name only a few) Ruth Vanita's Sappho and the Virgin Mary (1996), Ellis Hanson's Decadence and Catholicism (1997), Kimberly VanEsveld Adams's Our Lady of Victorian Feminism (2001), Frederick S. Roden's Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (2002), Susan Griffin's Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (2004), Michael Wheeler's The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century Culture (2006), and Maria LaMonaca's Masked Atheism (2008). To this, of course, could be added those accounts of nineteenth-century Catholicism that ground themselves more specifically in traditional historical methods, published with some regularity since the end of the nineteenth century itself. As Maureen Moran suggests at the end of her vigorously argued and wide-ranging Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature, the surprise should not, perhaps, be the recent proliferation of such studies but rather the relative dearth that preceded them, a dearth encouraged by an academic culture for which religion—especially a [End Page 236] religion like Catholicism—seems fundamentally opposed to "liberalism, secularism, rational science ... and other progressive, non-religious outlooks" (284, quoting Turner 6). The cultural studies approaches that could most add to the complexity of our understanding of nineteenth-century religious belief and practice have been, in some ways, most suspicious of religion's reactionary politics: The mapping of texts and authors on a faith-doubt continuum replicated the twentieth-century cultural myth endorsed by historians: that Victorian society grounded our own modernity through the move to a more "enlightened," non-spiritual understanding of the world. The embedding of critical and cultural theoretical discourses in the academy has certainly put paid to such grand narratives. Nonetheless, these traditions of intellectual activity have tended to eclipse the importance of religion to the Victorian literary imagination. (285) That is particularly unfortunate, Moran correctly insists, since "the saturation of nineteenth-century culture by Christianity and its denominational variants makes religion always and everywhere a presence" (3). As the list that opens this review suggests, Moran's book is certainly not alone in striving to fill the void, but it is one of the most intelligent and most cogently constructed. Moran's chapters are generally thematically (rather than chronologically) organized, each appearing under the rubric of a topic of importance to the nineteenth-century representation of Catholicism and focusing on two or three more or less canonical texts or sets of texts. Thus, a chapter on representations of Jesuits provides significant readings of Charles Kingsley's Westward Ho! (1855) and Wilkie Collins's The Black Robe (1881), while one on martyrdom highlights Grace Aguilar's The Vale of Cedars (1850) and George Eliot's Romola (1862-63). Poetry is represented by Robert Browning's monologues (paired with Charlotte Brontë's Villette in a chapter on nuns and priests) and the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Francis Thompson (in a chapter devoted to Art Catholicism). An effective epilogue nicely frames the book, gesturing toward modernism and, ultimately, our own contemporary moment. Moran situates the anchoring texts of each chapter within a clear and engaging set of historical events, other literary texts, and various archival documents; the bibliography that she has assembled is alone a valuable resource. Collins aside, Moran does not in general focus on the sensation novel but rather on a broader and conceptually more complex notion of "sensationalism," bringing together "the many and interrelated understandings of 'sensation' that haunted the period" (3). Related to the Gothic, and largely opposing realism, this Victorian sensationalism stresses heightened emotional states—"extreme, eccentric scenarios and language" (12), and it "replaces the passive, escapist comforts of the older genres with a somatic involvement—a physical frisson that moves the reader from shock to curiosity and thence to the active decoding [End Page 237] of a hidden truth" (13). In Moran's account, a culture of...

Journal Article Katherine Byrne, Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination. Get access Katherine Byrne, Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination. Pp. x + 230. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Hardbound £55.00 (ISBN 9780521766678). Patrick R. O'Malley Patrick R. O'Malley Georgetown University pro@georgetown.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 59, Issue 1, March 2012, Pages 147–148, https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjr246 Published: 27 January 2012

In England at the turn of the nineteenth century, the advent of Romanticism coincided with major changes in ideas about children and childhood, eventually resulting in a great flowering of imaginative children's literature. In contrast to the previous century's stern moral tales, children's books began to appeal to the unsullied powers of perception, cognition, and creativity thought by the Romantics to reside in pre-adolescents, and also to the anxieties of adults who longed to reclaim their own lost childhood selves. These essays document and examine the transformation of children's literature during the Romantic period, and trace Romanticism's influence on Victorian children's literature. Using a variety of critical approaches, including neo-historicist, feminist, mythic, reader-response, and formalist, the contributors challenge established dichotomies in children's literature regarding morality and imagination. Rather, as they demonstrate, a complex interplay of instruction and delight ran throughout nineteenth-century texts for and about children. In addition, they document some of the ways the child was perceived and interpreted, secularized and spiritualized, by such writers as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Maria Edgeworth, Mrs. Sherwood, Hesba Stretton (Sarah Smith), Juliana Ewing, George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and E. Nesbit.

This essay addresses itself to the following question: how did Victorian writers of imaginative literature use and interpret that most enduring form of 19th-century garden architecture, the conservatory? I wish to make three main points. First, that the conservatory figures, sometimes significantly, in many works which treat of middle-and upper-class Victorian life. Second, that in these works the emphasis is upon the social and not simply upon the horticultural uses of the conservatory. And third, that the ways in which the conservatory is presented are selective but largely consistent.

Kittens All the Way Down: Cute in Context

Katherine Byrne: Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination

Victorian Contagion: Risk and Social Control in the Victorian Literary Imagination, by Chung-jen Chen | Kept from All Contagion: Germ Theory, Disease and the Dilemma of Human Contact in Late Nineteenth Century Literature, by Kari Nixon

Edited by Katherine Byrne. Published by Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011, hardback, 240 pages. ISBN 9780521766678, £55.00. Katherine Byrne's new book Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination is a welcome...

Why was the Victorian feminine ideal emaciated and consumptive, epitomized by Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s wife, Elizabeth Siddal, aestheticized as she was dying in Beata Beatrix? This is one of the questions that Katherine Byrne’s Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination addresses, explaining how pulmonary tuberculosis, or phtisis, a disease which was at its height in Europe in the nineteenth century influenced “the construction of the nineteenth-century social body through its pathol...

<em>Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination</em>, by Katherine Byrne

In this introduction to the Dickens and Science issue of <strong>19</strong>, Holly Furneaux and Ben Winyard consider the relationship between Dickens’s writing, science and the Victorian literary imagination. Dickens’s response to scientific ideas was very often at the heart of his cherished ideal that literature should show ‘the romantic side of familiar things’, illuminating the wonder, even magic, of everyday phenomena for people of all classes, and affectively uniting them by relieving a shared thirst for imaginative succour.

Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination Katherine Byrne New York: Cambridge UP, 2011 x +223, 1 illustration. ISBN 978–0–521–76667–8 To scholars of the nineteenth-century novel, the phra...