Editor's Note

Abstract

Editor's Note Christopher Keep We welcome Abigail Boucher and Daniel Jenkin-Smith as guest editors of this issue's forum, which is dedicated to different bodily fluids, such as tears and breast milk. Far from reticent in their treatment of literally fluid aspects of human experience, the essays they have brought together demonstrate the extent to which the substances that bodies generate and emanate, whether linked with health or disease, are central to the Victorian history of the body. In its concluding essay, by L. Anne Delgado, the forum extends its reach to consider ectoplasm, the history of which signals the centrality of fluids to psychic as well as physical experience. The winning essay of the 2018 Hamilton Prize competition is "'The Limits of the Imaginable'": Women Writers' Networks during the Long Nineteenth Century" by Andrea Stewart (University of St. Thomas). We are pleased to publish this exceptional contribution to the field of Victorian studies in the current issue. The Hamilton Prize is awarded to the best essay submitted to our annual competition by a graduate student. Our grateful thanks go to the advisory board members who generously served as judges: Stephen Arata (University of Virginia), Holly Furneaux (University of Leicester), and Catherine Delyfer (Université Toulouse–Jean Jaurès). This issue features, too, the first of two clusters of articles on animal studies. As Matthew Calarco puts it citing the work of Jacques Derrida, the question of the animal is "a question deriving from an animal who faces me, an interruption deriving from an animal, an animal whom I face and by whom I am faced and who calls my mode of existence into question" (5). For the Victorians, too, the encounter with the animal was a kind of interruption, breaking up the epistemic grounds by which the human might claim its evolutionary right to consume the natural world, and calling attention to the ethical implications of our conflicted relations with non-human agents. Drawing on the burgeoning scholarship on animal studies in the study of nineteenth-century literature and culture, the essays gathered here explore topics ranging from Darwin's research on worms and the 1875 Royal Commission on Vivisection to the challenge posed by vegetarianism to proponents of natural selection and the animality of the non-human species in Kipling's The Jungle Books. A second cluster of essays on animal studies will appear in our Fall 2020 issue. Work Cited Calarco, Matthew. Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. Columbia UP, 2008. Google Scholar Copyright © 2019 Victorian Studies of Western Canada