<em>Victorian Hybridities: Cultural Anxiety and Formal Innovation</em>, edited by U. C. Knoepflmacher and Logan D. Browning

Abstract

Reviewed by: Victorian Hybridities: Cultural Anxiety and Formal Innovation ed. by U. C. Knoepflmacher and Logan D. Browning Jessica R. Valdez (bio) Victorian Hybridities: Cultural Anxiety and Formal Innovation, edited by U. C. Knoepflmacher and Logan D. Browning; pp. viii + 205. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, $35.00 paper. This collection of essays productively juxtaposes cultural, formal, and discursive instances of hybridity. Collectively, the essays show that Victorian writers not only treated hybridity as a subject but also manifested it in form and discourse. In his rich introduction, U. C. Knoepflmacher offers a succinct genealogy of the word “hybrid” before it became central to the evolutionary writings of Charles Darwin. As early as 1807, intellectuals challenged the idea of immutable biological forms and suggested the possibility of development as a result of changes over time. In these early writings, cultural oppositions and “contraries” were seen to make possible new forms of belief and literature (3). The collection that follows Knoepflmacher’s introduction then traces the extent to which “fragments can be reshaped into new wholes,” and is itself divided into three fragments: “Formal Hybrids,” “Discursive Hybrids,” and “Cultural Hybrids” (2). The collection achieves considerable breadth, ranging from essays on Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning to essays on W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan and less canonical writers like Florence Marryat. The first section, “Formal Hybrids,” includes essays that consider the intermingling of different literary forms. C. D. Blanton’s “Arnold’s Arrhythmia” studies the relationship between Arnold’s poetry and criticism. In 1852, Arnold published Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems; the next year, he famously left out the title piece in the collection Poems: A New Edition. Whereas Arnold and others have understood this exclusion to highlight his sense of his poetry’s irrelevance, Blanton instead argues that the “disappearing poem” remains in the background of his prose (15). In place of the failed poem, Arnold offers a “hybrid of negated verse and critical prose designed to mediate the loss” (14). One outstanding essay in the first section, Christine Chaney’s “The Prophet-Poet’s Book,” presents Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) as a gendered reframing of Victorian sage discourse. Chaney urges us not to see Barrett Browning’s verse-novel as a failed and fragmentary instance of either verse or novel but as a persuasive hybrid form—“a new form of persuasive truth telling in fiction” (48). On this account, Aurora Leigh is a literary self-portrait that subordinates narrative to character and image in a form that recalls Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796). The second section examines an increasingly hybrid reading public and its effect on changing conceptions of authorship. Here, Jonathan Smith’s essay, “Domestic Hybrids: Ruskin, Victorian Fiction, and Darwin’s Botany,” suggests that John Ruskin saw the hybridity of the modern novel intertwined with evolutionary materialism. Ruskin critiques the focus of science on physical corruption; he is particularly critical of Darwin’s suggestion that so-called illegitimate crosses between plants can result in fertility. The third section features cultural hybridity and mingled identities. Ann C. Colley begins the section with her essay, “Robert Louis Stevenson’s South Sea Crossings,” in which she examines Stevenson’s blurring of the line between territory and metropole. In her account, the cross-cultural exchange described in Stevenson’s Pacific Island works subverts colonial authority while complicating and changing indigenous cultural [End Page 165] practices. Colley provides a rich analysis of Stevenson’s fascination with the blending of Western and native clothing, including his tendency to dress his servants in a hybrid West-East style. In his introduction, Knoepflmacher admits that the collection is uneven in its emphasis on poetry, and it is true that the book would have benefited from a more concentrated analysis of novelistic hybridity—especially since recent scholarship has emphasized the hybrid nature of the novel and its relationship, in particular, to journalism and the periodical press. Smith suggests that the sensation novel forged a new hybrid between the gothic and the realist novel—and, other critics might argue, the discourse of news. Danielle Coriale’s essay, “Sketches by Boz, ‘So Frail...