Middle-class Readers Research Articles

On the Weird Nostalgia of Whiteness: Poor Whites, White Death, and Black Suffering

On the Weird Nostalgia of Whiteness:Poor Whites, White Death, and Black Suffering Christian Ravela (bio) "I am afraid that most of the white people I have ever known impressed me as being in the grip of a weird nostalgia, dreaming of a vanished state of security and order, against which dream, unfailingly and unconsciously, they tested and very often lost their lives" —James Baldwin (1985)1 "Black workers suffer because it was and is our lot. But when white workers suffer, something in nature has gone awry." —Ta-Nehisi Coates (2017)2 James Baldwin probably would have found Donald Trump's campaign slogan—Make America Great Again—quite familiar, but less for its bombastic claim of American greatness than for the way it expressed what Baldwin called a weird nostalgia. Revealed in the slogan's Again, this weird nostalgia constitutes the present as a fallen state from a former glory and promises its return in the future. Of course, all nostalgia is idealistic. It selects, ignores, and often completely fabricates elements of the past in order to imbue it with a halcyon glow that outshines the present. What makes the slogan's nostalgia so weird is not so much its idealistic rendering of the past but the peculiar relationship that its idealization of the past has to suffering. As Baldwin claims, those caught in nostalgia's grips come to suffer much as they "test…[themselves] and very often lo[se] their lives" to nostalgia's dream.3 Yet, this dream of the past is not a vision [End Page 27] of heroics but a "vanished state of security and order."4 Surely, this is a sad and unheroic dream that indexes a miserable underlying state of affairs. The desire to be rid of suffering is what pushes the dreamer, yet the pursuit of that desire, ironically, leads to more suffering. Thus, what makes this nostalgia so weird and truly tragic is how this cycle of suffering—alleviation of suffering leading to more suffering—is propelled by a fantasy of the past. This article explores an earlier instance of this weird nostalgia in order to unpack its articulations of suffering, temporality, whiteness, and race. Through a comparative analysis of the figures of poor whites in Erskine Caldwell's and Margaret Bourke-White's (1975) You Have Seen Their Faces (Faces) and James Agee's and Walker Evans's (2001) Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Famous Men), I argue these figures function as narrative tropes of white death to render suffering as a transcendent event that intimates a redemptive future and a return to pastoral origins.5 However, white death is undermined by whiteness's contradictory relation to embodiment.6 As a result, Face's and Famous Men's lapsarian drama of white death relies upon the spectacle of black suffering to provide both the necessary enfleshment of white death and the libidinal charge for its emancipatory dream of redemption.7 Thus, blackness forms the internal contradiction of whiteness's weird nostalgia, exposing what makes it truly weird—its paradoxical refusal to attend to suffering while simultaneously addressing it. To address suffering, one must move away from the drama of white death to examine the seeming permanence of black suffering. Even though Faces and Famous Men are not such a project, they disclose the narrative underpinnings of whiteness as an "undesirable historical form to which suffering, and action, have been relegated" both past and present.8 On the Representations of Poor Whites and Time Criticism on Faces and Famous Men has often positioned them antagonistically to one another on aesthetic, moral, and political terms.9 There are good reasons for such readings. On the one hand, Caldwell's omniscient narrator and plain reportage style offers readers an 'objective' account of Southern tenant life and history. Bourke-White's photography draws on a host of visual traditions, particularly sentimentality, to emotionally draw in Faces's middle class readership.10 On the other hand, Agee's highly self-conscious narrator, fragmented narrative structure, scrambled temporal order, complex intertextual references, and dizzying linguistic strategies refuse any possibility to detached objective reporting.11 Unlike Bourke-White, Evans's photography offers a quiet and detached...

Converting Celebrity Status into Feminine Authority in the Periodical Press

Looking closely at discussions of Lady Jeune in the press during the 1880s and 1890s, this essay examines how her sharp judgments on demoralizing behavior became advice for middle-class readers and her biting observations of London society sparked responses that ranged from personal insults to lauding her as the sensible woman of her day. Through a close analysis of her early publication history and reception, I show how Lady Jeune used her increasing celebrity status to become a respected authority on the social problems of late Victorian London.

Histories for the Many: The Victorian Family Magazine and Popular Representations of the Past: The Leisure Hour, 1852-1870, by Doris Lechner

Reviewed by: Histories for the Many: The Victorian Family Magazine and Popular Representations of the Past: The Leisure Hour, 1852–1870 by Doris Lechner Jennifer Phegley (bio) Histories for the Many: The Victorian Family Magazine and Popular Representations of the Past: The Leisure Hour, 1852–1870, by Doris Lechner; pp. 340. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript-Verlag, 2017, $45.00. Doris Lechner's Histories for the Many: The Victorian Family Magazine and Popular Representations of the Past: The Leisure Hour, 1852–1870 has a great deal to offer anyone who wants to understand Victorian magazines, the emergence of mass-market publishing, or representations of history in popular culture. The book explores these broad topics through a case study of the Leisure Hour and the Religious Tract Society, its founder and publisher. While the Leisure Hour appealed to readers with entertaining non-fiction serials about historical events and figures, its editors were aware that competition from secular rivals such as the London Journal were brimming with sensational serials accompanied by equally exciting illustrations and non-fiction essays. Lechner argues that while the London Journal had the advantage, the Leisure Hour capitalized on the most appealing traits of [End Page 534] the penny family magazine as a way to propel itself into the realm of its bestselling rival. The Leisure Hour also anticipated "the arrival of the family magazine to the middle classes in the 1860s" as it bridged the gap between the penny weekly and the shilling monthly versions of the genre with its promotion of middle-class notions of respectability (62). Indeed, the magazine was redesigned in the early 1860s in order to incorporate some key elements of the middle-class family magazines, including a full-page illustration for each issue; a larger, more easily readable format; and features that would appeal to both middle-class housewives and railway commuters. The magazine was finally converted from a weekly to a monthly in 1881. After defining the genre of the Victorian family magazine and tracing its trajectory from a cheap mass-market genre in the 1840s and 1850s into a more expensive format for middle-class readers in the 1860s, Lechner delves into the rationale behind the Leisure Hour's focus on historical narratives rather than fiction. She maintains that the Religious Tract Society believed that the use of fiction would undermine its goal of religious conversion while historical writing would support its evangelical aims. Historical content also promised to unite its target audience of working- and lower-middle-class readers with its more educated and affluent founding members. As Lechner points out, the magazine's historical agenda was "defined by the periodical's design as an intermediary within Victorian historical culture: between secular and religious, working and middle class, male and female, popular and academic" (15). History in the Leisure Hour took many forms, including travel writing, biographical and autobiographical narratives, descriptive sketches of monuments and landscapes, and reviews of historical books and exhibitions. Much of the historical writing was serialized and illustrated, suggesting an equivalence to the popular fiction published in other family magazines. The historical selections represented English national identity across historical periods and "often addressed domestic, everyday experiences and objects" as a way to connect "historical actors or events to contemporary" readers (27). Perhaps not surprisingly for a magazine that wanted to walk the line between the secular and the religious, the Leisure Hour typically refrained from engaging in overtly religious discourse. Lechner goes on to compare the Leisure Hour with its working-class rival the London Journal (1845–1912), as well as with its middle-class counterparts Good Words (1860–1911) and the Cornhill Magazine (1860–1975). Interestingly, John Gilbert served as one of the primary illustrators for both the Leisure Hour and the London Journal, which gave the magazines a similar appearance. Both magazines also featured images of historical events, monuments, and national landscapes, though the Leisure Hour was more focused on these subjects of illustration than the more sensational London Journal. According to Lechner, the Religious Tract Society was interested in "didactic and moral notions" derived from historical events relevant to its readers' lives (77). The London Journal, on the other hand, focused on "great men...

Accounting for Taste: Very Hard Cash and Middle-Class Readership

Accounting for Taste:Very Hard Cash and Middle-Class Readership Sean Grass (bio) Charles Reade was laboring over a late installment of Very Hard Cash in August 1863 when he was visited by Charles Dickens's sub-editor W. H. Wills, who brought from Dickens a pointed and presumably unwelcome suggestion: begin winding the novel to a close. Very Hard Cash had been All the Year Round's lead serial since March.1 But in August, Reade was only just beginning to work the plot toward its sensational crisis, protagonist Alfred Hardie's daring escape amid a terrible fire from the insane asylum into which his conniving father had placed him. Dickens had negotiated hard for Reade's novel, relying on his personal charm, All the Year Round's wide circulation, and his own standing as a novelist to bring Reade into the fold. Wilkie Collins had recently defected to the Cornhill, lured there by the princely sum of £5,000 for Armadale.2 Reade was no Collins, but he had won a substantial following with his exposé of prison abuses in It Is Never Too Late to Mend (1856), then expanded his readership with the medieval romance The Cloister and the Hearth (1861). Though they differed in subject, both novels relied upon Reade's "great system" for accumulating documentary facts and placing them in the service of bloated plots.3 In negotiating with Reade, Dickens gave him the £800 he asked for the serial, but he stipulated that Reade would not be compensated if he went beyond the prescribed limits of time and space.4 But even this did not keep Reade from making Very Hard Cash into an unwieldy narrative sprawl featuring Oxford boat races, lovers' sighs, pirates, a hurricane, a shipwreck, the railway bubble, lunacy laws, and the abuse of asylum inmates. Reade crammed all of these into a plot that traces the titular "hard cash" from Calcutta to England in the pocketbook of merchant ship captain David Dodd, who survives numerous exotic perils only to be robbed in England by Richard Hardie, an insolvent banker who institutionalizes his own son to conceal his frauds. Despite these thrills, [End Page 464] Wills told Reade, All the Year Round had lost 3,000 readers since March.5 It was high time to end the novel. But Very Hard Cash was not to be wound down so easily. It ran for seventeen more weeks, finally concluding on December 26. "This meant that Wills and Dickens had 115 pages for nothing," John Sutherland observes, a "gift" they could probably have done without.6 Reade plunged the plucky Alfred into one asylum, then another and another, before allowing him to escape via the providential fire. He killed off Alfred's sister by having one of Richard Hardie's many financial victims bludgeon her to death. He sent David Dodd to sea again, amnesiac and under another name, where he recovers his memory after nearly drowning and returns to England just in time to claim his £14,000. And he waged a furious battle against the injustices of Victorian lunacy laws, depicting at length the legal chicanery by which villains might conspire with doctors to lock up sane persons who were then abused at the hands of brutal warders. By October, one exasperated asylum proprietor, Dr. J. S. Bushnan of Laverstock House Asylum, had had enough, complaining to the Daily News of "the terrible slander" that Reade's novel was casting upon a respectable body of professional men.7 By November, Dickens had apparently had enough too. On November 22 he instructed Wills to insert a note after Reade's final installment, in capital letters and crossing both columns, stating that while the contents of All the Year Round ought generally "to be received as the statements and opinions of its conductor," this was not so with works of fiction.8 "When one of my literary brothers does me the honour to undertake such a task," Dickens declared, "I hold that he executes it on his own personal responsibility, and for the sustainment of his own reputation."9 Very Hard Cash's slender purchase on a twenty-first-century afterlife rests to...

"Making room in Heaven for all sorts of souls": Temperance Rhetoric and Maggie: A Girl of the Streets"

"Making room in Heaven for all sorts of souls":Temperance Rhetoric and Maggie: A Girl of the Streets" Robin Jeremy Land (bio) In Stephen Crane'S Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, alcohol, violence, and the promise of violence is in every part of Maggie's home and neighborhood. Immediately after her older brother Jimmie fights with other wayward youth in the ominous Rum Alley, the boy's father finds him in the street, kicks him, and drags him home to his mother, who is an equally violent drunk. The following domestic disturbance in the Johnson home is filled with violent imagery as husband and wife fight with one another; Jimmie threatens his sister, and the mother severely beats Jimmie for his street fighting. Even the infant Tommie goes to sleep "with his fists doubled,"1 implying the stress he is under and foreshadowing the violence that awaits him when he is older. This is far from a happy home, and, throughout the entire scene, alcohol fuels the violence and dysfunction. Alcoholism and intemperance permeate every aspect of the titular Maggie's world. Alcohol is symbolically represented in the street names around her house; both her parents are constantly inebriated, her lover is a bartender, and even her final sexual partner is apparently drunk. Alcohol and its impact is an inescapable part of the characters' environment, and this environment and its influence on a person's life was one of Crane's more pressing concerns when he penned Maggie. In 1893 when Stephen Crane wrote to his friend and fellow author Hamlin Garland about Maggie,2 he enclosed the now famous description of his intent "to show that environment is a tremendous thing in the world and frequently shapes lives regardless,"3 and his hope was that Maggie would persuade his audience to make "room in heaven for all sorts of souls . . . who are not confidently expected to be there by many excellent people."4 Crane intended Maggie to convince his audience that the lives of the working poor in New York's Bowery district were greatly influenced by the world they inhabited, and that middle-class readers should reconsider some of the value judgments they impose on the working poor. For many readers the most obvious environmental factors contributing to Maggie's tragedy are the sexual double standards between men and women and the decay of middle-class morality in the slums. My study of Maggie does not disagree with those arguments that focus on [End Page 60] the novel's discussion of gender roles, the moral failings of New York's Bowery district, or those works that place the novel in the slum literature tradition. Instead my intent is to expand on the critical understanding of the novel's structure by examining a second narrative structure that lies beneath the already well-established slum narrative. While Maggie contorts the established slum narrative and the story of a fallen women, it also builds on the other well-known temperance narrative to reflect the lives of women living in New York's slums and ultimately challenge middle-class conceptions of the working poor by subverting a rhetorical strategy largely developed by middle-class temperance workers. These narratives, adopted by the Women's Christian Temperance Union and other temperance workers, were a combination of fictional and nonfictional accounts of alcoholism and its impact on families. Although ostensibly these were works of fiction, these narratives employed a common set of rhetorical practices designed to influence their audience's behavior, practices which Crane manipulated in order to challenge his middle-class audience's understanding of the working poor and in doing so, reworked the temperance narrative into naturalist novel. In effect, Maggie upturns middle-class expectations of the temperance narrative by repositioning alcohol and its abuse as an environmental factor contributing to Maggie's destruction, thus removing the sentimentalism so closely associated with traditional temperance narratives while still maintaining a strong sense of sympathy for Maggie that could encourage middle-class audiences to reconsider their opinion of women living in poverty. The temperance narrative was a well-known part of the American temperance movement by the end of the nineteenth...

Open Houses: Poverty, the Novel, and the Architectural Idea in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Barbara Leckie

Reviewed by: Open Houses: Poverty, the Novel, and the Architectural Idea in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Barbara Leckie Carolyn Betensky LECKIE, BARBARA. Open Houses: Poverty, the Novel, and the Architectural Idea in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 312 pp. $79.95 hardcover. Barbara Leckie’s Open Houses is an original study that will make scholars reconsider the social and political investments of the nineteenth-century novel, as well as the evolution, in the period, of the novel form itself. This provocative and lucid book locates an unexpected dialogue between novels that have not been read, for the most part, for their concern for housing, and the profusion of mid-nineteenth-century nonfiction texts describing and re-envisioning the homes of the poor. By demonstrating the responses of novelists such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry James to a crisis of humanity and representation, Leckie shows us a self-reflexive, protomodernist side of the Victorian novel. Representations of poverty have long drawn the attention of literary critics and historians, but seldom have scholars focused on the ways Victorian writers across genres made peering inside the homes of the poor into a compulsory feature of their texts. Understanding interior scenes of abjection as metaphorical settings more than as sites of interest in their own right, critics have overlooked novelists’ engagement with architectural and housing policies that were being promulgated in the public sphere. The proliferation of nonfiction writing on the built environments of the poor has not been appreciated as a phenomenon with its own distinct, obligatory tropes; scholars have understood this writing, rather, as being concerned more generally with poverty or sanitary reform. Consequently, they have not appreciated the profound effects the discourse of housing reform had on the institution of the novel. So many mid-century reformists issued invitations to their middle-class readers to view in situ the inhabitants of urban slums and rural cottages, and the language of these invitations was both so urgent and so predictable that Leckie wonders: why were middle-class readers being summoned so insistently and repeatedly, at this historical juncture, to look into the homes of the poor? The impulse to expose the interiors of these homes related, in part, to the fear that the dwellings of the poor were incubating different forms of immorality. As Edwin Chadwick and other reformers argued, squalid living quarters bred not only unsanitary conditions but also—more significantly—vice and the vitiation of national character; better housing design would lead directly into better, more wholesome, more tractable workers. At the same time, however, the constant invitation to readers to look into the homes of the poor also implied anxiety among the most fervent reformists over the potential power, or powerlessness, of the exposé itself to function as a mechanism of social change. Leckie shows how doubts about what the exposé could accomplish began to crystallize in the reports and plans of reformists even before novelists came [End Page 322] to consider ways to cajole readers into focusing on persistent problems that seemed to make demands on these same readers. Leckie’s attention to the ways Victorians understood the limits of the exposé leads into a provocative set of claims relating to the mutual influence of what she calls “the architectural idea” and the novel. With breathtaking boldness, she attributes to novelists’ concern for housing their inclination to (1) rethink the genre of the novel in terms of form; (2) offer a subtle and compelling case for the novel as a work of architecture; and (3) offer a persuasive argument for the novel’s intervention in social debates (19). Leckie is arguing here for nothing less than a revised understanding of the nineteenth-century British novel in its formal evolution and social function. Working with contemporary architectural theories of interpenetration and mediation as well as recent literary approaches to form, she resituates the architectural idea at the center of Victorian aesthetic and social dialogues. Open Houses devotes its first two chapters to close analysis of several mid-nineteenth-century nonfiction genres: reports, articles, architectural plans, and other policy interventions. Leckie shows how authors ranging from Chadwick to Bessie Rayner Parks, as well as...

Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America by Patricia Crain

Reviewed by: Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America by Patricia Crain MicKenzie Fasteland (bio) Patricia Crain. Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America. U of Pennsylvania P, 2016. Patricia Crain's Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America constructs an impressive history exploring the ideological underpinnings of literacy development in the United States, a practice she argues promised children both the opportunity for property acquisition (of themselves, of books) and escape (from themselves [End Page 152] into a book). If children were the property of their parents—or in the case of enslaved children, their owners—literacy provided one method for gaining the cultural and financial capital required for independence. Simultaneously, early children's literature promoted the affective bonds between adults and children, thereby ensuring what Courtney Weikle-Mills calls the "transfer of children's affectionate feelings, through education, from their parents to the law" (43) Although literacy nominally promised self-possession, its promise was highly conditional upon the child's race. Laws banned enslaved children from learning to read and write, whereas Christian missionaries used the promise of ownership to perpetuate the cultural genocide of Native populations by "acculturating them to white property customs" (7). After the Civil War, images of the "reading child" illustrated an alternative privilege offered to middle-class white children: the option to escape oneself. If reading became a site of pleasure for middle-class children, the sight of children reading and writing provided adults nostalgic access to their own childhood selves, leading to what Crain calls the "medial child" in the late nineteenth century, a figure that she argues "often functions as a residual and conserving and at the same time emergent and creative means of accessing the 'interiorised self' (in Carolyn Steedman's term) of modernity" (8–9). Crain creates a vast network of archival and literary sites stretching from the seventeenth to twenty-first centuries, and her inclusive approach situates her scholarship at the intersection of book history, literary analysis, and histories of childhood. She begins with two chapters examining the divergent trajectories of two canonical children's texts, Goody Two Shoes and "The Children in the Woods." The former provides one of the earliest links between literacy and cultural capital, as Goody's nigh-magical ability to read and write, and in turn, instruct others using her wooden alphabet, provides her (and by extension, disenfranchised populations) a radical new route to prosperity, one outside lines of inheritance that cannot be lost; however, later adaptations would lose this revolutionary spirit, transforming Goody's "economic bildung" into a fairy tale suited more for promoting reading absorption instead of agency (29). In contrast, Crain traces the near 400-year history of "The Children in the Woods" from adult ballad to cherished children's tale to excavate the imagined child reader so central to the development of children's literature. Despite its dark subject—a dispute resulting in the death of two children—the ballad became popular because the genre's orality allowed eighteenth-century collectors and children's publishers to imagine a child audience listening to and learning from their literary peers' experience. While as much a product of nostalgia as a burgeoning literary market, this hypothetical child reader demonstrates that "what makes children's literature possible is adult consciousness of childhood as a privileged time and space [End Page 153] that's been lost . . . and yet remains indefinitely accessible to adult memory and imagination through the medium of literature and the practices of literacy" (53). And yet, if Goody promised equality (at least in its early iteration), later adaptations of "The Children in the Woods" began to carve out childhood as a haven only for white children. Here, Crain begins to develop one of her most crucial interventions, which she continues throughout her third and fourth chapters: how literacy instruction, practice, and ideology upheld colonialism and white supremacy in the United States. Her third chapter explains how missionaries indoctrinated Cherokee children in white property practices by teaching literacy through the Lancaster pedagogical system. In contrast to the slow reveries of white, middle-class reading...

Mobility in the English Novel from Defoe to Austen by Chris Ewers

Reviewed by: Mobility in the English Novel from Defoe to Austen by Chris Ewers Leah Orr EWERS, CHRIS. Mobility in the English Novel from Defoe to Austen. Woodbridge and Rochester: The Boydell Press, 2018. pp. xiii + 219. $99.00 hardback; $24.99 e-book. Critics of eighteenth-century fiction have long called attention to the ways that novels in this period interacted with their cultural moment, from Ian Watt’s grand narrative of the rise of the middle-class reader spawning the novel, to the more nuanced approaches of recent critics like Christopher R. Miller, Chloe Wigston Smith, and Linda Zionkowski, among others. Chris Ewers’s Mobility in the English Novel [End Page 603] from Defoe to Austen contributes to this tradition with a new approach that reminds us of the importance of people’s ability to move across space and time to our thinking about fiction. In looking at the era after epic tales of global wandering and before the railway, Ewers is shedding new light on a period of transport history that has been relatively neglected by literary critics. The book is arranged into roughly chronological chapters that each focus on a different aspect of transit and a major work or author of eighteenth-century fiction: Robinson Crusoe, Fielding, Smollett, Tristram Shandy, A Sentimental Journey, and Northanger Abbey. The main historical thread is a narrative that Ewers weaves throughout the book about the increase in coach travel and its consequences over the course of the eighteenth century, from the building of a turnpike network to the focus on speed of travel to the increased marginalization of walking as a form of long-distance transportation. Ultimately, Ewers argues, this helped to shape the novel form because “the master trope for explaining the reading process was that a reader journeyed through the pages of a book” (4). The historical information that Ewers provides leads to new readings of familiar texts. In his discussion of Robinson Crusoe, he points out that the different modes of travel (by sea and by land) offer different balances of realism and fantasy. The geography of the country changed as new roads were built, and as Ewers argues about Tom Jones and the “Man on the Hill” episode, “By making the landscape harder to traverse, the alternation between hills and country lanes alter the way time is ordered and experienced compared to the country and city sections” (74). Some of his arguments help to explain the trends of literary history: for example, ramble novels (such as Roderick Random) were popular in mid-century Britain, “but by 1770 [had] been marginalised by the dominance of a faster, more efficient, destination-based transport system” (82). Others illuminate aspects of the reading experience, such as the examination of the difference between speed and pacing in Tristram Shandy’s representation of travel, the passage of time, and the amount of time the reader takes to read the novel. As Ewers explains, “Instead of a reading norm, there is a shuttling between moments of rapid relation and passages where the narrative slows to the point of stasis” (119). The concept of reading speed, like physical speed, being a matter of personal perception reflects eighteenth-century reports of travel experiences and shows how the metaphor of reading as a journey becomes literal in the relativity of time. In his analysis of Northanger Abbey, Ewers analyzes the ways that mobility was a sign of class and power, so that “[c]oaches enabled some women to move with relative freedom, with the elite able to use their rank and wealth to arrange a freer type of mobility” (166). While most of the book is focused on the changes that increased mobility, Ewers is careful to remind the reader that not everyone benefited from the turnpike system and other innovations, and for the poor the rapid building of roads often hampered mobility. This book is strongest in its readings of individual texts and authors: Ewers makes an interesting case that closer attention to the realities of transport can lead us to a better understanding of the authorial choices made in fiction, and he makes new points about some very well-studied novels. But the book...

PLACING “ASIA” AGAINST THE “WEST”: OCCIDENTALISM AND THE PRODUCTION OF ARCHITECTURAL IMAGES IN SHANGHAI AND HONG KONG

The paper explores the idea of architecture and Occidentalism in the writings of building journals and illustrated magazines in the early twentieth century. More specifically, it examines how images of architecture, buildings and landscapes of the “West” and the “non-West” were used as key tropes to construct particular imaginaries and moral claims at a specific time and space: republican Shanghai and colonial Hong Kong from the mid-1920s to the late 1930s. Central to these developments was the emergence of new image-making practices that were made available by modern printing technologies, which led to a surge of production and circulation of images in the popular press. As a salient representation of modernity, progress and achievements of “civilizations,” images of architecture came to capture the attention of architects and builders, cultural producers and the fast-growing middle-class reading public in these metropolises. The exploration of these representational practices raises several questions: What kinds of assumptions about the “West” and the “non-West” were associated with these architectural images at this time? What kinds of new knowledge did the authors of these articles seek to produce through their experimentation with new visual and textual strategies? How did these representations relate to and differ from those in the more authoritative architectural historiographies? Finally, if these narrative productions about the West can be seen as processes of Occidentalism, what new historical insights do they offer?

Roman Türünün Sonu Kuramları

Compared to the other literary genres, the novel is the most recent form that emerged, for example, in English Literature with the rise of the bourgeoisie in the late eighteenth century. It was the work of Defoe, Richardson and Fielding in England in the same period of time that popularised the novel especially among the middle class readers. In contrast to the classical genres, particularly the epic, the novel was about common man. It depicted the everyday life of ordinary individuals. During the nineteenth century, the novel developed and became a fully established genre. It was the era of the most refined examples of the genre in English Literature. In the twentieth century, especially after the end of the Second World War, the novel became the subject of the discussions about a sense of an ending. It was openly argued that the genre would not have a future. It was claimed that the novel would soon be a deceased genre. Although all those pessimistic prognostications have failed to predict the future of the novel truly, it is essential to comprehend why a number of writers and literary theorists participated in the discussions.

“Given to You by Nature for an Enemy”: The Landlady in Mid-century London

The domestic novel and the family home are closely associated with mid-century Victorian culture, but less attention has been paid to narratives about lodging-house life. These prose essays and short stories, published in huge numbers from the 1840s through the 1860s in London magazines, reached an audience of middle-class readers eager to read about home spaces defined not by comfort and security, but by invasions of privacy, frustration, and awkward social encounters. The most important figure in representations of lodging-houses was the landlady, portrayed as the cruel, calculating despot of the lodging’s domestic sphere: the antithesis of the ideal mid-century wife. The landlady was represented by the striving authors behind these semi-autobiographical narratives as a formidable enemy, challenging what they saw as their right to deferential service from a wife or mother figure. These expectations jarred with the landlady’s own economic needs in the widespread business of urban accommodation. This essay examines a number of mid-century lodging-house narratives, paying particular attention to Charles Dickens’s popular story about a landlady, ‘Mrs Lirriper’s Lodgings’ (1863).

“Wishy-washy liberalism” and “the art of getting lost” in Ivan Vladislavić’s <i>Double Negative</i>

The politics of the protagonist of Ivan Vladislavić’s Double Negative, Neville Lister, are broadly liberal during apartheid, but show signs of becoming more conservative during the post-apartheid era. In this article, I argue that this development is unsurprising because bourgeois white liberals and conservatives in South Africa continue to cling to the privileges afforded them as the propertied class. For this reason, acknowledgements of privilege and quests for discomfort, while not necessarily dishonest, do not in and of themselves constitute progressive politics. Rather, one can, as Neville does, become comfortable with discomfort so long as it allows one to enjoy a privileged lifestyle. I therefore draw a distinction between the unease argued for in much of what constitutes whiteness studies, and a sense of being lost that seems to demand the loss of the home and its attendant association with control. This sense of lostness emerges in two ways in the novel: in a description of a photograph that contains the spectral presence of a dead child, and in a game that Neville played when he was a young boy. Both of these sections of the text also deal with the limits of art – of writing and of photography in particular. I propose that these self-reflexive episodes suggest the novel’s own limits, and gesture beyond them in ways that are worth consideration by its middle-class readership.

The Man of Law’s Reading of Chaucer: The Readers and Scribes of Late Medieval Vernacular Literature

이 논문은 중세 후기 자국어 문학 작품의 생산에 깊이 관여했던 필경사라는 직업을 중심으로 인쇄술이 도입되기 이전 14세기 영국의 매체와 시장의 변화를 역사적으로 접근함으로써 제프리 초서를 비롯한 자국어 작가들의 저자성을 규명한다. 중세 시대에는 하나의 텍스트가 작가 외에도 텍스트의 생산과 유통에 관계된 사람들의 공동 작업의 산물이라는 점에서 시장과 매체의 변화는 작품을 이해하는데 있어서 중요한 요소이다. 저자의 지위는 절대적인 것이 아니며, 인쇄술 도입 이전 자국어 문학 작품의 필사를 담당했던 필경사나 중세 문학 시장의 기능을 수행했던 후원자 혹은 독자 등, 일종의 매체로서 문학 작품의 생산에 관여했던 사람들과의 관계 속에서 끊임없이 타협하고 유동한다. 따라서 중세 후기 자국어 작가의 저자성을 이해하기 위해서는 정부나 의회, 런던 상인 길드에 소속되어 있으면서 자국어 작가들의 작품을 필사했던 중세 후기 필경사들의 활동과, 그들이 속했던 법률가와 상인 등 중산계급 전문직 지식인 독서층의 성장을 탐색하는 작업이 필수적이다. 필경사 집단과 중산층 독자에 대한 이와 같은 역사적 탐구는 초서의 작품에 대한 새로운 해석의 가능성을 제시한다. 자국어 문학에 관심이 많았고, 법에 대한 지식이 풍부했으며, 속인으로서는 보기 드물게 식자층이었던 이들은 초서 작품의 일차적인 독자이자 비평가로 그의 작품의 방향을 제시했다. 이 논문에서는 초서의「법률가의 이야기 도입부」와 「총서시」에 묘사된 순례객 법률가의 모습, 그리고「필경사 애덤에게 보내는 초서의 전언」을 분석하면서 독자층의 변화에 대한 저자의 인식이 뚜렷이 드러나는 1380년대 이후 초서의 작품들과 필경사 집단과의 연관성을 탐색한다.Focusing on late medieval English lay scribes, this paper examines changes of material and social conditions before the introduction of the printing press to understand contemporary ideas about vernacular authorship. The authority of an author was never absolute and constantly under the negotiation between the scribes, readers, and patrons, whose interests and tastes dictated the direction of late medieval English literary tradition. An investigation of the scribes and their association with Westminster and the London Guildhall sheds light on the role played by the middle-class readers who promoted vernacular literary writing. Well-educated and well-equipped with legal knowledge, these professional readers and writers chose and read the works of Chaucer, Gower, and Langland, establishing them as canonical authors. This paper pays particular attention to The Introduction to The Man of Law’s Tale , and “Chaucer’s wordes unto Adam, his Owne Scrivener,” while arguing an interrelationship between Chaucer’s later works and the changes of readership.

Literary Regionalism and Mark Twain's Telephone

Abstract Focusing on the work of Mark Twain, this article considers the convergence of two late nineteenth-century voice technologies: dialect writing and the telephone. The racial and rural dialects transcribed by regionalist fiction offered mostly white, urban, middle-class readers entertaining encounters with “other” voices from a safe remove. The rhetoric surrounding the telephone's development promised that it would one day fulfill the same function in real time. But “the ideological power of dialect literature” (Gavin Jones) reinforced stereotypes rather than conveying geographically or socially distant voices to readers. Similarly, despite early fantasies of cross-cultural communication, the telephone facilitated socially insular conversation as it became systematized. Twain, however, emphasized the numerous miscommunications of the emergent telephone. Especially in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), he debunked the myth of cultural contact promulgated by dialect writing and telephony by making readers question their ears.

“Who Can Estimate the Value of a Book!”: Buying and Owning Books in Antebellum Domestic Fiction

This paper explores the role of books in American antebellum domestic fiction. Written primarily for middle-class readers, domestic fiction offers advice on how to create an ideal home and in these ideal homes the presence of books is necessary. In an era plagued by a volatile national economy, monetary assets proved an unstable basis for class affiliation. Domestic fiction, however, presents the ownership of books as an alternative foundation for class status. As a result, rather than being based on economic resources, which might lose value overnight, thus causing a plunge on the social ladder, in these tales, middle-class status transcends economic status as it becomes synonymous with the ownership and appreciation of books and the personal qualities books were expected to foster.

‘All Are Instructive If Read in a Right Spirit’: Reading, Religion, and Instruction in a Victorian Reading Diary

ABSTRACTThis paper conducts a study of reading choices and practices through the reading diary of a middle-class reader in mid–nineteenth-century Glasgow within the context of her sociocultural, intellectual, and religious milieu. Anne Galloway (1802–1889) wrote her reading diary between 1850 and 1856, wherein she recorded one hundred eighty-four books and three periodicals. This study combines an investigation in the availability of books and their circulation with a focus on Stirling's Library, a subscription library founded by Walter Stirling in 1791, from which Anne obtained her books. Anne's borrowing record is reconstructed using the library catalogues. These are used to assess the different classifications of the books she read and their respective numbers to determine the pattern of Anne's borrowing and reading practices. This investigation offers new insights into Glasgow's book culture through the reconstructed history of a ‘lesser-known’ Evangelical, nonprofessional, married woman reader in the...

Defining Duty in the Civil War: Personal Choice, Popular Culture, and the Union Home Front by J. Matthew Gallman

Reviewed by: Defining Duty in the Civil War: Personal Choice, Popular Culture, and the Union Home Front by J. Matthew Gallman Andie Tucher Defining Duty in the Civil War: Personal Choice, Popular Culture, and the Union Home Front. By J. Matthew Gallman. Civil War America. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. [viii], 327. $45.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-2099-2.) How did Union civilians figure out what “duty” meant during the Civil War, a crisis bigger and more complicated than anything America had ever seen? How did ordinary northerners who wanted the Union to win decide what they themselves should or would contribute to the victory? In this rich study J. Matthew Gallman explores one critical and almost universal action: reading. Drawing on a vast array of newspapers, magazines, novels, pamphlets, sermons, songs, poems, cartoons, and comic papers, Gallman argues that a vast public conversation about personal responsibility and the meaning of citizenship was shaped by the popular press. Part 1 is devoted to satire. Especially during the first years of the war, humorists, cartoonists, and novelists constructed a range of stereotyped figures whom civilians could safely and righteously mock: empty-headed dandies and coquettes enjoying a giddy social life; hypocritical “shoulder straps,” who strutted in officers’ uniforms but never actually set foot on a battlefield (chap. 2); and profiteers and the “shoddy aristocracy,” who exploited the wartime market for their own gain (chap. 3). By offering themselves up for derision, these characters marked the outer boundaries of acceptable behavior during the crisis. The boundaries, in Gallman’s telling, turned out to be generous, only excluding actions that were excessively dishonest, venal, or crass, and gently embracing the candid self-assessments and modest readjustments made by generally well-intentioned civilians navigating a changed world. [End Page 180] Part 2 turns to an examination of the messages directed at men and women, white and black, who were making hard choices about their own duty. Should I enlist? Should I actively avoid the draft? Should I encourage my sweetheart to sign up? Should I volunteer as a nurse? Should I fight for white men who deny me basic rights? Gallman describes a literature that, at least for white and middle-class readers, encouraged individual decision making based on the honest evaluation of one’s own circumstances, rarely if ever making overt appeals to patriotism or invoking the rights and obligations of citizenship. The much more limited universe of printed materials that specifically addressed African American readers, in contrast, focused more on reciprocal rights and collective responsibilities. Gallman concludes that the Union “relied on individual citizens to make informed decisions,” and individual citizens relied in large part on their novels, newspapers, poems, and cartoons for that information (p. 252). Gallman is an insightful, indefatigable guide to this immense body of literature and offers an intriguing and intimate perspective on what people may have thought about during the crisis of war. Yet his efforts to shape a wildly diverse corpus—which ranged from rude jokes to syrupy novels to orotund sermons and was cobbled by motley legions of often faceless scribblers, advocates, elites, and hacks—into the building blocks of a coherent and prescriptive “cultural conversation” can sometimes feel a little uncomfortable (p. 13). While Part 1 makes a compelling case for the importance of satirists as boundary workers, Gallman’s later section on romantic fiction struggles to make a consistent argument out of shelffuls of sentimental complications that sometimes seemed to use the war as simply another scenic backdrop. There are few acknowledgments of the Miltonian marketplace of ideas or of the commercial marketplace. Surely some of these materials sank without a trace, were roundly repudiated, or did duty as straw men, while others certainly served mainly as guilty pleasures or outhouse reading. Yet Gallman gives all printed materials equal weight as participants in the conversation. Defining Duty in the Civil War: Personal Choice, Popular Culture, and the Union Home Front is lucid, informative, and admirably researched, and it offers an invaluable glimpse into the teeming world of ideas in print—but neither all print nor all ideas are created equal. Andie Tucher Columbia University Copyright © 2017 The Southern...

Radical Cross-Writing for Working Children: Toward a Bottom-Up History of Children's Literature

Radical Cross-Writing for Working Children:Toward a Bottom-Up History of Children's Literature Elizabeth Massa Hoiem (bio) In a letter to the editor of the Radical newspaper The Poor Man's Guardian, an anonymous article signed "M.A.B." urges the "mothers and teachers of both sexes, (whose business it is to instruct the rising generation)," to read educational literature with their families. Self-identifying as a wife and mother, M.A.B. provides the following list of suggested works: "the 'poor Man's Guardian,' Mr. Cobbett's 'History of the Reformation,' the 'Poor Man's book of the Church,' 'Church Examiner,' 'The National Holiday,' the 'Political Writings of Mr. Paine, and other such excellent publications.'"1 Such pamphlets and periodicals touting constitutional reform, deism, general strikes, and redistribution of wealth are the kind of dangerous literature that made British elites ask whether teaching poor children to read "would only tend to make the people study politics, and lay them open to the arts of designing men" (Hansard HC Deb 24 April 1807). These recommended readings look nothing like the early nineteenth-century moral tales, domestic fiction, or imaginative literature widely anthologized in the Norton Anthology of Children's Literature or Patricia Demers's From Instruction to Delight, and none of the authors single out children as their intended audience. Yet M.A.B.'s recommendations point to a tradition of Radical working-class cross-writing from Britain's First Industrial Revolution that warrants integration into our histories of children's literature.2 I establish this tradition by focusing on the 1830s as a watershed decade, when Radicals first identified children as an important audience. The writings of Thomas Paine or William Benbow may not strike us as children's literature. But the suggestion that their texts were recommended reading for young people begs the question why we accept as children's literature classics some adult works that were appropriated by children, [End Page 1] such as Robinson Crusoe, but not Paine's Rights of Man or his defense of deism, Age of Reason. Neither do we include Radical works that explicitly target a working youth audience, such as William Cobbett's surprisingly seditious A Grammar of the English Language.3 Such exclusions are all the more remarkable given that some "church and king" polemical literature, written to counteract Paine's influence among poor adults and children, passes as children's literature, including Hannah More's Village Politics and Sarah Trimmer's The Family Magazine and The Servant's Friend (Jackson 174–90). Those Radical Dissenters and reformers who regularly attract scholarship—William Godwin, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and Mary Wollstonecraft—are specifically bourgeois Radicals, tied to Unitarianism and rational Enlightenment values—in Godwin's case, vilified but not imprisoned.4 The pattern suggests that we may unwittingly eliminate from consideration those texts written for and embraced by Radical working-class readers.5 This oversight stems from a scholarly consensus that pioneers of children's literature publishing (e.g., John and Elizabeth Newbery, John Marshall, and John Harris) served middle-class readers with books that reflect their values. Thus, the rise of English children's book publishers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is closely associated with the rise of middle-class families, with parents who could afford to purchase books and whose children had the time and education necessary to read them. Rigorous studies have established and embellished this narrative: Isaac Kramnick charts the eighteenth-century transition from aristocratic to bourgeois values by locating the Dissenting Protestant doctrine—that life is a race fairly won through hard work—in children's literature from Little Goody-Two Shoes to The Little Engine that Could (99–132). Offering a more nuanced reading, Andrew O'Malley in The Making of the Modern Child argues that by the late eighteenth century, "Children's literature became one of the crucial mechanisms for disseminating and consolidating middle-class ideology" (11). Approaching children's books through the history of reading, M. O. Grenby's The Child Reader, 1700–1840 confirms that no one profession dominated children's book ownership, but "irrespective of authors' or publishers' intentions, children's literature was consumed predominantly by middle...

Repurposing and the Literary Magazine

MARK PARKER Repurposing and the Literary Magazine W ILLIAM MAGINN, WRITING AS ENSIGN O’DOHERTY IN ONE OF THE FINEST of the Nodes Ambrosianae, offers this assessment of the success of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine: People have learnt the great lesson, that Reviews, and indeed all peri­ odicals, merely qua such, are nothing. They take in his book not as a Review, to pick up opinions ofnew books from it, nor as a periodical, to read themselves asleep upon, but as a classical work, which happens to be continued from month to month.1 The implication here—that literary magazines such as Blackwood’s should be objects of study in their own right, and that they constitute something of a genre in themselves—is a suggestive one.2 In this essay I would like to extend this argument by examining the relation between literary magazines and the literary work they consider. More specifically I will take up the question of how such magazines refashion the novel, poetry, drama, and the essay.3 Put another way, I argue that Blackwood’s continual (and admittedly selfserving ) assertions of primacy in the literary world are worth serious con­ sideration, and that more neutral and conventional claims about the rela­ tion of the magazine to literature—such as those articulated (but, as we I. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 12 Quly 1822): 106; hereafter BEM. 2. See my Literary Magazines and British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) for a discussion of this methodological move. 3. The study of Romantic periodicals has grown rapidly since Jon Klancher published his 1987 study of the reading audiences formed by magazines. His approach—largely classificatory—has been extended by studies that examine the rhetoric ofthe magazine. Mark Schoenfield has asked us to consider the play of voices within magazines; Kim Wheatley taught us to parse the politics ofsuch magazines, whether “paranoid” or gothic, closely; Pe­ ter Murphy urged us to reflect on the intense self-consciousness implied by the proliferation ofmagazine personae. To draw a loose analogy from the sciences, there is a recognizable and sturdy “standard model” for the study of magazines, and more recent books (by David Hig­ gins, Karen Fang, Schoenfield, Simon Hull, Richard Cronin, and David Stewart) have de­ veloped this model in ways both useful and edifying. SiR, 56 (Winter 2017) 479 480 MARK PARKER shall see, not always followed) in the London Magazine by its editor John Scott—are inadequate. Scott’s careful insistence on tracing in his magazine what he calls, quoting Hamlet, the “form and pressure” of the time does not do justice to the force and influence of literary magazines on literary production.4 In fact, the overstatement characteristic of Blackwood’s points to a deeper truth: that the relation between the magazine and other literary forms is dialectical, not simply mimetic. Magazines like Blackwood’s, to bor­ row a phrase from media studies, remediate material from these genres.5 In their cogent account of new media, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin define remediation as “the representation of one medium in an­ other.”6 Although their focus is on the relation of digital media to earlier forms, they note their debt to the intense interest of literary critics in the refashioning of material within literature—to what we might now term “old-fashioned” studies of influence. In adapting their terminology and analysis to the borderline case of literature and the literary magazine, we can recognize some of our “rejected thoughts” returning to us with the “alienated majesty” that Emerson speaks ofin “Self-Reliance.” For in con­ sidering periodicals as a medium distinct from novels or collections of poems, we need only consider their differing cultural, social, and economic relationships, and especially the relations they cultivate with their audience. As Bolter and Grusin put it: “A medium is that which remediates. It is that which appropriates the techniques, forms and social significance of other media and attempts to rival them or refashion them in the name of the real”—the “real” here being the rapidly growing middle-class reading pub­ lic ofthe first quarter ofthe nineteenth century in Britain and the concom­ itant expansion of the market for books...

Material Culture and the ‘Backstage’: A Response to Peter K. Andersson’s ‘How Civilized Were the Victorians?’

As part of a roundtable response to Peter Andersson's article 'How Civilized Were the Victorians', this paper argues that material culture studies can help us to articulate new historical narratives about the Victorian period. Post-structuralism helped to privilege linguistic representation to the detriment of direct analysis of material culture while approaches aligned to archaeology and anthropology enable us to rediscover the significance of physical matter and those who shaped it. The opportunities for learning how to study material culture are limited but could be enhanced through the heritage sector. As a case study, the paper examines the first selected edition of Tennyson's verse. The covers, layout and design of the book clashed with the poet's ambition of publishing a cheap edition for the working classes. The book generated a lot of profit and the selection provides evidence of Tennyson's attempts to be populist and patriotic. The posthumous description of this book, written by the poet's son, misrepresents the book as a philanthropic gesture to poor readers while it was in fact a moderately expensive book pitched at middle class readers. This interpretation of the book is only available though study of the artifact.