Nineteenth-century British Novels Research Articles

How the fictional representation of historical characters can serve to justify historical events and actions: Tipu Sultan’s Tiger

ABSTRACT This paper is a comparative analysis of three nineteenth-century British novels – The Surgeon’s Daughter (1827) by Walter Scott; Tippoo Sultan: A Tale of the Mysore War (1840) by Philip Meadows Taylor; and The Tiger of Mysore (1895) by G.A. Henty – all of which feature Tipu Sultan, the Muslim ruler of the south Indian kingdom of Mysore, who used the tiger as his personal emblem, and was killed by the British and their allies on 4 May 1799. Previous scholarship on Tipu has mainly focused on the rationale behind his adoption of the tiger as his personal insignia which, among other things, stood for his fierce independence and military acumen. However, there is little discussion of the representation of Tipu’s tiger as an emblem in the literary tradition of the colonial power at that time or as an implied justification of its political ventures in the south of India reflected in the novels written after his death. This paper argues that these British novels subvert the emblematic significance of Tipu’s tiger through the use of tiger imagery, whose main thrust is to synonymize the savagery of the Indian tiger with the rulership of Tipu. To damage Tipu’s legacy, the tiger is portrayed both as formidable, with a morbid thirst for blood, and as vulnerable and weak. The study focuses on these variations, and suggests that Tipu’s fluctuating fictional images are influenced by the shifting British attitudes towards the Sultan during different periods of the East India Company’s rule. These novels were statements within the larger discourse of colonization whose enunciative context contributed to the process that reinforced Tipu’s status as a distinct menace to be solved by the colonial conquest.

Enhanced Discovery with Linked Open Data for Library Digital Collections

ABSTRACT Libraries have been digitizing their collections for years in order to provide users with enhanced access and improve preservation of library materials. This article studies how the linked data can be used to describe objects in the digital collections. Researchers selected a digital collection of the nineteenth-century British novels from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library, and converted the metadata for 7,829 British novels from MARCXML to BIBFRAME 2.0. Their project demonstrates that the BIBFRAME 2.0 model is a feasible way to enhance the discoverability of digital collections within and beyond library communities.

Keeping Count: Direct Speech in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel

In this paper, I employ large-scale data analysis to highlight trends in the use of direct speech across a corpus of 898 novels published in Britain between 1789 and 1901. The paper begins with a brief description of my quantitative method. Following this, it illustrates that an unexpected statistic—here the high number of speaking characters in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre—can shed new light on individual novels. After this example, the paper argues for the usefulness of combining computational methods with literary analysis when studying direct speech in the novel. The paper then presents several corpus-wide facts about direct speech, and offers some hypotheses about what these statistics reveal about the role of speech in nineteenth-century British novels. Finally, the paper proposes ways in which the current corpus and data can be improved and considers how those improvements can shed further light on the use of direct speech in Romantic and Victorian novels.

Did the Ancient Greek Novels Have Characters?

Did the Ancient Greek Novels Have Characters?

The Unaccounted inTessandTrishna

New Historicism and cultural studies have worked to reclaim the people, events, and narratives consigned to the trash heap of history, suggesting that what has been deemed unsuitable to a capitalist narrative of progress nevertheless has value and should be accounted for. Although the ethical intent behind such reclamation efforts is commendable, these efforts enact their own version of a capitalist improvement ideology—the imperative to turn all things, even “waste,” to profit or good account. This essay explores the tension between the desire to account for experiences that fall outside improvement's profitizing calculus and the choice to allow such experiences to remain unheard and erode away undetected. This tension informs Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) and Michael Winterbottom's Trishna (2011), a recent film adaptation of the novel set in twenty-first-century India. The author reads the male protagonists in the novel and the film and the film's implied viewers as improving subjects—characters and spectators that marry a capitalist's desire to turn waste to profit and a New Historical impulse to uncover hidden narratives and make them count. She argues, however, that both texts ultimately resist such capitalist improvement energies by using the female protagonists and minor characters to foreground moments of withholding, silence, and nonnarrativity that refuse to be incorporated into a profitable project of articulation. The essay aims to demonstrate that twenty-first-century film adaptations of nineteenth-century British novels can make newly visible latent critiques of improvement discourse in the source novels while at the same time deploying these critiques against new objects of analysis.

“Whoever Explains A ‘But’”: Tact and Friction in Trollope’s Reparative Fiction

138 Victorians Journal “Whoever explains f? 'Sat’”: Tact and friction in Trollope’s Reparative fiction by Jonathan farina In July 1849, as a Surveyor’s deputy for the Post Office in Ireland, Trollope stood witness against local postmistress Mary O’Reilly, whom he had caught stealing a marked coin from the mail (Hall 106-08; Mullen 229-32; Terry). Trollope’s testimony was rebutted by the prominent Irish barrister, Isaac Butt, an eventual MP and founder of the Home Rule League, who was nicknamed “The Rebutter” for his infamously aggressive cross-examinations. 1 According to the newspapers, Trollope adeptly parried Butt’s rebuttal with crowd-pleasing repartee, yet Butt’s acerbic manner vexed him. To discredit Trollope’s testimony, Butt questioned his character by broaching his unsavory portrayal of Mr. Allewinde of The Macdermots ofBallycloran, one of several lawyers who viciously rebut witnesses for professional necessity rather than the pursuit of truth. Thus, Trollope later parodied Butt with browbeating barristers like Mr. Chaffanbrass of The Three Clerks, Orley Farm, and Phineas Redux. Butt seems to have personified for Trollope how rebuttal formally instantiated and institutionalized the indecorous presumption that witnesses were duplicitous and partial. Rebuttal moreover routinized a narrative practice that adjudicated a matter by doubting all of its witnesses—its narrators—although they obliged the court with testimony and were not charged with malfeasance. And yet few things resemble rebuttal so much as Trollope’s fictional practice; not only does he explicitly and consistently subordinate plot to character, but many of his novels might be summarized as sustained rebuttals ofcharacter testimony: The Eustace Diamonds, to be sure, centers on the rebuttal—or the many indirect, would-be 1 May Laffan Hartley negatively portrays Butt as “Mr. Rebutter” in Christy Carew (255-80, passim). Alas, the novel does not inflect Mr. Rebutter’s idiolect with a Trollopian abundance of adversatives. Victorians Journal 139 rebuttals—of Lizzie Eustace. The Last Chronicle ofBarset assails Josiah Crawley until the trial is avoided by Mrs. Arabin; Orley Farm crosses Lady Mason; and in The Small House at Allington and The Last Chronicle of Barset, Lily Dale is subject to the crossexaminations of her mother, uncle, and friends, all of whom doubt her decision to decline Johnny Eames’s proposals. Butt’s surname is even more wonderfully apposite than his nickname: as an adverb, coordinating conjunction, and preposition, but occurs frequently in English prose and most frequently in Trollope’s novels.2 In Doctor Thorne, Framley Parsonage, The Small House at Allington, and The Eustace Diamonds, in particular, Trollope uses but about thirty percent more frequently than other nineteenth-century novelists do—almost once every one hundred words and often in succession. In a 1960 article, Hugh Sykes Davies aspires to affirm a “hunch” that Trollope’s prose has a distinct “cadence” against prevailing assertions to the contrary, yet he also nicely catalogs some ways but functions. It can “introduce a qualification or exception” (78); it can “lay bare the perplexities of motives in conflict,” imply “the presence of motives not quite conscious” in characters, and “reveal indecision,” and in this sense it facilitates Trollope’s representation of processes of decision making (78-79). Further, it periodically discriminates the difference between a character’s “own estimate of himself, and the real estimate” (79); and, finally, it can “point the discrepancybetween theory and practice in moral conduct, the almost universal failure to practice what we agree ought to be preached” (80). Adversatives, including but, then, and yet, are the signature ligatures of Trollope’s style. As such, they evidence a specific and concurrently aesthetic and social form; they grammatically instantiate a manner of ordering the world. I refer to this form as 2 In Doctor Thome, but comprises 2,159 out of 220,553 words, a frequency of 0.009789; in Framley Parsonage, 2,097 out of 211,290 words, a frequency of 0.009924; in The Small House at Allington, 2,569 out of263,246 words, a frequency of0.009758; and in The Eustace Diamonds, 2,331 out of274,376 words, a frequency of 0.008495. The standard frequency of but in a sample collection of 150 canonical and popular nineteenth-century British novels is...

Arthur Miller: Self and Tragedy

Editor's Note: At the 2014 Modem Language Association Annual Convention in Chicago, the Miller Society organized a special round table session, Arthur Miller: Self and Tragedy, that discussed cognitive approaches to Miller's work. Presided by David Palmer, the session brought together the cognitive literary scholars, Patrick Colm Hogan and Bruce McConachie and the Miller scholars: Stephen A. Marino and Matthew C. Roudane. The following is an edited transcript of the session.Palmer: Welcome. This session is the beginning of events leading up to the Society's celebration of the centennial of Miller's birth in October 2015. The core idea for our round-table discussion this evening is quite simple: bring together two scholars who specialize in cognitive approaches to literature and two scholars who specialize in the works of Miller and let them discuss how cognitive approaches provide insights into Miller's vision of tragedy and how Miller's plays reveal the workings of the human mind, in particular how a person develops a sense of self.Miller's plays seem especially well-adapted to this discussion because of the way Miller structured his tragedies. As Ben Brantley, the theater critic of The New York Times, noted in a recent issue of The Miller Journal (Vol. VII, 1 & 2, Fall 2012, 2), Every one of Miller's plays is steeped in a sense of guilt that taints each of its characters; they all take place 'after the fall.' The crisis that prompts the collapse of the narrative that constitutes a person's self generally takes place in Miller's plays before the action begins. Miller approaches tragedy not as a depiction of the moment a character confronts his flawed self-narrative but as a depiction of his characters' floundering to find a new psychological equilibrium the confrontation has occurred, after the fall. This certainly is true of the Keller family in All My Sons (1947), of Willy Loman in Death of a (1949), of John Proctor in The Crucible (1953), and of Quentin in After the Fall (1964). The same pattern is seen in many others of Miller's plays and is what makes these plays such suitable subjects for a cognitive approach to literary interpretation, in particular our understanding of crises in a person's sense of self. This is the general theme our panelists will discuss.We'll begin the round table with brief opening statements from the two cognitive scholars and follow these with statements from the Miller scholars. There then will be a discussion among the panelists, and we hope to have 25 minutes at the end of the session for an open discussion with the audience.McConachie: I've entitled my opening remarks Salesman and Literary to indicate my general endorsement of this approach to literary criticism and my application of it to Miller's Death of a Salesman. I would modify literary Darwinism in a couple of ways, however, which I hope we can talk about during the discussion.In Graphing Jane Austin: The Evolutionary Basis of Literary Meaning (2012), authors Joseph Carroll and Jonathan Gottschall, plus their two co-authors, summarize the results of their web-based survey questioning hundreds of readers about their response to nineteenth-century British novels. The four literary Darwinists draw several conclusions, three of which are particularly relevant to our purposes today. First, following the work of others, they state that story-telling and listening helped small bands of our evolutionary predecessors to survive. Second, these stories endorsed egalitarian norms through an agonistic structure that favored such values over the norms that promoted individual success. Third, the literary Darwinists demonstrate that we are still telling these kinds of stories, which continue to communicate the biocultural norms we learned in our hunter-gatherer past.Let's look more closely at these conclusions before moving to Salesman. The authors make a strong case that our ancestors adopted altruistic norms around 100,000 years ago to ensure the social cohesion and survivability of their bands. …

Imagining Otherwise: Comparative South Asian Literatures and the MLA

As someone who entered the United States as a foreign student in the late 1980s, my academic career was intensely shaped by the then burgeoning discourses on colonialism and postcolonialism.1 The triumvirate of Said, Spivak, and Bhabha functioned like a citation machine; and despite Said’s Orientalism, South Asia, especially India, dominated as the colonial/ postcolonial site par excellence. Much of this had to do not just with the presence of many a South Asian scholar studying, writing, and teaching in U.S. universities but also with the fact that some of the most brilliant work was being undertaken on India: Lata Mani’s work on the discourses on sati, the work of the Subaltern Studies historians, Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and her famous essays on the Rani of Sirmur, and of course Bhabha’s legendary essays “Sly Civility” and “Signs Taken for Wonders.” The outpouring of anglophone fiction from South Asia, topped off by the publication of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, made certain that there would be no dearth of work on South Asian (read Indian) postcolonial fiction, and even today, despite a fairer distribution of attention to other parts of the ex-colonial worlds, works on South Asia continue to dominate the scene. Much has been written about this privileging of South Asia (again, read India) and its incarnation as the quintessential postcolonial site, and I am not going to rehearse the debates here. But suffice it to say that while my teaching spans continents, my first book was part and parcel of the work on the discourse of gender and nationalism in colonial and postcolonial literary representations by British, Bengali, and anglophone South Asian writers. But, in another sense the book was comparative because it brought into play writers working in different languages, and I remember getting a report from Cambridge University Press asking me why there was no chapter on Rushdie.

Graphing Jane Austen

Building on findings in evolutionary psychology, we constructed a model of human nature and used it to illuminate the evolved psychology that shapes the organization of characters in nineteenth-century British novels. Characters were rated on the web by 519 scholars and students of Victorian literature. Rated categories include motives, criteria for selecting marital partners, personality traits, and the emotional responses of readers. Respondents assigned characters to roles as protagonists, antagonists, or associates of protagonists or antagonists. We conclude that protagonists and their associates form communities of cooperative endeavor. Antagonists exemplify dominance behavior that threatens community cohesion. We summarize results from the whole body of novels and use them to identify distinctive features in the novels of Jane Austen.

<i>Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature Randy Robertson John Mullan. Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature. Princeton: Princeton, 2007. Pp. 374. $23.95. Mr. Mullan enumerates and analyzes various motives for anonymity, including mischief, modesty, and privacy. Indeed, for some, anonymity and pseudonymity became literary devices, useful fictions that inflected the works themselves. Defoe and Swift, for instance, attributed their fictions to their narrators; such literary disguises formed an integral part of their work. Other writers shunned publicity. For centuries, women writers needed to be particularly careful, for if a stigma attached to a gentleman’s appearing in print, the “offense” of a woman’s publication was greater. Women, therefore, frequently signed their works “A Lady” or posed as men. What is perhaps more surprising, however, is that literary cross-dressing went in the other direction as well. Mr. Mullan contends that, among other things, such gender-switching allowed male authors to spin out domestic themes, which were normally associated with women. Writing ignoto also had a generic dimension. While writers in all genres embraced anonymity, novelists seem to have been especially secretive: most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novels were published anonymously or pseudonymously. Authors went to strange lengths to distance themselves from their work. Sir Walter Scott, for instance, wrote a review critical of one of his own anonymously published novels. The Rev. C. L. Dodgson (alias Lewis Carroll) implored a Vanity Fair cartoonist not to publish his “likeness” as Carroll. The magazine editors acceded to his request, provided that he would write an article for them—a genteel form of blackmail. For a time, Fanny Burney used her brother Charles as an intermediary between herself and the bookseller Thomas Lowndes. In disguise and answering to “Mr. King,” Charles first met Lowndes “in the dark of the evening.” Anonymous reviewing afforded the pretense of objectivity; it also provided a screen, and sometimes a shield, for the reviewer. Friends puffed the works of friends, and rivals skewered rivals. Thus, Mary Shelley praised her father William Godwin’s novel Cloudesley in the pages of Blackwood’s Magazine. A scathing review of Endymion, also in Blackwood’s, provoked the normally temperate Keats to demand “satisfaction” from the reviewer, but the poet was unable to identify him (or them). In such an environment, misattributions flourished. Anonymity also has flaws. Although the book is highly readable, at times the organization seems higgledy-piggledy. I cannot discern a method to the arrangement of the chapters; nor can I detect a guiding thread other than the broad topic of its title. Mr. Mullan in spots might also have probed more deeply. Take, for example, this perceptive passage on Swift’s use of [End Page 85] anonymity: “In his satires Swift enacted what he disdained or despised or feared; he imagined what should not be. His best writing is entirely negative creation. Anonymity was at its root. The initially authorless life of Gulliver’s Travels was part of its author’s design.” Mr. Mullan does not follow up these astute insights. While he devotes a chapter to “Danger,” in some cases he hastily dismisses the pressures of censorship and self-censorship in anonymous publications. In his treatment of the Travels, for example, he emphasizes the playfulness of Swift’s elaborate plots to cloak his authorship. Not all of the dean’s stratagems of self-concealment can be reduced to teasing or taunting, however; for the Scriblerians, anonymity was not merely a game. Swift enjoyed toying with his readers, but his caution was as much prudential as playful. Indeed, Pope’s remark in a letter to Swift that “none, bar ‘the mob of criticks’ . . . ‘suspected [Gulliver’s Travels] of particular reflections . . . so that you needed not to have been so secret on this head” indicates the degree of Swift’s anxiety over publishing a topical satire. Finally, Mr. Mullan is not the first to have written on anonymity, yet he overlooks or minimizes Foucault, Marcy North, Paul Hammond, and Donald Foster, who have published on this topic. Anonymity, nevertheless, is a fascinating survey of anonymous literature from the Renaissance forward. Rendered in clean, vigorous prose, it wears its learning lightly and will interest...

The literary monster on film: five nineteenth century British novels and their cinematic adaptations

The literary monster on film: five nineteenth century British novels and their cinematic adaptations

Dickens and the rise of divorce: the failed-marriage plot and the novel tradition

Questioning a literary history that, since Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel, has privileged the courtship plot, Kelly Hager proposes an equally powerful but overlooked narrative focusing on the failed marriage. Hager maps the legal history of marriage and divorce, providing crucial background as she reveals the prevalence of the failed-marriage plot in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novels. Dickens's novels emerge as representative case studies in their preoccupations with the disintegration of marriage, the far-reaching and disastrous effects of the doctrine of coverture, and the comic, spectacular, and monstrous possibilities afforded by the failed-marriage plot. Setting his narratives alongside the writings of liberal reformers like John Stuart Mill and the seemingly conservative agendas of Caroline Norton, Eliza Lynn Linton, and Sarah Stickney Ellis, Hager also offers a more contextualized account of the competing strands of the Woman Question. In the course of her revisionist readings of Dickens's novels, Hager uncovers a Dickens who is neither the conservative agent of the patriarchy nor a novelistic Jeremy Bentham, and reveals that tipping the marriage plot on its head forces us to adjust our understanding of the complexities of Victorian proto-feminism.

“THE COUNTRY OF THE PLAGUE”: ANTICULTURE AND AUTOETHNOGRAPHY IN DICKENS'S 1850S

This short paper proposes toconsider the transition fromBleak House(1852–53) toLittle Dorrit(1856–57) as a phase of particular significance in Dickens's debate with himself over the claims, benefits, and pitfalls of national and wider forms of belonging. I elideHard Times(1854) because it seems to me that with the composition ofBleak HouseDickens had definitively arrived at the conviction that the twenty-number monthly novel was that one of his novelistic forms best suited to sustained exploration and testing of capacious social networks making claims upon individuals' identification and loyalty. InBleak House– as I have argued inDisorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels(2005) – Dickens responds to the false universalism of the Great Exhibition of 1851 by producing his most restrictively “national” of novels, programmatically and demonstratively shutting out a wider world in order to produce an image of Britain that negatively foreshadows the kind of autarkic, autotelic fantasies of single cultures associated with the classic functionalist ethnography of the early twentieth century, as practiced by such luminaries as Bronislaw Malinowski and Franz Boas. “Negatively” is key here, since anticipations of ethnography in nineteenth-century British (autoethnographic) fiction typically involve representation of the nation as “a form ofanticulturewhose features define by opposition the ideals [later] attributed to genuine cultures” (Buzard,Disorienting21). Whereas the fast-disappearing genuine culture of ethnographic literature was credited with the integrated totality of “a sturdy plant growth, each remotest leaf and twig of which is organically fed by the sap at the core” (Sapir 90–93), Britain's culture vouchsafed inBleak Houseand exemplified in the tentacular Court of Chancery presents “a state of disastrous and inescapable interconnection,” “a culture-like vision of social totality that is simply marked with a minus sign” (Buzard,Disorienting21).

Expansion, Interruption, Autoethnography: Toward Disorienting Fiction, Part 2

The thesis of my 2005 book Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels is gestured at by the three words of this essay's main title: nineteenth-century Britain's imperial expansion is the ultimate context in which to make sense of the nineteenth-century novel's apparent commitment to an autoethnographic enterprise aimed at writing into existence a delimited and distinctive culture for the English or even the British people at a time when there was every encouragement for them to regard their way of life as exhausted in identification with a globally exportable “Civilization” or capital-C “Culture” itself. That delimiting impulse found expression in what I call the “self-interrupting” features prominent in Romantic-era and Victorian narrative. This essay considers the challenges facing a planned sequel to Disorienting Fiction that would extend that thesis from the later nineteenth century into the heyday of modernism.

Human Nature in Nineteenth-Century British Novels: Doing the Math

Human Nature in Nineteenth-Century British Novels: Doing the Math

BOOK REVIEW:Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels, by James Buzard

Reviewed by: Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels Catherine Gallagher (bio) Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels, by James Buzard; pp. vi + 320. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005, $24.95, £15.95. A book we have been waiting for—a serious, careful, and original study explaining how nineteenth-century British world hegemony shaped major Victorian novels—has finally appeared. James Buzard's Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels is not a survey of little-known fictional depictions of imperialism, nor is it yet another inquiry into the attenuation or complete absence of such depictions in canonical novels. Instead, it explores how well-known British novelists (Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and surprisingly, William Morris) adopted the perspective of outsiders in depicting their home cultures. The implied authors of Bleak House (1852–53) , Villette (1853) , and Middlemarch (1871–72) seem to have left home and returned; they evince a combination of intimacy with and estrangement from English culture, which figures itself in narrators resembling ethnographers and protagonists resembling native informants. Rather than being stuck in the evolutionary assumptions of Victorian ethnology, which allegedly turned spatial and cultural difference into a temporal continuum surveyed from its highest point of development, the novelists explored England through complex, doubled, and self-interrupting narrative modes. Indeed, Buzard demonstrates that nineteenth-century British novelists developed the ethnographic concept of culture as well as the procedures of the participant observer before anthropologists did and that both were used first at home rather than in some exotic locale. And yet English presence in foreign lands was the condition that both enabled and required the novelists' autoethnographic labors. The formal features that Buzard identifies as belonging to this stage of the novel were first developed in the national tales of the Celtic fringe and brought to early maturity in Scott's novels. In his analysis of Waverly (1814), Buzard concedes that Scott gave his metropolitan English audience the thrill of penetrating into self-contained and otherwise inaccessible milieus. But Buzard demonstrates that the tendency to consolidate Britain through "touristification" of its alien enclaves was also a strategy by which an ethnically, linguistically, religiously, and politically various Scotland could become a cultural whole, for only efforts to create a supra-Caledonia could save the country from "becoming nothing or no place distinctive in accommodating itself to English ways and expectations" (101). The consolidation of Scottishness into a particular culture (rather than a collection of disparate factions) increasingly became Scott's aim, and the impression of giving complete surveys of all Scottish types in, for example, Heart of Midlothian (1818), set a representational pattern through which the wholeness of a culture was associated with the boundedness of the book describing it. Moreover, the characters who best personified the wholeness of the [End Page 109] country in Scott's later novels were metropolitan persona with cosmopolitan experience, neither entirely limited to the local perspective nor completely deracinated from it. Thus another of the formal traits of what came to be (in Buzard's phrase) metropolitan autoethnography was a strong but elastic bond between an unplaced narrator outside the story world and a diegetic persona within—a form of narratorial doubling anticipating the pairing of the ethnographer and the native informant. The transference of these national narrative strategies to the south of the island, even to the cosmopolitan center of London itself, served a similar purpose for the English, who feared that their specific culture was disappearing into a general "imperial statehood" (107). Both the expansiveness and the coherence of Bleak House arose from the need to proliferate "a series of discontinuous and seemingly irreconcilable spaces within Britain," to set in motion a narrative that not only connects them but also isolates "the single moral geography in which all these connections obtain against an expansive backdrop of other possible connections" (107). The seeming completeness and locality of the novel's world protects the metropolis against the very forces of global amalgamation it has set in motion. Moreover, Bleak House neatly illustrates the doubling of narrative responsibility between the nameless, detached third-person, present-tense narrator and...

Ada's Piano Playing in Jane Campion's The Piano

Since the late eighteenth century, when the piano first became available for the private home, numerous female characters in literature have demonstrated their skill on the instrument. In nineteenth-century British novels, the prevalence of piano-playing women reflected the contemporary social expectation that middle-class women display some level of competence on the instrument. Yet representations of women pianists in twentieth-century films such as Jane Campion's The Piano (1992) reflect a persistent Romantic fascination with women's piano playing as a means of expressing authentic inner emotion, especially sexual passion. In this paper I provide an overview of existing historical scholarship on the significance of the piano in nineteenth-century British and colonial culture. In light of this cultural history, I examine Campion's feminist reworking of the Romantic ideal of the artist. Judith Butler's model of performative subjectivity enables us to see the constructed nature of the Romantic ideal of individual self-expression as deployed in The Piano. In Campion's film, Ada's pianistic performance functions as a literal metaphor for the constitution of her subjectivity in the Butlerian sense. Moving beyond a critique of the Romantic model of artistic self-expression, however, I read the central violent conflict of the film as a specifically Victorian collision between genteel feminine and Romantic models of musical performance, the locus of which is the body of the piano-playing woman—Ada.

Sisters: relation and rescue in nineteenth-century British novels and paintings

This book concerns nineteenth-century British paintings and novels concerning sisters, examining the way the works of Reynolds, Millais, Austen, Scott, Dickens, Gaskell, Eliot, and others use sisters as metaphors for the relation of all women and as ways to introduce the main public concerns of women in the century. Illustrated.