Nineteenth-Century British Literature Research Articles

Book Review: Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History and Culture by Sandra Dinter and Sarah Schäfer-Althaus (eds)

Book Review: <i>Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History and Culture</i> by Sandra Dinter and Sarah Schäfer-Althaus (eds)

“Thoughts, that breathe, and words, that burn,” or the growth of a writer’s mind: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s diary

Published first in 1969, Diary by E. B. B. (1831–1832) has been an intersection of scholarly debates on nineteenth-century English literature, femininity, diurnal narrative, and aesthetic experience. A confessional document of the last two years of Elizabeth’s life at the family estate of Hope End, the diary throws her unique self-creationist and self-revisionary impulses into relief. It is an outstanding prose-fiction piece of evidence of her overall penchant for self-acclaim by way of self-denial. This paper aims at tracing the development of the woman writer in view of the immediacy and ontological priority of an implied Other found at the core of self-writing, as Elizabeth’s diary signals. A modicum of contextual references to some of E. B. Browning’s poetical works brings out her self-reflexive leanings. Finally, it could be argued that self-questioning distinguishes Elizabeth Barrett Browning as a polemicist whose private diary identifies the concept of time as the kernel of her perception of identity as responsibility.

Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, by Winter Jade Werner

Reviewed by: Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature by Winter Jade Werner Kimberly VanEsveld Adams (bio) Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, by Winter Jade Werner; pp. vii + 210. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2020, $79.95, $24.95 ebook. I always thought that in Jane Eyre (1847), the dangerous passion of St. John Rivers is for Rosamond Oliver, the bewitching daughter of a wealthy mill owner. He suppresses his emotions, since he considers her unfit to be a missionary’s wife. But no—the danger [End Page 702] is the “‘hot action’ of India,” or the attractiveness of native women. St. John manfully seeks to resist temptation by pressuring his unloved cousin Jane to become his helpmeet, or, as Jade Winter Werner says, his “prophylactic” (134). In Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Werner explores the development of missionaries’ claims to, and concern with, world citizenship. Charlotte Brontë’s novel provides the most vivid example. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, intermarriage between British missionaries and female converts (preferably from influential native families) was seen as positive, a demonstration of universal human kinship. But misgivings began to emerge by the 1820s: missionaries’ “going native,” the challenge to British superiority of biracial bicultural families, the disapproval of white slaveholders in South Africa, and what came to be seen as the corrupting effect of interracial union. The last is exemplified in Jane Eyre by Mr. Rochester’s brutal descriptions of his marriage to Bertha Mason, a Jamaican-born planter’s daughter. The new policy of British missionary societies was for men to marry before going overseas. St. John’s endogamous proposal to his cousin, Werner argues, shows an extreme effort to avoid contamination. The thesis of Werner’s book is that “cosmopolitanism both fueled and found an unlikely champion in the modern missionary movement” (3). The Dissenting missionaries who are her primary focus were not, as opponents claimed, irrational enthusiasts, ill-educated “pious tinkers” (77), or as Sydney Smith said, “little detachments of maniacs” (qtd. in Werner 3). Nor were they unthinkingly allied with empire, as some scholars contend. The missionaries’ often-repeated claims to be “cosmopolites,” or world citizens, were based, Werner found, on the ongoing interactions between Protestantism and Enlightenment (or Enlightenment-Liberal) beliefs and values, such as a common human nature, individual freedom and tolerance, reason, and the benefits of scientific knowledge and global trade (71). A difficulty with this argument is that the core religious beliefs and practices of the denominations—Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists, and evangelical Anglicans—are not described. That makes it difficult for the reader to assess when the missionaries’ use of Enlightenment ideas is a matter of Christian morals, as they claimed, or when it is strategy, or appropriation of available terminology. Moreover, some points would have been clarified or strengthened with use of a wider range of materials and more extensive historical evidence. Werner for example shows that during the French Revolution, missionary cosmopolitans who spoke of universal benevolence and the rights of man were accused of republican sympathies, despite their professions to have no political agenda. But Werner’s discussion here might have gone beyond the quarreling periodicals, since there is some basis for the charge of republicanism. Dissenters were prominent not just in missionary societies but also among British working-class radicals and American revolutionaries, particularly those from colonies such as Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. In Britain, Dissenters resented legal restrictions on their religious and civic liberty. Only with the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828 was their access to political and military office unrestricted (if they were men). Werner centers the four chapters of her book on literary texts because these reveal the tensions within missionary cosmopolitanism, in contrast to the propaganda of the various societies. In her second chapter, “Robert Southey and the Case for Christian Colonialism,” Werner demonstrates the Romantic author’s interest in Dissenting missions. Southey published reviews of societies’ periodicals between 1802 and 1809. But he broke [End Page 703] from the missionaries in considering forceful colonization necessary for the spread of Christianity. In A Tale of Paraguay (1825), Southey’s verse narrative based on the 1784 account...

Redux

How much time has passed since the publication of VLC’s Keywords issue five years ago? This is not a trick question. Students of nineteenth-century British literature and culture are primed to see five years as a long time (“with the length of five long summers”), and events at both national and global scales have encouraged a widespread sense that 2018 is located less in the recent past than on the far side of a divide—in the Before Times. On the other hand, the long view encouraged by a scholarly focus on a period that ended over a century ago may see little or no meaningful time as having passed between 2018 and 2023. Moreover, on a more quotidian level, the very pace of scholarship—the amount of time it typically takes to conceive, research, write, and publish work, even for those without a Casaubonian bone in their bodies—can make five years seem like no time at all (“five summers that flew by,” as Wordsworth might have put it had he been on an academic calendar).

Window Women: A Way into Nineteenth-Century English Literature

Window Women: A Way into Nineteenth-Century English Literature

Dorsality, and: Reencountered, Months Later

Dorsality, and: Reencountered, Months Later Travis Chi Wing Lau (bio) Keywords Travis Chi Wing Lau, poem Dorsality When I let him touchthe small of my backfor the first time, I thought a finwould erupt forth— to ground mewhile I learned to breathe in new waters,this first and sacred time when I was becomingsomething else entirely too slick,for the flesh I know must stay in motionor risk never moving again. [End Page 743] Reencountered, Months Later i saw you when he sought care beside meat the clinic that always runs hours behind one where more men go than comeout of impatience to court some other urgencythat feels better than a test of blood you were there in the same shirt I took offand did not bother to look me dead in the eyes you claimed were littlebitter almonds that knew more than they should because the last thing you did was hurry toescort me down the hard stairs that would break no fall after I relented and realizedthe cold of it the cold of you a persistence that gets to claim innocencewhere the no never comes only the yes skips in the recording offering but theshallowest relief of a rehearsal we both do [End Page 744] that leaves a collision of two less slipperythan it in fact always already was as I walked out of your brownstonei bathed in the coolness of former heat slowly buffeted by what i could not seeyet knew encircled me the beginning of a familiarsiege [End Page 745] Travis Chi Wing Lau travis chi wing lau (he/him/his) is assistant professor of English at Kenyon College. His research and teaching focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, health humanities, and disability studies. Alongside his scholarship, Lau frequently writes for venues of public scholarship like Synapsis: A Journal of Health Humanities, Public Books, Lapham's Quarterly, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. His poetry has appeared in Wordgathering, Glass, South Carolina Review, Foglifter, and Hypertext, as well as in three chapbooks, The Bone Setter (Damaged Goods Press), Paring (Finishing Line Press), and Vagaries (Fork Tine Press, 2022). Copyright © 2022 The Massachusetts Review, Inc.

Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture, by Patricia Cove

Reviewed by: Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture by Patricia Cove Diana Moore (bio) Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture, by Patricia Cove; pp. x + 190. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019, $105.00, $24.95 paper, $27.94 ebook Patricia Cove's Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture forms an admirable addition to the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture series and skillfully fulfills the series' mission of re-evaluating Victorian literature, culture, history, and identity through close readings. In many ways, Cove's work treads a well-established path. Countless British authors wrote about Italy during the Risorgimento, the movement for Italian independence and unification. An equal, if not greater, number of scholars have subsequently shown how these authors fashioned and refashioned their selfunderstanding through their relationship with and depictions of Italy. Cove provides a fresh take on this British obsession with Italy, however, by moving away from the most widely celebrated and studied authors, like Lord Byron, in favor of lesser-known and more marginal figures, such as Italian patriot and exile Giovanni Ruffini. Cove claims that the voices of these "outsiders and figures of cultural hybridity—women, expatriates, exiles, Anglo-Italians and Anglo-Irish"—reveal more about the contradictory and varied British responses to the Italian Risorgimento and related ongoing debates about "selfdetermination, citizenship and political rights" (23). The book is comprised of a general introduction, four case study chapters, and a brief conclusion. The chapters chronologically trace "four concrete, political focal points of British engagement with the Risorgimento" from the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to the creation in 1861 of the Kingdom of Italy, and they show how throughout this period British authors increased their engagement with the Italian present rather than its idealized past (21). Chapter 1 examines Lady Morgan's travelogue Italy (1821) and Mary Shelley's historical novel Valperga (1823). Cove argues that, unlike many of their fellow Romantic authors, who wrote about an abstract version of Italy and only cared about how Italian affairs impacted British politics, Morgan and Shelley were attentive to the specific historical and political realities of the Italian peninsula. Moreover, she claims, their status as outsiders made them more sensitive to issues of power and appreciative of Italy's resistance to the dominant post-1815 empires. [End Page 495] Chapters 2 and 3 move forward into the Victorian period, tracing the rise of leftwing Mazzinian politics, its eventual disappointment in the failed revolutions of 1848-9, and subsequent decline. In chapter 2, Cove focuses on two of Ruffini's English-language novels, Lorenzo Benoni (1853) and Doctor Antonio (1855), and reveals how Ruffini subverted the common trope of Italy as a place of exile, estrangement, and disorientation for British travelers by centering the sufferings of dispossessed Italian patriots instead. Chapter 3 then analyzes Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1859-60) in relation to both the 1844 Post Office Espionage Scandal and the emergence of the sensation novel. Cove demonstrates how the British public's discovery that their government had been opening Mazzini's mail and sending its contents to continental authorities prompted a crisis of mid-Victorian liberalism and uncovered hidden continental-style despotism underneath the façade of British freedom and modernity. In a parallel fashion, she claims, sensation novels like The Woman in White brought the themes of the gothic novel home from historic settings and foreign shores to the contemporary British domestic sphere. The final chapter looks at the trauma surrounding the 1859 Second War of Independence through an examination of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Poems Before Congress (1860) and Last Poems (1862). Cove shows how Barrett Browning, who was supportive of the Risorgimento, also acknowledged the costs of unification and "the silences and erasures imposed through violent, historical change" (126). Finally, in the conclusion Cove offers a brief glimpse at the period after 1870, when the Italian state reclaimed control over the city of Rome, through the writings of authors like Henry James, Vernon Lee, and George Meredith; these works "demonstrate the extent to which politics infiltrated post-Risorgimento, aestheticised Italy" (164). Overall, this volume reveals the benefits of studying nationalist movements...

Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature by Winter Jade Werner

Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature by Winter Jade Werner

The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, 1843-1907, by Giles Whiteley

Reviewed by: The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, 1843–1907 by Giles Whiteley Isobel Armstrong (bio) The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, 1843–1907, by Giles Whiteley; pp. xiv + 290. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020, £85.00, £24.99 paper, $110.00, $29.95 paper. In The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, 1843–1907, Giles Whiteley provides a deeply researched and imaginative study of nineteenth-century spaces, with a virtuosic prologue that demonstrates the originality of his critical method. Whiteley follows Joris-Karl Huysmans's character Jean des Esseintes, from À rebours (1884), through the spaces of Paris, eating, shopping, loitering. Only it is not wholly Paris, as he shows: in Huysmans's text, Paris is elided with London, the Seine with the Thames, the Rue de Rivoli with the Thames Tunnel, the Boulevard d'Enfer with the Metropolitan Railway. Charles Dickens, James McNeill Whistler, Thomas De Quincey, all reading and rereading one another, are conjured intertextually and collectively superimposed. This is not just a question of allusion, or even a metonymic slide. Whiteley deftly establishes an intimate relation between widely separated spaces in what we might loosely call a chiastic technique, by bringing them together and assimilating them so as to demonstrate their affinity and difference. Dickens's London and Huysmans's Paris resonate with and critique one another, as do the London of late Dickens and John Ruskin's Venice. This convergence, Whiteley claims, is what the figures under discussion in his book—Ruskin, Dickens, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James—achieve in order to explore the quintessential nineteenth-century space: the metropolitan. In his highly particularized readings, one space generates and mutually changes another. The prologue sets out what Whiteley sees as "a new kind of aesthetics of space" developing in the period, which he theorizes through Walter Benjamin's ideas of dream space and the phantasmagoria of the city, as well as Benjamin's signature poet, Charles Baudelaire, and other postmodern critics (15). It is a political and psychic space, shaped by modern capital. Henri Lefebvre's classic The Production of Space (1974) is central to the discussion, and his distinction between representational space and the representation of space is particularly important to Whiteley's study: des Esseintes, for instance, encounters that celebration of Napoleon, the imperial Arc de Triomphe, and seeks out maps and guides to London. Both the arch and maps are ideological objects, but the first is intentionally so, whereas maps and boundaries are not produced with deliberate intent to alter consciousness even when they do so. Through des Esseintes and his sensory life, Whiteley introduces the antithetical binary that shapes his book: Ruskin's distinction between Theoria and Aesthesis—that is, an opposition between an ethical and moral reading of space and its history, related to the realist tradition, and an account of space that is read through the sensoria. Through Aesthesis, metropolitan spaces act on both the body and language, understood through a Friedrich Schelling-like sensuous cognition and issuing in a release of the unconscious that manifests itself in a range of affects and images, from desire to melancholia and even madness. The category of Aesthesis implicitly extends and consolidates Benjamin's dream space. This Theoria/Aesthesis opposition is the dialogue of the book, but Aesthesis becomes the dominant voice. Ruskin initiates the discussion. His commitment to ethical reading is introduced through the famous attack on Whistler and consolidated by his understanding of a [End Page 358] "conceptive" truth (56). The deterministic psychological realism of the eye rigorously governs perception in a sublime Platonic account of the body: there is a morality of the body that becomes social morality. Ruskin read Venetian architecture through the moral order of its governing power, but Whiteley argues that Aesthesis frequently invades Ruskin's theoretic readings of Venice with the attraction and repulsion of Decadence and its erotics. London and the reterritorialized space of the modern railway finally invade Venice as the two spaces converge, calling out not a theoretic but an aesthetic response. And Ruskin's Venice haunts all subsequent writers. Dickens is another figure for whom there is a conflicting response to the...

Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature by Winter Jade Werner (review)

Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature by Winter Jade Werner (review)

The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, 1843–1907 by Giles Whiteley

The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, 1843–1907 by Giles Whiteley

Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature by Winter Jade Werner

Reviewed by: Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature by Winter Jade Werner Cheri L. Larsen Hoeckley (bio) Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature Winter Jade Werner The Ohio State University Press, 2020. xi + 210 pp. $79.95 cloth, $24.95 paperback. Missionary Cosmopolitanism surprises in the most satisfying ways. While drawing broadly and deeply from religious, imperial, and literary archives, Winter Jade Werner resists relentless condemnation of nineteenth-century missionaries for their occasionally enthusiastic complicity in colonialism's exploitation and oppression. Yet she also avoids an apologia for the missionary project's participation in empire. As Werner recounts her early research questions, she found herself drawn in by missionary claims to cosmopolitanism, asking what would happen if she "commenced a study of imperial history and literature not with a presumption of missionary backwardness but rather with a careful consideration of those values that missionaries [End Page 224] themselves claimed to be central to their work? What might history tell us about how religion and imperialism together influenced cosmopolitanism in the nineteenth century and beyond?" (3). Forging a meticulously researched path in scholarship prompted by these questions, her argument explores the interweaving of Enlightenment humanist ideals with Christian doctrine and practice as these ideologies cross to undergird missionary activity across the empire. Along the way, Werner offers fresh analyses of some of the most frequently read Victorian novels and recovers forgotten works that bear re-reading in our current moment. Readers expecting umbrage for missionary complicity in colonial exploitation will quickly note Werner's minimal usage of terms like "racism" or even "xenophobia," though her attentive readings persistently highlight power structures that missionaries supported, often to the detriment of indigenous populations. Her summary of Robert Southey's Tales of Paraguay, for instance, might be encapsulated as the narrative of the Jesuit-induced death of a Guarani family. Reading Southey through missionary society publications, Werner offers nuanced support for her conclusion that by "adopting the language of natural theology, proto-ethnography, and cosmopolitanism…missionaries distinguished their Christianity as 'rational,' painting a flattering portrait of their own faith as uniquely 'enlightened' when compared to superstitious 'heathen'" belief systems (81). When Werner combines her reading of Southey's defense of empire with her argument for his secularization of Christian education in Sir Thomas More, we see white supremacy's early roots that are better remembered in literary texts, such as Kipling's "White Man's Burden." Throughout, Werner stays fruitfully in conversation with previous scholars on both empire and cosmopolitanism, from Patrick Brantlinger to Amanda Anderson, James Buzard, and Tanya Agathocleous. Taking her scholarly strategies into consideration, it is not surprising that Missionary Cosmopolitanism opens with the words of missionary John Williams and his claim that the missionary is "the only true cosmopolite" (1). Werner grounds her argument by considering Williams's statement in the context both of missionary society documents and of Kant's writings on cosmopolitanism. From that foundation, she turns to literary texts, seeking "to complicate the often under-examined binaries that govern understandings of religion, imperialism, and cosmopolitanism in literary scholarship" (37). Her analysis of Bleak House builds convincing parallels between Mrs. Jellyby's renowned telescopic philanthropy and Harold Skimpole's "dangerous moral indifference" (61) as two sides of the cosmopolitan coin that emerges from the mint of Kantian philosophy. Werner concludes that the [End Page 225] similarities of these two apparently disparate characters reveal "the novel's keenly historic sense of cosmopolitanism: its savvy recovery of early nineteenth-century conservative fears of missionaries' (supposedly) depoliticized, re-Christianized cosmopolitanism in order to critique the 'cosmopolitan' fervor surrounding the Great Exhibition" (43). The mid-century missionary movement, that's to say, plays its part in a broader Dickensian turn toward the domestic, bolstering conservative anxieties about more secular forms of cosmopolitanism. Attuned as she is by her attention to missionary tracts and letters alongside Kantian discourse, when Werner turns to Jane Eyre, she shifts the focus of the novel's racial discourse from its debasing representation of creole Bertha Mason. Instead, Werner examines mid-century missionaries' racial controversies that ground St. John's impassioned demand that Jane marry him. Werner's analysis of what is arguably the Victorian period...

Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature by Winter Jade Werner

Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature by Winter Jade Werner

A Random Stroll Amongst Anthony Trollope's Lawyers

Abstract Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) resides in the pantheon of nineteenth century English literature. While working full time in his postal position until 1867, he still managed to publish 47 novels, travel books, biographies, short stories, collections of essays, and articles on various topics. Trollope has been described as the novelist of the ordinary for his realistic description of English society. Law and legal issues flow through Trollope's fiction. The legal system held a special importance to him as the skeleton upholding the social and political framework of the country. Over one hundred lawyers appear in his work and eleven of his novels feature trials or hearings. The law intrigued and exasperated him. Along with the lawyers and legal issues he depicts are ideas of the law and legal system that are part of elaborate philosophical and jurisprudential traditions, which he recognized. This article examines Trollope's changing attitude toward lawyers. It describes the structure of the Bar in terms of class, status and reputation. Trollope believed the legal system should ensure justice, and those who labored in the law should be the vehicle of that pursuit. Justice for Trollope was the meting out of rewards and punishments as the consequence of a right or wrong decision. However, the law, as he depicted it, was often an impediment to this process, and lawyers were unreliable guides. Initially Trollope portrayed lawyers critically as caricatures as evinced by such names as Alwinde, O’Blather, Slow &amp; Bideawhile, Haphazard, and Chaffanbrass. He was outraged that barristers (lawyers who appear in court) put loyalty to their clients ahead of the search for truth and justice. The adversary system was flawed as the enactment of laws in accord with the laws of nature assumes an inbuilt moral compass in humans that contains self-evident truths of right and wrong. Trollope felt there was no reason why a right-minded person could not intuitively recognize the truth, so criminal law's adversary system was unnecessary. The legal system sought not the discovery of the truth but was more interested in aiding the guilty defendant to escape punishment. As he matured as a writer and achieved success, Trollope's understanding and appreciation of the legal profession changed. He met and become friends with leaders of the Bar, and they influenced his descriptions of lawyers, who became realistic and often admirable human beings. Beyond the legal problems of its characters, Trollope's later novels incorporated the social, political, and jurisprudential issues of the times and engaged the Victorian legal culture in a broader sense of history, traditions, continuity and change. Natural law principles were challenged during the Victorian era by positivist notions that law is what the statute books say. These divisions lurk in the background of his later portraits of lawyers and the legal system. In his later period Trollope created a realistic characterization of the legal profession at the time that offered universal insights into human nature.

Wakefield's Offspring

Wakefield's Offspring

Les Lois de l’économie selon les romanciers du xixe siècle. Par Christophe Reffait

Political economy, wrote Flaubert in his Dictionnaire des idées reçues, is a ‘science sans entrailles’. ‘Heartless’ is probably a better translation of the phrase than ‘gutless’, ‘merciless’, or ‘pitiless’, although, as Christophe Reffait shows in this large and well-organized monograph, all these terms were very readily associated with political economy throughout the nineteenth century. Reffait’s book takes this characterization as his starting point, but his investigation is very different from the usual reconstruction of the avalanche of hostile adjectives aimed at the subject of political economy. Its aim is to examine the uses made of some of the major conceptual components of the history and historiography of political economy in the literature of nineteenth-century France, from the time of Stendhal and Balzac to that of Jules Verne and Émile Zola. The first of these components is the distinction between the passions and the interests, a distinction usually associated with the history of eighteenth-century economic thought and the scholarship of the famous development economist Albert O. Hirschman. This is followed by an extended set of examinations of the subjects of the division of labour, the law of markets, or the idea that supply creates its own demand, and the principle of population, subjects often linked with the thought of Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, and Thomas Malthus respectively. Reffait’s aim is to piece together the ways in which, partly because of their presence in Stendhal’s works, many of the key concepts of political economy were taken up and scrutinized aesthetically and analytically, not only in subsequent works of literature but also in an impressively wide range of accounts and reviews in contemporary periodicals. The result is a study of how the history and conceptual resources of political economy were integrated into the imaginative and dramatic worlds of literature and, inversely, an investigation into the light that the resources of literature help to throw on the content of political economy. Although at times these results are somewhat predictable — partly because the intellectual initiative seems, for both chronological and analytical reasons, to belong to the conceptual resources generated by political economy, and partly because of the overlap between much of the subject matter of political economy and works of fiction — Reffait’s book forms a real companion piece to comparable studies of political economy in nineteenth-century British and American literature. The result is a thought-provoking examination of the relationship between fiction in literature and abstraction in economics, which is certain to ensure that Reffait’s book will have as large a readership among historians of economic, social, and political thought as among specialists of literature.

제국의 시민권: 2020년과 19세기 영국문학 연구

This essay examines recent scholarship on imperialism and citizenship in nineteenth-century British literature. Against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic and the Black Lives Matter Movement of 2020, events that prompted worldwide discussions on citizenship rights and racial (in)justice, this essay interrogates the relative scarcity of scholarship on citizenship in the subfield of nineteenth-century British literature. Drawing on the postcolonial insight of the North American journal Victorian Studies’s widely-discussed special issue for Spring 2020 titled “Undisciplining Victorian Studies,” this essay argues that studies on nineteenth-century citizenship requires an interdisciplinary approach connecting the achievements of diverse disciplines encompassing history, political science, sociology, and more. In the nineteenth century, the British people understood themselves as “British subjects” rather than citizens, which was not yet a concept fully legally embraced though the definition of citizenship was being actively developed in other contexts. Historically, discussions of British national citizenship focused on suffrage, which inevitably emphasized class as the central question. This essay proposes that gender and race deserve more scholarly attention, especially through an expanded understanding of a British imperial citizenship that can encompass more kinds of social belonging beyond the right to vote. The essay concludes by raising the the question of academic citizenship in order to highlight the importance of the inclusion and participation of scholars from both formerly colonized parts of the world and outside the British Empire.

Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature by Winter Jade Werner (review)

Reviewed by: Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature by Winter Jade Werner Matthew VanWinkle Winter Jade Werner. Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Ohio State UP, 2020. 210p. A substantial strand of recent scholarship on nineteenth-century literature and culture contests the secularization hypothesis, the claim that religiously oriented worldviews are becoming less pervasive and influential as more rationalistic perspectives increasingly drive cultural priorities and decisions. This hypothesis depends on, and often merely assumes, a simplistic binary opposition between these two organizing visions of reality. Werner’s study counters this hypothesis by focusing on texts from the first half of the nineteenth century that find an emergent religious impulse not only compatible with but also contributing to a more inclusive view of intercultural encounters. An 1837 introduction to John Williams’s A Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Seas confidently proclaims that “the Christian is the only true cosmopolite” (1). Few in Britain would have aspired so explicitly to such an appellation at the close of the eighteenth century. To call oneself a citizen of the world in the immediate wake of the French Revolution was to risk being suspected of an incendiary disregard for nation and family. Werner’s first chapter traces how the rhetoric and practice of the early nineteenth century missionary movement contributed to the rehabilitation of cosmopolitanism as a concept. In describing their aims as cosmopolitan, missionary societies returned [End Page 140] to an earlier Enlightenment conception of universally shared values “born of Christian belief rather than from an explicit political agenda” (49). By focusing on saving individual souls and largely abstaining from the local politics of the places they visited, missionary efforts plausibly advanced the possibility that one could be cosmopolitan and at the same time reassuringly British. While emphatic critique of missionary priorities persisted—Werner’s first chapter concludes with a discussion of Bleak House as an example—for the most part these priorities and their fundamental view of the world became more acceptable over the first half of the nineteenth century. Because missionary societies frequently described their efforts in terms of revived and rehabilitated Enlightenment ideals, their work frequently proved especially appealing to those seeking “reasonableness” in religion. Werner’s second chapter examines how one such admirer, Robert Southey (Britain’s poet laureate from 1813 until 1843), both popularized and crucially misrepresented this aspect of the missionary perspective. Although their travels frequently coincided with British colonial expansion, missionaries were often opposed to the more overtly coercive features of the imperial project: “the political and cultural benefits of Christianity would only be realized by changing individual hearts […] Social good followed individual spiritual salvation” (91). Southey’s literary representations of missionary work, in contrast, “tries to appropriate missionary cosmopolitanism to suit his own nationalist ends” (93). Werner shrewdly emphasizes this contrast through a reading of A Tale of Paraguay (1825), a long poem that construes the logic of posthumous salvation as an exculpation of imperial brutality: “colonial disease and native deaths work ultimately work for the greater good” (99). What might be seen as common ground in a rhetorical tendency toward pragmatism overlooks deeper theological and ideological divides in practice. The first two chapters of Missionary Cosmopolitanism, then, highlight the ways in which early nineteenth-century missionary work entered a mainstream that it sometimes subtly strove to redirect. The final two chapters illuminate the fissures that opened up in the movement in the 1840s and 1850s. The third chapter reads St. John Rivers’s proposal to Jane Eyre in connection with the increasingly vexed debate over missionaries and interracial marriage. Because the missionary movement was predicated on the idea of universal [End Page 141] human kinship, interracial marriages were accepted and even to some degree encouraged well into the 1820s. Yet precisely because these marriages proceeded from this assumption of equality, they also disrupted other assumptions about cultural superiority that tacitly informed missionary work. St. John’s insistence that he marry someone like Jane, someone as much like himself as possible, betrays an anxiety about a disruptive desire for the other by pre-empting it as emphatically as possible. Werner’s final chapter explores a turning point in the way that missionaries...

Teaching Nineteenth-Century Novels to Today's Teens

ABSTRACT A survey of AP English Literature and AP English Language exams administered over the past two decades reveals that nineteenth-century British literature—especially novels of this era—is underrepresented compared to texts from other literary historical periods. At the same time, a range of recent or relatively recent fiction, television shows, and film depicts teenagers embracing Victorian texts, particularly the novels of George Eliot. This unexpected enthusiasm for literature published two centuries ago, however, is even more evident in high school English classes today. This article includes six accounts of the successes that secondary school English teachers have had in motivating their students to read nineteenth-century fiction that seemed destined to gather dust on the shelves of their schools' bookrooms.