Nineteenth-century Fiction Research Articles

Sarah Orne Jewett’s China

Abstract This essay reads Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven (1877) to show how chinaware could be used to delineate American identity in late nineteenth-century fiction. As I show, china’s aura of exoticism—reflected in its very name—could be deployed by regionalist writers to prop up local identity. Importantly, Jewett’s characters make china the centerpiece of their bequeathals so that the foreign is the vehicle by which generations exert influence over the present. Chinaware’s utility reifies the association of Asian identity with objectification. The town more generally appropriates Chinese signifiers and objects in their creation of a distinct spirit. I argue that towns perform this subsumption of the international in the service of the regional to position themselves in an intriguing position with regards to the national: distinct but also useful. Authors like Jewett show how the regional can, in part, deviate from the national by offering a tame and safe version of exoticism. The stakes of materiality thus include the determination of American belonging.

Telling Details: Realism and the Evidential Paradigm: The Case of Manzoni

Taking as a point of departure the long-standing debate on the forms and function of description in realist writing, I reflect on the status accorded to details within literary descriptions in early nineteenth-century fiction. I argue that, in the movement towards realism, details—especially in character descriptions—acquire a new evidential function. They act as clues to be deciphered or symptoms to be interpreted by the reader within a system of signification that can be associated with the evidential paradigm, as defined by Carlo Ginzburg. The first section of the essay focuses on the changing function of details within literary descriptions between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and discusses, from different disciplinary perspectives, three examples of the epistemic shift that was brought about by the rise of the evidential paradigm. The second section of the essay takes Manzoni as a case study and focuses on the evidential function of details in I Promessi Sposi.

Spare the rod and spoil the pervert: Corporal punishment and the nineteenth century in popular culture

This article compares corporal punishment in nineteenth-century fiction with corporal punishment in the fictional recreation of the nineteenth century in twentieth-century film and television. It locates in the literature of the actual nineteenth century two creative impulses influencing the dramatic representation of Victorian schooling in modern adaptations. One is the evocation of schools in Victorian works of fiction, which became television and film adaptations. Another impulse is the subversive and covert flagellation literature of the fin de siècle. Both the respectable and the illicit literatures adduce core elements of corporal punishment: the formation of tableaux of bodies; the importance of access to the body; the subversion of what should be an act of correction because the subversion becomes permanent; and the way the restorative becomes aberrant. This article proposes that the popular culture of the twentieth century made overt what had been covert in the nineteenth century. Surveying period drama on British television and film using the 1971 adaptation of Tom Brown’s School Days as a focal point, this article proposes the fusion of the overt and covert of the preceding century. Close readings of popular culture productions show, as do the reactions of contemporary viewers, that they presented corporal punishment which subverted rather than chastised and which perverted rather than restored. These twentieth-century evocations of the previous century were contiguous with debate on the use and abolition of corporal punishment in modern schools. This article weaves together the past and the present, suggesting that classic works made by modern interpreters evoked the past in ways that subverted the present.

Roots in Fiction and Philology: George Eliot, Ernest Renan, and Willed Ethnonationalism

Abstract: Scholarship on George Eliot’s 1860s Condition-of-England novel Felix Holt has been divided on whether it signals the racist nativism of its decade or advocates for inclusive, willed national belonging. This paper proposes that it accomplishes both, promoting what I call “willed ethnonationalism.” A counterintuitive phrase, willed ethnonationalism captures how Eliot’s novel both defines the nation-form against race belonging and encourages modern nationals to perform racial self-identification. I argue that this stance emerged from Eliot’s engagement with Ernest Renan’s philological career. Recalling how theories of racial-linguistic inheritance influenced a zeitgeist of thinking around constructed nations (epitomized by Renan’s 1882 essay on nationalism), I show how mythic ideas about racial roots informed the ostensibly rational form of the nation-state as expressed in late nineteenth-century fiction and essayistic prose.

Gothic Realism, or Reading is Believing in Dracula

This essay explores the ways Bram Stoker brings eighteenth-century affective gothic reading practices to bear on Victorian fiction’s investments in realism. By investigating modes of affective reading in Dracula, the essay develops a definition of ‘gothic realism’ to describe an affective experience of the real that gothic fiction offers in place of verisimilitude and representations of everyday life. Beginning by tracing the explicit and implicit histories of this term through both literary criticism and the gothic tradition, the essay turns to Dracula to discover an alternative definition of ‘gothic realism’ that bridges a longstanding divide between the colonial fractures intrinsic to nineteenth-century Irish literature and the claims to coherent representational reality usually aligned with the Victorian novel. ‘Gothic realism’ becomes a term, and a reading practice, for newly understanding how the gothic entwines with realism across both British and Irish nineteenth-century fiction, not as its critical antithesis, or as its hidden secret, but as an affective mode through which we can see nineteenth-century Irish novels representing the realities of the world around them.

Blood and Footprints: Traces of Embodiment in Jude the Obscure and The Woman in White

ABSTRACT Both blood on snow and footprints in sand illustrate the ways that bodies impress their physical presence upon their surroundings and leave behind traces of their labouring, suffering, and travelling. In examining the multiplicity of remnants in nineteenth-century fiction, my analysis draws upon the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s model of triple mimesis and his definition of the trace uniting material marks with memory in order to investigate how characters’ bodily agency is intertwined with residue, ruins, and reminiscence. With a comparative approach, I evaluate how two Victorian novels employ imprints, inscriptions, and stains to highlight characters’ mobile bodies and thus stimulate readers’ involvement in protagonists’ anguish, explorations, and romantic entanglements. Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure exemplify how a wide variety of memorable vestiges assert the past infringing upon the present, thereby implicating emotional devastation, physical destruction, and crucial discoveries of hidden secrets.

The Journalist and the Photographer: Janet Malcolm's Still Pictures

The Journalist and the PhotographerJanet Malcolm's Still Pictures Brian Dillon (bio) Janet malcolm, who died at the age of 86 in June 2021, was above all a payer of close attention, an extreme noticer. Obituaries and appreciations of her work reminded us that she practiced an exacting, even unsympathetic sort of attention: Malcolm, according to a cliché on which her mind might have snagged, "cast a cold eye" on her subjects, whether they were murderers, television personalities, wayward Freudians, great artists, or morally ambiguous journalists (among whose number she counted herself). What else should we call her? Essayist, critic, biographer, celebrity profiler: in Malcolm's case they all reduce to the rigors and lures of reporting. [End Page 110] She was certainly renowned for this precise reportage, but in her writing there are other kinds of exactitude—other styles of attention due. In her most daring profiles during her long tenure as a staff writer for The New Yorker, Malcolm frequently "senses" something about her interviewees, providing the reader with some intuition, quality, more or less occult truth about the people she describes. Frequently this mysterious "sense" depends on strictly visual cues, details Malcolm gives us with a nicety and ease that seem immune to distortion. Her distinctive ability to reflect on images and appearances comes into focus in a new book, Still Pictures, a posthumously published memoir of sorts. It is composed of twenty-six essays or chapters, most departing from or (rarely) staying close to a single photograph in her possession. The subtitle is "On Photography and Memory," a phrase that immediately summons photographic ruminations in the work of Marcel Proust, Vladimir Nabokov, Roland Barthes, and W. G. Sebald. And in invoking those writers, she reminds us that images may be diversions from reality. The book is also a reflection on the nature and desirability of autobiography. As Malcolm has it, autobiography contends peculiarly with memory. In a short essay from 2010 called "Thoughts on Autobiography from an Abandoned Autobiography," she writes: "Memory is not a journalist's tool. Memory glimmers and hints, but shows nothing sharply or clearly. Memory does not narrate or render character.…If an autobiography is to be even minimally readable, the autobiographer must step in and subdue what you could call memory's autism, its passion for the tedious." Still Pictures may not be an autobiography, as it is all about memory, its passions and errors. It's possible that photography operates here—and in modern autobiography in general—as a way to indulge or excuse what Malcolm calls (with a dated turn) the "autism" of memory. An excuse not to be tedious but to tarry with details without racing to judgment. To allow a kind of drift, a vacation from acuity. That in Malcolm's case the rest cure does not take is surely no surprise. She remained wary of the genre, its longueurs and indulgences, the unwarranted settling of scores. [End Page 111] Click for larger view View full resolution Janet Malcolm photographed with a camera, date unknown. Courtesy Janet Malcolm and Farrar, Straus and Giroux. [End Page 112] This predilection for details plays out in her writing more generally—she sometimes wrote about images, but she always wrote about appearances. She inherited this commitment from nineteenth-century fiction: a belief that the first task of the narrator is to detail her characters' appearance and dress, the fixtures and fittings of their home or work. Such details open a royal route to the delineation of character and morals. How often does Malcolm note that this or that person she has met or interviewed reminds her of a minor character in Russian fiction? The genius of the method includes those moments when she is forced to admit she got it wrong and has misread the appearance in question. One of the risks: that she is looking from some hampering vantage, with her own tastes and prejudices in the way. Another, that this becomes the representative Malcolm trick, and we stop trusting it. When she was interviewed by Katie Roiphe for The Paris Review in 2011, she made sure to leave the room so that her interviewer could take notes...

Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America by Xine Yao

Reviewed by: Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America by Xine Yao Denise Wong (bio) Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America, by Xine Yao. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. Ix + 291 pp. $27.95 paper. ISBN 978-1-4780-1483-6. Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America marks an exciting turn in affect studies towards the radical affordances of unfeeling as a tactic of resistance. Xine Yao's debut monograph moves critical discussion beyond "the stifling imperatives of the political stakes of sympathy" to uncover "what we can apprehend" by "stay[ing] with the negativity of unfeeling and [End Page 105] suspend[ing] its rehabilitation" (3). Disaffection is both negative feeling and the negation of feeling as resistance but neither resolved nor subsumed by discourses of overcoming. It is a mode for understanding the extent to which cultural fantasies of justice and social change are contingent upon a politics of recognition and sympathy. Yao contends that the Western liberal project of inclusion demands sympathetic recognition and, though seemingly innocuous, presumes a false universality masking an insidious disparity between who gets to retain their subject status while refusing to feel. One of Yao's most generative provocations is her reading of sympathetic recognition as a colonial legacy originating in the culture of sentiment advanced by Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). She identifies four modes of disaffected unfeeling "in the cultural imagination deployed to flatten out and invalidate individual and collective subtleties" (6): unsympathetic Blackness, queer frigidity, Black objective passionlessness, and Oriental inscrutability. Although Disaffected is concerned with how American literature and culture understands affect and politics, a paradigm with a disproportionately global impact, the scope of Yao's framework extends far beyond the geographic and historical specificity of her corpus which focuses on nineteenth-century fiction that "question[s] the politics of sympathetic identification in the cultural imagination informed by sentimentalism" (21). The primary texts include Herman Melville's Benito Cereno (1855), Martin R. Delany's Blake; or the Huts of America (1861), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Doctor Zay (1882), Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Iola Leroy (1892), and Edith Maude Eaton's Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912). These writers "use the space of fiction to question the politics of sympathetic identification in the cultural imagination informed by sentimentalism" (21). The first two chapters explore unsympathetic Blackness as a mode of dissent from two contexts. In the first, the novella Benito Cereno illustrates how the false universality of white sentimentalism ensures that Babo, Melville's Senegalese slave-turned-rebel leader, remains an illegible and thus contemptible subject. Following philosophers Denise Ferreira da Silva and Sylvia Wynter, Yao argues this falsely universal discourse of sentimentality is predicated upon racialised politics of recognition. In the second, Martin R. Delany's eponymous protagonist Blake rejects dominant white modes of feeling but, instead of being executed as an act of justice, he forms an alliance with the Indigenous community "to unmake the structural conditions of Black enslavement and Indigenous dispossession that produce the modern world" (23). Borrowing Tiffany King's formulation, Yao reads "convergence without conflation" (73) in the way Blake "disrupt[s] the colonial dichotomization of Blackness and Indigeneity as antagonistic to each other" (77) by thinking through the historical and theoretical intersections of Black emancipation and Indigenous sovereignty. [End Page 106] The third chapter reads queer frigidity as a consequence of white middleclass women's entry into the medical profession. Yao takes Phelps's Doctor Zay as an example amidst a cluster of late nineteenth-century American novels which use the marriage plot to stage debates about the correlation between love and political desire for suffrage and other rights. The expectation for women to reappropriate "the masculinized authority of medical science's disciplinary detachment" (112) juxtaposes "the coercive affective imperatives of marriage and family" (25). Yao focuses compellingly on the homology between the invention of anaesthesia and the pathologisation and queering of female frigidity (diagnosed by sexologist Havelock Ellis as "a medical condition prevalent among women" [114]). Anaesthesia as a mechanism of controlled unfeeling for professional advancement parallels "the alleged abnormality of frigidity" (115) in the way detachment signifies agency...

Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction by Talia Schaffer

Reviewed by: Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction by Talia Schaffer Catherine J. Golden COMMUNITIES OF CARE: THE SOCIAL ETHICS OF VICTORIAN FICTION, by Talia Schaffer. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. 296 pp. $45.00 hardback; $31.50 ebook. Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction by Talia Schaffer is a rare academic book that provides a fresh approach to Victorian literature, stimulates the scholarly mind, and offers sage lessons for academic life. As the subtitle promises, the book examines nineteenth-century fiction in which acts of care are omnipresent. Novels by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Charlotte Mary Yonge, George Eliot, and Henry James offer a record of caregiving before and after the mid-century ascendance of paid care and care communities that we can emulate today. Schaffer is admittedly “trying to do a lot of tasks at once,” but she does these tasks with excellence (p. 2). The result is a capacious, smart, and engaging book that is part theory, history, literary case [End Page 162] study, and pedagogy, bridging nineteenth-century literature with ideas of how we can care for one another today. The book is comprised of an introduction, six chapters, and an epilogue. The opening line, “Reader, I want to warn you from the start”—reminiscent of Jane Eyre’s (1847) “Reader, I married him”1—imparts intimacy, inviting us on a journey to uncover care ethics in fiction and life (p. 1). The introduction establishes a theoretical framework for the ethics of care and a definition of care, here meaning “an action, not a feeling” and “the connective tissue of social life” (pp. 5, 21). Chapter one, “Ethics of Care and the Care Community,” draws on feminist ethics and theories of community. Schaffer outlines five essential characteristics of care communities—“performativity, discursivity, affiliation, egalitarianism, and temporality”—a constellation of qualities evident in fiction and lived experience (p. 49). Schaffer also introduces the sustained metaphor of a cantilevered bridge (aptly a nineteenth-century invention), illuminating how relationship is a founding principle of care. For instance, Shaffer notes that “each side must seek the other by reaching toward that other from its own anchorage, braving the risks of empty space” (p. 30). Turning from theory to history in chapter two, “Austen, Dickens, and Brontë: Bodies before the Normate,” Schaffer considers a shift in nineteenth-century Britain from homebased care (a model she calls “ordinary bodies”) to a professional model of paid caregiving that institutionalized what was once part of everyday life (p. 24). Here we meet skepticism toward the medical professional through Austen’s Sanditon (1817) and the merits of ordinary bodies in Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Austen’s Persuasion (1818) through, respectively, the social relationships Jane forms with the Rivers sisters and the inclusive care community that tends to Louisa Musgrove after her impetuous leap from the Cobb. Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843) teaches us about more than saving just one boy with a visible disability but rather about forming a community of care that, in Tiny Tim’s words, embraces “every one!”2 Chapters three through six offer literary case studies of Victorian novels. Chapter three, “Global Migrant Care and Emotional Labor in Villette,” incisively examines professional care by an emerging global migrant population through Brontë’s Villette (1853). As Schaffer teases out the emotional labor of enigmatic Lucy Snowe in her roles as paid companion, nursery-governess, and schoolteacher, she aptly acknowledges the connection between the paid migrant caregiver to today’s disproportionate number of women caregivers of color, a group particularly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic (p. 95). Chapter four, “Beyond Sympathy: The State of Care in Daniel Deronda,” addresses what Schaffer calls “feeling without acting” and a move from sympathy to care in her perceptive reading of Eliot’s last published novel, Daniel Deronda (1876) (p. 117). Schaffer [End Page 163] foregrounds a dyad of mutual reciprocity that forms between the titular Deronda seeking his identity and the spiritually rich but economically poor, disabled, and dying Mordecai Cohen. This chapter proposes a way of reading Daniel Deronda’s oft criticized turn to Zionism as an imagined “care community on an international scale...

Mediating the Nineteenth Century: Literature, Science, and the History of Knowledge

Mediating the Nineteenth Century:Literature, Science, and the History of Knowledge Jessica C. Resvick (bio) My research on nineteenth- and twentieth-century German literature, media, and material culture draws from the histories of science and ideas to study how media shape what we know. I am working on two book projects, each of which explores how literature and media produce and codify new knowledge and new ways of knowing. My first book project, Recognizing Reality: German Realism and the Transmission of Knowledge, examines the media-historical and epistemological parameters of nineteenth-century German realism. I take as a starting point Aristotle's concept of recognition, understood as that "aha" moment that occupies a cornerstone of the complex plot and the basic operation that underlies the human proclivity for mimesis. In Aristotle's account, it is by recognizing the identity of a newly perceived object with known representations held in memory that one gains knowledge about the world, and this pleasurable recognitive work in fact lies at the root of literary creation. My project exploits this paradigm as it investigates the kinds of knowledge transmitted by works of nineteenth-century realism, for which mimesis becomes an especially pressing concern. Beginning with a rereading of the scar episode in the Odyssey—and of Erich Auerbach's reading of this scene—the book proposes that realist recognition short-circuits the experience of reality with knowledge about reality, with the former remaining beyond the reach of linguistic expression and the latter underpinned by specific media. [End Page 132] While recognition has always occupied a central role in literature, its status has shifted over the centuries in ways that reflect developments in media. For instance, Bertolt Brecht's epic theater strove to disrupt routinized processes of recognition to generate V-Effekte in the audience. By attending, for example, to the serial publication format, specific writing and drawing aids, or even personal doodles, I show how contemporary media in fact condition the types of knowledge conveyed in realist narratives. Moreover, I show how early theories of realism—generally understood as a prose-dominant period—drew explicitly from theatrical forms of recognition. The project, then, highlights at once the media-specificity of recognition and the epistemological influence of specific media. Finally, by tracing out the influence of nineteenth-century literature and media on early psychoanalysis, the project shows how German realism lays the groundwork not only for modern conceptions of recognition but also—and more suggestively—for new conceptions of the individual's lived experience within and of modern reality. My second book project, From Stereotype to Isotype: Media, Individuality, and Society, provides a media history of "typological" thought in the German and American contexts. Examining scientific, literary, and visual types—from the Goethean Typus to typefaces—the project illustrates how typological thought spread far beyond its original contexts. For instance, the commonplace term "stereotype" in fact originally designated a print technology that allowed for the reproduction of stock images or texts. While this association seems lost today, in the early twentieth century, the medial conception of the stereotype was still in force. Thus, in his 1912 essay "The Dynamics of Transference," Sigmund Freud could, without much justification, liken an individual's recurrent patterns of instinctual satisfaction to this print technology. The history of the term "stereotype" is, I contend, more broadly indicative of the transfer of "type" across disciplines at the turn of the century. The "social type" occupied a central role in nineteenth-century fiction, even beyond the strictures of Marxist criticism that deemed it "the central category and criterion of realist literature."1 It was above all the industrialization of print and the resultant rise of periodical literature—in which stereotype printing played a key role—that helped to solidify clichéd representations of individuals and reality more broadly.2 Typological thinking also permeated the (pseudo-) sciences of the day. Literary constructions of the social type were shaped by fields like phrenology and physiology, and so-called race science attempted to categorize humankind based on phenotypical differences.3 While links between the social type and the stereotype—understood both as a print technology and in its contemporary sense—are thus readily apparent, strategies of...

Barri J. Gold, Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Novel Ecologies

Barri J. Gold, Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Novel Ecologies

Dangerous Giving in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Dangerous Giving in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

The Mother-Sister of Victorian Fiction: Domestic Compromises and Replaceable Heroines

Abstract This article critically examines the figure of the “mother-sister” in Victorian popular fiction. Sisters whose main function in the household comprises mothering their siblings, combines several narrative possibilities in nineteenth-century fiction, while constructively complicating the representation of domestic work. Whereas canonical fiction depicts sisters taking care of motherless siblings more often than their general absence from critical discussion might suggest, for several Victorian women writers, the mother-sister’s experience offers an opportunity to detail everyday domestic labor, to validate homemaking without sentimentalizing it, and to express frustration without rejecting domestic ideals. After a general discussion of the significance of this hitherto neglected figure in Victorian culture, this article juxtaposes the mother-sister’s representation in novels by otherwise markedly different popular authors of the time: the religious writer Charlotte Yonge and Mrs. Henry Wood, one of the most successful sensation novelists of the time. Their contrasting portrayal of reluctant, resentful, and resented mother-sisters offers a different angle on expected depictions of capable homemaking as a sign of value in Victorian fiction.

How Did the Translation of Genovefa by Christoph von Schmidt Become the 19th-Century Lithuanian Vestseller?

This article analyses the repertoire of nineteenth-century Lithuanian fiction to identify cases of bestsellers and to reconstruct their publishing history. The concept of nineteenth-century Lithuanian fiction publication is broadly understood. It includes fiction printed in the Lithuanian language in Lithuania, Lithuania Minor and the Lithuanian emigration from 1795, when the third partition of Poland and Lithuania took place and the lands of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were annexed by Russian empire, until 1904, when the ban on printing in Latin script, which lasted for four decades after 1864, was lifted. The history of the translation and publication of German writer Christoph von Schmidt’s work Genovefa was selected as a study case. A study was conducted to find answers to various issues: Does this publication with its fifteenth editions qualify as the Lithuanian bestseller? What factors led to the large number of new editions of this title? How did contrafactions (publications with intentionally false imprints) contribute to book sales during the ban on publishing in Latin characters in Lithuania? The research findings reveal publishing trends characteristic of Europe in a phase of modernisation (new business models of the publishing industry, growing public literacy and changing public demand for reading material). In addition, they show the peculiarities of nineteenth-century book publishing and the book trade in the European regions involved in a struggle against occupation and for the preservation of their national identities.

The Nadir and the Zenith: Temperance and Excess in the Early African American Novel by Anna Pochmara

Reviewed by: The Nadir and the Zenith: Temperance and Excess in the Early African American Novel by Anna Pochmara Michaela Corning-Myers (bio) The Nadir and the Zenith: Temperance and Excess in the Early African American Novel, by Anna Pochmara. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021. 256 pp. Cloth, $114.95; Paper, $29.95; Ebook, $28.45. Anna Pochmara’s The Nadir and the Zenith is an excellent study of melodrama and temperance in late nineteenth-century fiction. Over the course of this concise and well-structured text, Pochmara seeks to achieve five goals. The first is a historical-aesthetic reclamation of the Nadir era, “the historical moment when black people’s status reached its lowest point” (1), as a productive period for African American fiction as prolific and multi-faceted. The second is defining the political consciousness of this era and type of literature. Third, Pochmara defines the political locus of the genre of naturalism as utilized by African American authors during the Nadir era. Fourth, Pochmara argues for the affective force of naturalism in the sense that there is a deep and sometimes indivisible relationship between sentimentalism and naturalism. Finally, Pochamara closely examines how ethical temperance in literature, manifesting as self-discipline among its youthful female characters, fosters social and political community. Pochmara draws from a compact archive of 26 primary texts published from 1876 to 1902. She also refers to an impressive bibliography of works from critics writing within the schools of neo-Marxism, critical race theory, and intersectional feminism. Pochmara’s refreshing text is emblematic of a crucial directional shift in studies in American literary naturalism over the last eighteen years: texts written by African American authors have been understudied at a substantial detriment to our field. Pochmara displays with acute attention to historical context the ways in which African American writers of this era were very much in tune with the literary— and political—conversations that evolved from the Antebellum Era into [End Page 100] the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century. In fact, these authors drove that conversation with rigor: there could be no conversation about the political health of the United States without discussion of the emancipated slave, the African American emigrant workers in the North, and the continued activism of African Americans as they fought for better economic conditions and against the growing tide of anti-Black violence. Within this historical context Pochmara situates her compelling study of novels published in the Nadir era by Charles Chesnutt, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Amelia E. Johnson, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Pochmara maps a trajectory from midcentury sentimentalism into twentieth century naturalism as evinced by these authors. Pochmara makes three distinct interventions in the field of African American literary studies and literary history. First, she argues that the “New Negro” woman is posed in direct contrast to her antebellum-era progenitors, particularly in her assertion of control in her community (e.g., as an effective and inspiring teacher) and in her private life (e.g., in her assertion of her right to accept or reject marital suitors or decide her family members’ living situations). Pochmara’s second intervention asserts that the female “mulatta” character is central too in the texts produced by African American male writers. Pochmara’s third intervention situates her study within the field of literary history studies. She is critical of “atemporal” analyses, in particular ones that develop critical tools that could not have been adopted or understood in the era to which they are applied. Pochmara’s interest is in examining a body of work over a short period of time. She seeks specifically to enumerate and parse through the ways authors over time examined the same ideas in different ways. Across all seven of the texts Pochmara closely examines, authors unrelentingly engaged with the genres, subjects, and social ideas of their time. Pochmara’s study serves specifically to show how these novelists utilized the “mulatta melodrama” to discuss the political, social, and economic issues of the Progressive Era. The structure of the mulatta melodrama is emblematic of a relationship between the present and the past. Embodied by the past are the father—white, paternalistic, and failing—and...

Dostoevsky's Incarnational Realism: Finding Christ among the Karamazovs by Paul Contino

Reviewed by: Dostoevsky's Incarnational Realism: Finding Christ among the Karamazovs by Paul Contino Thomas Gaiton Marullo (bio) Dostoevsky's Incarnational Realism: Finding Christ among the Karamazovs Paul Contino Cascade Books, 2020. ??? + 334 pp. $32 paperback. In this study, Paul Contino asks a provocative question: can literary classics move readers towards reformation and transformation, i.e, can they inspire audiences to be better people? For Contino, the answer is yes, with Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov as exemplar: a work that surprises, challenges, shocks, and eventually changes the lives of those who journey with its writer to find Christ among one of the most engaging, if perverse families in nineteenth-century fiction. Contino asserts that at the core of Dostoevsky's final novel is what he terms as "incarnational realism," and specially, how it takes root in Alyosha, the hero of the novel. In the third Karamazov son, Contino affirms, Dostoevsky shows that divine grace is present amid human violence, trauma, and deformation; and that pure and ideal Christians are not abstractions, but tangible, real possibilities in literature and life. [End Page 222] Contino defines incarnational realism as Dostoevsky's belief that despite epistemological contradictions and social constrictions, people can comprehend the world ontologically. The writer's incarnational realism, Contino goes on to say, suspects images and ideals that are romantic, utopian, sentimental, and apocalyptic. It embraces confessional dialogue, kenotic attentiveness, and scholastic prudentia. It seeks active bodies, minds, and hearts; it applauds physical and spiritual accomplishments and deeds. Contino notes further that Dostoevsky's incarnational realism not only confesses the reality of a triune God in Jesus Christ, but it also sees all creation as participating in the integral reality of the Trinity in heaven and of the Deity on earth. It fosters freedom in unity of reason, will, knowledge, love, and choice. It assumes that humans, with God as guide, have the power to act on their own, to think and act responsibly, and to attain openness and closure, descent and ascent, sanctification and salvation. In his idea of incarnational realism, Contino pursues two lines of argument. For him, Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov is a tale of two confessors. The first considers Zosima, particularly his youthful encounter with Mikhail, his "mysterious visitor," before he engages sinners of all shapes and sizes. The second reflects on Alyosha as an incipient "monk in the world." It is Alyosha's vision of Cana, Contino asserts, that grants him strength and fortitude to attend to Mitya's struggle to become a "new man," to Ivan's rebellion against God, and to his own mentorship of Kolya and the schoolboys. Critical to Contino's analysis of incarnational realism is his thesis of confession as a prosaics of conversion. True acknowledgment of sins, he notes, is a dialogue: a profession of sin and faith. It is a prayer and bow to God; an act of humility; a stepping stone in the passage of inner descent and ascent, openness and closure. False confession is a monologue: an apologia pro sua vita of self-justification, punishment, aggrandizement, and exhibition. False confessors do not appear naked before God and the universe. Rather, they don costumes and masks to hide the rottenness within. Unsurprisingly, they do not experience happiness and peace in telling all. Just the opposite, they know only new frustration and fear at their fallen state. Indeed, it is use and misuse of confession that has Zosima and Alyosha appear as winners in The Brothers Karamazov and everyone else in the novel as losers. Acknowledging their sins in a genuine and straightforward way, the two integrate the openness of mercy and the closure of responsibility as they step out brightly into a dark and troubled world. Equally important, perhaps, Contino affirms that Alyosha is the star of the show. In so doing, he counters conventional studies of The Brothers Karamazov that often dismiss the third Karamazov son as too angelic and [End Page 223] sweet against such demonic and sour figures as Fyodor, Dmitri, and Ivan. In trial and error, Alyosha discerns his vocation. In Cana, he assumes physical and spiritual prowess. In ministry, he moves others towards valid confession, prodding and probing men, women...

Beyond the Bond: Love, Marriage and Romance in Anton Chekhov’s Selected Short Stories

Anton Chekhov is a literary giant in nineteenth century fiction. He has contributed to the contemporary literature a deep awareness of human emotions, which foregrounds the necessity to understand the emotional values in narrative. Chekhovian realism has been a formula which writers have diligently followed ever since. In most of his fictional oeuvre he has depicted the individuals of modern society experiencing various shades of emotions which guide their psychological, interpersonal as well as social life. The stories written by Anton Chekhov are kaleidoscopes of various experiences which are an integral part of modern existence. Interpersonal relationships, especially man-woman relationships are portrayed by Chekhov in a striking manner. The present paper is an attempt to study a few of his selected short stories, keeping in mind Chekhov’s interest in a counter-presentation of such relations.

Feminist Reflections on Childhood: A History and Call to Action by Penny A. Weiss

Reviewed by: Feminist Reflections on Childhood: A History and Call to Action by Penny A. Weiss Anna Mae Duane Feminist Reflections on Childhood: A History and Call to Action. By Penny A. Weiss. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2021. 310 pp. $110.50 cloth/$34.95 paper and e-book. Penny A. Weiss's new book Feminist Reflections on Childhood: A History and Call to Action is an ambitious text that pulls from thinkers including John Stuart Mill, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sarah Ahmed, and the author's own friends and family. Weiss cites women writers ranging from novelists to celebrated academics to argue that we need to apply feminist principles to the work of raising, educating and generally engaging children. Her argument leans heavily on feminist traditions that emphasize voice and agency. Extrapolating from feminist critiques of patriarchal exclusion, Weiss argues that children, like women, deserve the capacity to speak up at school and at home and to have their voices respected. Weiss intersperses her scholarly engagement with everyone from Mary Shelley to Paul Bloom with glimpses into her own life, including her childhood, her own work with young people, and her experiences as a mother of three [End Page 117] children. The anonymous interludes that capture conversations with parents and caretakers in Weiss's life provide a sense of conversation between the scholarly world and the everyday concerns of children and caretakers in the twenty-first century. In departing from what might be deemed traditional scholarly writing practices, this text harkens back to some of the modalities of twentieth-century feminism, particularly the investment in agency, voice, and, most strikingly, the argument that "the personal is political." This sense of personal exploration continues throughout the text, as Weiss refers to her own reactions to the texts she reads, letting the reader into her own thinking process. Perhaps the text might best be characterized as a scholarly memoir, tracing Weiss's eclectic reading practices and offering her ruminations on how feminist principles might be applied to childhood. Such eclecticism and warmth offer the sense of an intellectual buffet, with the author inviting us to sample thinkers ranging from Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Emma Goldman to Octavia Butler. The chapters are brief, often moving quickly from one thinker to another, from one discipline to another, and from one century to another. This breadth, however, comes at the expense of deep engagement with both the current conversations taking place in feminist scholarship and, even more strikingly, the rich and vibrant field of childhood studies scholarship, which is largely absent from Weiss's work. For much of the book Weiss paints feminism—and antifeminism—with a broad brush; for example, she begins by suggesting that the general public views feminists as people guilty of "hating men, being lesbians, and equating heterosexual sex with rape" (20). No doubt one could find such reductive and stereotypical portrayals of feminism in the public sphere, but they do not represent approaches to feminism within the academic circles that constitute the audiences for monographs published by university presses. Weiss laments, "Many people, women included, think that feminists hate children because they 'enslave' you" (21). Having established such binary opposition, Weiss seeks to redeem feminism from such criticism by illustrating a long history in which feminist writers do in fact evince care for children and child rearing. By setting up an opposition between "feminists" and misogynistic "nonfeminists," Weiss eludes the complications of twenty-first-century feminism itself, a complex and sometimes contradictory intellectual movement, with internal criticism emerging over questions of trans identity, racial equity, and political advocacy. In short, there is no one voice of feminist thought, as many of the most salient critiques of feminism come from within the movement itself. Throughout the text, feminist approaches to childhood are represented primarily by female authors across a wide range of chronology [End Page 118] and ideology, even when those authors do not explicitly engage childhood as a separate identity category. Weiss deploys another binary contrast between feminist and nonfeminist approaches to studying children in the first chapter by pairing as its epigraphs strikingly similar quotations from the twenty-first-century psychologist Paul Bloom and the nineteenth-century fiction writer...

“Those damned, dirty apes”: Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy and the Evolution of the Ape-Man

Abstract Netflix’s popular science fiction series The Umbrella Academy raises new questions about how the familiar trope of the ape-man has been adapted for a contemporary audience. Tracing the figure of the ape-man through representative works of nineteenth-century science fiction—Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes—shows that the character has often been used to interrogate ideas of race, gender, and power across the Victorian age. More than just a stand-in for nineteenth-century evolutionary debates, the figure of the ape-man reflects cultural ideas about the relationship between humans and their “animal instincts,” constantly questioning what sets humans apart in the hierarchy of animals.

Edith Wharton Society Panels at the American Literature Association Conference, Chicago, 2022

Edith Wharton Society Panels at the American Literature Association Conference, Chicago, 2022