Nineteenth-century Fiction Research Articles

Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction, by Kylee-Anne Hingston

Reviewed by: Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction by Kylee-Anne Hingston Natalie Prizel (bio) Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction, by Kylee-Anne Hingston; pp. x + 221. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019, £80.00, $120.00. Reviewing a text concerned with how disability at times disrupts narrative linearity, one might do as well to start at the end as at the beginning, and it is indeed at the end that Kylee-Anne Hingston gives the origin story of her book, Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction, a study of how disability is formally articulated in nineteenth-century literature. Reading Robert Buchanan's indictment of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites, Hingston "wanted to know what allowed Buchanan to collapse body and text so thoroughly that he could consider poetic form susceptible to disease" (193–94). If Buchanan turns text into flesh in a manner that inspires Hingston's book, Charles Dickens shows Mr. Venus, the articulator of bones from Our Mutual Friend (1865), turning flesh into text, something to be taxonomized and, as he puts it, articulated. These two examples bookend Hingston's detailed treatment of the relationship between bodies and narrative in nineteenth-century fiction. Hingston's book joins several new endeavors to think about disability in formal and, here, narratological terms in an effort to complicate the hitherto dominant terms of disability theory. It attempts to move from the overarching claims of disability theory—claims that nonetheless underlie and inform Hingston's analysis—to the more contingent and local arguments of disability criticism. Dividing her chapters by subgenre (gothic fiction, social problem fiction, sensation fiction, "sentimental religious" fiction, fairy tales, and detective fiction), Hingston analyzes focalization and narrative shape (especially narrative closure) to account for the narrative workings of disabled bodies from the 1830s to the 1890s (9). Hingston begins with John Ruskin's critique of the presence of disabled, dying, and (to him) disgusting bodies in Fiction, Fair and Foul (1880), using his famously intemperate [End Page 310] response to certain texts to make claims about Victorian attitudes toward disabled fictional figures more generally. Ruskin calls Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) "the effectual head of the whole cretinous school" (qtd. 21). Hingston's treatment of Hugo is compelling, particularly her focus on on Hugo's aesthetics of incompleteness, his use of optical discourse, and the relationship between architectural and embodied form in the novel. While shifts in focalization are at the heart of the chapter, it is in reference to these other concerns that Hingston makes her strongest case for complexity and hybridity in Hugo's treatment of disability. (Hybridity might be considered the watchword of this study due to Hingston's insistence on the ambiguous narrative position of disability.) Nonetheless, Notre-Dame de Paris serves as a somewhat odd start to a book announcing itself as Victorian and otherwise concerned with British texts, particularly because much of Articulating Bodies is concerned with culturally contingent anxieties. Despite Ruskin's insistence on Hugo's text as foundational to a "cretinous" canon, it seems that cultural and social anxieties regarding the body might very well differ across the Channel. Ruskin drops out as a principal antagonist as the book goes on, but it is worth mentioning that his aesthetics might not be so diametrically opposed to Hugo's as Hingston (or Ruskin himself) suggests. She writes that Notre-Dame de Paris "insists that there is beauty in hybridity, in the incomplete, and in the ugly; it holds beauty and ugliness, normalcy and abnormality, as both distinct and indistinguishable from one another" (47). Here, Hingston actually sounds much like Ruskin, who writes in Modern Painters, "The ugliest objects contain some element of beauty; and in all it is an element peculiar to themselves, which cannot be separated from their ugliness, but must either be enjoyed together with it or not at all" (The Works of John Ruskin, edited by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, vol. 5 [London: George Allen, 1903–12], 58). In the second chapter, on Dickens's Bleak House (1852–53), Hingston's claim...

Pandemic Consciousness and Narrative Perspective in Sheri Holman’s The Dress Lodger

Sheri Holman’s neo-Victorian novel The Dress Lodger (1999 ) depicts the beginning of the 1831 cholera epidemic in Britain. The novel skilfully manipulates the conventions of nineteenth-century realism and neo-Victorian fiction to test the limits of readerly empathy and its foundations in the conception of the liberal subject as disembodied and disinterested. Although the novel seems ‘faux-Victorian’ and apparently encourages immersion in the story and identification with the central characters, metaphorical uses of language and shifting points of view disrupt such comfortable ways of reading, challenging the readers’ tendency to derive pleasure from representations of working-class suffering. Through complex characterisation of the protagonists, the factory and sex worker Gustine and the doctor Henry Chiver, the narrative exposes the violence of representation through parallels with medical discourse. This essay argues that Holman’s experimentation with narrative strategies ultimately suggests the need for a pandemic consciousness that transcends the clashing responses to the cholera epidemic and cultivates an awareness of global interdependence. The possibility of such pandemic consciousness is conveyed through ‘the Great Narration’ by the novel’s unconventional intradiegetic narrator, the working-class Dead, whose bodies were stolen by doctors for the purposes of dissection.

Review of Sensational Deviance: Disability in Nineteenth-Century Sensation Fiction by Heidi Logan

No abstract available.

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.

Colonial Relations in Miniature: Affective Networks, Race, and the Portrait in Victor Séjour’s “Le Mulâtre”

AbstractThis essay attends to the presence of a small portrait carried by an enslaved character, Georges, in Victor Séjour’s 1837 sketch “Le Mulâtre” (“The Mulatto”). While most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction deploys miniature portraits to mediate social ties and signal emotional connection, in “Le Mulâtre” the carrying of a miniature departs from this trope, marking alienation, not affiliation. Reading Séjour’s text against popular depictions and material histories of ivory portrait miniatures, I demonstrate that these familiar objects of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century life function not merely as emblems of intimacy, as past scholars have argued, but rather as tools of what Elizabeth Maddock Dillon calls “intimate distance”—a social configuration that depends on asserting closeness with geographically distributed white populations while disavowing intimacy with physically present Black and Indigenous peoples. Although the portrait is said to depict Georges’s father, who readers know is also the man’s white enslaver, the object remains hidden from view in a bag until the final moments of the sketch, which concludes with the father’s beheading and the son’s suicide. I argue that by emplotting the miniature in a moment of bloodshed rather than of sentiment, Séjour registers the affective and material violence that undergirds white colonial definitions of the family, and invites broader critical comparison of the ways that both sentimental and colonial structures depend on racialized distributions of affections. In the concluding portion of this essay, I turn to the “little buckskin pouch” containing Alfred’s miniature and consider how its resemblance to Afro-Atlantic folk charms recasts the racialized binaries traditionally advanced by miniature portraits. Viewed as part of a charm, the portrait underscores that whiteness is a ritualized notion dependent on material signifiers.

Review

Review

Genres of Valuation: Marginalist Economics and American Literary Realism

Abstract This essay argues that late nineteenth-century American fiction, as exemplified by William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), is entangled in the period’s embrace of a new understanding of economic conditions, one premised on the significance of consumer data as the raw material of economic interpretation and fixated on mathematical analysis as a source of knowledge about value. Marginalism in economic theory and realism in American literary practice were contemporaneous efforts to mediate value at a moment of decisive transition in America, as a model of commodity-centered competitive capitalism yielded to the regime of corporate finance. The young academic economists of the period and their literary counterparts explained the economic landscape in much the same way and to many of the same ends. Both began with the daunting question of how to reimagine value in a world characterized by fictitious goods and increasingly abstract financial instruments, a world in which the labor theory of value seemed hopelessly outdated. Both responded to this challenge by proposing novel intellectual procedures for making values appear stable again by focusing on the subjective experiences of consumers. Finally, both marginalists and realists sought to provide a quasi-scientific bedrock for fixing values in consumer society not only by appealing nostalgically to an economy of actual goods and honest work but more importantly by accommodating readers, policy makers, and stakeholders of all kinds to the new realities of finance capitalism.

The First British Edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne's “Feathertop” inHome Circle(1852)

AbstractThis article is an introduction to the publication of the first British edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne's “Feathertop” in Home Circle in 1852. Hawthorne scholars have previously been unaware of the appearance of “Feathertop” in this magazine. However, a commentary on the appearance of Hawthorne's work in this little-known periodical reveals, even though no correspondence survives, Hawthorne's hitherto-unknown connections to the world of nineteenth-century British popular fiction.

Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Childhood and the Politics of Play. Michelle Beissel Heath

<i>Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Childhood and the Politics of Play.</i> Michelle Beissel Heath

Reveling in Restraint: Limiting the Neo-Victorian Girl

Reveling in Restraint:Limiting the Neo-Victorian Girl Michelle Beissel Heath (bio) There is an inherent tension in neo-Victorian fiction1 between deviance and comfort. Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn refer to this as the appeal, on the one hand, of the "dangerous edginess of nineteenthcentury fiction," "the possibilities nineteenth-century fiction always contained within itself for subversion" (4), and, on the other hand, what many neo-Victorian critics observe as comforts inherent in the nostalgia the genre has the potential to provide.2 This tension is both defused and elevated in contemporary children's fiction depicting or alluding to the long nineteenth century. Except for a special edition of Neo-Victorian Studies, The Child in Neo-Victorian Arts and Discourse (2012), put together by Anne Morey and Claudia Nelson, and a recent collection, The Victorian Era in Twenty-First Century Children's and Adolescent Literature and Culture (2018), edited by Sonya Sawyer Fritz and Sara K. Day, the vast majority of criticism focusing on neo-Victorian texts over the last few decades has centered on texts designed primarily for adults. Yet growing numbers of neo-Victorian texts take children as their primary audience.3 It is to these understudied texts this article will turn, tracing some of the contradictions and critical commonplaces of neo-Victorianism to examine portrayals of gender and especially girlhood in a range of neo-Victorian children's texts: adaptations, realist texts, and a notably long-lasting, slowly evolving, children's neo-Victorian fantasy series. In their consideration of contemporary children's neo-Victorian texts, Morey and Nelson reference the nineteenth century's seemingly unfettered imperialist practices to acknowledge that "part of the past's appeal may be the lack of restraint that it promises to those pursuing artistic and financial success" ("Secret Sharer" 6). As ideas of "dangerous edginess" and "subversion" highlighted by Heilmann and Llewellyn suggest, adult neo-Victorian texts and even Young Adult (YA) neo-Victorian texts often take as their focus this seeming "lack of restraint": liberating explorations of what is typically repressed, oppressed, dark, and/or hidden in nineteenth-century texts—such as explicit sexuality and deviations from heteronormative expectations. The very nature of their audience ensures that adult publishers and purchasers would likely frown on children's texts that, say, offer overt [End Page 80] explorations of sexuality. As a result, children's neo-Victorian texts, unlike their adult counterparts, are frequently left both grappling with and reveling in restraint rather than enjoying a lack of it, a fact that is perhaps most forcefully clear with the case of children's literature featuring girl protagonists. Girlhood, and the space between childhood and adulthood (including but not limited to today's notions of adolescence), were challenging concepts for the Victorians, especially in the latter part of the century and at the turn of the century when, increasingly, ideas of what girls and women could be and do were under vigorous debate. This fact has been observed by a variety of children's literature scholars, including Sally Mitchell in her groundbreaking The New Girl and Beth Rodgers in her recent revisiting of the idea of the "New Girl" (or really, the "modern girl") and ambiguous notions of adolescent girlhood. Indeed, in their consideration of Katie Kapurch's analysis of Jane Eyre adaptations today, Morey and Nelson echo such ideas and state the situation bluntly: "girlhood was a troubling, ambiguous concept for the Victorians" ("Secret Sharer" 8). They note, though, that the Victorians' difficulty in pinpointing "girlhood" may help "to explain the popularity of the neo-Victorian for modern girls, who must confront similar ambiguities in social status," if not in "negotiating agency" (8). It is with this notion of ambiguous girlhood that I return to Morey and Nelson's comment about nineteenth-century settings as a place of "lack of restraint" today. For realist neo-Victorian texts, or texts adapting original nineteenth-century literature (whether realist or fantastic in origin), negotiating nineteenth-century limitations is seemingly inevitable if one wishes to remain faithful to the period or to the origin text. Indeed, realist or adapted neo-Victorian texts' focus on historical accuracy aligns with Kate Mitchell's argument for "[p]ositioning...

Desperate Times, Desperate Futures

301 BOOKS IN REVIEW also runs the risk of obscuring the vibrant presence of a plethora of other emerging and established First Nation and Métis writers/artists/filmmakers of sf/f/horror, such as Cherie Dimaline (Métis), Gwen Benaway (Anishinaabe/ Métis), Richard van Camp (Dene), Nathan Nigaan Noodin Adler (Lac Des Mille Lacs First Nation), Drew Hayden Taylor (Ojibwe/Curve Lake First Nation), David A. Robertson (Norway House Cree Nation), Chelsea Vowel (Métis), Joshua Whitehead (Oji-Cree), Celu Amberston (Cherokee/Scots-Irish), Sonny Assu (Ligwilda’xw Kwakwaka’wakw), Warren Cariou (Métis/European), and Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers (Blackfoot/Sámi). These qualifications aside, this volume deserves a lot of credit for successfully representing diversity and contemporariness while not losing sight of the Canadian sf/f canon. What unites all articles is an acute attention to both historical and cutting-edge debates within the scholarly field, frequently positioning Canada’s relationship with colonialism at the critical forefront and managing to amplify an impressive variety of structurally marginalized voices and potentially emancipatory perspectives. Ransom and Grace’s sweeping, detailed, and perspicacious introduction sets the tone for a variegated engagement with Canadian science fiction, fantasy, and horror that abounds in theoretical linkages, intertextual and critical references, and ample opportunities for dialogue both among the contributions and beyond.—Moritz Ingwersen, University of Konstanz Desperate Times, Desperate Futures. Amanda Rees and Iwan Rhys Morus, eds. Special issue: “Presenting Futures Past: Science Fiction and the History of Science.” Osiris 34 (2019). vi+352 pp. $35. Science and its history have offered much to the development of science fiction (sf). When the achievements of science are circulated and celebrated, or even when their outcomes are catastrophic, they provide endless fuel for the sf imagination. But the reverse is true as well: in complex exchanges of ideas, methods, and lexicons, sf has offered much to the development of science—a newer idea, undoubtedly, but one that is now explored in literary criticism, science and technology studies, discourse analysis, and elsewhere. The recent edition of the annual history of science journal Osiris, titled “Presenting Futures Past: Science Fiction and the History of Science,” brings fresh perspectives to this dialogue. As the editors state in their introduction, “This volume of Osiris had as its inspiration the question of what science fiction could do for the history of science” (1). The “could do” in that sentence is important: rather than cataloguing the various ways in which sf has informed the history of science, this volume is an exploration of possibilities, of how sf could or should inform that discipline, though several articles touch on past interactions as models for future ones. The volume’s uniqueness lies in this historiographic focus which, unlike examinations of the connections between sf and science proper, is largely uncharted territory. The articles showcase a diverse range of interdisciplinary work, all exploring the real and potential connections between sf and the history of science—and not a single one of them disappoints. In “Sleeping Science- 302 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) Fictionally: Nineteenth-Century Utopian Fictions and Contemporary Sleep Research,” for instance, Martin Willis explores the concept of sleep by comparing medical narratives from the nineteenth century with utopian fictions from the same period. Fascinatingly, he anchors the comparison in his own experiences as a participant-observer in a sleep lab at Cardiff University, where he spent time embedded within the institutional and technological machinery of sleep research. He explains that, like Bruno Latour in Laboratory Life (1979), “it is the culture of the sleep laboratory itself that interests me” (267), and that interest leads him to a number of insights. He finds, for example, that due to the need to stay awake all night to analyze the sleep patterns of others, leading to a kind of professional narcolepsy, many sleep researchers view good sleep as a utopian space, a notion that bleeds into the analysis of sleep: “Their own aberrant wakefulness and their desire for participants to sleep well constructs sleep as utopian” (267). He then goes on to trace the concept of utopian sleep across nineteenth-century fictions, including W.H. Hudson’s The Crystal Age (1887), Edward Bellamy...

“Fog-Shaped Men”: The Remnant Figure in Postbellum American Regionalism

This essay isolates, analyzes, and contextualizes a prevalent character type in nineteenth-century American fiction that it calls (following Ina Ferris) the “remnant.” Although remnants appear in the earliest American experiments in fiction, the type becomes truly ubiquitous in postbellum regionalist writing. Depicted as living relics or belated leftovers from superseded cultural epochs, remnants, the essay claims, project the distinctly modern modalities of displacement and ontological insecurity into the regionalist texts they inhabit, thus unsettling the conventional critical readings of the genre as a backward-looking nostalgic form while also opening anew the question of regionalism’s complicated appeal for its contemporary readers. While beginning and ending with Sarah Orne Jewett’s representative remnant figure, Captain Littlepage, the essay also surveys several lesser-known examples, discusses the type’s peculiar characteristics, and speculates on the reactions it drew from its original audiences.

The Art of Being: Poetics of the Novel and Existentialist Philosophy. Yi-Ping Ong. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. 298.

<i>The Art of Being: Poetics of the Novel and Existentialist Philosophy</i>. Yi-Ping Ong. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. 298.

Gothic Truths in the Asylum

This article suggests that Victorian Gothic prose fictions privilege the voices of madness, where, operating in the historical lunatic asylum, truth is encrypted. It begins by expanding upon the relevant background contexts of the nineteenth century, with focus upon the medicalisation of madness, and goes on to offer fresh critical interpretations of false confinement in two pinnacles of nineteenth-century Gothic fiction: the penny dreadful, The String of Pearls (1846–7), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). The article argues that Gothic writing simultaneously registers and articulates the silence of a madness that has been perceived to threaten rational speech; Gothic subverts the view of the mental asylum as guarantor of truth by demonstrating that this functional site is, by contrast, the generator of falsehoods.

Physiognomy in The Professor

One of the most striking things about nineteenth-century English fiction is the extent to which it betrays the influence of the extraordinary cult of physiognomy that had been pervading Europe and elsewhere ever since Lavater’s Physiognomische Fragmente (Essays on Physiognomy) first appeared in the late eighteenth century. This influence is especially conspicuous in Charlotte Brontë’s posthumously published novel, The Professor. We note, for example, that as well as referring to various physiognomic terms and making use of some of Lavater’s best-known theories, the author presents a number of her characters as physiognomists, the most prominent among them being her first-person narrator, William Crimsworth. Noteworthy, too, are the ways in which physiognomy is resorted to in the portrayal of perhaps the most interesting character of the novel, Yorke Hunsden. Also worth mentioning is that, as in Charlotte’s other fictional works, physiognomy here plays an important part in the treatment of love.

Banning Jewish “Extremist” Literature in Russia: Conversion and Toleration in Historical Perspective

In 2017, Russia’s Ministry of Justice banned a nineteenth-century book written by the German rabbi Markus Lehmann, labeling it extremist literature. This article places current Russian efforts to stamp out religious extremism in a broader historical context of imperial productions of tolerance and intolerance and the impact on religious minorities. It examines the case of Jews in the Russian Empire and post-Soviet Russia through the lens of religious conversion, forced baptisms, and freedom of conscience in the realm of apostasy. Lehmann’s book, characteristic of nineteenth-century Orthodox Jewish historical fiction in German, used the historical memory of forced conversions of Jews in medieval and early modern Europe to forge a new path to integration in tolerant, Protestant environs. This article offers a historical and literary reading of Lehmann’s banned book against the longer arc of imperial Russian toleration and conservative appropriations of toleration for discrimination against minorities.

Failed to Feel It: Stoniness in Henry James's The Wings of the Dove

Failed to Feel It:Stoniness in Henry James's The Wings of the Dove Diana Leca Kate Croy is hard to like. In critical appraisals of The Wings of the Dove, she has been called "dreadful," "diabolical" (Krook-Gilead 299, 331), "vindictive[]" (James's own contribution [CN 106]), an "avaricious vampire" (Cornelius 6), and—from Michael Wood's Schadenfreude-inspiring list—"greedy, ghoulish, shabby, disgrace, and swindling" (33). As one early reader of the novel asked: "Who could feel any desire for even a fictional acquaintance with such persons?" (Cornelius 6). The dream of sympathetic attachment, after all, remains alluring. While it is unlikely that many novel theorists today would crusade for its centrality, most continue to operate quietly under its assumptions. In my reading, Kate Croy elicits such a strong response from readers not because she has too many—or the bad sort—of feelings but because she has too few. E. M. Forster famously condemned James's method of "pruning" emotion in Aspects of the Novel: "[James's] characters, beside being few in number, are constructed on very stingy lines. They are incapable of fun, of rapid motion, of carnality, and of nine-tenths of heroism. … Even their sensations are limited" (143). For many of James's contemporaries, his late novels were not simply shy or reticent—affective states with a scintilla of charm—but emotionally stony. We would do well not to shelve these complaints too swiftly. How supple, in fact, are our theories of reading when faced with figures who are not only inscrutable but also indifferent or hard of heart? Can thinking more carefully about stoniness as a literary and aesthetic property intervene in current debates about styles of reading? My conviction that it ought to is reinforced by a small but emerging set of critics investigating diminished or flat affect in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction. In her study on insensibility, Wendy Anne Lee argues that "failures of feeling" are bound up with, rather than incidental to, the historical development of the novel as a discrete genre, persistently testing its limit points. As she puts it in relation to figures [End Page 234] like Fanny Price in Mansfield Park: "Characters who cannot or will not generate the feelings demanded of them (in stories oriented towards, but not restricted to, conjugality) upset the terms of subjectivity offered by the novel and its ontological design of investigating feelings" ("British Novel" 6).1 But does hardness offer any analytical purchase on The Wings of the Dove? On first blush, it appears to be an unpromising category for a discussion of the types of feelings and formal properties particular to James's late period. That stoniness tends to jar with contemporary interpretations of the novel, however, is part of the reason I am inclined to explore it here. This is less from an impish will to upend the received narrative and more from a sense that current figurations of The Wings of the Dove continue to miss something of its unsettling rigidity and coolness.2 James's novel is invested not so much in the sentimental nuances of specific subjects than in exploring what Rei Terada calls the "opalescent end" of feeling (14, emphasis mine). Stoniness is not a quirky or ancillary feature of James's late novel; rather, it is integral to its structural shape, affective texture, character investigations, and plot construction. In what follows, I attempt to show that rather than stymying creativity, states of unfeeling and associated lapidary elements like imperviousness and fixity are built into The Wings of the Dove at various levels of its compositional process. The Wings of the Dove opens with a bitter pas-de-deux. Kate Croy and her father, Lionel, fume, plead, stare hard at the street below, stare hard at each other. When her father displays a rare sliver of sentiment, Kate is described as being left cold: "she cared, however, not a straw for his embarrassment—feeling how little, on her own part, she was moved by charity" (7). To be unmoved has of course more than one sense: literally, it means to be inert. Catherine Malabou's definition here is instructive: "Inertia names the resistance of...

Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture by Catherine Maxwell

 Reviews (p. ); here Steinlight rethinks Gillian Beer’s enormously influential reading of Hardy’s fiction in Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). e novels of Hardy and George Gissing, Steinlight contends, show how characters are ‘unfit to survive’ (p. ), unlike the earlier texts. e book concludes by looking forward, considering how the modernist novel becomes preoccupied with portraying consciousness, not society. Populating the Novel is an extremely accomplished and wide-ranging monograph that contributes forcefully to the field of nineteenth-century novel studies. e argument that the multitude, not the individual, is the focus of nineteenth-century fiction takes criticism in an exciting new direction. Steinlight’s book will soon become an indispensable reference point for academics and advanced students working in the area of literary biopolitics and beyond. U   W  E G B Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture. By C M- . Oxford: Oxford University Press. . xviii+ pp.;  colour plates.£. ISBN ––––. e cosmetics industry struggles with a fundamental sensory conundrum: how can perfume be conveyed or understood in written or visual terms? is engaging study explores how writers responded to that challenge during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its punning title signalling a concern with the literature of perfume and its scientific and cultural context. Catherine Maxwell’s ambitious approach combines penetrative textual analysis with discussions of chemistry, botany , household management, advertising, fashion, and etiquette. is is genuinely interdisciplinary scholarship, though her primary concern remains the poetry of the mid to late nineteenth century. As Maxwell explains, poets were fascinated by the perfumes entering the market from the s because they were no longer mimetic. Instead of copying nature, perfumiers distilled and blended fragrances in ingenious ways, placing the nose of the olfactif on a par with the wine connoisseur’s palate. Unique interactions between perfumes and the bodies of their wearers produced still greater allure, and Maxwell provides revealing discussions of poems such as Arthur Symons’s ‘Peau d’Espagne’ (), which celebrates a fragrance notorious for mimicking the aroma of the female body. What makes this book so distinctive is less its impressive literary analyses than its intriguing engagement with perfume itself. e field of literary studies has generally privileged the interpretative over the instructive, but Maxwell sees no disjunction. Her method is exemplified by her use of Symons’s essay ‘Being a Word on Behalf of Patchouli’ to initiate an exploration of patchouli itself, an Indian plant used as a perfume and insect repellent. Heady and pungent, it proved too overpowering for ‘polite’ Victorian society but was popular in the demi-monde, favoured by MLR, .,   prostitutes or, in male fragrances from the s onwards, by those who flaunted their willingness to breach sexual decorum. Patchouli’s olfactory semiotics were elaborate, and Maxwell does an excellent job of explaining the scent’s significance in late Victorian fashion as well as literature. e book commences by explaining how Victorian perfume—soaps, bouquets, nosegays—was strongly gendered, with women encouraged to ‘favour light and floral fragrances’ rather than those containing ‘animalic extracts such as musk and civet’ (p. ). Male scents were initially governed by similar rules, but by the s, department stores stocked a wide range of masculine cosmetics which drew inspiration from India, China, and Japan. Using perfume catalogues, period advertisements , and etiquette books, Maxwell shows how perfume became as complex a Victorian language as flowers themselves. What follows moves seamlessly between accounts of the composition, manufacture, and usage of various perfumes (some now unable to be made because they contain illegal chemicals), their reputation, and their literary and artistic incarnations. Maxwell considers the relationship between perfumes and remembrance, before presenting insightful examinations of Swinburne, Pater, John Addington Symonds, and Lafcadio Hearn, a passionate advocate for Japanese culture who did much to popularize Far Eastern art. Elsewhere, Maxwell deciphers a hidden language of olfactory decadence, showing how homosexual and lesbian writers deployed perfume as an instrument for encoding transgressive desire. A chapter on Field offers exemplary readings of important poems; another on s dandyism is equally persuasive in exploring Wilde’s use of perfume in his self-stylization. e...

Behind the Victorian Novel: Scott's &lt;em&gt;Chronicles&lt;/em&gt;

Despite the significance of Walter Scott's fiction for Victorian writers, he is too often either left outside of our literary lineages or only incorporated as a leading figure in historical fiction. I argue that Scott was the foundational novelist for a definitive form of Victorian fiction, the chronicle. Chronicles exhibit three key features: first, they are more likely to have settings (the Highlands, Barsetshire, Carlingford) than plots; second, chronicles are potentially endless; and third, they are non-protagonistic, telling the story of a group rather than an individual. These features can all be found in Scott's metafictional prefaces and frame narratives, which set the tone for an important strand of nineteenth-century fiction in the chronicles of writers such as Charlotte Yonge, Anthony Trollope, and Margaret Oliphant.

"In Constant Fellowship with One Unseen": Negotiations with the Native Other and American National Identity in Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona

"In Constant Fellowship with One Unseen":Negotiations with the Native Other and American National Identity in Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona Alex McDonnell (bio) Writers such as Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, and Octave Mannoni have used postcolonial psychoanalysis to analyze the interrelations between the political aspects of the colonial situation and the psychological conditions of the colonizers and colonized. However, there has been little research into the development of the national "psyche" of the United States as a postcolonial state during the nineteenth century in relation to its own brand of imperialism, namely Indian removal. This article draws on the recent postcolonial psychoanalytic methodology of Ranjana Khanna to extrapolate how U.S. nineteenth-century fiction dealt with the legitimacy of national expansion and the American state pertaining to Indian displacement. I will discuss Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona (1884) in terms of how it works against masculine conceptions of violent frontier conquest while advocating for Indian assimilation. Nonetheless, I propose there is a dissonance at the heart of her reform agenda, which more generally reflects the nation's melancholic negotiation with its historical treatment of the Indian. Jackson's national ideal emerges from the conflicts between her assimilationist discourse, her racial attitudes, and her preservation of tribal sovereignty, an ideal that underscores her conception of the U.S. as a participatory, democratic state. The preservation of an undefined Indian-otherness, one that cannot be reduced to the parameters of the American imaginary, exists to validate the choice of assimilation and define the boundaries of national community in the novel. Nonetheless, this epistemic space of the Other is never fully delineated or directly explored. Jackson incorporates rather than assimilates the Native American into the nation by variously drawing upon and repressing his otherness to define a sense of national community. [End Page 571] I will propose that her conception of American subjectivity is melancholic as a result of this dissonance, which links back to the national psyche's historically conflicted understandings of Western frontier colonization. ________ Bringing a postcolonial psychoanalytic apparatus to Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona (1884) enables exploration of the novel's conflicted approach to Native American assimilation, recognition for tribal sovereignty, and the national ideal in nineteenth-century southern California. Drawing upon psychoanalytic and postcolonial theories advanced by Ranjana Khanna in Dark Continents (2003), I propose there is a melancholic dissonance at the heart of Jackson's reform agenda which emerges from the preservation of a racially and culturally different unassimilable Other—"the Indian"—that is also used in discourses of native sovereignty as an extension of the democratic ideal of the American state. Although Jackson condemns the violent nature of U.S. imperialism, she nevertheless supports the idea of civilizational expansion under the proviso that it is regulated by the enlightened dictates of domesticity. This article will examine a conflict in the narrative of Ramona between its desire for assimilation, its suppression of resistance towards this end, and yet its implicit recognition of Indian sovereignty, which underscores its particular national ideal. This recognition in turn necessitates its paradoxical acknowledgment of native resistance. Melancholic markers are produced by the failure of the narrative's approach to show national identity in which the Other is absorbed and erased. Such signifiers of melancholia are identifiable, for example, in Ramona's repressed Indian subjectivity at the end. Furthermore, the novel's romantic plot deflects attention from its compromised political agenda and therefore tries to contain the unassimilable elements generated by an inability to effectively assimilate the Indian into the national corpus. Postcolonial Psychoanalysis Before turning to analysis of Jackson's conflicted national ideal and her ambivalent treatment of the Other, I will detail some key concepts dealt with by Khanna and others which will later afford unique insights into the political-psychical dynamics of the text. One of Khanna's central contentions is that national affiliation entails specific forms of haunting, narrative, sites of memory, and psychical effect. She also adopts Freud's [End Page 572] terms, melancholy and melancholia, demonstrating how they can be used to critique colonialism and its effects. For Khanna, melancholia can be characterized in an ethico-political context as a remainder which "insists on...