Nineteenth-century Literature Research Articles

Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1890s, edited by Dustin Friedman and Kristin Mahoney

<i>Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1890s</i>, edited by Dustin Friedman and Kristin Mahoney

Toy Stories: Analyzing the Child in Nineteenth-Century Literature by Vanessa Smith (review)

Toy Stories: Analyzing the Child in Nineteenth-Century Literature by Vanessa Smith (review)

REALISM AND THE FANTASTIC

Nineteenth-century Spanish literature was characterized by decades-long continuities stemming from revolutionary political and aesthetic impulses. The fantastic was central to these continuities. However, in advocating for “Realism”, Galdós and Pardo Bazán successfully rewrote literary history to their own ends, occluding swathes of inventive nineteenth-century literature and ideology, deemed extravagant and lacking serenity. The great deletion included the fantastic, along with a spectrum of literary and political explorations of imaginative freedom to which it belonged. Too often taken as near-literal accounts, Galdós and Pardo Bazán’s essays were polemical interventions in long-standing debates. Their “Realism” primarily aimed for a new balance of serenity and fantasía, a quest shared with literary writers, historians, aspects of “realist” practice, as exemplified in El amigo Manso, may seem perplexing.But, re-situated amid nineteenth-century debates, Spanish “Realism” is an attempt, not to suppress either fantasía or the fantastic but to re-invent them, and so re-imagine Spanish and imperial history and society.

‘It biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder’: female rivalry in Caroline Lee Hentz’s novellas

ABSTRACT Nineteenth-century literature often depicts women as rivals, a phenomenon Virginia Woolf attributes in ‘A Room of One's Own' to the male-dominated nature of literature up until the twentieth century. This led to women being defined in relation to men. Feminist critics often reject female competitiveness as it challenges the collective effort to contest patriarchal control, focusing instead on female friendship. However, there is a lack of critical exploration into rivalry among female characters in nineteenth-century literature by nineteenth-century female novelists, particularly regarding overt spite or ill will. This article addresses this gap by examining poisonous relationships among female friends and siblings in novellas by Caroline Lee Hentz. Drawing from Freud's theories on female sexuality, critiques by feminist scholars like Janice Raymond, and Sianne Ngai’s studies on negative affects, the study uncovers the origins and often-tragic outcomes of toxic relationships among women. It contextualizes these themes using biblical imagery from Psalm 140:1-3, which depicts metaphorical venom resonating with jealousy and treachery in nineteenth-century literature. Additionally, this analysis highlights societal barriers in the judgmental Victorian society that hindered the establishment of genuine relationships among women.

Walking, empire, and nineteenth-century literature

Walking, empire, and nineteenth-century literature

True Women as Sacred Friends

Drawing from African American author and anti-slavery advocate Harriet Jacobs, this essay demonstrates that even well-intentioned white abolitionists can inadvertently reinforce racist systems. Jacobs sought help from white abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe to share her emancipation story, but received a response that exposed her past to Jacobs’s employer without consent. In her novelized memoir Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jacobs demonstrates the importance of Black voices and leaders in the abolitionist movement, showcasing feminist scholar Chandra Mohanty's concept of a “coalition” of women using their diverse positions to combat social inequities. By examining Jacobs's portrayal of the white women who aided her, I argue that Jacobs employs the rhetoric of true womanhood and sentimental novels to depict models of true allyship marked by consent-based sympathy. This essay delves into the nuances between sympathy and empathy in the context of nineteenth-century literature, referencing Gay Gibson Cima's assertion that these terms cannot be collapsed. By connecting Jacobs's use of sentimentality to Cima's differentiation between Black expressions of sympathy and empathy, this essay reveals how Jacobs strategically fosters empathetic connections between white and enslaved women, promoting a coalition of consent-based allyship in nineteenth-century abolitionist discourse.

Introduction: Disturbing the Sedimentations of Nineteenth-Century Environments

Abstract This research cluster offers four original case studies in Victorian and neo-Victorian ecocriticism. Clustered around the key concepts of form, materiality, and politics, its articles build on recent efforts by Victorianists to analyse interconnections of nature, agriculture, industry, and empire in the nineteenth-century literary imagination. The introduction first relates the cluster’s concerns to the latest scholarship in Victorian ecocriticism, and then turns to the aims and thematic focal points of the four contributions. The articles by Julia Ditter, Felipe Espinoza Garrido, Katharina Kalthoff, and Marlena Tronicke foreground the ecological project at the heart of a variety of fictional and nonfictional genres: the sensational novel, travel and nature writing, fantasy, and neo-Victorian gothic fiction. Ditter examines industrial travel narratives in the periodical press; Espinoza Garrido investigates the eco-colonial aesthetics of Florence Marryat’s sensation fiction; Kalthoff provides an ecofeminist reading of H. G. Wells’s mermaid tale The Sea Lady; and Tronicke examines material embodiments of the Irish Famine in the work of Paul Lynch. Together, these contributions offer fresh perspectives on the emerging field of Victorian ecocriticism and embrace the interdisciplinary dialogues facilitated by the environmental humanities for the study of nineteenthcentury literature and culture.

Toy Stories: Analyzing the Child in Nineteenth-Century Literature by Vanessa Smith (review)

Toy Stories: Analyzing the Child in Nineteenth-Century Literature by Vanessa Smith (review)

‘Never trust a Philologist’: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and the Place of Philology in English Studies

Abstract This article brings to light seven poems by C. S. Lewis that have never been published before. These poems, composed during the 1920s, form part of a lengthy campaign against the study of philology at Oxford, and specifically against its most eminent exponent, H. C. Wyld. Drawing on entries in his diary and personal correspondence, the article shows how Lewis’s antipathy for the subject grew out of his undergraduate studies, his frustration with Wyld’s published scholarship and prescriptive attitude towards language study, as well as a dislike of the man and his lecturing style. It was the appointment of J. R. R. Tolkien to the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon in 1925, and their subsequent friendship, that was to convert Lewis to the study of philology and convince him of its centrality to the discipline of English Studies. The remainder of the article describes how the two men engineered revisions to the Oxford English syllabus, which resulted in a much more prominent role for philology, at the expense of nineteenth-century literature.

A tyrannical societal something: Drawing lessons for twenty-first-century ‘privacy-protecting’ technology from long nineteenth-century literature

This paper demonstrates a novel, literature-based approach to the consideration and regulation of advanced computational and data systems, in particular artificial intelligence (AI). The paper contributes uniquely to the discourse of AI through its proposal that although we may think of AI as presenting a distinctly contemporary challenge, in fact, its roots can only be explored by starting with the discourses, narratives and social imaginaries of the long nineteenth century. To illustrate this, the paper looks at one of the most widely recognised cultural threats associated with big data and AI systems, namely the threat to privacy. It explores how the concept of privacy might be viewed, and ultimately managed, differently through the application of an historical and literary frame of reference, deploying a mixed-methods close and distant reading of novels in English and German. For this, we focus on two specific literary exempla, each of which illustrates the function of privacy in society. This close reading is complemented with exploration of experimental data generated by using a modern privacy dictionary to query a large corpus of nineteenth-century novels and a modern test corpus comprised of policy discussions targeting privacy issues related to the rise of big data and AI.

We Are All Monsters: How Deviant Organisms Came to Define Us, by Andrew Mangham

Andrew Mangham’s monograph entitled We Are All Monsters: How Deviant Organisms Came to Define Us (2023, The MIT Press) explores the polyvocal nature of monster science across the period 1750-1900 and its dialogue with nineteenth-century literature. Mangham’s “monsters,” as defined in biological sciences, are “organisms … born with at least one permanent physiological defect” (p. 1). Guided by the approach disability studies takes towards the term “disability,” he explores how monster science defines monstrosity “not as a failure, but as an embodiment of, or a cog in the machine of, organic law” (p. 2). Monsters with their corporeal singularities and differences are integral to the laws of nature. They are not “by-products of the laws of natural development which they had failed in varying ways to embody,” but “the adaptive workings and the dynamic forces to which all life forms, normal and abnormal, owe their being” (p. 2). In other words, congenital anomalies or corporeal deviations are structural variations which are not the antithesis of what is “normal” or “natural,” but significations of life’s variety and the ingenuities of nature. Mangham’s choice of literary works from the long nineteenth century helps explore the interplay between monster science and literary or imaginary monsters, emphasizing how they represent monstrosity as central to the interpretation of nature’s diversity and creativity. Offering an in-depth survey of monster science across the period and its literary reverberations in nineteenth-century novels, We Are All Monsters interrogates the causes and meanings of monstrosities with the claim that congenital structural deformities or differences are not failures or violations of nature’s laws, but symbols of vital creativity. With this claim at the center of his work, Mangham explores how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1841), and Lucas Malet’s The History of Sir Richard Calmady (1901) engage in dialogue with the ideas developed in monster science and problematize the meanings of difference and normalcy.

TRANSCENDING THE LIMITATIONS OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY WOMEN’S DOMESTIC SPHERE AND FICTION: ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS’S CONTRIBUTION

Nineteenth-century literature written by women has traditionally been associated exclusively with the domestic space. Most upper middle-class white women of that period were similarly confined within the limits of their home environments. However, this article critically examines and questions the sometimes too hermetic interpretations of the role that the domestic realm played in the lives and literary works of nineteenth-century women writers. Specifically, it portrays how Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844-1911), instead of assuming submissively those domestic restrictions, strove to transcend them and shared her innovative initiatives with her contemporary women through her writings. To achieve this objective, this work analyses new female attitudes and the actual houses and domestic environments inhabited by Phelps and some of her female characters. It focuses on how they endeavoured to escape from these settings or to transform them into contexts that might favour their professional lives, instead of passively accepting them as inevitable obstacles to their true vocations.

Feminine Singularity: The Politics of Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Feminine Singularity: The Politics of Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Peripheral Networks: Canon-Formation in the Nineteenth-Century Reception of Regionalist Writers

ABSTRACT In many histories of nineteenth-century literature of the Low Countries, only a handful of authors are associated with emerging genres of regional fiction such as the village tale. In view of the immense popularity of regional literature, these histories overlook a large part of the literary field. This article aims to provide complementary perspectives by looking at how nineteenth-century Dutch and Flemish regional literature was framed and understood in contemporary reception, by systematically tracing all mentions of other artists and authors in reviews of selected authors. This has resulted in a ‘co-mention network’, revealing associations contemporary reviewers made between Dutch and Flemish regionalist writers and other cultural figures. This network functions as a starting point for investigating the impact of genre, gender and nationality on associations between authors, while also attending to which connections are not made, and which authors are left out of dominant narratives. Network analysis suggests that genre boundaries were fluid, and that numerous transnational authors were associated with Dutch and Flemish regionalists. At times nuancing or amending existing accounts of regionalism in literary histories, this article is also a tentative investigation of processes of canon-formation more broadly.

Lost and found in the archives: Hannah Lynch and Dimitrios Vikélas Dublin, Athens, Paris: literary crossings and collaborations

ABSTRACT This essay illuminates a late nineteenth-century literary connection between Ireland and Greece, also revealing hitherto unexplored layers of the vibrant fin-de-siècle salon cultures in Paris and related literary and artistic networks. As a transnational and interdisciplinary collaboration, the essay maps a process of archival discovery in the National Library of Greece, Athens: a significant cache of letters from Hannah Lynch, Irish New Woman, Ladies’ Land League activist, author of a truly international and diverse body of travel writing, cultural commentary and fiction, to Dimitrios Vikélas, iconic figure of nineteenth-century Greece. The discovery of Lynch’s significant textual and photographic presence in the archive amassed by Vikélas, man of letters and scholar, translator, novelist, philanthropist and founding President of the International Olympic Committee, is significant for several reasons: Lynch’s correspondence reveals further details that flesh out the biography of this marginalised writer; the letters also offer insights into the struggles of a “woman of letters” in the late nineteenth-century literary and publishing landscape, documenting where articles are published and sometimes the remuneration; finally, letters in the Vikélas archive from Lynch and those who were part of their shared Paris-centred intellectual networks foreground patronage, collaboration, friendship and underpinning salon culture.

Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History, 1645–1742

Book Review| June 12 2023 Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History, 1645–1742 Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History, 1645–1742. By Melissa Mowry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. viii + 250 pp. John Owen Havard John Owen Havard John Owen Havard is professor of English at Binghamton University. He is author of Disaffected Parties: Political Estrangement and the Making of English Literature, 1760–1830 (2019) and Late Romanticism and the End of Politics: Byron, Mary Shelley, and the Last Men (2023). His articles and essays on literature and politics have appeared in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, ELH, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the New Rambler, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and Public Books. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Modern Language Quarterly 10574873. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10574873 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation John Owen Havard; Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History, 1645–1742. Modern Language Quarterly 2023; 10574873. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10574873 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsModern Language Quarterly Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2023 by University of Washington2023 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Concerns over colour durability in the nineteenth-century industrial revolution: insights from John Ruskin’s teaching collection

The numerous new pigments that gradually became available to artists during the nineteenth-century Colour Revolution were received with contrasting attitudes. The initial enthusiasm for new chromatic possibilities was soon nuanced by concerns about the stability and performance of industrial materials. This study focuses on the work of John Ruskin, the famous art critic of Victorian England, whose artistic production was as impressive as his penmanship. Archival research into nineteenth-century literature is combined with material analyses with macro-XRF, XRD and FORS on a group of watercolours by Ruskin preserved at the Ashmolean Museum to determine his attitude towards pigment stability. The results show that he was very concerned with colour durability and chose his materials carefully, using the treatise Chromatography by the chemist George Field (first edition 1835) as guidance. The material analyses also provided new insight into the composition of specific pigments, revealing the use of a hitherto unreported cobalt-based blue.

Human Rights and Oppressed Peoples: Collected Essays and Speeches

Human Rights and Oppressed Peoples: Collected Essays and Speeches

Sámi Literature in Norwegian Language Arts Textbooks

Sámi Literature in Norwegian Language Arts Textbooks

Industrial Gothic: Workers, Exploitation and Urbanization in Transatlantic Nineteenth-Century Literature by Bridget M. Marshall (review)

Industrial Gothic: Workers, Exploitation and Urbanization in Transatlantic Nineteenth-Century Literature by Bridget M. Marshall (review)