Nineteenth-century Literature Research Articles

To Fathom His Very Roots: Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance and "Evidence" of His Literary Racial Passing

During the latter part of the long nineteenth century, actor and author Sylvester Clark "Chief Buffalo Child" Long Lance completely discarded his African American ancestry to assert a composite Native American identity. He did so in hopes of escaping anti-Black violence. His writings suggest that he believed that performing the racialized stereotype of the "noble savage" would better position him to achieve inclusion in US society, which was otherwise denied to him in his legal "colored" (read: Black) racial identity. His complex and problematic approach to his ancestry and racial identity invites scholars to critically consider how some authors simultaneously challenged yet adhered to social expectations regarding racial identification when reflecting on their personal lives and asserting their racial identities in literature. Long Lance's life and writings invite scholars to question what counts as "evidence" to prove so-called racial passing when authors or their characters reflect on certain aspects of their ancestry and racial identity. In this essay, I examine the complexities of racial passing in nineteenth and twentieth century literatures with attention to Long Lance's unique perspective of his racial identity and shows how he used literary and legal racial passing to challenge racial binarism.

Intertextual Connections in Nikolai Shchegolev’s Lyrical Poetry: Pasternak, Mayakovski, Futurists

This article analyses the poetics of Nikolai Shchegolev’s works from the point of view of the influence of the futuristic and avant-garde tradition on the artistic world of his works. The research aims to identify semantic (themes and motifs) and asemantic aspects (such as the rhythmic structure and construction peculiarities of stanzas and rhymes) of Shchegolev’s poems. These aspects resonate with such phenomena in the poems that were associated in émigré circles with the revolution and Soviet Russia’s art. There is a tendency in scholarly literature to consider the works of poets and writers of the “Eastern branch” of emigration as part of the development of nineteenth-century classical literature and as a continuation of the traditions of symbolism and Acmeism. This approach is often associated with the special position of Harbin, the Russian city in China, which has become a kind of symbol of the past, as life there was based on the model of pre-revolutionary Russia. Nevertheless, some scholars (A. A. Zabiyako, G. V. Efendiyeva, E. O. Kirillova, E. Yu. Kulikova) note the reflection and development of Harbin poets’ avant-garde experience. Nikolai Shchegolev’s works, including these aspects, remain insufficiently explored. In this work, referring to historical and literary and structural and semiotic approaches and the principles of intertextual and poetic analysis, the author turns to the study of themes, motifs, and images, as well as rhythm and strophic structures in the poetry of Nikolai Shchegolev, which makes it possible to deepen and summarise ideas about the poetics of his works. When considering individual texts, the author concludes that some themes and motifs (such as urban themes, the images of a cinematograph and a mannequin which is coming back to life, and the associated theme of oscillation between the living and the dead), as well as experiments with rhythm, strophic division, and word coinage were accepted and understood by Shchegolev through the poetry of Vladimir Mayakovski, Boris Pasternak, and the futurists.

Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Serial Novels by Dale M. Bauer

Reviewed by: Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Serial Novels by Dale M. Bauer Melissa Gniadek Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Serial Novels. By Dale M. Bauer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. xviii + 172 pp. $99.99 hardcover/$80.00 e-book. Scholars of nineteenth-century literature are accustomed to thinking about seriality as an important aspect of print culture and publishing. We recognize that individual titles often appeared in installments and that this had an impact on the pace and narrative structure of texts. In Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Serial Novels, Dale M. Bauer sets out to focus on the careers of serial novelists rather than individual texts. Reading across the work of authors who [End Page 167] were popular and prolific, writing twenty-six, thirty-nine, fifty, or more novels over their long careers, Bauer compellingly recuperates the very repetition that has marked this body of work as simple or predictable. The serial novelists that Bauer reads often used the same plot points, character types, and even some of the same language across their work, but, Bauer argues, this is not an indication of simplicity or something to be discounted. Repetition across an author’s career is not an aesthetic flaw but rather how these authors secured a reader-ship and grappled with concerns facing the nation, and women in particular, by urging a sense of shared feeling. Repetition “enables serial novelists to recur to the ongoing vulnerabilities of women in their expansive narratives,” Bauer writes (1). And it creates a sense of urgency as it repeatedly depicts female pain and suffering in US culture. Serial novels, Bauer writes, “help readers interpret American experiences of pain and recovery” through their constant return to particular dramatic plots (94). E. D. E. N. Southworth exemplifies the type of author subjected to the reading practices that Bauer identifies and revises, and she is the subject of the first chapter. Many read, teach, and write about Southworth’s novel The Hidden Hand, focusing on its entertaining and subversive cross-dressing plot without considering Southworth’s other work. Reading across Southworth’s serialized novels and acknowledging the serial nature of her career, Bauer traces patterns of “moral insanity” through her plots. Southworth “returns, again and again, to the joys of responsibilities, the temporary pain of mania and insanity, and the necessary juggling of identity to fix the gap between private desire and public duty,” Bauer writes (31). She “favored repetitions of various moral insanities because they enabled her to experiment with the narrative means for overcoming them” (31). Recognizing the patterns that characterize an author’s career as Bauer does can provide new frameworks for reading the entire body of work of an author like Southworth, but it can also lead us to revisit a now-well-known novel like The Hidden Hand and to approach it in new ways with these patterns in mind. In chapters devoted to the less-well-known serial authors Ann Stephens, Mary Jane Holmes, and Laura Jean Libbey, Bauer similarly reveals how recurrent plots of family dramas, secret marriages and adoptions, brain fevers and brain surgeries, prisons, and work register what US culture, and women in particular, “feared and felt” across the decades when these authors were active (133). According to Bauer, “The accumulation of novels within these writers’ careers . . . produces a broader encounter with US culture than any single serial novel reveals, though each serial novel contributes its version to the whole of a writer’s array of novels” (133). Bauer goes even further than acknowledging the collective cultural work of these texts as they constantly return to traumas [End Page 168] even as they envision new possibilities, however. She also considers how the recursive serial structures of these authors’ careers keep readers coming back for more in a way that is about financial success for the authors (as Bauer notes, “repetition paid”), as well as the promise of transformation and change for readers (1). Individual serial installments or individual novels offer the pleasures of narrative closure as tensions are resolved, identities are revealed, families are reunited, or women are absorbed back into domestic certainty. But these resolutions are only temporary. An installment or novel concludes...

Image of a Russian Professor in Stanislav Rakъs’s The Eccentric University

This article focuses on the image of the Russian professors in The Eccentric University (2008), a novel by Stanislav Rakús. Based on previous research, the author presents a short survey of Russian images in Slovak Literature in the late nineteenth — early twentieth-first centuries, whose peculiarities are rooted in the history of interaction between the two Slavic nations. Thus, the early twentieth century idealistic image of the Russian was built on the basis of Russian literature. The first images of Russians based on personal experience were created by Czechoslovak legionnaires as a result of interaction with Russians between 1917 and 1920, while after World War II, they were presented through a dichotomy “brother — suppressor”, to be changed into more dynamic ones by the early twenty-first century. The Eccentric University, which the author approaches from the perspective of the academic novel and part of Rakъs’s academic trilogy, enlarges the list of literary images of the Russians in Slovak literature. The author analyses images of Maria Petrovna Golovčikova, a female professor of Russian nineteenth-century literature, and Alexandr Kirillovič Ћuprej, a professor of Russian literature, both immigrant scholars at a Slovak university in the 1950s. The author maintains that through these images, Rakъs addresses not only Slovak Russophilic stereotypes historically embedded in nineteenth-century literary images of Russians, but also gender and immigrant stereotypes that circulate in contemporary Slovak culture. The author concludes that an ironic portrayal of Russian professors is directed at the cultural memory activation, which together with other features typical for both campus and academic novel adds to the new (Rakús’s) invariant of the “university novel”.

Chantal Akerman: Afterlives ed. by Marion Schmid and Emma Wilson

Reviewed by: Chantal Akerman: Afterlives ed. by Marion Schmid and Emma Wilson Tessa Nunn Schmid, Marion. Emma Wilson, eds. Chantal Akerman: Afterlives. Legenda, 2019. ISBN 978-1-781886-39-7. Pp. 170. The thirteen essays constituting this edited collection offer diverse perspectives on the creative works and legacy of the Belgian film director, author, and installation artist Chantal Akerman. Her approaches to creating art as the child of a Holocaust survivor and representing mother-daughter relationships are recurrent themes throughout the diverse chapters. Unlike most studies on Akerman that focus predominately on her innovative films of the 1970s and 1980s, this book, centered on representations of identity and memory, gives more attention to her later films, installations, and literary productions. Instead of emphasizing her novel methods of filming women, the authors explore the multifaceted ways in which Akerman's works grapple with traces of the past, empathetic observation, and the representation of what is invisible or unspeakable. Her films and texts thus transmit secrets, traditions, or anxiety. According to Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Akerman's portrayals of Jewish identity seek to express an ineffable absence through the theme of non-belonging. Hilde D'Haeyere and Steven Jacobs explain how Akerman drew from American slapstick to create Demain on déménage (2004), a comedy haunted by memories of the Holocaust and exile. Comparing Akerman's films to Alain Resnais's Nuit et brouillard and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, Anat Zanger shows how Akerman represents processes of remembering and forgetting through thresholds, material objects, personal writing, and anxious gazes. Analyzing temporality and collective memory, the authors nuance the role of Akerman's mother Natalia in the director's depictions of mother daughter-relationships. For Jenny Chamarette, Akerman's films rethink the passage of time in a way that refuses aging by creating a genealogy of interchangeable female figures. Several chapters reflect on the director's polymorphic representations of pleasure and [End Page 274] sexuality. Alice Blackhurst demonstrates how Akerman represents mothers engaging in the ritual of smoking to see themselves independent of maternity, connect with the sensory world, and take pleasure in not having to explain themselves. Investigating how Akerman's films and installations allow for empathetic viewing, So Mayer draws from Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology to scrutinize cinematic attempts to document racial hate and question definitions of human rights. Essays by Albertine Fox, Adam Roberts, and Cyril Béghin study the ethics of the formal choices in Akerman's work with regard to gestures of listening, silence made visible, the musicality of her films, and her dramaturgical uses of light. Emma Wilson and Marion Schmid present Akerman as both a reader and a writer in her literary productions and cinematic adaptations. Refusing to negate the artist's lived experience and position within a global collective memory, this book provides methods of understanding cinema and art in relation to the creator's personal history, particularly with regards to familial memories of trauma. The diverse theoretical frameworks utilized in the essays allow for interdisciplinary discussions of Akerman's oeuvre and propose new approaches for film studies. Elegantly written, this publication will interest scholars of European cinema, documentaries, multimedia art, cinematic adaptations of nineteenth-century literature, cultural memory, and the Holocaust. Tessa Nunn Duke University (NC) Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French

Nature, Women, and Animals: Louisa May Alcott's Environmental Imagination

Abstract Modern scholarship has documented the ways in which many nineteenth-century American writers have addressed environmental issues in their works. This essay intervenes in discussions regarding the depiction of nature in nineteenth-century American literature through an examination of Louisa May Alcott's short fiction. It focuses on Alcott's “A Whisper in the Dark” (1863) and “V.V., or Plots and Counterplots” (1865), exploring the ways in which the environment is represented. This analysis exhibits Alcott's insightful awareness of the immense and drastic environmental changes occurring in early nineteenth-century America while simultaneously registering Alcott's optimism about human beings nurturing a sustained relationship with the nonhuman world. The several instances of “environmental evocations” in Alcott's short stories indicate in Alcott an environmentally-attuned sensibility whose scope has been largely neglected.

Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature: Untimely Meditations in Britain, France, and America, by Ben Carver

Reviewed by: Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature: Untimely Meditations in Britain, France, and America by Ben Carver Christopher Ferguson (bio) Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature: Untimely Meditations in Britain, France, and America, by Ben Carver; pp. xviii + 292. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, £79.99, $109.99. In Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature: Untimely Meditations in Britain, France, and America, Ben Carver describes his book as a study of the “nineteenth-century imagination of worlds that history might have produced” (1). Specifically, he analyzes the writing of “alternate histories” and identifies the wider contexts that produced them. Carver defines “alternate histories” as literary works wherein an author identifies a single point of historical divergence (example: Napoleon’s decision to begin his retreat from Moscow in September rather than October of 1812) and from this point imagines all subsequent history evolving in a new direction as a result of this change. (By leaving Russia earlier, the Grande Armée avoids decimation by the Russian winter, and Napoleon remains undefeated and rules over a massive French empire until his death from old age.) Carver contends that a wide variety of nineteenth-century authors—including British journalists, French philosophers, and American housewives—engaged in imaginative rewritings of history not only in order to imagine alternate “forms of society” or “the history of nations that might have followed,” but also as a means of “working with and often testing ideas about cycles of cause and effect that had produced the world they lived in” (5). Nineteenth-century alternate histories thus represented an important medium that allowed reflection on how new forms of knowledge, such as archaeology, astronomy, or the natural sciences, “altered the understanding of the past” (1). Carver’s book is one of several recent works interested in analyzing the production, content, and meaning of fictional histories, with Catherine Gallagher’s Telling It Like It Wasn’t: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction (2018) being the most notable among them. Indeed, it is difficult to assess Carver’s study without comparing it with Gallagher’s, and Carver himself notes some important affinities between their [End Page 688] two studies. This includes their shared preference for the phrase “alternate history” as opposed to “alternative history,” the first strictly referencing “a narrative set of circumstances that history might have produced” while the second also potentially encompassing nonfictional accounts which “offer marginal perspectives normally excluded from histories of a subject” (11). Carver’s definition of what constitutes an “alternate history,” however, is more fluid and inclusive. While Gallagher draws clear distinctions between “alternate histories,” “alternate history novels,” and “counterfactual histories” on the basis of both their formal elements and contents (Gallagher, Telling It Like It Wasn’t: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction [The University of Chicago Press, 2018], 5), Carver argues that the “boundaries between alternate and counterfactual histories are hard to establish.” Such distinctions, he contends, are “anachronistic” to the study of nineteenth-century “historical imaginaries” because none of these styles had “solidified into a form that [contemporary] writers and readers were conscious of” (12). Despite these differences of definition, Carver and Gallagher analyze many of the same works, including Louis Geoffrey-Château’s Napoléon et la conquête du monde [Napoleon and the Conquest of the World] (1836), Charles Renouvier’s Uchronie [Uchronia] (1857), Auguste Blanqui’s L’éternité par les astres [Eternity According to the Stars] (1872), Edward Everett Hale’s Hands Off (1895), and Edmund Lawrence’s It May Happen Yet: A Tale of Bonaparte’s Invasion of England (1899). These varied works are united not only by their presentation of fictional histories but also by their relative obscurity and the rarity with which they have been utilized by other scholars; the same might be noted about most of the other texts Carver examines, including Richard Whately’s Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Buonaparte (1819), Benjamin Disraeli’s early novel The Wondrous Tale of Alroy (1833), an essay on astronomy and the plurality of worlds by Thomas De Quincey (“System of the Heavens As Revealed by Lord Rosse’s Telescopes” [1846]), and Mary E. Bradley Lane’s feminist utopia Mizora: A Prophecy...

Helga Crane’s camera obscura: Nella Larsen, Garbo’s face, and the modernist longing for plot

ABSTRACT Through an examination of Nella Larsen’s repeated viewings of George Cukor’s 1936 film Camille, this paper argues that we must understand modernism’s troubling of realist Bildung within the context of the classical Hollywood cinema and its invocations of nineteenth-century literature. Starring Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor, Camille is based on the stage adaptation of Alexandre Dumas fils’s The Lady of the Camellias (1848), a novel critical of the Balzacian Bildungsroman, predicating the self-possessing, bourgeois individualism of its protagonist Armand Duval on the expulsion of the consumptive courtesan Marguerite Gautier. Cukor’s Camille, to the contrary, integrates Marguerite, through the legerdemain of classical Hollywood style, into a bourgeois liberal plot of social arrival and self-becoming. Larsen’s fascination with Cukor’s Camille offers a new way to read her first novel Quicksand (1928), not as a rejection of novelistic plot and its racialized promises of social belonging, but as a deeply vexed and ambivalent longing for it. Building on the speculative turn in the historiography of Black literature, film, and cinematic spectatorship–as well as recent work in asynchronic literary historiography–this essay suggests that it may have been a complicated form of desire and longing that brought Larsen again and again to Camille, since she would have been primed to detect the remarkable ease with which the film stylises out of existence the skepticism about Bildung that animated Dumas fils’s novel, and the resolute impossibility of Bildung that her own Quicksand so systematically laments.

From Maternal Impressions to Eugenics: Pregnancy and Inheritance in the Nineteenth-Century U.S.

This essay examines the theory of maternal impressions, the belief that a woman's experiences or emotions during pregnancy could explain congenital disability or emotional/ behavior differences in her child and asks why this theory circulated as an explanation for disability seen at birth by both medical doctors and in literature for far longer than it did across the Atlantic. By presenting examples from nineteenth-century medical literature, popular fiction, maternal handbooks, and two canonical works of literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave, I argue that maternal impressions worked to maintain anxiety for women, and particular white women, to ensure they felt responsible if anything was "wrong" with their child. Ultimately, I show how maternal impressions was both an ableist and racialized understanding of inheritance that wouldn't be discarded until the emergence of eugenics in the early twentieth century.

Neuerscheinungen zu Nietzsches Ästhetik

Abstract Content and formal structures are inextricably linked in Nietzsche’s texts. Formal qualities convey meaning, for example, by indicating whether an expressed thought should be understood as an assertion, or rather subverted and ultimately negated. The following recent publications explore intermediality and performativity in Nietzsche’s language from different perspectives. Federico Celestini and Rüdiger Görner each examine the musicality of Nietzsche’s language against the grain of the common assumption of the language-like character of music. However, the two authors arrive at different conclusions about the correspondence between language and music in Nietzsche’s work. A volume edited by Christian Benne and Dieter Burdorf draws connections between Nietzsche and the philologist Rudolf Borchardt in terms of their concept of language. While Nietzsche and Borchardt exhibit parallels with regard to language skepticism and the self-creative process of writing, they fundamentally disagree in their conception of art. Finally, Diemo Landgraf sees Nietzsche’s work as the culmination of nineteenth-century decadent literature, grounding his critique of Nietzsche’s unique approach, which arises out of a music philosophical perspective, by labelling it as nihilistic.

Shiny Black and Layers of White: Japanned Papier Mâché, Race and the British Empire

Abstract Race, class and empire in nineteenth-century England inflected understandings of japanned papier mâché, influencing both its brief popularity and its abrupt demise in the 1860s. Although the material was rarely used as an explicit signifier in nineteenth-century literature or theory, or indeed mentioned at all, its inclusion in the Great Exhibition suggests its cultural and industrial centrality. This article proposes that this disparity results not from an absence of meaning, but from too great a complexity and too clear a set of implications. As an imitation of an East Asian form, japanned papier mâché represented an Orientalizing fantasy; as a shiny black surface, japanned papier mâché tapped into both desires and anxieties surrounding racial Blackness; as a backdrop for depictions of recognizably British landscapes and architecture; and as a distinctively British industry, japanned papier mâché offered a kind of national identity-fashioning. Tying a ubiquitous but understudied material of the English mid-nineteenth century to broader histories of the British empire, this article demonstrates the tidy encapsulation of the fraught and complex 1850s and 1860s into the materiality, forms and failure of japanned papier mâché.

Nineteenth Century Literary Society: The John Murray Publishing Archive

Nineteenth Century Literary Society is drawn from archive of the House of John Murray publishing company, held by the National Library of Scotland. The family-run firm, with Scottish roots, spanned seven generations and flourished in London from 1768 until 2002. John Murray is especially remarkable for publishing seminal English-language works of the 19th century, including those by Charles Darwin, David Livingstone, Charles Lyell, and Samuel Smiles, the father of self-help. The largest collection of Lord Byron’s private writings and manuscripts, assembled by the publisher, form a large part of the resource. Women writers feature prominently in the John Murray’s collection, including Jane Austen, Isabella Bird, Elizabeth Eastlake, and Caroline Lamb.

Avtorske pravice v češki literaturi na prelomu 19. in 20. stoletja: Jiráskov spor za Pasjeglavce

Razprava obravnava teoretske in zgodovinske vidike avtorskega prava v obdobju Habsburške monarhije na primeru nedovoljene gledališke priredbe romana Aloisa Jiráska Pasjeglavci (Psohlavci), ki jo je 1899 pod naslovom Jan Sladký Kozina napisal in uprizoril Jan Baptist Kühnl (1849–1904), dramatik, prevajalec in eden prvih plagiatorjev v zgodovini češke književnosti. Leta 1899 je Jirásek dobil tožbo proti nezakoniti uprizoritvi na podlagi cesarskega zakona št. 197/1895 o zaščiti avtorskih pravic za literarna, umetniška in fotografska dela, ki je nadgradil cesarski patent iz leta 1846 (nekatere formulacije v njem so prešle v avtorsko pravo neodvisne Češkoslovaške). Toda leta 1920 sta Kühnlovi vdova Marie in hči Marie Luisa igro izdali v knjižni obliki, pri čemer sta besedilo iz leta 1899 le jezikovno posodobili. Jirásek je l. 1921 dobil še eno tožbo proti plagiatorstvu, ki kaže na pomen avtorskih pravic kot manifestacije duhovne, nesnovne lastnine, ki jo je treba pravno zaščititi, z literarnega vidika pa demonstrira primer plagiata kot neinventivne imitacije, ki si izposoja »celotno zgradbo, romaneskno zgodbo in posamezne sestavine« literarnega dela.

Letter from the Editors

Editorial| July 01 2020 Letter from the Editors Resources for American Literary Study (2020) 42 (2): v–vi. https://doi.org/10.5325/resoamerlitestud.42.2.v Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Letter from the Editors. Resources for American Literary Study 1 July 2020; 42 (2): v–vi. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/resoamerlitestud.42.2.v 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 All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressResources for American Literary Study Search Advanced Search Issue 42.2 of Resources for American Literary Study features exciting new developments for the study of early and nineteenth-century literature. First in the issue is Stephanie Palmer's “Prospects for the Study of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman,” which takes us beyond the Freeman recovery work of the 1980s and 1990s to highlight twenty-first-century discoveries of previously little-known Freeman fiction and new scholarship presenting Gothic, naturalist, ecocritical, feminist-materialist, and queer-theory approaches. Palmer spotlights intriguing possibilities for future Freeman studies, where new attention to race, transnational contexts, aesthetics, and style will further enrich our understandings of Freeman's multifaceted writings.A multipart collaborative forum entitled “Reimagining Early American Literature” next details a new digital resource and illustrates its application as scholars reenvision the early American literary canon. Abram Van Engen's introduction to the forum offers an overview of Exploring Anthologies of Early American Literature, a searchable database with a compendium of information on... You do not currently have access to this content.

Drugs and the Addiction Aesthetic in Nineteenth-Century Literature, by Adam Colman

Reviewed by: Drugs and the Addiction Aesthetic in Nineteenth-Century Literature by Adam Colman Mike Jay (bio) Drugs and the Addiction Aesthetic in Nineteenth-Century Literature, by Adam Colman; pp. vii + 209. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, €72.79, $84.99, £59.99. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the term drugs referred to any medicine one might buy in a pharmacy, and the term addiction to the habitual enjoyment of any pleasure, often edifying ones such as reading or long walks. By the century's end, both terms had taken on their modern senses, more specialized and more censorious. This transition usually is described in medical terms, as involving the arrival of newly potent substances such as morphine and cocaine and methods of administration such as the hypodermic needle; the pathology of so-called morbid craving developed by clinicians from the 1870s onward; and the procession of statutory controls, beginning with the 1868 Pharmacy Act, that created a medico-legal category of the drug addict. Adam Colman proposes an alternative view: the development across the same period of an "addiction aesthetic" through which similar preoccupations were explored from a literary perspective. Colman defines the "addiction aesthetic" as a "repetitive, experimental" process that constantly "drives towards possible understanding" while never satisfying the desire that underpins it (17). It is a mode of scientific investigation, but equally of literary experiment, a hybrid form associated with the Brunonian theories of the maverick Edinburgh doctor John Brown (1736–88), who held that the body's energies can be stimulated or exhausted by the intellect and the imagination just as they can be by drugs. Brunonian theory was influential for many of the writers Colman examines, and Brown's ideas were recapitulated in cultural debates about the "literary addiction" of the Romantic era and the enervating thrills of late- Victorian sensationalism (168). Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an avid reader of Brown, is identified in this scheme as a pivotal figure in the transition from the digressive, picaresque eighteenth-century mode of literary exploration to more focused, iterative approaches that advertised the kinship between literature and science. Percy Shelley's interest in the formative power of habits, both medical and intellectual, is reflected in the patternings and recurrences that structure The Cenci (1819). Thomas De Quincey literalized these metaphors by writing directly about his drug habit and connecting it explicitly to his aesthetic patterning, framing his discovery of the self through opium as an obsessive pursuit that he compared to the labyrinths and cul-de-sacs of Giovanni Battista Piranesi's prison drawings. De Quincey was explicit, too, in presenting his work to the reader as a form of scientific investigation in which the experimental method was expanded to include memories, dreams, and visions. By mid-century, addictive drugs commonly were deployed as subject matter for literary meditations on consumption, temptation, and desire. Colman reads Alfred Tennyson's The Lotos-Eaters (1832) as a cautionary fable of opium addiction, whereby habituation to the drug is driven home with linguistic repetitions, though it could be interpreted equally as a nostalgic plea for rustic simplicity and refusal of the obsessive pursuits of the addiction aesthetic. Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market (1862) is less ambiguous in using the goblins' wares as a parable of uncontrolled consumption, reinforced by incantatory repetitions, as when Laura "sucked and sucked and sucked the more" in a doomed effort to quench her desire (127). Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852–53), which was informed by his reading of Robert Macnish's study The Anatomy of Drunkenness (1827), develops the addiction aesthetic [End Page 343] through the form of the detective's quest, an iterative series of attempts to unlock the narrative's mystery. Many of the novel's characters and themes resonate with Macnish's theories, most obviously the endless lawsuit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a repetitive pursuit that continues until it has exhausted all available resources. The sensation novel, when it emerged in the second half of the century, often used drug addiction and the pursuit of knowledge as metaphors for one another. In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Robert Louis Stevenson sets Dr. Jekyll and his potion...

Dickens's nightmare: dreams, memory and trauma.

This article considers the role of stress in nineteenth-century literature and culture as both a catalyst for, and a symptom of, troubled sleep. Taking the figure of Charles Dickens as my principal case study, I investigate Dickens's fictional and non-fictional explorations of sleep as a space and time where traumatic memories might be relived and repeated, where grief and longing might be articulated, and, finally, where guilt and loss may give rise to sentimental visions of possible future reunions. The model of stress depicted here is that resulting from trauma, which manifests in later life as a psychological disturbance affecting sleep. For Dickens, I will argue, the state of the mind as it was emerging from sleep was fundamentally associated with human mortality and fragility, and it facilitated the possibility of crossing between different temporalities and states of being, while positing a kind of threshold to the past, the future and the dead.

Review: Intransitive Encounter: Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange, by Nan Z. Da

Book Review| March 31 2020 Review: Intransitive Encounter: Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange, by Nan Z. Da Nan Z. Da, Intransitive Encounter: Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. Pp. x + 294. $65. Caroline Frank Caroline Frank Brown University Caroline Frank, a Visiting Scholar in the Department of American Studies at Brown University, is the author of Objectifying China, Imaging America: Chinese Commodities in Early America (2011). In progress is a book project tentatively titled “Agents of God, Agents of Men: Cross-Cultural Intimacies in the Early American China Trade.” Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Literature (2020) 74 (4): 543–547. https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2020.74.4.543 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Caroline Frank; Review: Intransitive Encounter: Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange, by Nan Z. Da. Nineteenth-Century Literature 31 March 2020; 74 (4): 543–547. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2020.74.4.543 Download citation file: Ris (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 All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The Regents of the University of California2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Teaching with Digital Humanities: Tools and Methods for Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Edited by Jennifer Travis and Jessica Despain

<i>Teaching with Digital Humanities: Tools and Methods for Nineteenth-Century American Literature</i>. Edited by Jennifer Travis and Jessica Despain

THE ELEMENTS OF TRADİTİON AND MODERNİSM İN NİNETEENTH CENTURY AZERBAİJANİ LİTERATURE: EAST - WEST THOUGHT AND RELİGİOUS-MYTHOLOGİCAL MOTİVES

The literary orientation based on common principles is determined on the same cultural, ethical and aesthetic traditions, the same outlook, philosophy of life, related principles of creativity and the unified social, cultural and historical environment. Public and political views also usually act as a powerful driving force. The nineteenth century literature is one of the stages distinguished with ideological and aesthetic achievements of the Azerbaijani literary culture which has rich history. Emerging as a reflection of new historical conditions, this literature attracts attention as an original and peculiar phenomenon because of its literary and poetic qualities. Literature that reflects the world through literary paints depending on the angle of view, approach, ethno-cultural thinking, is also of interest as the product of its formation era and environment. As fiction or poetic literature reflects life, it is important to understand the reflection of the social, socio-historical processes, to “catch the pulse" of life, and to address worldwide problems that are relevant for all periods. The writer's social life, social activities, and communication circle sometimes play a decisive role in issues such as being more aware of problems and finding ways to solve them. Azerbaijani literature which has historically been at different stages of development, has not only gained new qualities, but also has been able to preserve the existing tradition, influenced by different literary trends and different socio-cultural processes.

H. G. Wells and the Fin-de-Siècle Gustatory Paradox

Abstract Beginning with a little-studied scene linking H. G. Wells’s ‘A Misunderstood Artist’ to Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À Rebours, this essay argues that a shared gustatory paradox runs from Huysmanian decadence, through the theories of Edwin Lankester and Max Nordau and into Wells’s writings. In each case, both a pragmatic and an aesthetic relationship to food can signify degeneration. The argument has three major stakes. The first is to reconstruct a robust intertextual relation between the oeuvres of Huysmans and Wells. The second is to complicate readings that cast two of Wells’s scientific romances, The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, as mouthpieces for imperialist or (pseudo)scientific discourses (Anger, Brantlinger, Budd, Gailor, Gregory, Hendershot, Pick). The third is to build on recent studies of food representation in nineteenth-century literature and propose a novel interpretive method (Cozzi, Gyman, Lee). Taking up William Greenslade’s proposal that fictions construct a ‘network of resistances’ to discursive myths, I argue that gustatory scenes show Wells’s ‘network’ operating in a curious way. They neither kowtow to degeneration nor assume Greenslade’s active role of a ‘critical, combative humanist’. Instead, they give contradictory depictions of moralized eating that play out the myth’s structural paradox.