Nineteenth-century Novels Research Articles

Was Shaw a Victorian? We Need to Ask Another Question

ABSTRACT Shaw scholars have long hesitated to label Shaw a Victorian writer. Although almost half of his life overlapped Queen Victoria’s reign, Shaw’s challenges to nineteenth-century morals and mores tend to mark him as an outlier. This article advocates a fresh approach: perhaps we have been taking the “Victorian” question too literally. Postmodern critics have long urged us to look for diverse and contradictory elements in literary works that seem to be staid and classical. In this article, the author looks for commonalities between Shaw’s Getting Married and three nineteenth-century novels (Eight Cousins, Great Expectations, and Jane Eyre). Do theatrical strategies and fictional writing techniques ever change places? Do the characters in Victorian novels ever explore Shavian ideas? And can we use those commonalities to rethink some of our assumptions about the Victorian era?

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.

“How nicely you talk; I love to hear you”

“‘How nicely you talk; I love to hear you’: Speech as Cultural Capital in Emma, Middlemarch, and The Portrait of a Lady” (pp. 286–315) In this essay, I examine how, in Emma, Middlemarch, and The Portrait of a Lady, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Henry James craft heroines who unite a precarious relationship to the British gentry with a talent for conversation. I argue that, through this glorification of their heroines’ eloquence, Austen, Eliot, and James align this socioeconomic positionality—what I term “precarious affluence” or “gentry-adjacence”—with novelistic protagonicity. Through this analysis, I study the differing degrees to which these three major nineteenth-century novelists use their smooth-talking heroines to imagine an emerging, alternative elite to the gentry and the aristocratic upper classes. Ultimately, the article suggests that, as the nineteenth century progresses, Eliot and James begin to give increasing credence to the possibility that a monied class distinct from the aristocracy and gentry could offer unique powers and freedoms to its members.

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.

Conrad, Lawrence, and the Sabotage and Salvage of Genre

Abstract This article considers Joseph Conrad's Nostromo and D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love as modernist reworkings of the industrial novels of the mid-nineteenth century, such as Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton and Charles Dickens's Hard Times. Conrad and Lawrence, the article argues, rework the industrial-novel genre as a way to figure a crisis of British culture—and of the novel as a form. In the era of British imperial decline, the apparent massification and globalization of modern Western culture, and revolutionary changes in gender relations and family life, the synoptic historical narratives of Nostromo and Women in Love describe the transformation of the earlier promise of development into an apocalyptic present, and, in turn, the dissolution of the progressive assurance of the realist novel. While the nineteenth-century novels plead for reform and paternalistic care to moderate but protect the free market and liberalism, Nostromo and Women in Love narrate precisely the historical fulfillment of this wish—but, then, in turn, also narrate the end of that reformist logic and the triumph of a fully globalized and “perfected” capitalism, which they characterize as worse than the free-market capitalism that the earlier novels both criticize and celebrate. Drawing on Marxist-feminist theories of “social reproduction,” the article describes especially how the modernist novels imagine the family as a machine for maintaining and servicing capitalist production: the regeneration of the family—a trope so important to the resolution of plot in the realist novel—is now a sign of decay instead of resilience.

“I didn’t know there were so many kinds of people and so many sorts of provincialism in the world’’: Tracking Provincialism Through the Nineteenth-Century Corpus

Abstract Beginning with a full text search for the term ‘provincialism’ across all entries in the OED Online, this article tracks ‘provincialism’ through the digitized fiction of the nineteenth century, eavesdropping on the ways in which the term was used in a dataset of references drawn from 165 nineteenth-century novels brought together from the British Library 19th Century Collection and the Hathi Trust Digital Library. The focus is not on a close reading of a small number of novels, a novel subgenre, or iterations of a single novel, but on a close reading of multiple short, references to the term ‘provincialism’ drawn from a large number of nineteenth-century digitized novels. Attention is concentrated on the textually small, the fleeting yet potent uses of the term deployed by nineteenth-century novelists writing in a mass cultural medium with a local and global reach. The findings offer up a relational and multidimensional picture of the term aggregated from the textually small, as it plays out in relation to class, gender, the city, the four nations of the UK, the British Empire and the wider world.

Our Lives in Literature

ABSTRACT The article traces the evolution of literary theory, beginning in the 1970s when it moved away from the New Criticism that saw the text as removed from the life of its readers toward Reader-Response Theory, where readers are encouraged to see themselves in what they read. I argue that this theory of reading leads to an awareness of how literature helps us fashion a coherent self. I use three examples – the Bible, Shakespeare, and certain nineteenth-century novels – to argue that great literature is great because it gives us the material we need to do this well.

„Wspomnienia wygnanki” Pauliny Krakowowej – powieść dla dziewcząt i pierwsza polska „robinsonada”

The aim of this dissertation is to present the forgotten novel Wspomnienia wygnanki from 1844 by Paulina Krakowowa. The author draws attention to its readability and literary values, which made it a bestseller in the 19th century. The dissertation also offers an analysis and interpretation of Wspomnieniawygnanki in the context of nineteenth-century novels for girls, as well as in the context of adventure novels, the so-called “robinsonada”. This is because Krakowowa’s novel is saturated with sensational, adventure and travel themes. Therefore, it should be placed within and outside the circle of nineteenth-century novels for girls. Wspomnienia wygnanki is an innovative novel,going beyond the usual conventions of moral prose and novels of manners towards an adventure novel (“robinsonade”), which, in the nineteenth century, was reserved almost exclusively for boys.

Metafiction as Reality Effect: Trollope's Quixotism and Novel Theory

Critics agree that Don Quixote helped originate realism, but its influence on nineteenth-century novels has been widely misunderstood. Realist Quixotism, usually assumed to oppose book and world, in fact models a dynamic imbrication of fictionality and reality. Thus, it helps bridge the normative and utopian functions of literary realism. This concept of realism is both exemplified and theorized by Anthony Trollope's novels, which insist on the mutual construction of literary and social convention. Their metaleptic narration, Victorian marriage plots, and use of the everyday illustrate how metafictionality, counterintuitively, can help construct a sense of the realistic.

:The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons

:<i>The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons</i>

‘Going home when it was not home’: Jamais Vu in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

Abstract ‘Jamais vu’ is a strange mnemonic disturbance that we continue to experience today, though few of us know what to call it. French for ‘never seen,’ jamais vu is the opposite of déjà vu (‘already seen’), and is defined as the temporary inability to recognize familiar things, people, and/or contexts. This essay comprises, to my knowledge, the first literary history of jamais vu. I begin by describing the complex features of this mnemonic disturbance, and uncovering its lost Victorian scientific archive. Though jamais vu went without a name until the 1920s, I also find it hiding in plain sight in nineteenth-century novels as early as Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, as well as in the work of Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell. From here, I follow jamais vu’s trajectory from realist accounts of everyday life into mid-century representations of the haunted house, where it becomes something more than a mnemonic disturbance. By attending to literary representations of jamais vu avant la lettre, I demonstrate its importance not just as a lost Victorian scientific concept, but also as a rich interdisciplinary category that is of great interest to scholars of the nineteenth century and beyond. Specifically, I show that jamais vu was integral to the development and popularity of the Victorian gothic, through which movement it exceeded its status as a mnemonic disturbance, re-emerging as a pervasive modern affect that we have inherited from the Victorians.

Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination by Leila Neti

Reviewed by: Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination by Leila Neti Lucky Issar (bio) Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination by Leila Neti; pp. 302. Cambridge UP, 2021. $114.95 cloth. Indian resentment toward British colonial rule began to manifest in India in the middle of the nineteenth century, most notably with the 1857 mutiny by Indian soldiers, which spread across northern India. Following the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre in 1919 in which British soldiers fired on peaceful protesters, killing more than one thousand people including women and children, most Indians of all persuasions became fiercely [End Page 136] opposed to British rule. The poet Rabindranath Tagore returned his knighthood in protest. Anyone who questioned British rule was imprisoned on flimsy charges. However, there was not a time when Indian people did not in some form resist the British presence in India, and there was not a time when the British, especially as they became stronger, did not use anti-Indian narratives as well as military and legal means to strengthen their position, a strategy central to the colonial policies that Leila Neti examines in Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination. Examining three important legal cases that came before the highest court in colonial India along with the works of prominent Victorian authors such as Charles Dickens, Philip Meadows Taylor, Wilkie Collins, and George Eliot, Neti's book focuses on how British laws and literary narratives worked in tandem to produce Indian subjects who were incapable of governing themselves, thus justifying continued British rule in India. The discourse on "thuggee" or "thugs" played a key role in enacting strict laws. The presence of thugs was not wholly a British fantasy, but the British exaggerated their numbers. Reading nineteenth-century literature and court cases, Neti demonstrates the tremendous energy the British put into creating the figure of the thug, essentially conflating it with all Indians. Not only did they use anti-thuggee laws to implement force against all those who acted against their interests; the British also convinced themselves of their superiority by constituting the inferior Indian, which legitimized their presence and gave them a reason to criminalize subcultures they did not understand. In addition to negative literary representations of Indians, the legal opinions of British lawmakers not only revealed what they thought about Indians but also exposed "their ability to reach back in time and reframe 'tradition' in order to influence how Indians would come to think of themselves" (20). The British also propagated the notion that thugs were motivated by biological reasons rather than political ones, a claim central to British popular and legal representations. In court proceedings, while the British courts claimed to be fair toward all, they handled Indian and British subjects differently. Moreover, at the same time that prison reforms were recommended in England, new harsher laws were introduced in India. Neti points out that this tendency of disparate treatment was also evident in literature. When dealing with English criminals, British authors narrated them in a way that ultimately rehabilitated them in society, whereas the treatment given to Indian criminals further augmented the nature of their criminality, emphasizing their inability to reform themselves, thus reinforcing the idea that Indians were not only incapable of governing themselves but were also innately corrupt. An important aspect of the book is its examination of nineteenth-century novels and legal cases to reveal how law and literary narratives emerged to produce knowledge that damaged Indians while strengthening colonial rule. [End Page 137] Through a major focus on Begum Sumroo, the ruler of Sardhana principality, and the case of her grandson, David Dyse, the book exposes British duplicity, but it also shows, by default, that British legal systems were not entirely to be summarily dismissed. The British authorities could have confiscated Begum Sumroo's properties, yet they were following legal procedures and were not completely fraudulent. Much later, Dyse too encountered property-related issues with the British. The court in English declared him insane, and although he later obtained a certificate in France attesting his sanity, the British court did not overturn its ruling. The British handling seemed dubious, but it could also be that...

"Ett löfte om lycka"

In this essay, I explore an innovative theme in the interfaces between theology, gender studies, aesthetic theory, and literary studies. More specifically, my aim is to shed light on fundamental theological conflicts underlying the immensely complex subject of the elevated status of "the beautiful woman" as image and idea in Western society. This will be implemented through a close reading of the influential short story of French nineteenth-century novelist Honoré de Balzac, Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu (The Unknown Masterpiece), from 1831. By virtue of this theologically informed reading, important facets of modern Western society's fantasy of the beautiful woman come to the fore. The essay discloses how this fantasy has far-reaching tentacles and ramifications, by which the beautiful female becomes identified with beauty per se, with art, nature, the divine, and even with life itself. Balzac's short story presents the reader with a strong statement of the scopophilic tendency of Western visual arts, but in its final peripeteia it also provides us with the tools to bring forth a contrary reading, and a direct confrontation with the traditional understanding of the task of the painter.

Annette R. Federico. My Victorian Novel: Critical Essays in the Personal Voice.

Annette R. Federico. <i>My Victorian Novel: Critical Essays in the Personal Voice.</i>

Melville's Quixoticism and the Modern World-System

Melville's Quixoticism and the Modern World-System

Parent-Child Resemblance in Literature Before the Age of Genetics: A Physiognomic Interpretation of the Novels of Zsigmond Kemény and Miklós Jósika

Although Zsigmond Kemény (1814-1875) and Miklós Jósika (1794-1865) inevitably figure among the most significant writers of nineteenth-century Hungarian literature, the interpretation of their novels is embedded within international historical contexts that are often inaccessible to the present-day reader. This study examines the physiognomic meanings of parent-child similarity in nineteenth-century novels and thus situates the examined works within the context of European literary and intellectual history. Such an interpretation of the novels reveals the diverse and strong current in the history of European ideas with which the analyzed texts engage in a lively dialogue.

Of Cosmetic Value Only: Make-Up and Terrible Old Ladies in Victorian Literature

By looking at the figure of the painted older woman in nineteenth-century novels, this article examines how changing attitudes to cosmetics punished ageing women who clung to the make-up of their youth. As a warning against such continued practices, Catherine Gore’s ageing Lady Ormington demonstrates how devotion to make-up cannot hold back the signs of ageing. In a similar manner, Dickens’s Mrs Skewton shows how Georgian make-up, her ageing features, and her corrupt personality are equally contaminative. Finally, Percy Fitzgerald’s ‘Terrible Old Lady’ shows how heavy make-up is a literary motif that better delineates the ravages of female ageing than biological change alone. I conclude that in nineteenth-century novels, cosmetics do not function as a worrying disguise or serve as a medical warning, but rather act to depict the ageing woman as extraneous, purposeless, and aesthetically irrelevant.

Keywords, Structures of Feeling, and the Novel

Keywords, Structures of Feeling, and the Novel

Reading the Absence: The Shaping of Male Characters and Their Crises in the Void

ABSTRACT Absence, and particularly the absent father, has been identified as a common feature in late eighteenth – and nineteenth-century French novels. In an era in which the patriarchal order was changing and the King — the nation’s father — was removed, it is unsurprising that so many of its novels have absent fathers. In the subsequent decades, as many children were left orphans in the wake of the Terror, the lack of a father figure has been identified as a key issue in the crisis of masculinity which arose in nineteenth-century France. The absent father figure has previously been identified as a crucial element in Mme de Staël’s Corinne (1807) and in the work of George Sand. Yet, the influence on the vulnerable young male hero of the absent biological father (and his difficult relationship with a replacement father figure) remains unexplored in the work of other women writers in which it also plays a key role: most notably in Mme Cottin’s Claire d'Albe (1799) and Mme de Krüdener’s Valérie (1803).

“No Woman, Much Less a Woman of Fortune, is Ever Fit to Be Her Own Mistress”: Gender, Wealth, and Agency in Inheritance Novels from the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

, This article compares the agency of heiresses with that of male heirs in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels focused on inheritance to investigate whether heiresses faced more restrictions on their financial and personal freedom compared with other characters from the period due to their fortune. We test James Thompson’s claim that “inheritance is enabling or authorizing for male protagonists and disabling for female protagonists” using computational analysis of a corpus of twenty-nine novels and combine our results with close reading of the novels from our corpus. We found that the representation of heiresses’ and heirs’ agency varies according to genre. Heiresses had more agency than expected, this was especially the case for heiresses in gothic fiction. We noticed a decline in the agency of male heirs in the nineteenth century compared with the eighteenth century, while the agency of other character types such as unmoneyed characters appears to increase.