Nineteenth-century Novels Research Articles

The Brontë Novels as Historical Fiction

Like other well-known nineteenth-century novelists, including Dickens and Thackeray, the Brontë sisters wrote fiction set in the past. Indeed, the main action in all their novels is backdated by at least one generation. This article explores reasons for the three writers’ respective choices of temporal framework, looking at works by all of them in the historical contexts to which they supposedly belong. The bulk of the analysis is devoted to the only Brontë book that may be called a condition-of-England novel, Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley. The paper addresses the stereoscopic properties of the action in that novel, Luddism prefiguring Chartism. Showing how past and present coalesce in the book’s portrayal of Yorkshire and Britain, this paper supplies an outline of what, to Charlotte Brontë, made Britain great.

How Bad Economic Memories are Made: John Law’s System in Les lettres persanes, Manon Lescaut , and “The Great Mirror of Folly”

French literature has received a lot of attention lately from an unexpected public: economists. Whereas Piketty et al. study nineteenth-century novels to identify the wealth people needed to appear distinguished in the 1820s, and note the fears of bankruptcy felt by the have-nots, I argue that such issues need to be contextualized in a broader history of emotion. This chapter focuses on John Law’s ill-fated “System” and shows how it launched a series of opportunities for parodying economists and soothsayers of their ilk. Writers and artists used fiction and caricature to temper the French confidence about money, banks, and credit.

Female Quixotism Refashioned: Northanger Abbey , the Engaged Reader, and the Woman Writer

This essay explores how Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1817) posits the engaged but ultimately discerning woman reader as an ideal in response to the dominant ideology of the dangerously absorbed, anti-social female quixote. Intertextual play between commentary on novel reading in the emergent genre of fashion magazines, Charlotte Smith's Emmeline (1788), Henry James Pye's The Spectre (1789), and Austen's Catharine, or the Bower (written 1792) reveals a counter discourse in defense of women's novel reading. Austen deploys this discourse in Northanger Abbey, shifting focus away from reforming the heroine, to show how quixotism initiates socialization and subsequently functions both to enable and emancipate the increasingly overdetermined and intertwined categories of women's reading and women's writing.

Toward a Theory of Adolescence: Queer Disruptions in Representations of Adolescent Reading

Using queer and psychoanalytic schemas, this essay develops a theory of adolescence to shed light on the ways in which categories of age shape our experiences of ourselves and others. It draws from social discourse surrounding adolescent reading and from fictional scenes of reading in nineteenth-century novels, twentieth-century classics, and contemporary young adult fiction in order to unravel the cultural logic of adolescence as it has been deployed throughout the twentieth century.

Toward a Theory of Adolescence: Queer Disruptions in Representations of Adolescent Reading

Using queer and psychoanalytic schemas, this essay develops a theory of adolescence to shed light on the ways in which categories of age shape our experiences of ourselves and others. It draws from social discourse surrounding adolescent reading and from fictional scenes of reading in nineteenth-century novels, twentieth-century classics, and contemporary young adult fiction in order to unravel the cultural logic of adolescence as it has been deployed throughout the twentieth century.

Reading Constellations: Urban Modernity in Victorian Fiction by Patricia McKee (review)

Reviewed by: Reading Constellations: Urban Modernity in Victorian Fiction by Patricia McKee Sean Grass Patricia McKee. Reading Constellations: Urban Modernity in Victorian Fiction. Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 2014. Pp. ix + 184. $65.00. A book that takes on capitalism, history, modernity, Walter Benjamin and three major nineteenth-century novelists ought to make for a provocative study. Patricia McKee’s Reading Constellations mostly meets this expectation, tracing its argument about the spatial and temporal disjunctions of the Victorian city from Charles Dickens’s London to Thomas Hardy’s Christminster and back to London again in Henry James’s “In the Cage.” As McKee writes in her first chapter, “My study of Dickens, Hardy, and James uses the work of Benjamin to clarify their undermining of presumptions of improvement and to elaborate the disputed and distracted urban modernities of their fictions: the progress characters dream of and the history that gets in its way” (2). She begins by discussing Benjamin’s concept of the “constellation” – developed in his posthumously published The Arcades Project – which, she argues, “refigure[s] history” by rejecting [End Page 159] the possibility of linear development and instead seeing ideas and events as “heterogeneous, discontinuous, in tension” (2). Key to her argument is her assertion that any moment is always both past and present, every spatial and temporal location interpenetrated by other spaces and other times. Thus, she explains, Dickens’s Charing Cross is never merely the Charing Cross of the present moment; rather, it is interlaced with other significations and tensions, whether from his miserable childhood memories of London or his awareness of a historical sweep that includes the Wyatt Rebellion at Charing Cross in 1554 and the execution of the regicides there a century later. For McKee – and, she argues, for Dickens, Hardy, and James – the Victorian city appears through the effects of constellations and their close corollary “colportage,” which together render “the single moment and the contained space dialectical,” defeating and defying the possibility of progress or succession (23). Certainly such effects are present in Dickens from the time of The Pickwick Papers’ interpolated tales, replete as they are with reminders of past violence, misery and madness that disrupt the lighthearted present-tense in which the Pickwickians move. But McKee is interested here in Dickens’s last two completed novels, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend, with their aggressive but nuanced critiques of capitalism and the modernizing city. The two chapters that discuss these novels will be of greatest interest to Dickens scholars. Chapter 2, “Great Expectations: The Narrative Winks,” argues that the Victorian city is characterized by what McKee calls an “urban unconscious,” a “phantasmagoria” in which “simulations of capitalism are haunted by what has been left behind” (37). One effect of this condition is the novel’s repeated interruption of Pip’s forward progress, by which McKee means both his narrative and his attempts to become a gentleman. Drawing from scenes early in the novel – the Christmas dinner, for instance, and Mr. Jaggers’s dismantling of Mr. Wopsle’s “performance” of the trial for murder described in the newspaper – McKee shows how interruptions play significant roles in developing alternative narratives that allow competing visions of Pip, or crime, or guilt to enter the novel. More to the point, she argues, the ways in which such interruptions create dialectical images underscore the novel’s investment in fragmented selves and elide the “missing scenes of violence” that haunt the novel’s periphery (60). She writes, “what really happened with Orlick at the forge, what happened when Pip, as a baby, was left with his sister, what happened on the prison ship, what happened to Miss Havisham at Compeyson’s hands?” (60). In her view, the narrative “winks” at this heap of wrongdoing, short-circuiting and misdirecting attempts at retribution even as it invokes explicitly the revenge plots of Hamlet and Frankenstein. The result is a novel that appears as constellation, as colportage, denied the linearity and completion that Pip pretends to achieve. [End Page 160] Chapter 3, “London Looking Backward: Our Mutual Friend,” approaches the terrain of the Victorian city from another angle, focusing primarily on “the passages in Dickens’s London through which its...

Alone withTess

This essay traces the connections between Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) and the work of the twentieth-century psychoanalytic writer D. W. Winnicott, particularly his essay “The Capacity to Be Alone” (1958). It argues that reading Hardy alongside British object-relations psychoanalysis and its present-day inheritors helps to uncover the invention of modern solitude: a paradoxical state in which we are never truly alone because we have internalized the presence of others, whether they are persons or, this essay argues, literary characters. We, like Tess, imagine that others are with us, narrating and experiencing our lives alongside us, even when we are alone. Analyzing Tess alongside Winnicott's relational solitude reframes many of the perceived failures of the novel—its stylistic incongruities and particularly the often-criticized “uneven” characterization of Tess—as important acts of formal experimentation. In turn, the essay uncovers in Winnicott's work on psyche and subject-formation a theory of novel reading that allows us to rethink how nineteenth-century novels work on their readers—including how they gender us. Ultimately, the essay is interested in the way novelistic representation comes to shape both theories of the psyche and psyches themselves.

Affective Realism

Affective Realism

RACE DISCOURSE IN WUTHERING HEIGHTS

This article explores how Emily Bronte, in Wuthering Heights, uses the discourse of race and slavery, or emancipation from slavery, to further a political project of freeing the underprivileged, Heathcliff, the excluded, demonised, and homeless slave, from the grip of the rich. He tries all the time to reconstruct his own position and the social ranks as a whole, to identify his own social position within a class hierarchy. Heathcliff begins his life at the very bottom of this hierarchy but he concludes it with a great shift, situating himself at the top of it. It reveals how an outsider, a faceless, homeless, placeless, and accursed slave of a goblin is excluded as someone who has no social or biological place in the existing social structure, and which makes him determined to carve his own place as equal, and renders himself free in a world of exploitation and inequality. This study explains that Wuthering Heights is among the nineteenth-century novels that contributed to a shift of cultural authority in Britain from the upper to the middle class, even to lower-middle-class. It focuses on how Catherine's authoritative white and middle-class subject is defeated by the lower-class Heathcliff. Heathcliff becomes a capitalist himself, an expropriator, thereby turning the ruling class's weapons of property accumulation and acquisitive marriage against them, by turning them into a yeoman class, as represented, for example, by Hareton. Indeed Heathcliff has succeeded in his attempts, all the time, to break down a cultural myth, the superiority of the white, and build from it a whole new construct of new relationships which he sees more racially fair and fit.

Containing Granuaile: Grace O’Malley in Two Nineteenth-century Novels

Containing Granuaile: Grace O’Malley in Two Nineteenth-century Novels Patrick Maume Grace O’Malley or Granuaile, the sixteenth-century pirate and chieftain celebrated in Western folk traditions, has attracted renewed interest in recent decades, both in popular culture and from biographers and scholars. A Granuaile Visitors Centre now operates in Louisburgh, County Mayo, and she features prominently in the displays at Westport House, run as a tourist attraction by the Browne family—her descendants through a female line—and built on the site of an O’Malley castle.1 The development of Irish women’s history has occasioned several explanations for her earlier marginalization in historical accounts. Ann Chambers, the author of a popular biography, believed that O’Malley’s reputation suffered from a clear misogyny.2 More recently, Judith Cook has called attention to the difficulty that O’Malley’s dealings with the crown pose for those who attempt to portray her as nationalist heroine.3 In the nineteenth century, two male authors with strong political commitments wrote fictional portrayals of the pirate queen; The Dark Lady of Doona (1833) by William Hamilton Maxwell, and A Queen of Men (1898) by William O’Brien. They, too, faced problems in adapting O’Malley to their expectations and those of their intended audiences. Maxwell (1792–1850) was a Church of Ireland clergyman and Tory journalist who spent part of his career in Connemara. O’Brien (1852–1928) was a Home Rule MP and a land agitator living in Westport [End Page 98] after the Parnell Split. Both books can be seen as “historical romances,” that is, as fantasias inspired by history but less bound to historical accuracy than the historical novel proper. Perhaps this slippery approach to fact is appropriate to Granuaile’s dual role as both historical figure and folk hero; such an approach also gives greater scope for authorial evasion and self-indulgence. Maxwell and O’Brien employ similar strategies in addressing the gender issues raised by O’Malley’s career. They tidy her complicated marital history; attribute her political and military career to doomed romance; and contrast her favorably with a loveless and frustrated Queen Elizabeth. Notably, each concludes by imagining her retiring to make her peace with heaven. O’Malley’s political activities are similarly re-imagined. The Tory Maxwell sees a sorceress whose occult dabblings are equated with unwomanly violence and seditious intrigues; she finds salvation in assisting the queen’s representative Sir Richard Bingham, who is cast as the incarnation of peace and justice. Maxwell emphasizes the internecine wars of preconquest Connacht and the sexual misbehavior of monks and chieftains. For O’Brien, Granuaile’s territory is a pastoral vision of peace, plenty, and piety, a land admired even by the fair-minded Lord Deputy Perrot, whose displacement by the murderous Bingham brings catastrophe. He presents O’Malley’s political intrigues as morally dubious, but reflecting concern for her people. Her abdication for a male and unequivocally rebellious successor mirrors O’Brien’s own dream that his agrarian and political agitations would bring a new golden age to famine-stricken Mayo. The historical Granuaile was born around 1530, the only daughter of Owen Dubhdara O’Malley, chieftain of a territory in the barony of Murrisk on the southern shore of Clew Bay. (She had a half-brother of little political significance.) O’Malley had a son and daughter by her first husband, the Connemara chieftain Donal-an-Chogaidh O’Flaherty; after O’Flaherty’s death she returned to her father’s territory, settled on Clare Island, and assumed control of the O’Malley fleet. From coastal strongholds, she carried out piratical raids as far as Scotland. Around 1567 she married Ricard an Iarainn Bourke, a contender for the MacWilliam chieftaincy; they had one son, Tibott-na-long. In 1577, Grainne and Ricard visited Galway to make formal submission to Sir Henry Sidney, lord deputy of Ireland, who noted that she was the predominant partner in the marriage. When Ricard an Iarainn died of natural causes in 1583, Grainne took one-third of his territories as dowry, including Carrigahowley Castle on Clew Bay, her principal base. In 1584 Sir John Perrot became lord deputy, and...

Subversion and Sympathy: Gender, Law and the British Novel ed. by Martha C. Nussbaum, and Alison L. Lacroix (review)

Reviewed by: Subversion and Sympathy: Gender, Law and the British Novel ed. by Martha C. Nussbaum, and Alison L. Lacroix Julia McCord Chavez Nussbaum, Martha C., and Alison L. Lacroix, eds. Subversion and Sympathy: Gender, Law and the British Novel. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013. 336 pp. $78.00 hardcover. In the introduction to the essay collection Subversion and Sympathy: Gender, Law and the British Novel, editors Martha C. Nussbaum and Alison L. LaCroix set forth a weighty aim: “to reinvigorate the law-and-literature movement” (6). In furtherance of this ambitious goal, Nussbaum and LaCroix bring together an eclectic mix of interdisciplinary essays on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels by leading scholars of law, philosophy, and literature. What unites the collection is an emphasis on gender and, more specifically, the ways in which novels of this period acknowledge a widespread absence of female agency while also revealing opportunities for female characters to find—even create—“spaces for choice despite large-scale absence of choice” (5). To organize diverse essays into a cohesive whole is no small feat, but Nussbaum and LaCroix skillfully group their material into four thematic sections, the first three of which line up with seminal legal frameworks for the period. The opening section focuses on the most obvious law and gender nexus, “Marriage and Sex.” The essays within this section are anything but predictable, however, and investigate such varied issues as marriage laws and folk practices in Thomas Hardy’s novels; the question of whether the law is central or peripheral in Jane Austen’s novels; and the history of obscenity within the British novel. The second section, entitled “Law, Social Norms, and Women’s Agency,” migrates naturally into a neighboring area of legal inquiry with a series of essays on rape, illegitimacy, and criminal culpability. Including some of the strongest essays in the collection, the breadth of coverage is expansive here. Topics range from “pious perjury” (the nineteenth-century equivalent to our present concept of jury nullification) in Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian, to rape versus seduction in Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, to the tropes of illegitimacy and women’s criminality in the many novels of Anthony Trollope. What is refreshing here is the forceful demonstration that marriage is certainly not the only—or even primary—legal issue facing female characters in the nineteenth-century novel. This section also demonstrates the power of varying methodologies within the law-and-literature movement. Julia Simon-Kerr and Nicola Lacey, for example, draw upon legal history to develop their arguments [End Page 129] about the novels of Scott and Trollope. In contrast, Nussbaum traces a genealogy of the bastard character back through Shakespearean drama in order to develop her argument on Trollopian “subversion” of gendered norms of illegitimacy as they appear in literature. When taken together, these essays demonstrate the many ways that the law-and-literature movement can shed light on human experience. The third and fourth sections of the collection are less developed than the first two, but nonetheless open up additional areas in which to explore the intersection of legal concepts and literature. The essays in section three are grouped under the moniker “Property, Commerce, Travel,” and they encourage readers to consider esoteric legal instrumentalities such as the bill of exchange and the law of primogeniture. Bernadette Meyler’s essay on “Defoe’s Formal Laws” is a particular asset to the collection for its lucid description of the frequent “pitfalls” of scholarship coming out of the law-and-literature field of inquiry (230), and its stunning analysis of Roxanna and Moll Flanders, which argues for a relationship between the travels of these female deviants and their “liminal relation to the law” (233). The final section of the collection broaches the topic of “Readers and Interpretation” rather than a specific legal concept. This represents a shift from a micro to a macro view of the field, and a greater emphasis on understanding networks of law and literature in a wider social context. LaCroix offers a fascinating essay on the foundational role that literature played in the development of sympathy for early nineteenth-century American legal professionals. Analyzing speeches and...

Speaking of Religion in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Speaking of Religion in Nineteenth-Century American Literature Brian Yothers COLEMAN, DAWN. Preaching and the Rise of the American Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013. ix + 293 pp. $69.95 hardcover. GOLDBERG, SHARI. Quiet Testimony: A Theory of Witnessing in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. viii + 197 pp. $45.00 hardcover; $33.99 ebook. KEVORKIAN, MARTIN. Writing Beyond Prophecy: Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville After the American Renaissance. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013. xviii + 259 pp. $45.00 hardcover. The nineteenth-century American novel is sufficiently saturated in religious discourse that criticism often begins by taking the religious dimensions of novels from this period for granted, or else by observing religious allusions in passing on the way to more pressing matters. Dawn Coleman’s Preaching and the Rise of the American Novel, Martin Kevorkian’s Writing Beyond Prophecy, and Shari Goldberg’s Quiet Testimony all consider how religious discourse provides both subject matter for nineteenth-century novels and also sources for emulation and competition. In each of these fine studies, the authors also attend to the ways in which nineteenth-century American novels interrogate discourse itself, reflecting self-consciously on the meaning of speaking and writing in religious and fictive contexts alike. The sermon and its novelistic representations and analogues loom particularly large for Dawn Coleman and Martin Kevorkian, while Shari Goldberg relies on the related, though not entirely coterminous, category of testimony to structure her study. The novel and the sermon can function as rivals for preeminence in nineteenth-century American literary culture, as Dawn Coleman points out in her illuminating study Preaching and the Rise of the American Novel, but as she goes on to suggest, they also interpenetrate each other and inform each other on multiple artistic and conceptual levels. The sermon, as Coleman points out, had a great deal more cultural authority for [End Page 116] many Americans than did the novel, and indeed, Coleman provides a useful corrective for our present tendency to assume that the mid-nineteenth century is simply the era of the novel’s triumph. Coleman deals deftly with the central challenge that she identifies in writing about preaching: how to capture the particulars of a performance that necessarily involves both communal context and the personal charisma and even physicality of the preacher. While acknowledging that much of the experience of hearing a nineteenth-century sermon is inaccessible to us, Coleman makes extensive use of manuals for the preparation and presentation of sermons to show the affective responses that preachers strove to cultivate and the methods that they used to stimulate these responses. Coleman shows that the ethos of the preacher was central to the authority of the sermon, and that increasingly during the nineteenth century, preachers depended on a relationship with their audience to shape their sermons, with ministers ranging from Henry Ware, Jr., to Charles G. Finney arguing for an extemporaneous mode of address that would allow the preacher to play off the cues of a congregation rather than remaining tethered to a manuscript. After discussing the structure and significance of the nineteenth-century sermon, Coleman brings together a diverse cast of characters to illustrate the cultural struggle between novelists and preachers in the nineteenth century: George Lippard, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and William Wells Brown. Coleman shows how the novel competes with the sermon for cultural authority and addresses various aspects of the experience of lived religion in the nineteenth-century United States. The working class radical George Lippard is the least well-known of the figures Coleman discusses, and she ably extends the case that has been made for Lippard’s place in the nineteenth-century American canon by David S. Reynolds, Shelley Streeby, and Samuel Otter, among others. Lippard frequently parodies and critiques preachers and preaching, but as Coleman acutely suggests, his voice in The Quaker City: Or the Monks of Monk Hall (1845) and other novels is also shaped by the forms of sermonic discourse. Lippard thus appears as both a critic of preaching and a preacher in his own right. Coleman suggests for several of the novelists she considers a seemingly unlikely sermonic source for...

Recent Work in Caribbean Literature

Recent Work in Caribbean Literature Amanda Perry Davies, Carole Boyce. Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from Twilight Zones. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2013. Frydman, Jason. Sounding the Break: African American and Caribbean Routes of World Literature. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2014. Martinez-San Miguel, Yolanda. Coloniality of Diasporas: Rethinking Intra-colonial Migrations in a Pan-Caribbean Context. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Orlando, Valerie, and Sandra Cypress (eds.). Reimagining the Caribbean: Conversations among the Creole, English, French, and Spanish Caribbean. Lexington Books, 2014. Fifteen years ago, scholarship that addressed Caribbean literature in light of the region’s linguistic diversity was relatively limited. The issue was not necessarily a preference for national genealogies, as the region’s major works have long been studied in transnational contexts—variously divided into postcolonial, francophone, and Latin American frames of reference. Rather, the institutional divisions of language departments and the competencies of individual scholars made linguistic barriers more tenacious, such that Derek Walcott would be placed in conversation with Salman Rushdie or Wole Soyinka more often than fellow poet Nicolas Guillén. That tendency has shifted, however, and the four works reviewed here are symptomatic of those changes. Each of them brings together texts from the English, French, and Spanish-speaking Caribbean, stressing the broader interconnectedness of the region over and against what the editors of Reimagining the Caribbean call a “balkanizing” approach (xvii). Taken together, these works implicitly raise the question: what, precisely, [End Page 208] are the grounds for comparison? What are the mechanisms that make such comparison plausible, convincing, and effective? The historical processes that encourage treating the Caribbean as a coherent cultural space are by now well rehearsed. All territories have been subject to some form of radical external domination, at times by multiple colonial powers; most were deeply marked by slavery and plantation labour; intraregional migratory flows in the twentieth century continued the creolizing process; peoples from various parts of the Caribbean frequently live side by side in the diaspora. That said, there remain good reasons for treating literary traditions separately. While some writers like Jacques Stephen Alexis, Eric Walrond, Alejo Carpentier, and Maryse Condé demonstrate a robust sense of a pan-Caribbean literary and cultural formation, many others are monolingual and, given the comparative difficulties of regional travel, may not have first-hand experience of other parts of the region. In a context where translations are not always forthcoming, cross-linguistic intertextuality is frequently limited to a number of usual suspects, chief among them Aimé Césaire. It is thus telling that none of the studies here focus on documenting concrete intellectual exchanges between major authors, such as the Jacques Roumain, Nicolas Guillén, and Langston Hughes triad. Instead, they opt for thematic analyses that seek resonance between contexts that can be considered in some way parallel. In justifying this approach, Édouard Glissant and Antonio Benítez-Rojo emerge as clear theoretical favourites, as both push against nation-based frameworks to reach for more evocative imaginings of the region: for Glissant, it is an “archipelago” that enables non-hierarchical cultural exchange, while Benítez-Rojo famously uses the metaphor of the repeating island to capture the tension between fragmentation and resemblance. Of the texts reviewed here, Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel’s excellent Coloniality of Diasporas: Rethinking Intra-Colonial Migrations in a Pan-Caribbean Context is the most explicitly concerned with disrupting nation-based interpretive models. She continually turns to moments when nationalism falters, whether they be in nineteenth century novels that are too ambivalent to serve as foundational fictions or twentieth century narratives of women forced into exile because of their transgressive sexual practices. Though she also deals with writers from the Anglophone Caribbean, her most important examples are from Puerto Rico and Martinique, islands whose continued attachment to imperial powers denaturalizes the ideal of the sovereign nation state. Martínez-San Miguel is furthermore interested in the formative role of “intra-colonial migration” in the region, or migration within the bounds of a former or actual empire, emphasizing that such movement reveals the contradictory status of many Caribbean subjects, who may be legal citizens and...

“Whoever Explains A ‘But’”: Tact and Friction in Trollope’s Reparative Fiction

138 Victorians Journal “Whoever explains f? 'Sat’”: Tact and friction in Trollope’s Reparative fiction by Jonathan farina In July 1849, as a Surveyor’s deputy for the Post Office in Ireland, Trollope stood witness against local postmistress Mary O’Reilly, whom he had caught stealing a marked coin from the mail (Hall 106-08; Mullen 229-32; Terry). Trollope’s testimony was rebutted by the prominent Irish barrister, Isaac Butt, an eventual MP and founder of the Home Rule League, who was nicknamed “The Rebutter” for his infamously aggressive cross-examinations. 1 According to the newspapers, Trollope adeptly parried Butt’s rebuttal with crowd-pleasing repartee, yet Butt’s acerbic manner vexed him. To discredit Trollope’s testimony, Butt questioned his character by broaching his unsavory portrayal of Mr. Allewinde of The Macdermots ofBallycloran, one of several lawyers who viciously rebut witnesses for professional necessity rather than the pursuit of truth. Thus, Trollope later parodied Butt with browbeating barristers like Mr. Chaffanbrass of The Three Clerks, Orley Farm, and Phineas Redux. Butt seems to have personified for Trollope how rebuttal formally instantiated and institutionalized the indecorous presumption that witnesses were duplicitous and partial. Rebuttal moreover routinized a narrative practice that adjudicated a matter by doubting all of its witnesses—its narrators—although they obliged the court with testimony and were not charged with malfeasance. And yet few things resemble rebuttal so much as Trollope’s fictional practice; not only does he explicitly and consistently subordinate plot to character, but many of his novels might be summarized as sustained rebuttals ofcharacter testimony: The Eustace Diamonds, to be sure, centers on the rebuttal—or the many indirect, would-be 1 May Laffan Hartley negatively portrays Butt as “Mr. Rebutter” in Christy Carew (255-80, passim). Alas, the novel does not inflect Mr. Rebutter’s idiolect with a Trollopian abundance of adversatives. Victorians Journal 139 rebuttals—of Lizzie Eustace. The Last Chronicle ofBarset assails Josiah Crawley until the trial is avoided by Mrs. Arabin; Orley Farm crosses Lady Mason; and in The Small House at Allington and The Last Chronicle of Barset, Lily Dale is subject to the crossexaminations of her mother, uncle, and friends, all of whom doubt her decision to decline Johnny Eames’s proposals. Butt’s surname is even more wonderfully apposite than his nickname: as an adverb, coordinating conjunction, and preposition, but occurs frequently in English prose and most frequently in Trollope’s novels.2 In Doctor Thorne, Framley Parsonage, The Small House at Allington, and The Eustace Diamonds, in particular, Trollope uses but about thirty percent more frequently than other nineteenth-century novelists do—almost once every one hundred words and often in succession. In a 1960 article, Hugh Sykes Davies aspires to affirm a “hunch” that Trollope’s prose has a distinct “cadence” against prevailing assertions to the contrary, yet he also nicely catalogs some ways but functions. It can “introduce a qualification or exception” (78); it can “lay bare the perplexities of motives in conflict,” imply “the presence of motives not quite conscious” in characters, and “reveal indecision,” and in this sense it facilitates Trollope’s representation of processes of decision making (78-79). Further, it periodically discriminates the difference between a character’s “own estimate of himself, and the real estimate” (79); and, finally, it can “point the discrepancybetween theory and practice in moral conduct, the almost universal failure to practice what we agree ought to be preached” (80). Adversatives, including but, then, and yet, are the signature ligatures of Trollope’s style. As such, they evidence a specific and concurrently aesthetic and social form; they grammatically instantiate a manner of ordering the world. I refer to this form as 2 In Doctor Thome, but comprises 2,159 out of 220,553 words, a frequency of 0.009789; in Framley Parsonage, 2,097 out of 211,290 words, a frequency of 0.009924; in The Small House at Allington, 2,569 out of263,246 words, a frequency of0.009758; and in The Eustace Diamonds, 2,331 out of274,376 words, a frequency of 0.008495. The standard frequency of but in a sample collection of 150 canonical and popular nineteenth-century British novels is...

The Paradox of Literary Commercialism in Trollope'sNina Balatka

This essay seeks to situate Anthony Trollope's short 1866 novel Nina Balatka in the context of the market conditions that characterized Victorian literary entertainment. These market conditions, which included a proliferating number of reprinting vehicles, accommodated copying, abridging, and reassembling as legitimate creative procedures and suggest that commercial forces made originality and ownership more difficult to stabilize than nineteenth-century novelists and copyright reformers would have liked. In this light, Nina Balatka's failed attempt to assimilate the figure of the Jew into a conventional marriage plot reflects a problem in Trollope's construction of authorship, a problem that inheres in how literary commercialism and literary professionalism might represent mutually exclusive value postulates. Max Weber's distinction between formal rationality and substantive rationality expresses this apparent contradiction: literary commercialism refers to the formal and impersonal laws of the economic market, while literary professionalism refers to the substantive ethos of service to the community and nation. In underscoring the incompatibility of the Jew and the Christian maiden of Prague, Nina Balatka's unconvincing marriage plot uses the same terms that make Trollope's representation of the novelist as both baker and barrister something of a fantasy.

Balzac's Unknown Masterpiece: spotting the next big thing in art and science.

There is no shortage of advice on how to become a creative writer, a creative artist or a creative scientist. Just in the last decade, hundreds of books and articles have been written on the subject, and in hundreds of TED lectures, inspired thinkers reveal their secrets for creative success. Despite this flood of contemporary advice, my favorite insight on creativity goes back over 100 years to the Irish playwright and wit Oscar Wilde, who famously proclaimed that “a writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave”—an assertion that can be applied to most creative individuals. One of the virtues of a misbehaving mind is its ability to spot the next big thing— whether it be in art or in science. A great example of a famous literary figure who passed the Oscar Wilde ‘misbehavior test’ with flying colors is the nineteenth-century novelist Honore de Balzac. In the 1830s, Balzac conceived the idea of writing a series of works that would describe the sweep and panorama of French society in all its splendor and squalor, from the highest aristocrats and politicians to the lowest swindlers and prostitutes. Over a 16-year period, he published a total of 91 novels and short stories, and shortly before his death in 1850 he organized his 91 works into a multivolume collection that he titled The Human Comedy. Balzac chose this title to contrast it with Dante’s The Divine Comedy, which portrayed Hell, Purgatory and Heaven and had nothing to say about the realism of the earthly life that Balzac presented. The Human Comedy contained many astute insights into human behavior. One of the most original and popular—and a prime example of his misbehavior—was his discussion about how certain people get ahead in life through advantageous marriages rather than hard work.

The Black Mass as Play: Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out

The Black Mass as Play: Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out

Famine, home, and transatlantic politics in two late nineteenth-century Irish-American novels

This article analyzes the continuing tensions and influences between political and nationalist self-representations of the Irish in the USA and the Irish in Ireland in James Doran's Zanthon and John Brennan's Erin Mor. As this essay shows, the ostensibly Irish (nationalist) ideologies of these texts are fundamentally transatlantic by nature. They are projected as an interface between Irish nationalism, current American affairs and politics, and British imperial ideology. As such, these texts construct a liminal discourse of transatlantic Irish nationalism, creating an intermediary discursive space between host country, home, and Empire. Instead of merely describing the Irish diaspora as a community of exiles or a victim diaspora, these works of fiction show that through the infusion or appropriation of North American ideals, the Irish nation could be (re)forged, at home or abroad. Moreover, on a more thematic level, both Doran and Brennan's political philosophies interact with political ideologies of the late 1880s and early 1890s, elaborating their own takes on the interrelations between the rhetoric of liberty and economic policy central to the political debate in the USA during the latter part of the nineteenth century. With their double message for both the USA and Ireland, these texts thus forge a genuinely transatlantic Irish transnationalism.

Thomas Hardy’s Notion of Impurity in Far from the Madding Crowd: The Tragic Failure of a Ruined Maid or The Blessed Life of a Fallen Lady

As a prolific nineteenth century novelist, Thomas Hardy witnessed how women were treated as well as the dreadful conditions in which they lived. Well aware of the nineteenth century limitations on femininity, Hardy stood for women’s downtrodden rights. Henceforth, so as to examine Hardy’s personal thoughts and impressions towards the prevailing perceptions of the nineteenth century femininity, Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd (1847) has been explored with focus upon the Victorian femininity in contrast with Hardy’s fictional heroines. Far From the Madding Crowd , as a typical example of his fiction, is representative of Hardy’s vision towards the Victorian ideal of femininity particularly the notion of impurity. This paper is an attempt to re-read Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd to explore the discrepancy between Hardy’s notions of impurity in accordance with the Victorian ideal perceptions of femininity to the Victorians extreme rigidity to the idea of impurity. This paper also concludes that despite his genuine commiseration towards women, Hardy was in line with the Victorian conservative view of sex where his fallen heroine –Fanny— is doomed to ignominious failure in the course of her life while Bathsheba’s fall is redeemed through a conventional marriage trial.

Totality from Interiority: The Nineteenth-Century Russian Novel as Epic in Georg Lukàcs’s The Theory of the Novel

In The Theory of the Novel, Georg Lukàcs’s (1885–1971) approach to the nineteenth-century Russian novel evidences underlying conflict: without presenting theoretical justification, Lukàcs continually refers to these works as ‘epic’. Yet according to the opposition he creates between novel and epic, the idea of a work’s belonging to both genres — even peripherally — appears paradoxical. This article explores the possibility that from Lukàcs’s approach within the Theory, the particular history and characteristics of the nineteenth-century Russian novel make it genuinely qualify for the seemingly-impossible classification of renewed epic; hence his continual implication that this is its true genre. Lukàcs’s treatments of nineteenth-century Russian novelists mentioned in the Theory are examined as support for this reading.