Nineteenth-century Studies Research Articles

Lissette Lopez Szwydky. Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century.

Lissette Lopez Szwydky. Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century.

Desire paths: nineteenth-century studies …

ABSTRACT This paper considers the idea of “desire paths” in relation to nineteenth-century studies, academic writing, and climate change. It argues that desire paths offer one example of how it is possible to rethink nineteenth-century studies in response to the joint challenges posed by the pandemic and the climate crisis. Desire paths, like pot-banging and protests, can interrupt established routes and model alternative approaches to academic work.

Anthropocene Under Paris? Rethinking the Quarries and Catacombs

ABSTRACT This essay takes the Paris underground as a ‘naturalcultural contact zone’ that allows us to consider what current eco-critical discussions of the Anthropocene might contribute to nineteenth-century French studies. Although the origin-point of the anthropocene era continues to be debated, some scholars point to late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century geological theories of deep time as causing a crisis of representation; the Paris basin emerges as a stratigraphic site that makes visible the incommensurability of human and Earth timescales. I put recent critical work on non-human agency of la terre into dialogue with writings by Nadar, Simonin, and Balzac.

Kari Nixon. Kept from All Contagion: Germ Theory, Disease, and the Dilemma of Human Contact in Late Nineteenth-Century Literature. Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2020. Pp. 274. $95.00 (cloth).

Kari Nixon. Kept from All Contagion: Germ Theory, Disease, and the Dilemma of Human Contact in Late Nineteenth-Century Literature. Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2020. Pp. 274. $95.00 (cloth). - Volume 60 Issue 4

Bending the Clock: New Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Ageing: A Roundtable Conversation

Over the past decade, several academic studies have taken nineteenth-century ageing as their topic, including Devoney Looser’s Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain (2008), Karen Chase’s The Victorians and Old Age (2009), Kay Heath’s Aging by the Book (2009), and Alice Crossley’s special issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies (2017). Following the publication of two significant new monographs — Andrea Charise’s The Aesthetics of Senescence (2020) and Jacob Jewusiak’s Aging, Duration, and the English Novel (2019) — the time is ripe for a synthesis of this dynamic cluster of scholarship, with special attention to where nineteenth-century perspectives on ageing is going, and ought to go, from here. Recorded in January 2020, this roundtable is a curated compilation of conversations with key scholars in the field: Devoney Looser (Arizona State University), David McAllister (Birkbeck, University of London), Ruth M. McAdams (Skidmore College), Jake Jewusiak (Newcastle University), and Travis Chi Wing Lau (Kenyon College). Edited by Andrea Charise, this roundtable assembles new perspectives on the present and future of nineteenth-century studies of age(ing), including: What’s next for age studies’ approaches to reading and teaching nineteenth-century texts? How might a better understanding of ‘old’ models inform our current day concerns with ageing populations and intergenerational discord? Can age studies research help make a case for the enduring role of the arts and humanities in a STEM-dominated culture? And how might attending to the old, ageing, and obsolete help address newly emergent global crises, including the rise of populism and climate change? Accessible in both audio format and textual transcription, this roundtable interview offers a timely resource for researchers, students, and a broader public interested in the literary present and futures of ageing and older age.

Floral UV Features of Plant Species From a Neotropical Savanna.

Despite the wide interest in flower colours, only after the end of the nineteenth-century studies started to comprise floral UV reflection, which is invisible to humans but visible to the major groups of pollinators. Many flowers and inflorescences display colour patterns, an important signal for pollinators, promoted by the presence of at least two different colours within flowers or inflorescences, including colours in the UV waveband. For Neotropical savanna plant species, we characterised floral UV features using UV-photography and reflectance measurements. We tested (i) whether floral UV features were constrained by their shared ancestry, (ii) whether floral UV features were associated with pollinators, and (iii) whether floral UV features were associated with floral traits mediating these interactions, including floral resource, type of attraction unit and presence/absence of non-UV colour patterns. Of 80 plant species, ca. 70% were UV-patternless, most of them UV-absorbing. Approximately 30% presented one of three types of UV-patterns: bullseye, contrasting corolla markings oriented toward floral resources or contrasting reproductive structures, which were all considered as floral guides. Floral UV features were phylogenetically constrained and were associated with pollinators, floral resources and attraction unit, but not with non-UV colour patterns. UV-patternless flowers were associated with most of the pollination systems, while UV-patterned flowers were mainly associated with bee-pollination. UV-absorbing flowers comprised the only category with hawkmoth- and butterfly-pollinated flowers, and a high percentage of hummingbird-pollinated species. Nocturnal pollinated species were also commonly UV-absorbing, except for one UV-reflecting bat-pollinated species and one beetle-pollinated species with UV-reflecting stigmas. All types of floral UV features were associated with nectar; however, flowers with contrasting reproductive structures were mainly associated with pollen. There was an association between UV-absorbing species and the presence of inflorescences and intermediate attraction units. Our results evince that phylogenetic relatedness can constraint floral UV features’ diversification, but combinations of evolutionary and ecological processes may be expected in this scenario.

Rus’/Russia and the Mongols: Some Remarks on the Historical Meaning and the Present Debate of the Mongol-Tatar yoke

Abstract The Mongol conquests and the following dominations have long been the subject of historical reevaluation by the scientific community. The spread and progressive specialization of Mongolian studies of the latest decades have also affected the westernmost of the four khanates resulted from the division of the Empire: the ulus Jochi, better known as Golden Horde. Russia’s territorial vastity, its proximity to Western Europe, and its multicultural characters have all attracted the historians’ attention to the Mongol era. By retracing the crucial historiographical passages, from nineteenth-century studies to the present day, this article aims to provide a broad and updated perspective of how the scientific debate has developed internationally and its relationship with the macro-levels of the Russian society today: from politics to public opinion.

A Most Mysterious Union: The Role of Alchemy in Goethe's Faust by Steven Y. Wilkerson

Reviewed by: A Most Mysterious Union: The Role of Alchemy in Goethe's Faust by Steven Y. Wilkerson Frederick Amrine Steven Y. Wilkerson, A Most Mysterious Union: The Role of Alchemy in Goethe's Faust. Asheville, NC: Chiron, 2019. 386 pp. This is a very introductory book. The author's choice to write an introduction has yielded a study with the predictable strengths and weaknesses. There is much to recommend this book to beginners, either with Goethe, with alchemy, with Jung, or with all three. It is for the most part intelligent and lucidly written. It begins with a capsule biography of Goethe, then proceeds logically to an introduction to alchemy, to a short biography of Jung, to the centrality of his alchemical studies, to an interpretation of Faust, and finally to brief considerations of other texts, Faustian and otherwise. Alas, the book also displays the weaknesses of an introduction. It replicates information that is easily found elsewhere. Indeed, A Most Mysterious Union consists largely of citations and allusions to extant studies, chiefly Gray's Goethe the Alchemist (1952) and Raff's Jung and the Alchemical Imagination (2000). It is telling that the author closely follows Ronald Gray's nearly seventy-year-old book. (Alice Raphael's 1965 Goethe and the Philosopher's Stone is not mentioned, either in the body or in the bibliography: Could Wilkerson possibly be ignorant of it?) Seventy years is a long time, and there has been a flood of work on Goethe and alchemy since then. None of it finds its way into Wilkerson's bibliography. I fear that he greatly underestimates the widespread acceptance of the influence of alchemy on Goethe and the sophistication of the insights that have been generated in the interim. Moreover, the biography of Goethe quotes several nineteenth-century studies, and is rather Victorian in simultaneously condemning Goethe's affairs and being titillated by them. Reading the biography, one might think that Goethe squeezed his writing into the little time left after his Byronesque adventures with women. Those of us who have lived through the sixties are not impressed by a 39-year-old virgin. The most original section of the book is the end, where the author compares Goethe's Faust with Marlowe's, Mann's, Dante's Divina Commedia, and, oddly, [End Page 389] Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. These comparisons are, however, lamentably simplistic and wrongheaded. At multiple key points, Wilkerson demurs even recapitulating the central tenets of Gray's and Raff's studies. Why not simply skip this book and read them instead? Frederick Amrine University of Michigan Copyright © 2021 Goethe Society of North America

Media Inventories of the Nineteenth Century: A Report from Two Workshops

Media Inventories of the Nineteenth CenturyA Report from Two Workshops Sean Franzel, Ilinca Iurascu, and Petra McGillen The first self-proclaimed General Bibliography of Printed Inventories (Bibliographie générale des inventaires imprimés) (1892–1895), arduously compiled by Fernand de Mély and Edmund Bishop, starts with an immediate disclaimer: "If the fear of incompleteness had deterred its two authors, th[is] publication … would have never seen the light of day."1 "We have only included inventories properly speaking," the preface states, leaving aside "manuscript and library" catalogues, "mere lists of relics," and "testaments and literary descriptions," which "would have carried us too far." De Mély and Bishop's pointed reference to "proper" inventories (as distinct from other types of itemized written records) calls for further examination. While the volume does not offer any definitions for the terms it invokes, the commentary here can be considered against the background of nineteenth- century dictionary entries. In Larousse's Great Universal Dictionary, for example, the term "inventory" is primarily understood as a "catalogue, a record that inscribes and describes, article by article, all the objects, immovable and movable property, goods, titles, papers, belonging to a person, or found in a house or residence."2 But during the nineteenth century, a growing interest in inventories of artifacts associated with historical sites or collections (such as those announced in the Bibliographie générale) gives rise to the need for more diverse and, at the same time, more systematic approaches.3 In the process, categorical limits are continuously tested and reexamined. By their own admission, de Mély and Bishop are "compelled to admit some exceptions," challenging their own self-imposed criteria and thus returning to the impossible task of not going "too far." Inventories, as de Mély and Bishop's efforts suggest, promise an overview and a systematic organization of accumulations of discrete objects, yet are based in a sense of incompleteness visà-vis the excess of practices of storing, listing, ordering, and recording with which they are confronted. De Mély and Bishop's multivolume undertaking thus serves as an apt starting point for a discussion around the slippery margins of inventorying categories, their nineteenth-century histories, media practices, and techniques. What cultural premises mark the increased awareness of the importance of inventorying that gives rise to metaprojects such as the Bibliographie générale des inventaires imprimés? How do inventories work against and in dialogue with other media of storage and retrieval such [End Page 285] as catalogues, indexes, bibliographies, and archives? What new media configurations do techniques of inventorying enable and how, in turn, are such techniques shaped by the media channels and formats they employ? What is at stake in the critical effort of "taking stock"—whether as commercial, bureaucratic, literary, historiographical, or scientific undertakings—and what does this tell us specifically about the nineteenth century? These questions were at the forefront of two research workshops organized at Dartmouth College (March 2018) and the University of Missouri (February 2020) under the title "Media Inventories of the Nineteenth Century," with participation from scholars in German studies and related fields. One of our expressed goals has been to go beyond certain canonical accounts in German media studies that have tended to favor construing the beginning and end of the nineteenth century ("around 1800" or "around 1900") as foundational breaks or turning points. Instead, our working principle has been to explore multiple historical trajectories, to engage with local and temporal configurations of objects and actions, and to expand the range of critical interventions. As a cultural mode, model, and medium, inventorying is a felicitous category for thinking about nineteenth-century studies, not least because there is a marked interest in its (re)definition throughout the century. Furthermore, inventorying operates in conjunction (and tension) with related cultural techniques and media of collection, classification, preservation, and distribution (from lists to catalogues and beyond) that likewise invite modular approaches and new critical tactics. Focusing on the particular semantics and connotations of the inventory, it is worthwhile to consider briefly the conceptual history of the term in the German cultural context. The term inventory (inventarium) arises in the early modern...

Twentieth-century research on the Alpine rural house between the epistemological issue and legitimizing narratives

Throughout the twentieth century, the gazes of observers from different disciplinary fields, ethnologists, geographers, architects have focused on the Alpine rural house. What do scholars seek within the theme of the house and the rural area? In Switzerland, the pioneering nineteenth-century studies were followed by research, starting from the 1870s, by the philologist Jakob Hunziker. In his analysis, he took into consideration not only exceptional constructions but also widespread building production. Buildings were detected and illustrated through diagrammatic “primarily planimetric” and photographic representations. However, the original data in Hunziker’s work is found above all in the correlation that is established between language and architecture. In this context, rural architecture is no longer a simple determinist adhesion to the natural and environmental context in which one lives but becomes a historically determined affirmation of a verified and mediated cultural model concerning the local datum. Alongside the readings of geographers and ethnologists, there is the chapter of the studies on the rural house conducted by architectural culture. The theme of rural architecture will represent a subject of dispute with often ideological overtones between proponents of modernity and those of traditionalism. Towards the mid-thirties, Pagano’s semantic translation represents the definitive shift, at least by the architects of the modernist front, from a mere question of a more complex theme, capable of considering the multiple aspects of building in the countryside, culminating in the exhibition Architettura rurale Italiana by Pagano and Daniel. The use of the category of functionalism when dealing with the farmer house allows to recognize rural architecture as a discipline and simultaneously allows it to function as a cultural background and a historical validation for rationalism.

Modern Bodies and Changing Identities

Modern Bodies and Changing Identities

Becoming Foreign in the Victorian Novel: International Migration in Little Dorrit and Villette

Abstract This article analyses the representation of migrant workers in Victorian fiction. While exploring the seldom-discussed experience of such migrants, I argue that in the fiction of the time, migration for work outside of the empire expresses the experience of individual isolation as the result of increasing urban anonymity as well as of global exchanges. The figure of the migrant thereby literalizes modern isolation in an emergent society of strangers. In depicting migratory characters as embodiments of loneliness, while establishing it as a shared experience through parallel plots, nineteenth-century novels map out possible connections in a globalizing world. In parsing the interplay of isolation and imaginary sympathy in two texts of the 1850s, Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, I argue that the experience of feeling foreign while working abroad enables characters to seek connections that transcend boundaries of class and national identity, even as the sympathy they imagine might be flawed, warped by projection and identification. In Little Dorrit, Cavalletto’s accident in the streets of London enacts a pivotal moment of imagined sympathy for the recently returned Arthur Clennam that ultimately helps to solve the renegotiation of home and host country in the novel, while in Villette, a female migrant articulates an increasingly widespread experience not only of modern isolation, social invisibility, and cultural disorientation, but also of the power of anonymity. A critical analysis of migratory work in Victorian fiction adds an important new dimension to nineteenth-century global studies.

Introduction: the green conference

From its inception, the 35th annual meeting of Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies sought to explore the history of environmentalism and sustainability, asking, implicitly, what that histo...

Reading Matter

Abstract Three new studies of the history of reading, literacy, and publishing bring together reception studies and book history to offer a nuanced and multifaceted look at the varieties of reading culture in the US during the nineteenth century. This essay offers an overview of the current state of nineteenth-century reception studies and book history, and discusses A Literate South: Reading Before Emancipation (2019) by Beth Barton Schweiger; Colonial Revivals: The Nineteenth-Century Lives of Early American Books (2018) by Lindsay DiCuirci; and Books for Idle Hours: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the Rise of Summer Reading (2019) by Donna Harrington-Lueker.

Identifying mid-twentieth-century historical trends in United States game law violations: any basis for conservation?

ABSTRACT The mid-twentieth-century was an important period for game laws in the United States. Identifying trends in game law enforcement can help identify violations that occurred more and less over time (e.g. species that have had more or less violations at a particular time). There has been little research on species emphasis with regard to game laws, with respect to historical game law roots in mid-twentieth-century America. For this study, 10,062 violations were identified from randomly selected states including Kansas, North Carolina, Florida, and Oklahoma. New Jersey and Massachusetts were used from a prior nineteenth-century study and used twentieth-century data for this analysis. The results of this study revealed that fishing violations or hunting/ fishing without a license composed the majority of violations and there were some significant differences between species, number of fines, amounts of fines, violations that resulted in jail, and number of acquittals. Potential reasons for these results are discussed. Future studies could encapsulate more states with various ecosystems and biota (e.g. coastal states or Midwestern states) to better understand the majority and minority of species-specific enforcement trends in those states.

Books Received in Nineteenth-Century Studies

Books Received in Nineteenth-Century Studies

General Materials

General Materials Albert D. Pionke (bio) In this year of pandemic library closures, frustrated interlibrary loan requests, and nonexistent campus mail service, four books are featured in the general materials section. All monographs, each manifests an interest in the intersection of literary form with aesthetic, intellectual, material, political, regional, or theological history. Identifying a “key role” for the “nineteenth-century study of language” in the “emergence of popular sovereignty” during the period between the First (1832) and Third (1884) Reform Acts, Barbara Barrow’s Science, Language, and Reform in Victorian Poetry: Political Dialects (London: Routledge, 2019) proposes that Victorian poetry’s “lack of orderliness, its passages where poetic language spills over or exceeds its meter or formal confines,” be understood as philologically inflected interventions designed “to make visible the blind spots and exclusion of liberal reform” (p. 2). Max Müller’s Lectures on the Science of Language (1861)—which asserts a concurrence between political revolution and linguistic rejuvenation—provides an initial warrant for the book’s “nexus between language, philology, and politics,” itself first explored by means, not of a poem, but of Thomas Carlyle’s 1837 “experimental epic in prose,” The French Revolution (pp. 5, 6). Barrow retraces the text’s at times stylistically excessive engagement with the Revolution-era theories of language articulated within John Horne Tooke’s The Diversions of Purley (1786), Noah Webster’s Dissertations on the English Language (1789) and “Preface” to An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), and Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Panorama of Paris (1781–1788) and The New Paris (1789), arguing that “Carlyle’s positioning of the revolutionaries as a source of untapped, embodied potential paradoxically sets the terms for a Victorian conception of the modern polity” (p. 23). Poetic responses to Carlyle’s example, to later iterations of philological theory, and to the politics of ongoing franchise reform occupy the book’s four chapters, each of which addresses carefully selected works by one of the period’s major poets. Chapter 1 focuses on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s incorporation of the language theories of John Locke and Étienne de Condillac in An [End Page 315] Essay on Mind (1826), A Drama of Exile (1844), and, most importantly, Aurora Leigh (1856) in order to create “a bodiless poetry as a symbolic expression of women’s exclusion from the reformed electorate” (p. 33). Chapter 2 then reinterprets Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868–1869) as a “challenge [to] the democratic pretenses of mid-Victorian philology” during the period of the Second Reform Act (1867) and Richard Chenevix Trench’s early work on what would eventually become the Oxford English Dictionary (p. 70). According to Barrow, Browning “refuses any easy consensus of the demos as imagined by Trench, showing how forms of mass consensus can perpetuate a dangerous and deadly collectivity—as in the growth of empire—as well as overlook those subjects still excluded from the political and social benefits of the reforming state” (p. 88). In chapter 3, Barrow devotes prolonged attention to Alfred Tennyson’s Maud (1855) and Idylls of the King (1859–1885), arguing that through “sound patterns, metonymic substitutions, and lupine and canine imagery, Tennyson subtly challenges the use of philology and evolutionary science as a model for British imperial sovereignty” (p. 95). The line between human and animal language appears increasingly porous in both works, exposing, in Maud, “the irresolvable crisis of Victorian class relations,” and, in Idylls, “the advent and decline of empire as a cycle of evolution from, and degeneration into, brutes” (p. 109). Finally, chapter 4 argues that Thomas Hardy’s Wessex Poems (1898) and Poems of the Past and Present (1901) “challenge the metropolitan appropriation of rural speechways into a unified vision of the nation that followed the passage of the 1884 Reform Act” (p. 127). Barrow’s short reading of “Her Dilemma” (pp. 136–137) provides what is, perhaps, the book’s best example of the interanimating relationship between metrical irregularity, word choice, and an inferable resistance to both contemporary philological theory and overly optimistic assessments of the effects of electoral reform. Whether a wider selection of poems and/or poets would sustain the correspondence between Victorian...

The Time of the Latinx Nineteenth Century

Abstract The Latino Nineteenth Century: Archival Encounters in American Literary History (2016), edited by Rodrigo Lazo and Jesse Alemán, is a formative volume that, in its capaciousness, reorients nineteenth-century literary history toward a substantial engagement with Latinx and Latin American literary and cultural production. Consisting of 15 sections written by leading scholars in the field of nineteenth-century Latinx literary studies, the volume tackles an impressive range of nineteenth-century Latinx thinkers and texts. The essays collected here oscillate seamlessly from macro to micro scales of space, move across the long nineteenth century, and engage with an array of printed materials of the Latinx nineteenth century. This volume is about multiplicity: from Jessie Alemán’s Philadelphia to Juan Poblete’s essay on the close ties between California and Chile in the nineteenth century; from the instances of failed immigration outlined by Robert McKee Irwin to Kirsten Silva Gruesz’s migratory “errancy”; from José Aranda’s essay on Mexican American modernity to Marissa Lopez’s argument about Latino dismodernity. Ultimately, the editors and contributors reveal the numerous nineteenth centuries across the hemisphere, and help us imagine the intersections of US literary history and Latinx studies in the nineteenth century.

New Scholarship

New Scholarship

Secular Lyric: The Modernization of the Poem in Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson

Secular Lyric: The Modernization of the Poem in Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson