Victorian Literature Research Articles

Lissette Lopez Szwydky. Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century.

Lissette Lopez Szwydky. Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century.

Ethical Traditions in British Drama: A Case Study of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw

Victorian literature, both its creation and criticism, mainly focused on the significance of morality and religion, and viewed literature as beneficial to the heart of mankind. Oscar Wilde, widely considered as an aesthete, is one such literary figure of the Victorian era who espouses the doctrine of “art for art’s sake.” His artistic style incorporates rich ethical connotations, and the interplay between aesthetics and ethics presents characteristics of both conflict and integration in his works. On the other hand, the problem plays of Henrik Ibsen, the so-called father of modern drama, exerted a profound influence on George Bernard Shaw, the great British dramatist of the twentieth century. Shaw’s creation of problem plays is directly attributable to Ibsen, and he creatively adapted the Norwegian playwright’s writing techniques for his only treatise of drama theory in 1891, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, which fully expressed his basic understanding of the dramatic arts. Aside from disagreements regarding artistic ideas, both Wilde and Shaw emphasize that the primary task of artistic creation is to reflect social problems, and that the degeneration of human morality is the root of all social ills. They also believe that traditional moral standards may not always meet the requirements of social reality, therefore it is necessary to find a set of ethics to solve social problems. In this way, both Wilde’s and Shaw’s dramas clearly reflect the ethical tradition concerning social issues.

Victorians on Broadway: Literature, Adaptation, and the Modern American Musical by Sharon Aronofsky Weltman

Reviewed by: Victorians on Broadway: Literature, Adaptation, and the Modern American Musical by Sharon Aronofsky Weltman Sooyoung Chung (bio) Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, Victorians on Broadway: Literature, Adaptation, and the Modern American Musical (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2020), pp. ix + 321, $37.50 paperback. Sharon Aronofsky Weltman’s Victorians on Broadway: Literature, Adaptation, and the Modern American Musical examines the Broadway musical’s creative and critical engagement with Victorian literature and culture. Weltman focuses on the intertextual network surrounding Broadway adaptations and their Victorian sources and explores other adaptations including plays, films, and illustrations. Beginning with the musical theater adaptations of Victorian literature produced in the “Golden Age of Broadway” in the 1940s, Weltman follows the chronological development of American musical theater, from musical comedy to integrated musical to the megamusical (4). This chronological organization allows Weltman to analyze each Broadway musical adaptation in the historical and cultural context of both Victorian literature and American musical theater. [End Page 662] Weltman’s extensive research bolsters her analyses of the literary and musical texts, helping the reader gain “reciprocal insights” to both texts (227). The strength of Victorians on Broadway lies in its attempt to understand Broadway adaptations of Victorian literature within a larger network of texts and contexts. The first chapter sets the stage for Weltman’s intertextual exploration of Broadway adaptations by providing a history of the American musical theater; a historiography of Victorian studies with reference to scholars such as Virginia Woolf, F. R. Leavis, Kathleen Tillotson, Walter E. Houghton, Lytton Strachey, and Richard Altick; and an overview of the twentieth century’s reception of Victorian literature and culture. Weltman examines One Touch of Venus (1943) in this larger context and argues that the musical “is a precursor and an outlier, illustrating an important conjunction of intellectual and aesthetic changes occurring simultaneously in the 1940s and 1950s” (53–54). Chapters 2 and 3, examining The King and I (1951) and Oliver! (1968) respectively, illustrate how these musicals negotiate each Victorian source text’s commentary on race, gender, and class for its American audience in the mid-twentieth century. “In The King and I’s mythologized Victorian milieu,” Weltman argues, “the white British governess represents in part an idealized United States” (56). Weltman’s claim that these musicals “use their Victorian lenses to refract contemporary American concerns” is more clearly demonstrated in Oliver! (56). Oliver! carefully downplayed the Jewishness of Fagin to address concerns of post–World War II audiences and recreated him, “a virulent anti-Semitic stereotype, in a way that makes the character likable while still utterly recognizable” (92). Weltman rightly acknowledges that this is a great example of an adaptation affecting the public view of its source text. At the heart of Weltman’s argument is the contention that Broadway’s perception of the Victorian equals Dickensian. She not only discusses the musicals adapted directly from Charles Dickens’s works, Oliver! and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1985), but more interestingly finds influences of Dickens in other musicals based on Victorian texts, such as Sweeney Todd (1979) and Jekyll and Hyde: The Musical (1997). In chapter 4, Weltman provides insight into Sweeney Todd’s relation to Victorian cultural contexts based on her personal interview with the creator, Stephen Sondheim. When asked about his idea of Victorian literature and culture, Sondheim pointed to Dickens—both the novels and their film adaptations (109). Weltman also examines how Sweeney Todd enjoyed a successful afterlife in opera and film, which also employed Dickensian features to ensure their Victorianism. In chapter 5, Weltman examines Rupert Holmes’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood, adapted from Dickens’s unfinished novel of the same title. She pays particular attention to the show’s metatheatricality, in which “Dickens, Holmes, the performers, and the audience as well as the [End Page 663] characters all seem to participate” (134). The musical actively engages with the unfinished state of the novel’s narrative and offers a do-it-yourself ending where the audience votes for a desired conclusion. This meta theatricality illuminates the inherent musical theatricality in Dickens’s novel, Weltman argues, supporting her central claim that “adaptations indelibly affect our understanding of Victorian literature and...

The Experience of Idling in Victorian Travel Texts, 1850-1901, by Heidi Liedke

Reviewed by: The Experience of Idling in Victorian Travel Texts, 1850–1901 by Heidi Liedke Maria Frawley (bio) The Experience of Idling in Victorian Travel Texts, 1850–1901, by Heidi Liedke; pp. xii + 279. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, $99.99, $69.99 paper, $54.99 ebook. In "An Apology for Idlers" (1877) Robert Louis Stevenson makes the appealing case that personal worth might be measured by one's comfort level with being idle: "Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality," Stevenson writes, "and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity" (Cornhill Magazine 36, 83). Still, despite the seeming confidence of this pitch for idleness, Stevenson often experienced deep discomfort when forced to be still, to take to a bed for required rest, or to lounge in the sun (or frigid air) with his fellow consumptives: a man wants to be "up and doing" was how he put it in "Health and Mountains" (1881) (The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Vailima edition, vol. 24 [1912], 458). The tension between these two stances is everywhere in Victorian literature, as Tennyson's works especially remind us. The poet who wrote in "The Lotos Eaters" (1832) that "there is no joy but calm," depicted "Ulysses" (1833) as deeply discontent when idle; unwilling to "rest from travel," Tennyson's hero embraces instead a life of unrelenting movement and striving pursuit (Alfred Tennyson: The Major Works, edited by Adam Roberts [Oxford University Press, 2009], l.68, 6). Heidi Liedke's study, The Experience of Idling in Victorian Travel Texts, 1850–1901, takes a deep dive into the fascinating phenomenon of writers in the latter half of the century exploring what it meant to be idle—for example, what sorts of experiences, spatial and temporal, enabled one, if so disposed, to be idle, and what sorts of responses were engendered by that state. The intellectual history and semantic survey that Liedke develops for the concept of idleness advances her claim that travel writing of the period is a "quintessentially late-Romantic" genre (8–9). This context informs her understanding of idleness, [End Page 564] which she sees as "a problem of history": "In Victorian England, idleness was anachronistic," Liedke writes, "happening 'against' other, dominant, concepts and their respective value for society. These other concepts were leisure and work in particular" (25). Although Liedke's readers may wish she had arrived at her destination—five substantial case studies—a tad sooner, her self-declared "itinerary" necessitates that she first chart a prehistory of idleness and examine the concept's semantic fields, the fund of rhetoric that later Victorian writers drew on for their understanding and representation of the experience (8). Along the way she posits and explores three esoteric but generative dimensions to the experience of idleness: readiness, which she claims as the "default state" of Victorian idlers, "thereness," and "dynamic perception" (9). Moreover, she makes a claim for idleness as essential to the ways the writers she studies experienced and represented space. I found her on more convincing ground when tackling the tangible facets of a culture whose commitments seemed to mitigate against and even to condemn the experience of being idle. Chapter 4, for example, studies the "Dangers of Idle Time" via an analysis of The Railway Traveller's Handy Book (1862) that examines the manual's deployment of a rhetoric of "musing" and "whiling away" to tackle the supposed dangers of idleness (70). Chapter 5, on gender and genre, traverses somewhat more predictable ground, showing how "to be idle (and enjoy it) would have been more acceptable for men than for women" (90). Whatever the benefits of the careful scaffolding supplied by these opening chapters, the book picks up the pace when it pivots to its case studies. These start with Anna Mary Howitt's study of Munich in the 1850s. Liedke moves from here to the relatively little-known but fascinating travel text of W. H. Hudson's Idle Days in Patagonia (1893) and from there to Jerome K. Jerome's semi-fictional Three Men in a Boat (1889). She then turns to parts of Margaret...

Wakefield's Offspring

Wakefield's Offspring

Music Physiology, Erotic Encounters, and Queer Reading Practices inTeleny

While music often appears as a “code” for sexual desire in Victorian literature, this article explores music's presence in a text for which no veiled language was needed: the anonymously published pornographic novellaTeleny(1893). The authors ofTelenyinvoke emerging scientific discourses about music physiology to draw explicit parallels between musical and sexual encounters—as when the protagonist Camille orgasms in response to the vibrations of his lover's piano music. In such moments,Telenyoffers an insistent defense of queer desire as a natural process rooted in the organic and often involuntary actions of the muscles and nerves—a particularly powerful intervention at a time when sexual “inversion” was most often denigrated asunnatural. In its use of biological science in the service of sexual representation—science that many twenty-first-century queer theorists might deem “essentialist”—Telenypresents a compelling challenge to scholars grappling with conversations about normativity, resistance, utopian desires, and idealized cultural objects.

ВИКТОРИАНСКИЙ РОМАН КАК ЖАНР: К ПОСТАНОВКЕ ПРОБЛЕМЫ

The article deals with the issue of the Victorian novel in the historical, cultural and genre aspects. There is no single point of view on that phenomenon in the academic literature: some scholars use the term in a chronological sense (Victorian literature referring to the era of the reign of Queen Victoria [1837–1901]); others synonymously use the concepts of “Victorian” and “realistic”; some try to identify the specifics of the phenomenon through non-literary factors (attitude to social issues, philosophical context, etc.). Such approaches, for all their validity, do not clarify the nature of the Victorian novel as a whole. The author of the article hypothesizes that the Victorian novel is a sub-genre of the classic 19th centurynovel, and the following can be distinguished as its distinctive features: attention is focused on the action (plot), and not on the character; social issues are subordinate to the action; the presence of a marriage plot and a happy ending. The above characteristics being not comprehensive, allow outlining further prospects for the study of the Victorian novel as a genre. It is also important to identify and formulate the genre originality of the Victorian novel in the aspect of studying its Russian reception, because otherwise such a comparative study will not have specifics.

Tom F. Wright'sTransatlantic Rhetoricas an American Studies Teaching Resource

I first read Tom F. Wright'sTransatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettesin late summer 2020, while drafting the syllabus for a new undergraduate rhetoric course in my university's Writing major. I proposed “Writing across Cultural Differences” several years ago and had been waiting eagerly to teach it, only to find myself delivering the inaugural version over Zoom during the coronavirus pandemic. As I write this essay in December 2020, I am in the midst of syllabus-building email exchanges with a now-frequent teaching partner (Victorian literature specialist Linda Hughes), as we prepare to offer a graduate seminar in nineteenth-century transatlantic literature for the fourth time. (Our first foray into collaborative transatlanticism was in 2010.) While we plan for the upcoming class (also – sigh – being taught over Zoom), I am rereading Wright's book, this time focussed more on the “transatlantic” side of his title. A generative resource for my teaching in both these classes,Transatlantic Rhetoricenacts a global brand of American studies, modeling content and methodologies crucial to the field today. To illustrate, I will revisit some ways in which Wright's anthology is informing my pedagogy in this challenging COVID-shaped year.

Victorian penny press plagiarisms as transmedia storytelling

The Victorian period saw the proliferation of penny press plagiarisms—that is, transformations of middle-class narratives, typically for a lower-class audience. Authors of these often anonymous transformations performed labor by expanding existing narratives in ways that resonate with today's understanding of fan fiction and transmedia storyworlds. Penny press plagiarisms illustrate the methodological challenges of studying the historical reception of literary and popular culture events that might be characterized as fannish, as the constitutive elements that describe a fan must be traced backward in the absence of living communities and with ephemeral evidence of engagement with popular culture texts. Application of insights from media and periodical studies shows that the penny press contributes to the long history of fandom. The Victorian period's literary markets, social class politics, and copyright paradigms defamiliarize these concepts in the field of studies of fans and fandoms, revealing how a history of Victorian fandom is also a history of for-profit transmedia storytelling.

Victorian Environmental Nightmares, edited by Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison

Reviewed by: Victorian Environmental Nightmares ed. by Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison Ailise Bulfin (bio) Victorian Environmental Nightmares, edited by Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison; pp. xi + 273. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, $119.99, £79.99. Seeking to open new lines of inquiry for Victorian ecocriticism and address a notable gap within it, Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison’s Victorian Environmental Nightmares focuses on the dark side of Victorian literary engagements with the environment, aptly encapsulated in its arresting cover image of a spectral figure symbolizing deadly Thames pollution. This edited collection thus focuses on texts that offer insight into what it calls Victorian environmental nightmares, defined briefly as “actual and imagined environmental crises during the Victorian Age” (8). In doing so, it follows the relatively recent turn in ecocriticism from examining how the nonhuman world is represented in literature to focusing more specifically on representations of environmental degradation and catastrophe, often through the lens of the Anthropocene and inspired by contemporary awareness of the spiralling climate and biodiversity emergencies. As such, the collection is an important intervention in Victorian environmental criticism and one of the first full-length works to address this subject. A key strength of the book is its broad, inclusive approach, expanding the parameters of what the editors view as a “developing” “canon” of Victorian ecocritical genres, authors, and texts (4). The collection places essays on expected authors, such as John Ruskin, Charles Dickens, and H. G. Wells, in productive conjunction with essays on authors not yet typically considered from this perspective, such as Ouida and Oscar Wilde. Chapters pursue the theme of environmental crisis across an extensive range of sources, from mid-century realism and poetry to travel writing and children’s natural history, finde-siècle speculative fiction, and fairy tales. Taken together, the essays demonstrate both the transgeneric prevalence of this theme in Victorian writing and the corresponding presence of some form of environmental awareness and concern in Victorian society. In keeping with its inclusive stance, the collection imposes no prescribed critical or theoretical approach, though many contributors deftly apply critical tools from the interrelated frameworks of environmental humanities and postcolonialism to reveal [End Page 433] how the texts problematize human exceptionalism and critique the capitalist socio-economic structures underpinning the environmental degradation depicted within them. John Miller and Alicia Carroll use the lens of eco-apocalypse to reveal, respectively, the radical, even utopian, extinctionist strain in James Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night (1874) and the paradox in Ouida’s environmentalist The Waters of Edera (1900), in which “nature” versus “modernity” is framed as a zero-sum game that leaves no room for recovery, “thereby effectively curtailing an ecological futurity” (149). Other contributors deploy the concept of the Anthropocene. Mark Frost reads late-Victorian disaster tales as “early intimations of the crises of identity, being, and agency that the Anthropocene prompts,” while Shun Yin Kiang critiques the concept’s inherent anthropocentrism by showing how Wells decenters the role of the human in the island ecology depicted in The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) (249–50). Together, these two essays draw attention to the ways in which all Victorian literature can be viewed as Anthropocene writing, extending Jesse Oak Taylor’s contention regarding the novel’s complicity in producing this epoch of massive human inscription on the nonhuman world. Despite, or perhaps because of, the collection’s wide-ranging, theoretically diverse approach, many synergies arise from the assembled essays—though the editors could have done more to highlight these in the introduction. Most notably, the essays collectively work to nuance scholarly understandings of Victorian environmental consciousness by revealing key differences as well as similarities between nineteenth-century and current perspectives, rather than simply reading contemporary views onto historical texts. Several contributors show how some Victorian authors conceived of the unadulterated nonhuman world as a threatening, hostile environment, notably Morrison’s deployment of the eco-gothic to illuminate Frances Trollope’s horror in Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) at the threat posed by the uncultivated parts of the Western U. S. to the nascent domestic realm. Sara Atwood convincingly argues that the mythic and apocalyptic...

Edward Lloyd and His World: Popular Fiction, Politics and the Press in Victorian Britain, edited by Sarah Louise Lill and Rohan McWilliam

Reviewed by: Edward Lloyd and His World: Popular Fiction, Politics and the Press in Victorian Britain ed. by Sarah Louise Lill and Rohan McWilliam Carolyn Vellenga Berman (bio) Edward Lloyd and His World: Popular Fiction, Politics and the Press in Victorian Britain, edited by Sarah Louise Lill and Rohan McWilliam; pp. xix + 240. New York and London: Routledge, 2019, $160.00. A gripping book, Edward Lloyd and His World: Popular Fiction, Politics and the Press in Victorian Britain makes visible a massively important presence in Victorian literature that has gone unrecognized for too long: the publisher Edward Lloyd. Lloyd is best known today as the proprietor of Lloyd’s Newspaper (1842–1931), which reached a circulation of one million copies soon after his death in 1890. He is also known for publishing Charles Dickens knock-offs in the 1830s and 1840s. As Sarah Louise Lill and Rohan McWilliam comment in a thoughtful introduction, “Lloyd systematically plundered his way through Dickens’s repertoire” with a set of works written by Thomas Peckett Prest, including The Sketch Book by Bos (1836), The Pickwick Posthumous Papers (1837), The Life and Adventures of Oliver Twiss (1838–39), Nickelas Nickelbery (1838), and Martin Guzzlewit (c.1842) (7). This book takes the rip-offs seriously, establishing these “illegitimate literary doppelgangers” as a mode of fan fiction, a phase of Victorian publishing that extended Dickens’s cultural impact by making his work accessible to working-class readers (16). As Anthony Trollope wrote in an obituary, Dickens “knew exactly how to tap the newly-growing mass of readers as it sprang up among the lower classes. He could measure the reading public—probably taking his measure of it unconsciously—and knew what the public wanted of him” (“Charles Dickens,” [St. Paul’s Magazine 1870], 371). But others tapped the inchoate desires of these readers as well—with more affordable works. In this respect, we may view Lloyd himself as a doppelganger for Dickens and other literary eminences, selling down-market versions of all kinds of publications. This book complements important scholarship on W. S. Reynolds, radical print culture, and Dickens’s journalism. It offers another angle, however, by focusing on the efforts of a publisher whose interest in working-class readers was almost exclusively commercial. It thus gives us access to a [End Page 465] wide range of cheap fiction from the 1830s to the 1850s along with myriad connections to popular culture, industrial history, and the rise of a liberal consensus. If a collection always resembles Frankenstein’s monster, this one is notably lifelike. More fun to read than is usual, it approaches a monograph in its careful unfolding of the question: “In what sense can a publisher be viewed as an auteur?” (4). (One imagines Dickens rolling in his grave.) It opens with a preface by the novelist Stephen Jarvis, reflecting on his Death and Mr. Pickwick (2015), and is framed by helpful examinations of mass-market publishing by Lill and of nineteenth-century innovations in printing technology by Matt McKenzie, an expert in letterpress printing. The central chapters, attending more to fiction than nonfiction, make a powerful case for serious consideration of the texts and images purveyed by Lloyd. Helen R. Smith’s knowledgeable introduction to his key authors (Prest and James Malcolm Rymer) lays the groundwork for a multifaceted examination of their work. First, we examine Rymer as the creator of the “penny dreadful” in a chapter by Louis James, author of the seminal Fiction for the Working Man, 1830–1850 (1963) (54), then the publications that “recycled” Dickensian characters, plotlines, and titles from different angles (98). Ian Haywood studies the illustrations; Adam Abraham considers the author (Prest) as “the man who would be Dickens” (96); and Marie Léger-St-Jean places Prest’s adaptations in the context of the theater world he occupied. This leads beautifully to Brian Maidment’s excursion into Lloyd’s performance and song books, before we return to Rymer with Anna Gasperini’s chapter on medicine, radicalism, and his Manuscripts from the Diary of a Physician (1844–47), followed by Sara Hackenberg’s comparison of Rymer’s Varney the Vampire (1845–47) with Reynolds’s Wagner, the Wehr...

In Memoriam: J. Hillis Miller (1928–2021)

In MemoriamJ. Hillis Miller (1928–2021) Andrzej Warminski (bio) I knew Hillis for a long time—it would be going on forty-six years now—first as a graduate student of comparative literature in the 1970s at Yale; then as a colleague, also at Yale, in the early 1980s; and then finally as a colleague in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine since 1989. J. Hillis Miller's path traversed not one but at least four careers. The first of these was his nearly twenty years at Johns Hopkins (1953–1972), where he distinguished himself as a talented scholar of Victorian literature and as the American "ambassador" for the Geneva School of literary theory. Hillis was also a prominent member of the school. (If you pick up Sarah Lawall's old book on the Geneva School of literary critics, Critics of Consciousness [1968], you will find there chapters devoted to Marcel Raymond, Albert Béguin, Georges Poulet, Jean-Pierre Richard, Jean Starobinski, Jean Rousset, and … J. Hillis Miller. Or should one say "EeLEES MeelER"?) Hillis's second career spanned the memorable years at Yale (1972–1986), when (along with Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, and Geoffrey Hartman) he gained fame (and notoriety) as a member of the "Yale School" of deconstructive literary criticism. The third career would be his years (1986–2001) as indefatigable Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UC Irvine, where he, along with Jacques Derrida (whom Hillis brought to UCI), was the main shaper of UCI's reputation as a center for the rigorous study of "theory." But his fourth career would have to be Hillis's years since retirement. Hillis's achievements in "retirement" constituted what would be a full and very distinguished career for lesser mortals. This is the case not only in regard to the volume of publications—I count at least fifteen books (with more in [End Page v] production) and numerous articles—and an international lecturing schedule that many a younger scholar would not be able to keep up with. (Particularly in China—imagine what kind of trip you have to take to get from Deer Isle, Maine, to Beijing!) It was also true of Hillis's work as teacher and mentor. Since "retirement" Hillis served as chair or member on the dissertation committees of many students in English and in comparative literature. I know that he also supervised dissertations at UCLA, UC Berkeley, and the University of Queensland. This is a remarkable record, and not just in terms of quantity. As anybody who has known Hillis within the academic context would affirm, Hillis was the most generous teacher that any of us will ever come across. His was above all an intellectual generosity: Hillis's willingness to see students' thoughts and projects through to the end without either preemptive acceptance or dismissal. But it was also a simply personal generosity with his time and effort that must have been a response to a genuinely ethical imperative—indeed, the equivalent of a religious "calling" or vocation—to treat others with the respect due to "the other." If Hillis was what one calls a "beloved" teacher, it is no doubt because students recognized this trait and appreciated being treated with respect—intellectual and personal. On the personal side: I have many memories of time with Hillis, a lot of them also involving Derrida, for instance, our annual ritual picking up Derrida at the airport—first at JFK, then at LAX—to take him to New Haven and Laguna Beach, respectively. From LAX we would drive to Irvine, Derrida would pick up his rental car, and then Derrida would drive the rental car, together with Hillis, to Laguna, with me following them, Derrida's very heavy suitcase (full of paper) in the trunk. After his long flight from Paris, Derrida would be weaving all over MacArthur Boulevard (and later Newport Coast Drive). I remember despairing, "Oh God, he's going to get himself killed, and he'll get Hillis killed too!"—while trying to make sure I didn't run into them, what with Derrida braking erratically on the hills. … Hillis and I sometimes...

HeathcliffWalks

Heathcliff<i>Walks</i>

Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature: Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire

At the beginning of his 1873 Australasian travelogue, Anthony Trollope observed that the future prospects of Australia and New Zealand “involved the happiness of millions to come of English-speaking men and women” while noting that “it has been impossible to avoid speculations as to their future prospects”. Philip Steer’s carefully-argued study of colonial settler writing in and about the Antipodes considers the cultural exchange between the Australasian colonies and the mother country, noting the importance of colonial culture to English realist writing. Positioning his work as a “sustained reckoning with Edward Gibbon Wakefield”, for Steer “the evolving frenzy of exploitation and transformation in the settler colonies put pressure on metropolitan forms of the novel and political economy, and provided new conceptual vocabularies for understanding British society and subjectivity”. In order to examine some of this pressure, Steer considers a range of authors—Victorian celebrities like Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope, alongside lesser-known writers including Catherine Spence and Henry Crocker Marriott Watson. He also seeks to re-evaluate how settler colonialism sits within Victorian writing generally, making a very convincing case for reconsidering the sense of overseas settlements as simply convenient places to which problematic characters might be banished.

Twentieth-Century Readers’ Concepts of Victorian Women and Sex Life

This paper offers an account of what a number of modern key works by notable twentieth-literary critics and historians give by way of generalization about the Victorians. They seek to find general terms and stamp the whole period with their broad generalizations, especially is this so when they generalize about women and sex relations. The wings of Patmore’s angel are still hovering over literary criticism. Moreover, the paper looks at the other side of the picture and investigates the works of key authors who shed light on various dim corners of the Victorian society and reflect different views. It shows that our views on Victorian sexual activity are confused and inadequate, and concludes that for the study of Victorian literature, we have to evolve an entirely new philosophy of women and sex relations, less overt and obscene than My Secret Life, less distorted than that of “Acton’s official view”, but also, perhaps, less “angelic” than we have previously imagined.

‘How differently it came upon her’: The Ageing Young Stepmother in Charlotte Yonge’s &lt;i&gt;The Young Step-Mother&lt;/i&gt; and Dinah Craik’s &lt;i&gt;Christian’s Mistake&lt;/i&gt;

This article looks at two domestic novels of the 1860s, The Young Step-Mother by Charlotte Yonge and Christian’s Mistake by Dinah Craik, alongside Victorian vital statistics and family structure in order to argue that fictional stepmothers of the period — even very young stepmothers — are better understood as a portrayal of female middle age. One of the strongest conventions of the nineteenth-century novel is that its protagonist be young, especially if that protagonist is female. This youth convention prevented novelists from putting many aspects of women’s lives at the centre of their work; one such aspect was mothering a child past the age of infancy. When critics write about the stepmother in Victorian literature, they usually portray her either as a stereotype (the wicked stepmother of fairy tale) or as a representation of a common nineteenth-century reality. This article shows that a young stepmother-protagonist offered Victorian writers a way to respect the novel’s youth convention at the same time as exploring emotions and experiences not typically available to biological mothers until their thirties, forties or even fifties: dealing with the competing demands of infant and adolescent children, for example, or with a daughter’s unhappy marriage or son’s professional difficulties. Through showing how Yonge’s and Craik’s novels give mature experience to young women, this article offers a model for finding Victorian representations of age in unexpected places and unexpected bodies.

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.

On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American EssayEmpire of Ruin: Black Classicism and American Imperial CultureReaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature

On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American EssayEmpire of Ruin: Black Classicism and American Imperial CultureReaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature

Review: Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature: Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire, by Philip Steer

Review: <i>Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature: Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire</i>, by Philip Steer

THE EVOLUTION OF FEMALE WRITERS IN THE 20TH CENTURY: FROM THE LATE 19TH CENTURY TOWARDS 21ST CENTYRY

This article gives an overview of writing by women in a revolutionary phase during the twentieth century and highlights the distinguished features of twentieth century women's literature including the diverse range of themes, change in women's social and family roles, a remarkable shift in subjects of writing which added a new frontier in women's writing. While contemplating the study of twentieth century women's literature, the most significant features that came under the spotlight include discovery of women's self- identity, women coming out from the male defined precincts to achieve independence and the authors' expedition towards autonomy and self-assertion through their writing. However, to trace the growth twentieth century women's literature has witnessed, a comparative investigation of Victorian and twentieth century women's literature has been stated briefly.