Victorian Novels Research Articles

The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space, by Anna Kornbluh

Reviewed by: The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space by Anna Kornbluh Lauren M. E. Goodlad (bio) The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space, by Anna Kornbluh; pp. xii + 217. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019, $82.50, $27.50 paper. Anna Kornbluh's new book extends the author's work on Victorian novels as both a lens on and subject for Marxist theory. The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space thus joins recent works by Ian Duncan, Elaine Freedgood, and Carolyn Lesjak in illustrating the diverse historical materialisms now flourishing in Victorian studies. While this new breed of materialists adopts varied approaches to Karl Marx's legacy—with Kornbluh standing out for her Slavoj Žižek-like merger with psychoanalysis—what they share is, first, a desire to invigorate materialism's luminous insights into cultural production (thus resisting the anti-historicism that sometimes travels under the sign of postcritique), and, second, an embrace of form and aesthetics that self-styled postcritics also uphold. Hence, while The Order of Forms calls out its allegiance to the resurgent formalism for which Caroline Levine's work is known, there are significant differences. Whereas Kornbluh builds on a longstanding Marxist tradition of theorizing literary form (including Georg Lukács's influential legacy), Levine participates in a project of ontological leveling which, via Bruno Latour's network theory, entered literary study from the social sciences. That explains why The Order of Forms still looks like a work of Victorianist criticism—with chapters on Wuthering Heights (1847), Bleak House (1852–53), Alice's Adventures [End Page 312] in Wonderland (1865), and Jude the Obscure (1895)—while Levine's Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015) is less literary criticism per se than a case for replacing the study of literary form with formalism as a prism for the world at large. It may also explain Kornbluh's choice of Emily Brontë's stormy poetics, Charles Dickens's multiplotted infusions of ghost story and murder mystery, Lewis Carroll's child's-eye surrealism, and Thomas Hardy's naturalistic proto-modernism to exemplify the realist novel. More than twenty years after Harry E. Shaw's Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot (1999), readers of this journal will likely recognize Kornbluh's study as part of an ongoing effort to redeem Victorian fiction from the misreadings of prominent New Critics, poststructuralists, and others. Likewise, her debates with Lukács and Fredric Jameson speak to a movement in Victorian studies to embrace these inspired dialecticians while countering their tendencies to misunderstand British literature's formal vigor in the years between Wuthering Heights and Jude the Obscure. As Kornbluh riffs on Jameson's spatial motifs, she reminds us that realist storytelling need not reflexively hew to extant structures or pursue accurate reportage to the detriment of art. This strong case for realist plasticity affirms what Raymond Williams (in a legacy Kornbluh does not explicitly claim) called the nineteenth-century novel's "subjunctive" mode (Writing in Society [Verso, 1983], 161). By far the most original feature of the book is the role accorded to innovations in math. "Mathematical formalism," Kornbluh writes, "powerfully recognizes what forms do," making "relations among abstractions fathomable and reconfigurable" and thus affirming "the madeness" of "laws and states of relationality" (8). When Victorian mathematics radically altered "the basis of human knowledge," it marked a crucial synergy for novels (105). The "broad intellectual milieu of Bleak House," Kornbluh shows, "activates with important advances in formalist mathematics the idea of a limit as that which enables structuration" (84–85). She pairs George Boole's exposition of the topic with a reading of Dickens's work in which limit-building takes the form of "ratifying law" (84). Kornbluh's larger claim, however, is that mathematical formalism presents a unique opportunity to "mightily revise political theorizing" (8). In set theory, advanced calculus, and post-Euclidian geometry, she finds a formalism that places "abstraction above empiricism, consistency before concretude," and the sundering of "signs from things" (105). By triangulating the isomorphic formalisms of math, aesthetics, and politics, Kornbluh urges readers to think less of "present reality" than of what can be "rendered thinkable"—a move toward the antimimetic...

A Beloved or A Devil?: Toxic Masculinity in Robert Browning's “My Last Duchess’’ and “Porphyria's Lover’’

Coinciding with the years between 1837 and 1901, The Victorian period witnessed the dramatic growth of the reading public and the increasing significance of the novel genre in accordance with the circulating libraries and weekly magazines through which a great number of Victorian novels were published. Although these realist novels, characterized by an impetus for social realism in order to portray the negative impacts of industrialism and capitalism upon the Victorian life, prevailed over any other genre through their critical imagery of contemporary issues, there was a group of poets such as Alfred Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and Robert Browning who contributed to the blossoming of poetry and its distinctive characteristics. Considered as a threshold between Romanticism and Modernism, Victorian poetry has a tendency to depict religious uncertainty, science, morality, and social reform, thereby leading it to incorporate both social and political issues into the realist lens of poetry. In view of its moralist outlook of Victorian poetry, Robert Browning (1812-1889) produced, essentially, a great number of dramatic monologues, based on a fictitious speaker and a listener, so as to epitomize women’s repression and patriarchal domination, consolidated by the growing male authority in the Victorian era in opposition to the country's female ruler named ''Victoria''. Thus, this article aims to analyze the objectification and victimization of women by the patriarchal society and toxic masculinity in the Victorian period through the male gaze of such poems as “My Last Duchess’’ and “Porphyria's Lover’’.

Listening to “the Squirrel's Heart Beat”

Listening to “the Squirrel's Heart Beat”

Miss Jane and Miss Eyre: From student to teacher in Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre is considered to be one of the most significant Victorian novels within the English literary canon as well as a governess novel. However, apart from her experience as governess, it must not be forgotten that, first of all, Jane was a student. Education has shaped the protagonist’s life and the plot of the novel making it one of the main topics of Jane Eyre and other Charlotte Brontë’s literary works such as The Professor (1857) and Villette (1853). The main aim of this essay is to study how education has shaped Jane Eyre both as a student and a teacher and how it has affected the outcome of the novel. In order to do so, a close reading of the novel is carried out along with a sociocultural background of Victorian society.

Review

Review

Class Affect and the Victorian Novelist: George Eliot's Gentility and the Origins of Sympathy in Felix Holt

Class Affect and the Victorian Novelist:George Eliot's Gentility and the Origins of Sympathy in Felix Holt Susan Zlotnick (bio) george eliot's husband, John Cross, singles out Esther Lyon, the heroine of Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), in the beginning of his biography, George Eliot's Life (1885), for her resemblance to his late wife. That observation might surprise Eliot's readers, who have been inclined to see the rebellious Maggie Tulliver and the ardent Dorothea Brooke as avatars of their creator, but not Esther Lyon. An aspirer to gentility who acquired "too many airs and graces" (Felix Holt 75) at boarding school to settle back into her father's small-town Dissenting congregation, Esther is a recurring figure in Eliot's fiction, an early version of that more ruthless aspirant to gentility, Middlemarch's Rosamond Vincy. Despite the glaring contrast between the vulgar young women who inhabit her novels and the mature Eliot's sage-like stature, there are sound reasons for adding provincial strivers to Eliot's roster of semi-autobiographical characters. In his "Introductory Sketch" of Eliot's childhood, Cross highlights the narrowness of Eliot's farmhouse upbringing before noting that Eliot glimpsed a wider life while visiting neighbourhood grandees, and that these glimpses "affected the imagination and accentuated the social differences—differences which had a profound significance for such a sensitive and such an intellectually commanding character, and which left their mark on it" (36). Cross follows this observation about Eliot's sensitivity to social distinctions with a description of Esther from Felix Holt that he believes captures his late wife's characteristic class feelings: No one who has not a strong natural prompting and susceptibility towards such things [the luxuries wealth can provide], and has, at the same time, suffered from the presence of opposite conditions, can understand how powerfully those minor accidents of rank which please the fastidious senses, can preoccupy the imagination. (qtd. in Cross 35–36) By aligning Eliot with Esther, Cross suggests that Eliot too suffered on account of her family's modest social position. Moreover, the link he draws between [End Page 115] Esther and Eliot raises the question: if "minor accidents of rank" preoccupied Esther's imagination, to what degree did they also occupy Eliot's? Embedded in this question about Eliot's rank is a larger one about class affect. Can what sociologist Diane Reay identifies as the "psychic landscape of social class," composed of an "affective lexicon" that includes such emotions as "envy, deference, contempt, arrogance, pride, rage, satisfaction, embarrassment and pity" (912–13), be discerned in a writer's work? This essay attempts to answer that question by turning to Esther Lyon, who shares Eliot's humble origins as well as her boarding-school education in gentility, and the novel in which she appears. Class has long been of vital concern to critics of Felix Holt because of its engagement with the politics of workingclass suffrage.1 Most often read as a contribution to the debates surrounding the Reform Bill of 1867, Felix Holt simultaneously looks back to 1832 and the emergence of the middle class as a rising political force in British society and forward to the passage of the Second Reform Bill. Nevertheless, its stereoscopic focus on both the middle and working classes has been overlooked, and the bulk of critical attention has been paid to the working class, even though the novel links the two reform bills through Felix Holt, who is less a radical than a reformer bent on reshaping the identities of both the middle and working classes. To be fair, Felix Holt remains a difficult text for critics to make sense of: its titular working-class radical turns out to be a conservative who opposes the extension of suffrage, and the backstory that explains how Esther Lyon comes to be the long-lost heir to the Transome estate is so complex that it impedes the story's flow. Moreover, the novel's main narrative threads, Felix's political plot and Esther's inheritance plot, do not seem to align easily, which has led Alison Booth to conclude that "it is impossible to make a fully coherent novel out...

Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848 by Clare Pettitt

Reviewed by: Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848 by Clare Pettitt Pete Orford (bio) Clare Pettitt. Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848. Oxford UP, 2020. Pp. xviii + 348. £65.00. ISBN 978-0-19-883042-9 (hb). The temptation when reviewing a book for Dickens Quarterly is to focus solely on the parts of the book that mention Dickens. But what Clare Pettitt's work on serialization offers is a much wider context, and a good thing, too. Frequently, as Dickens scholars, we celebrate the importance of serialization to his works, and the frequency with which we do so often leads to the implicit inference that Dickens is as central to serialization as serialization was to him; what Pettitt's book offers is a broader view of serialization that explores a much larger trend across several authors and generations. "At its most basic, seriality is about the relationship of the part to the whole and the relationship of the singular to the plural," Pettitt tells us; "seriality has therefore emerged as an important term for political theories of citizenship in the nineteenth century and since" (201). The book is the first of three planned monographs, aiming to examine serialization from 1818 through to 1918. While Pettitt acknowledges her book is "deliberately Eurocentric and metropolitan" her subsequent books will aim to expand to "Continental Europe and then to the technologically networked empire towards the end of the century" (22). In doing so, Pettitt is keen to explore serialization in its broadest sense, not limited to literature [End Page 209] but also in its wider social functions. In the introduction, for example, she points towards serialization as "a dangerously … flexible form," which "can be emancipatory, but it can also be regulatory and repressive" (6), pointing to its darkest form in the numbering of prisoners at concentration camps, which forcefully highlights how far serialization can differ from the cheery numbers of Pickwick. Though I've noted the broader range of this book beyond Dickens, that is not to say that Dickens does not make regular appearances. Sketches by Boz is his most referenced work in Pettitt's book, first alluded to frequently in the opening chapter, "Yesterday's News," in which the veracious devouring of the news by nineteenth-century readers as described is akin to modern day consumption of social media. A particularly illuminating chapter called "Scott Unbound" follows, in which Walter Scott – frequently upheld as the antithesis to serialization and the penny dreadfuls – is explored as a fragmented author through his various ballads and poems, subsequently collected. Pettitt uses the disparate nature of Scott's poetry and the illusion of cohesion in its bound form to segue into discussing "the importance of the scrapbook and the album in understanding nineteenth-century print culture" (83). The next chapter, "Live Byron," considers how Don Juan and Childe Harold intersect with contemporary news, and aims "to think about forms of performance that made innovative claims to 'liveness'" (109). This is then followed by a fascinating chapter, "Vesuvius on the Strand," which looks at how Pompeii and its neighboring volcano featured prominently in English print in the 1820s to become a familiar and omnipresent sight: "It must have been difficult to ignore the insistent process of Mount Vesuvius in London from the 1820s onwards. The volcano would pop up all over the place and erupt, often several times a day, in multimedia shows, spectacles, and plays across the city" (148). In this chapter and others, Pettitt argues persuasively for the background noise of print that has so often been ignored in our championing of Victorian novels, showing how something apparently distant such as Vesuvius can become a firm presence in nineteenth-century England through the repeated minor (and major) references occurring in the peripheral vision of the reader. This is something that needs further exploration in Dickens's work as we pay more attention to the paratexts around his monthly and weekly instalments, to better understand the wider context his readers were experiencing as they navigated through his stories via several pages of advertisements, competing serialized fiction and shorter articles. The next chapter devotes itself more fully to Dickens...

Constrained Realism: Representing Social Facts in George Gissing's Fiction

Constrained Realism:Representing Social Facts in George Gissing's Fiction Maria Su Wang (bio) over the past fifteen years, studies of the nineteenth-century novel and the rise of the social sciences have proliferated. These studies have revealed the confluence of ideas and shared discourse between Victorian fiction and developments in the emerging fields of anthropology (Buzard 2015), economics (Jaffe 2010), political economy (Gallagher 2006; Steinlight 2018), and sociology (McWeeny 2016). These accounts often describe narrative form and social scientific ideas as mutually shaping or overlapping, productively elucidating one another in their juxtaposition. Writing on the significant intersection of the social mistake and the literary, Kent Puckett has argued that "if worked properly, narratology might emerge as a productive kind of sociology" (10). In this essay, I would like to amend Puckett's claim as follows: expanding our contexts for the Victorian novel beyond immediate materialist or cultural registers, beyond even the periodicity of "Victorian" itself, reveals how early sociology—as founded by Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber—might emerge as a productive kind of narratology. That is to say, reading social theory as a type of narrative thinking, similar to Victorian realism, can reveal broader, unexpected histories and disciplinary convergences. This essay thus takes as its starting point the urgency of reading the Victorian novel form alongside and against early sociological theory in order to show how both reflect an interrelated interest in the fact that emerges over the nineteenth century. Today we use "fact" to mean a singular epistemological unit that transcends belief or opinion and corresponds with reality, but that was not always the case. As Mary Poovey has shown in A History of the Modern Fact, it has been a contested term contingent upon epistemological and disciplinary shifts at various historical junctures. Yet while Poovey focuses on the natural and social sciences generally, she glosses over how early sociologists attempted to work through their disciplinary understanding of facticity; this was especially true of Durkheim, who sought to define the "social fact" as a distinguishing methodological concept for sociology. At a parallel moment at the fin de siècle, Victorian novelist George Gissing addresses similar concerns, trying to enact in his narration the constraining [End Page 97] power of social structures and their affective impact on individual subjects. By looking at Gissing and Durkheim together, this essay reinscribes them into their respective traditions and asks what this comparison reveals about Victorian narrative realism and the development of sociology at the fin de siècle. Both the fiction of Gissing and the social theory of Durkheim converge around the idea of constraint—specifically, how social structures impinge on individuals. While Gissing asks what this means for character and narration, Durkheim explores its meaning for understanding the collective dimensions of social life. This comparison reveals fin de siècle realism and early sociology as congruent attempts at grappling with and accounting for the constricting material and affective realities of social existence, what Durkheim has named the social fact. Social facts, according to Durkheim, transcend the individual yet play a crucial determining role in the individual's life. Focusing on social facts enables Durkheim to document both social norms and values (e.g., rules governing etiquette) and structures (e.g., the institution of kinship and marriage). By reading Gissing's fiction as an attempt to translate the constraining social facts of urban life into realist narrative practice, this essay clarifies his place within the history of the novel: as a later realist writer whose narrative mode adopts a Durkheimian realism.1 More broadly, reading Gissing's narrative form alongside and against Durkheim's concept of the social fact shifts us away from considering his novels as primarily documents of fin de siècle social history, whether indexing the changing publishing landscape of the period, in New Grub Street (1891), or annotating debates over gender, in the case of The Odd Women (1893).2 As valuable and insightful as such accounts are, they overlook the longer histories in which Gissing's work partakes, both as a contribution to realism and as part of the longer process of knowledge reorganization that led to our modern understanding of the fact. By...

Kestner, J. A. (2017). <i>Sherlock’s sisters: The British female detective, 1864–1913</i>. New York: Routledge.

The monograph of the American scholar Joseph A. Kestner is devoted to Victorian novels and stories that feature a female detective protagonist. The author introduces a large volume of little studied texts written in the period from 1864 to 1913, which he explores to follow the process of the female detective character taking shape, noting its specific structural and sociocultural traits as well as features of narration. As a literary example and a starting point, the author considers the character of the amateur detective Sherlock Holmes: it is in comparison and polemic with him that the character of a female detective is formed in the subsequent literary tradition. In recognizing realistic prose as documentary evidence, the author painstakingly reconstructs the historical context, mostly in the area of gender issues. This enables him to shed a new light on the origins of English detective writing, while not without certain limitations.

Portrait of Women in Victorian Novels

This article examines the representation of three female characters in three Victorian novels. These three novels are Bleak house, Ruth, and Lady Audley’s Secret. This work is, in fact, a study of how women were viewed in Victorian novels which actually depicted the Victorian society. The society of that time was male-dominated that tried to rule over women unfairly and made them as submissive as possible in order to handle them easily according to their selfish tastes. If women in Victorian society followed the expectations of men thoroughly, they were called angel-in-the-house; if not, they were labeled with negative labels like fallen-woman or mad-woman. This article tries to go through the characters of Esther Summerson, Ruth, and Lady Audley who appeared in the three aforementioned novels respectively in order to prove that the Victorian Society, which was represented in the novels of that period, was a harshly male-dominated society that ruled over women with bitter patriarchy.

Gender, Animals, and Gaskell’s Cousin Phillis

The so-called animal turn in the humanities has given rise to an increased interest in the ways in which representations of animals shape human cultures. In Victorian studies, scholars have attended to the significance of domestic pets and other animals in the production of Victorian ideologies and subjectivities. Recent studies often point out the role animals played in the formation of Victorian domesticity. While these studies in general assign a key role to animal figures in the mediation of traditional domesticity, this essay explores the opposite phenomenon taking place in the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cousin Phillis, a novella in which pets and farm animals are prominent. In this work, the eponymous protagonist, a young woman living on a farm, falls in love with a cosmopolitan engineer. Rather than portraying Phillis as an ethereal angelic creature who would be typical of the ideal Victorian woman, Gaskell ascribes to her a passionate nature, though hidden behind a constrained façade. Phillis is partly able to express her deep-set emotions, including her interest in the cosmopolitan engineer, when interacting with animals. This non-traditional gender role becomes possible through the representation of birds and the family dog. Animals enable the imagination of a femininity that resists restrictive gender codes. The traditional association of animals with women has sometimes worked to denigrate the latter, but as Gaskell shows that this link also has an emancipatory potential.

Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel. Elaine Freedgood. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. xxii+152.

<i>Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel</i>. Elaine Freedgood. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. xxii+152.

La alegr�a del capit�n Ribot by Armando Palacio Vald�s (review)

Reviewed by: La alegría del capitán Ribot by Armando Palacio Valdés Gustavo Pérez Firmat Armando Palacio Valdés La alegría del capitán Ribot (1899). Tomo XI. Madrid: Librería general de Victoriano Suárez, 1920. Project Gutenberg Open Access. [Invited retrospective review essay]. More than a Hispanist's "bucket list," this commentary is a "book shelf" list, since my bucket contains books. Not the ones I'd like to read or write, but those I'd like to write about. Now in the tercera edad of my academic life, I've been writing about books or authors whose company I have prized, that I have read over and over, but that have not been relevant to my research or my teaching. Writing about them is a way of memorializing our acquaintance, tying the knot of readerly affection. The list is not long, mostly limited to works generally within my competence, modern Spanish or Spanish American literature, and many of my favorites fall outside this field. So far, I've taken about half a dozen items out of the bucket. I have a few more left. Next up is La alegría del capitán Ribot (1899), one of Armando Palacio Valdés's most widely read novels, whose popularity lead to its prompt appearance in English the next year and century as The Joy of Captain Ribot (1900). I acknowledge that my temperament makes my task a bit harder. In literature, as in life, I shy away from complexity, ambiguity, tension, suspense – some of the features of literary works that give [End Page 241] scholars pasture to feed on. Instead, I favor intelligent sentimentality. To Unamuno's El Cristo de Velázquez, I prefer his Teresa. To Neruda's "Alturas de Machu Picchu," I prefer "Poema 20." One of the Cuban poets formerly in my bucket, José Ángel Buesa, was said to write for cooks and chauffeurs. Another, Dulce María Loynaz, likened her poems to ripples of water glinting in the moonlight. When it comes to fiction, my inclinations run along the same soft lines: Pereda, not Pérez Galdós; Valera, not Pardo Bazán. And Palacio Valdés. The Victorian novelist Wilkie Collins's recipe for writing fiction was simple: Make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait. I would add a fourth imperative: Make me happy. My poets and novelists do. Some will conclude that my bucket is full of treacle. Sure, but their treacle is my treat. If I am to trust my gap-stricken journals, I first read La alegría del capitán Ribot in the summer of 2010 while on vacation in Duck, a resort town on the outer banks of North Carolina. That was a difficult summer, and Palacio Valdés helped me get through it. Since then I've reread it many times. I'm not sure how many because recently I've been reading it on Kindle and my highlights are not dated (or if they are, I don't know how to locate them). With every reading, the Captain's alegría rubs off on me once again. Some of Palacio Valdés's novels bear ironic or misleading titles: El idilio de un enfermo is hardly an idyll. The title of La alegría del capitán Ribot means what it says. My problem is this: I love this novel, I want to record my gratitude to its author, but I don't know what to say about it. Not because it has been the object of abundant critical commentary, it hasn't. Like much of Palacio Valdés's fiction, La alegría del capitán Ribot is viewed with gentle condescension. Some scholars have labelled it a novela rosa, the kiss of death for serious fiction. A few years ago, I wrote about another of his rose-scented works in my bucket, Sinfonía pastoral (1931). Written in his late seventies, no one had ever taken it seriously, an incentive for me to do so. I would like to do the same with La alegría del capitán Ribot. My rule of thumb: If I like it...

Anti-individualism in the Victorian Family Chronicle

AbstractThe bildungsroman privileges singularity: the unique and, often, the only child. This essay turns away from familiar literary narratives of a protagonist's personal development in order to examine the narrative possibilities of a genre that instead maintains focus on a group of siblings: the Victorian family chronicle. Family chronicles understand their large families as systems; they celebrate the replaceability of relationships rather than the irreplaceability of individuals. By insisting that a flourishing group can function in the absence of any particular person, they achieve fulfillment not in individualist plots but in group activities and brimful houses. The most influential Victorian family chronicler was Charlotte Mary Yonge. Yonge's episodic form was taken up by Anthony Trollope, Margaret Oliphant, Louisa May Alcott, and Margaret Sidney. These writers’ chronicles are non-protagonistic, nearly plotless, and potentially endless. They have been dismissed as minor works; nonetheless the anti-individualism of the large family chronicle offers an innovative approach to the nineteenth-century novel's tense negotiation between individual needs and group membership. Glimpses of chronicle narration can be seen operating within and against the competitive character systems that dominate canonical Victorian novels. A twentieth-century variant, Gilbreth and Carey's Cheaper by the Dozen, proves that the mutualistic form is also capable of hardening the boundaries around a family unit in order to compete in a capitalist marketplace. Nonetheless, the family chronicles developed by Yonge model a social economy in which both narrative and economic resources are not concentrated on a single striver but are distributed across a system.

Casting Shadows at Chesney Wold: Empty-House-Time and Realism in the British Novel

AbstractWhat insights into literary realism can be found by dwelling in the empty rooms and abandoned spaces of Bleak House, a novel more often read for its representation of overcrowded environments? Traveling between and imaginatively inhabiting empty houses of Charles Dickens's and Virginia Woolf's construction, this article proposes empty-house-time as a distinctive narrative chronotope, one that nineteenth- and twentieth-century British writers use to investigate the processes of realist fiction, especially its affective dimensions. Taking the character-less built environment as a figure for the novel form, the article shows that the chromatic present that characterizes narratives of spaces like Chesney Wold when the Dedlocks are absent throws into flux boundaries between the fictional and the real, the reader and the world of the text, and different modes of imagining. It opens up continuums along which strategies of realist characterization and world-building are dramatized and interrogated. Most powerfully, empty-house-time reveals how affects associated with imagining the world going on without you shape encounters with fiction. Identifying the vital, ongoing existence of unoccupied rooms in Dickens's writing can in turn revitalize studies of the relationship between Victorian and modernist novels and theories of realism. This article concludes by turning to the Ramsays’ abandoned coastal home in To the Lighthouse, in which Woolf, like Dickens, links an interrogation of realist fictionality to a historically specific reimagining of the household.

Painful Subjects

Painful Subjects

Poets of Promotion: Corporate Personality and Crowd Psychology in Guy Thorne and Leo Custance’s Sharks (1904)

Abstract This article deals with the relationship between fin-de-siècle crowd psychology and joint-stock companies in late Victorian and early Edwardian financial novels, most notably Guy Thorne and Leo Custance’s Sharks (1904). This satirical novel is not only an anatomy of the turn-of-the-century joint-stock economy, but also a critical examination of the legal principle of corporate personality and the ontology of the financial corporation. Tracing the launch and life of a ridiculously speculative joint-stock company, and employing a central metaphor of emergent corporative agency drawn from contemporary crowd psychologists such as Gustave Le Bon, the novel applies the formal logic of incorporation as a narrative principle and constructs a dystopic, farcical vision of the possibilities inherent in joint-stock companies for organizing, ordering, and connecting individuals. The article argues that, by positing the corporate person as a beheaded Leviathan, the novel portrays joint-stock business, and particularly the promotion of new companies, as an eminently imaginative kind of work, involving not simply the dissemination of financial information, but also an affective preconditioning of the investing public by means of an excessive production of texts across the period’s booming print industries.

Metaphorical Verbalization of the Concept 'Woman' in the Victorian Novels of Mary Braddon

The representation of women in the written texts of the Victorian Era has received a great deal of attention and critics have analysed different strategies used for the description of women in novels. This paper looks at a particular device employed by the Victorian novelist Mary Braddon in the representation of women, namely, the use of conceptual metaphors. Women and metaphors alike are at once meditational and relational. A woman serves to mediate between man and man, man and Nature, man and Spirit. The research deals with repeated metaphors presenting women in the guise of foods, animals, babies, parts of the body, members of the aristocracy and supernatural creatures. Bearing in mind the social force of metaphor in our understanding of the world and of ourselves as well as the important role language plays as a channel through which ideas and beliefs are transmitted and perpetuated, the present study attempts to offer a preliminary exploration of how images of women are transmitted and perpetuated by the Victorian novelist Mary Braddon through linguistic metaphors.&#x0D;

The contribution of Freuds theories to the literary analysis of two Victorian novels: Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre

Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytical theories can be used with reference to the analysis of literary works. Reading novels, poems and other compositions through the lens of psychoanalysis gives the opportunity to analyse and evaluate the works of literature in their genesis and presentation. Freudian doctrine can be considered as a reading tool that allows the investigation of the enigmatic areas of human experience and, therefore, its main contribution to literature is related to the discovery of hidden aspects of the text, of the writer and of the reader as well. In this article, the main characters of two Victorian novels, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre are analysed with reference to Freud theories concerning the tripartite structure of the mind (Id, Ego and Super-Ego) along with the Oedipus complex, the analysis of dreams and other aspects of sexuality. Several passages from the two works are highlighted and discussed according to the psychoanalytical theories with a main focus on the characters: Heathcliff and Catherine and then Jane and Mr. Rochester. The importance of the interpretative capacity of psychoanalysis is widely emphasized. Key words: Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis, literary analysis, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre.

The Blackness in The Bluest Eye

Novels, of any time, carry certain stories related to reality. The earlier forms of the Novel, Allegory and Romance, contained religious, philosophical facts. These literary genres took the shape of Novels, which continue to carry moral, philosophical and historical truths. George Meredith, a Victorian novelist, defined Novel as the ‘summary of actual life’. According to William Henry Hudson, an English writer, Novel is an effective medium of the portrayal of human thoughts and actions.&#x0D; The English word, Novel derived from the Italian term, Novelle, which means ‘a fresh story’. It was in 1350 that the Italian writer, Giovanny Boccassio, wrote his world famous collection of love stories in prose, named Decameron. Such stories in prose were called ‘novelle’ and a story in verse was known as ‘romance’. It meant a story of the legendary past. Malory’s Morte d’Arthur is an example. Some experts gave various definitions for a ‘Novel’. According to an American novelist, F. Marion Crawford, a Novel is a pocket theatre; a novel contained all accessories of a drama without requiring to be staged before an audience. George Meredith, an English novelist, called it a ‘summary of actual life’ including both ‘the within and the without’. According to W.H Hudson, Novel is an effective medium of the portrayal of human thought and action, ‘combining in itself the creations of poetry, the details of history and generalised experience of philosophy’.