Reading Victorian Literature

Julian Wolfeys is Professor of English Literature at the University of Portsmouth, where he is also Director of the Centre for Studies in Literature. He is author and editor of more than 40 books on nineteenth- and twentieth-century English literature and literary theory. Most recently he has published Dickens’s London and The Derrida Wordbook, both with Edinburgh University Press. He recently published his first novel, Silent Music. Monika Szuba is Associate Professor in Literature at the Institute of English and American Studies, University of Gdańsk. Her research is concerned with modern and contemporary literature informed by Environmental Humanities, with particular interest in phenomenology. She is the author of Contemporary Scottish Poetry and the Natural World: Burnside, Jamie, Robertson and White (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), co-editor of Literary Invention and the Cartographic Imagination: Early Modern to Late Modern (Brill, 2022), The Poetics of Space and Place in Scottish Literature (Palgrave, 2019) and Reading Victorian Literature: Essays in Honour of J. Hillis Miller (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), and editor of Boundless Scotland: Space in Scottish Fiction (Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, 2015).

Although J. Hillis Miller writes compellingly about a wide range of topics in literary studies and critical theory, he remains one of our great critics of Victorian literature. Exploring this achievement in diverse ways, this Festschrift also includes new discussions by Miller of Hardy, Trollope and Dickens.

• Notes on ContributorsAcknowledgementsForeword, Monika Szuba and Julian WolfreysIntroduction: There can be no doubt: the reading of J. Hillis Miller, Julian Wolfreys and Monika SzubaI. Singular Hardy1. Varieties of Rural Experience in Virginia and Wessex, J Hillis Miller2. ‘There were three men came out of the west’: Experiencing the Rural or, the Ghosts of Community—a ‘response’ for J. Hillis Miller, Julian Wolfreys3. ‘What consciousness grasps’: ‘silent knowing’ and the Natural World in Hardy’s poetry, Monika Szuba4. The Hills Have Eyes, Eamonn Dunne II. Self and World5. J. Hillis Miller’s Hopkins: Poet of the Anthropocene, Claire Colebrook6. Walter Pater in the Wilderness, Megan Becker-Leckrone7. ‘This world is now thy pilgrimage’: William Michael Rossetti’s Cognitive Maps of France and Italy, Eleonora Sasso8. Personal and Political Fainéance in George Gissing’s Vernanilda, Tom Ue9. Great Expectations: Narration, Cognition, Possibility, Dianne F. SadoffIII. Histories, Historicities10. How Not to Historicize a Poem: On McGann’s ‘Light Brigade’, Henry Staten11. Hellenising the Roman Past: Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean and Anthony Trollope’s Life of Cicero, Frederik Van Dam and Melanie Hacke12. The Ghost in the Machinal: De-/Re-contextualising Daniel Deronda, Deep Bisla13. J. Hillis Miller’s All Souls’ Day: Formalism and Historicism in Victorian and Modern Fiction Studies, Perry MeiselIV. Strange Pleasures14. The Comedian as the Letter C: Wit in Martin Chuzzlewit, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst15. Critical Listening & Rhetorical Reading: performative utterance in George Eliot’s Felix Holt, Helen Groth16. Repetition and / of / in Victorian Pleasures, John Maynard17. Philanthropic Rot in Print Run for Profit: The Tu-Quoque-Time-Bomb in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Ortwin de GraefIV. Interviews 18. The Pleasure of that Obstinacy: An Interview with J. Hillis Miller, Frederik Van Dam19. Toward an Appreciation of the Victorian Umwelt: An Interview with J. Hillis Miller, Monika Szuba and Julian WolfreysAfterwordDickens in My Life, J. Hillis Miller