Marlene Tromp – författare

The first book to address the entire career of this key Victorian authorMary Elizabeth Braddon, journal editor and bestselling author of more than eighty novels during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was a key figure in the Victorian literary scene. This volume brings together new essays from a variety of perspectives that illuminate both the richness of Braddon's oeuvre and the variety of critical approaches to it.Best known as the author of Lady Audley's Secret and Aurora Floyd, Braddon also wrote penny dreadfuls, realist novels, plays, short stories, reviews, and articles. The contributors move beyond her two most famous works and reflect a range of current issues and approaches, including gender, genre, imperialism, colonial reception, commodity culture, and publishing history.Contributors include Jennifer Carnell, Jeni Curtis, Pamela K. Gilbert, Lauren Goodlad, Aeron Haynie, Heidi Holder, Gail Turley Houston, Heidi H. Johnson, Toni Johnson-Woods, James R. Kincaid, Elizabeth Langland, Eve Lynch, Graham Law, Katherine Montweiler, Lillian Nayder, Lyn Pykett, and Tabitha Sparks, and Marlene Tromp.

Considers the role of Spiritualism in Victorian culture.Altered States examines the rise of Spiritualism-the religion of séances, mediums, and ghostly encounters-in the Victorian period and the role it played in undermining both traditional female roles and the rhetoric of imperialism. Focusing on a particular kind of séance event-the full-form materialization-and the bodies of the young, female mediums who performed it, Marlene Tromp argues that in the altered state of the séance new ways of understanding identity and relationships became possible. This not only demonstrably shaped the thinking of the Spiritualists, but also the popular consciousness of the period. In diaries, letters, newspaper accounts, scientific reports, and popular fiction, Tromp uncovers evidence that the radical views presented in the faith permeated and influenced mainstream Victorian thought.

Considers the role of Spiritualism in Victorian culture.Altered States examines the rise of Spiritualism-the religion of séances, mediums, and ghostly encounters-in the Victorian period and the role it played in undermining both traditional female roles and the rhetoric of imperialism. Focusing on a particular kind of séance event-the full-form materialization-and the bodies of the young, female mediums who performed it, Marlene Tromp argues that in the altered state of the séance new ways of understanding identity and relationships became possible. This not only demonstrably shaped the thinking of the Spiritualists, but also the popular consciousness of the period. In diaries, letters, newspaper accounts, scientific reports, and popular fiction, Tromp uncovers evidence that the radical views presented in the faith permeated and influenced mainstream Victorian thought.

Sensation novels, a genre characterized by scandalous narratives, and emotionally and socially provocative dialogue and plots, had their heyday in England in the 1860s and 1870s, in the midst of growing concern about codes of behaviour in marriage. Largely excluded from the academic canon of the late 20th century, sensation novels had an impact on Victorian culture that we have only recently begun to evaluate. Exploring the central metaphor of marital violence in these novels, Marlene Tromp uncovers the relationship between the representations of such violence in fiction and in the law. Her investigation demonstates that sensational constructions of gender, marriage, ""brutal"" relationships and even murder were gradually incorporated into legal debates and realist fiction as the Victorian understanding of what was ""real"" changed. Sensation fiction's reconfiguration of literary and social norms, evident in works by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, is also explicitly evoked in the ""realist"" representations of domestic violence in novels by Margaret Oliphant and George Eliot. Despite the apparent gulf between fiction and the law, Tromp explores these texts as mutually constitutive forms through which a major shift in the understanding of domesticity took place. The Victorians responded to marital violence by debating its terms in both Parliament and the circulating libraries, incorporating the language of each realm into the other. By the end of the century, this cross-pollinating conversation threatened the tenuous legal and social fiction of peace and safety in the middle-class home, and new readings of the relationship between domesticity and violence emerged.

Since the 1980s, scholars have made the case for examining nineteenth-century culture—particularly literary output—through the lens of economics. In Culture and Money in the Nineteenth Century: Abstracting Economics, two luminaries in the field of Victorian studies, Daniel Bivona and Marlene Tromp, have collected contributions from leading thinkers that push New Economic Criticism in new and exciting directions.Spanning the Americas, India, England, and Scotland, this volume adopts an inclusive, global view of the cultural effects of economics and exchange. Contributors use the concept of abstraction to show how economic thought and concerns around money permeated all aspects of nineteenth-century culture, from the language of wills to arguments around the social purpose of art.The characteristics of investment and speculation; the fraught symbolic and practical meanings of paper money to the Victorians; the shifting value of goods, services, and ideas; the evolving legal conceptualizations of artistic ownership—all of these, contributors argue, are essential to understanding nineteenth-century culture in Britain and beyond.Contributors: Daniel Bivona, Suzanne Daly, Jennifer Hayward, Aeron Hunt, Roy Kreitner, Kathryn Pratt Russell, Cordelia Smith, and Marlene Tromp.