Nineteenth-Century and Neo-Victorian Cultures – serie

Life Writing and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Market begins from the premise that nineteenth-century life writing circulated in a market, in material and discursive forms determined substantially by the desires of publishers, readers, editors, printers, booksellers and the many other craftsmen and tradesmen who collaborated in transforming first-person narrative into a commodified thing. Studies of nineteenth-century life writing have typically focused on the major autobiographers, or on the formation of 'genre', or on the ways in which different class, gender, race and other affiliations shaped particular kinds of exemplary subjectivities. The aim of this collection, on the other hand, is to focus on life writing in terms to of profits and sales, contracts and copyright, printing and illustration to treat life writing, through particular case studies and through attentive analysis of print and material cultures, as one commodity among many in the vast, complicated literary market of nineteenth-century England.

Life Writing and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Market begins from the premise that nineteenth-century life writing circulated in a market, in material and discursive forms determined substantially by the desires of publishers, readers, editors, printers, booksellers and the many other craftsmen and tradesmen who collaborated in transforming first-person narrative into a commodified thing. Studies of nineteenth-century life writing have typically focused on the major autobiographers, or on the formation of ‘genre’, or on the ways in which different class, gender, race and other affiliations shaped particular kinds of exemplary subjectivities. The aim of this collection, on the other hand, is to focus on life writing in terms to of profits and sales, contracts and copyright, printing and illustration—to treat life writing, through particular case studies and through attentive analysis of print and material cultures, as one commodity among many in the vast, complicated literary market of nineteenth-century England.

The emergence of a mass reading public during the early decades of the nineteenth century sparked a period of creative innovation in the popular press. This collection focuses on the early decades of the nineteenth century as a key period of innovation in the popular press. Steam printing, popular education campaigns, and new technologies of illustration led to new trends in book and periodical production.

The emergence of a mass reading public during the early decades of the nineteenth century sparked a period of creative innovation in the popular press. This collection focuses on the early decades of the nineteenth century as a key period of innovation in the popular press. Steam printing, popular education campaigns, and new technologies of illustration led to new trends in book and periodical production.

Considers the interrelated careers of three highly significant women writers of the nineteenth centuryTraces a chain of influence among three highly significant women writers of the nineteenth century: Mary Russell Mitford, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George EliotReconsiders the literary category of provincialism and the genre of the village story with due consideration of a range of publication formats and contextsWorks across literary periods to offer innovative rereadings of several important Romantic- and Victorian-era textsCombines nineteenth-century cultural-historical and literary analysis to advance recent revaluations of liberalism by considering its emotive and not just its ratiocinative dimensionsIn this lively and illuminating work, Kevin A. Morrison offers a reassessment of Mary Russell Mitford's and Elizabeth Gaskell's provincial fiction, sometimes deprecated within a genre frequently considered 'minor literature', and demonstrates the importance of their work to the development of George Eliot's liberalism in the age of high realism. Although Gaskell was influenced by Mitford, and Eliot by Gaskell, only a handful of scholars have considered the affinities and resemblances among them. None have done so in depth. Establishing a chain of influence, this book examines the three authors' interrelated careers: the challenges they encountered in achieving distinction within the literary sphere; the various pressures exerted on them by publishers, reviewers, and editors; and the career-enhancing possibilities afforded, and the limitations imposed, by different modes of publication. Attending to publication history, genre, and narrative voice, Morrison suggests new ways to think about provincialism, liberalism, and women's networked authorship in the nineteenth century.

Although Elizabeth Gaskell was influenced by Mary Russell Mitford, and George Eliot by Gaskell, only a small number of scholars have considered the affinities and resemblances among all three writers of provincial fiction, and none have done so in depth. Establishing a chain of influence, this book considers Mitford, Gaskell, and Eliot's interrelated careers, including the challenges they encountered in achieving distinction within the literary sphere, and the various pressures exerted on them by publishers, reviewers, and editors. It also analyses the career-enhancing possibilities afforded by different modes of publication including periodicals, anthologies, the three-volume novel, and monthly and bimonthly instalments as well as their concomitant limitations. In so doing, the book offers a reassessment of Mitford's and Gaskell's provincial fiction, which has been frequently derided as a 'minor literature'. It also demonstrates the importance of their work to the development of Eliot's liberalism in the age of high realism.

The closing decades of the nineteenth century saw the birth of psychology as a discipline. The question of the relationship between mind and body was a central topic of concern across an array of genres, media and textual forms during these years. In this collection we trace the role literature played in responding to fundamental questions within this interdisciplinary intersection. How do writers conceptualize perception, memory, sense-experience, understanding, empathy, cognition, and their relation to embodiment? What is the Victorian contribution to the new conceptions of the nature of thought and feeling developed by such figures as William James in America and Henri Bergson in France? Mind and Embodiment in Late Victorian Literature shows how writers grappled with pivotal intellectual and scientific developments of the nineteenth century and how these ideas transformed Victorian literature itself.

The closing decades of the nineteenth century saw the birth of psychology as a discipline. The question of the relationship between mind and body was a central topic of concern across an array of genres, media and textual forms during these years. In this collection we trace the role literature played in responding to fundamental questions within this interdisciplinary intersection. How do writers conceptualize perception, memory, sense-experience, understanding, empathy, cognition, and their relation to embodiment? What is the Victorian contribution to the new conceptions of the nature of thought and feeling developed by such figures as William James in America and Henri Bergson in France? Mind and Embodiment in Late Victorian Literature shows how writers grappled with pivotal intellectual and scientific developments of the nineteenth century—and how these ideas transformed Victorian literature itself.

Since the emergence of the ‘Stage Irishman’ in early modern London, Ireland’s national character, both at home and abroad, has been associated with drunkenness. Today, this fondness for drink is marketed as a sign of Irish people’s irrepressible sociability, but historically it was read as evidence of an innate propensity for disorder. This book tracks depictions of drunkenness in Irish literature alongside international trends, such as the medicalisation of ‘habitual drunkenness’ in the late-eighteenth century, the rise of the Temperance Movement in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the dawn of the Age of Psychiatry in the later nineteenth century. As this book demonstrates, in Ireland these developments were filtered through a distinct political reality, one in which an insecure colonial elite sought to defend its position in the context of the vexed question of the country’s capacity for self-governance.

Drawing on a wealth of material from children's periodicals from the Victorian era to the early twentieth century, Kristine Moruzi examines how the concept of the charitable child has been defined through the press. Charitable ideals became increasingly prevalent at a time of burgeoning social inequities and cultural change, shaping expectations that children were capable of and responsible for charitable giving. While the child as the object of charity has received considerable attention, less focus has been paid to how and why children have been encouraged to help others. Yet the ways in which children were positioned to see themselves as people who could and should help in whatever forms that assistance might take are crucial to understanding how children and childhood were conceptualised in the past. This book uses children's print culture to examine the relationship between children and charitable institutions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to foreground children's active roles.

Drawing on a wealth of material from children’s periodicals from the Victorian era to the early twentieth century, Kristine Moruzi examines how the concept of the charitable child has been defined through the press. Charitable ideals became increasingly prevalent at a time of burgeoning social inequities and cultural change, shaping expectations that children were capable of and responsible for charitable giving. While the child as the object of charity has received considerable attention, less focus has been paid to how and why children have been encouraged to help others. Yet the ways in which children were positioned to see themselves as people who could and should help – in whatever forms that assistance might take – are crucial to understanding how children and childhood were conceptualised in the past. This book uses children’s print culture to examine the relationship between children and charitable institutions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to foreground children’s active roles.

Positions the sensation novel, and nineteenth-century popular fiction more generally, as vital to the history of feelingArgues for the literary significance of this popular formExamines work by lesser-known female writers, such as Caroline Clive, Annie Edwards and Florence WilfordDemonstrates that sensationalism can be traced across a wide range of writers and genres, from spasmodic poetry to the novels of Louisa May AlcottConnects Victorian writing on feeling to contemporary affect theoryNarrative, Affect, and Victorian Sensation: Wilful Bodies argues that Victorian sensation novels long dismissed as plot-driven, silly, and feminine develop complex theories of narrative affect, our embodied responses to reading, imagining, and even writing a narrative. The popular sensation novel thus should be understood as a key contribution to the novel's assessment of its own workings, especially the ways in which reading and writing figure as affective acts. Additionally, the book radically expands the field of sensation fiction, taking seriously lesser-known female authors, and reading them alongside a range of writers not typically considered sensational. These novels insist that feelings are not bound to a single body and that bodies generate meaning when they are put in relation to other bodies and systems of knowledge.

Narrative, Affect, and Victorian Sensation: Wilful Bodies argues that Victorian sensation novels long dismissed as plot-driven, silly, and feminine develop complex theories of narrative affect, our embodied responses to reading, imagining, and even writing a narrative. The popular sensation novel thus should be understood as a key contribution to the novel's assessment of its own workings, especially the ways in which reading and writing figure as affective acts. Additionally, the book radically expands the field of sensation fiction, taking seriously lesser-known female authors, and reading them alongside a range of writers not typically considered sensational. These novels insist that feelings are not bound to a single body and that bodies generate meaning when they are put in relation to other bodies and systems of knowledge.

The well-known and well-loved writings of Anne, Charlotte and Emily Bronte are full of violence. From the many battles waged in their early writings to the violent emotions and threats expressed in their published novels, the Brontes' representations of brutality shocked initial Victorian reviewers and continue to surprise readers in the twenty-first century. Violence and the Brontes accounts for such intense reactions by tracing the sisters' self-conscious grappling with the transformational complexities of representing violence in literature as a destructive but also mutually creative force. Through a new reading of the Brontes' major works, as well as film, stage and television adaptations, this book argues that violence is at the centre of the Brontes' imaginative engagements with nineteenth-century life and continues to be vital to interpreting their works' reception history and afterlives in modern culture.

The well-known and well-loved writings of Anne, Charlotte and Emily Brontë are full of violence. From the many battles waged in their early writings to the violent emotions and threats expressed in their published novels, the Brontës’ representations of brutality shocked Victorian reviewers and continue to surprise readers in the twenty-first century. Violence and the Brontës accounts for such intense reactions by reading the sisters’ literary violences as transformational, encompassing harm, pain and suffering while at times also signalling creativity and even renewal. Through a new reading of the Brontës’ major works, as well as film, stage and television adaptations, this book argues that violence is at the centre of the Brontës’ imaginative engagements with nineteenth-century life. In the process, it demonstrates how violence continues to be vital to interpreting the Brontës’ reception history and afterlives in modern culture.

The well-known and well-loved writings of Anne, Charlotte and Emily Brontë are full of violence. From the many battles waged in their early writings to the violent emotions and threats expressed in their published novels, the Brontës’ representations of brutality shocked Victorian reviewers and continue to surprise readers in the twenty-first century. Violence and the Brontës accounts for such intense reactions by reading the sisters’ literary violences as transformational, encompassing harm, pain and suffering while at times also signalling creativity and even renewal. Through a new reading of the Brontës’ major works, as well as film, stage and television adaptations, this book argues that violence is at the centre of the Brontës’ imaginative engagements with nineteenth-century life. In the process, it demonstrates how violence continues to be vital to interpreting the Brontës’ reception history and afterlives in modern culture.

The well-known and well-loved writings of Anne, Charlotte and Emily Bronte are full of violence. From the many battles waged in their early writings to the violent emotions and threats expressed in their published novels, the Brontes' representations of brutality shocked Victorian reviewers and continue to surprise readers in the twenty-first century. Violence and the Brontes accounts for such intense reactions by reading the sisters' literary violences as transformational, encompassing harm, pain and suffering while at times also signalling creativity and even renewal. Through a new reading of the Brontes' major works, as well as film, stage and television adaptations, this book argues that violence is at the centre of the Brontes' imaginative engagements with nineteenth-century life. In the process, it demonstrates how violence continues to be vital to interpreting the Brontes' reception history and afterlives in modern culture.

This book is a timely intervention in the history of museums in Britain. BP’s ongoing sponsorship of the British Museum, the appointment of George Osborne as a trustee and the Museum’s continued resistance to the repatriation of holdings such as the Parthenon Marbles and the Benin Bronzes have brought questions of the Museum’s funding, leadership and right to the objects in its collection to increased public attention. The book reveals this is not a recent ‘woke’ agenda but rather part of a long history of public resistance and activism enacted through the British Museum. It presents a cultural history of the nineteenth-century British Museum, departing from traditional institutional histories by centring public perception of the museum’s purpose and its uses in society.

Queer books, like LGBTQ+ people, adapt heteronormative structures and institutions to introduce space for discourses of queer desire. Queer Books of Late-Victorian Print Culture explores print culture adaptations of the material book, examining the works of Aubrey Beardsley, Michael Field, John Gray, Charles Ricketts, Charles Shannon and Oscar Wilde. It closely analyses the material book, including the elements of binding, typography, paper, ink and illustration, and brings textual studies and queer theory into conversation with literary experiments in free verse, fairy tales and symbolist drama. King argues that queer authors and artists revised the Revival of Printing's ideals for their own diverse and unique desires, adapting new technological innovations in print culture. Their books created a community of like-minded aesthetes who challenged legal and representational discourses of same-sex desire with one of aesthetic sensuality.

Queer books, like LGBTQ+ people, adapt heteronormative structures and institutions to introduce space for discourses of queer desire. Queer Books of Late-Victorian Print Culture explores print culture adaptations of the material book, examining the works of Aubrey Beardsley, Michael Field, John Gray, Charles Ricketts, Charles Shannon and Oscar Wilde. It closely analyses the material book, including the elements of binding, typography, paper, ink and illustration, and brings textual studies and queer theory into conversation with literary experiments in free verse, fairy tales and symbolist drama. King argues that queer authors and artists revised the Revival of Printing's ideals for their own diverse and unique desires, adapting new technological innovations in print culture. Their books created a community of like-minded aesthetes who challenged legal and representational discourses of same-sex desire with one of aesthetic sensuality.

Bringing together leading scholars from the fields of Dickens studies and decadence studies, this collection considers the ways in which Dickens's work can be placed into dialogue with various ideas of decadence. It includes chapters dealing with Dickens's treatment of the decadence he saw manifested in mid-Victorian society; his treatment of the themes of decadence and decay in his work, including anticipations of, and unconscious sympathies towards positions which came to define fin-de-siecle Decadence; and the ways in which Decadent writers from the 1880s 1920s responded to Dickens. This book therefore broadens our understanding of the work and the significance of Dickens as a pre-eminent Victorian novelist and also deepens our understanding of the contours of fin-de-siecle Decadence.

Bringing together leading scholars from the fields of Dickens studies and decadence studies, this collection considers the ways in which Dickens’s work can be placed into dialogue with various ideas of decadence. It includes chapters dealing with Dickens’s treatment of the decadence he saw manifested in mid-Victorian society; his treatment of the themes of decadence and decay in his work, including anticipations of, and unconscious sympathies towards positions which came to define fin-de-siècle Decadence; and the ways in which Decadent writers from the 1880s–1920s responded to Dickens. This book therefore broadens our understanding of the work and the significance of Dickens as a pre-eminent Victorian novelist and also deepens our understanding of the contours of fin-de-siècle Decadence.

Temporality and Progress in Victorian Literature argues that Victorian literature uses traces of a lingering past to theorize time as non-progressive and discontinuous. For decades, the dominant view in Victorian studies has been that the period's economic, political, and intellectual developments led to a broad sense that time was defined by continuous improvement and that this masternarrative of progress was evident across Victorian writings. McAdams contributes to a broader scholarly challenge of this thesis by considering how the irregular life-cycles of individuals and objects undermine Victorian progress. Unfashionable waistcoats, aging courtesans, and remembered conversations in Victorian literature instead reveal numerous alternative conceptions of time theorized against the emerging dominance of a progress narrative. The book uncovers the heterogenous shapes of time imagined by Victorian literature regress, cyclicality, stasis, and rupture. These shapes are not simply progress's others, but rather constituent elements of progress's theorization.

Temporality and Progress in Victorian Literature argues that Victorian literature uses traces of a lingering past to theorize time as non-progressive and discontinuous. For decades, the dominant view in Victorian studies has been that the period’s economic, political, and intellectual developments led to a broad sense that time was defined by continuous improvement—and that this masternarrative of progress was evident across Victorian writings. McAdams contributes to a broader scholarly challenge of this thesis by considering how the irregular life-cycles of individuals and objects undermine Victorian progress. Unfashionable waistcoats, aging courtesans, and remembered conversations in Victorian literature instead reveal numerous alternative conceptions of time theorized against the emerging dominance of a progress narrative. The book uncovers the heterogenous shapes of time imagined by Victorian literature—regress, cyclicality, stasis, and rupture. These shapes are not simply progress’s others, but rather constituent elements of progress’s theorization.

This book studies how writers, artists and scientists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries thought about queerness through encounters at the water’s edge. Authors in this period witnessed dramatic and destructive changes to shorelines, including those caused by industrial pollution, the commercialisation of waterways and the rise of seaside tourism. Through an analysis of literary, cultural and visual texts, the book unearths a strand of ecological desire that merges better stewardship of the waters with an affirmation of sexual and gender diversity. It puts queer and feminist approaches in conversation with coastal studies and the blue humanities, and centres moments of multispecies joy.

Examines history, modernity, gender, and sexuality through the literary innovations of two late-Victorian female co-authorsOffers new readings of a wide range of Michael Field texts (Callirrho , Fair Rosamund, Canute the Great, Long Ago, Sight and Song, Underneath the Bough, Wild Honey, Poems of Adoration, Mystic Trees, Whym Chow, the joint diary Works and Days and many unpublished poems)Uses interdisciplinary methods to bring Michael Field's life and work in conversation with queer and feminist approaches to literary form, art history, ecocriticism, disability studies and religious studiesIdentifies the literary, visual, and philosophical precursors of Michael Field's adaptations and proposes that we read their appropriations as a deliberate blend of objective and subjective epistemologiesTraces resonances between fin-de-si cle culture and today's theoretical debates about historicist vs. presentist approaches to the archive and Foucauldian vs. phenomenological understandings of subjectivity, gender and sexualitySituates Michael Field in relation to literary texts and philosophical thought of their contemporaries the late Victorians and Decadent Moderns with whom they bridge the nineteenth and twentieth centuriesAll authors try to do something new, or tell an old story in a new way; but for Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who wrote as Michael Field and called themselves 'Poets and Lovers', rewriting old stories, history and traditional literary forms with extraordinary innovation was nothing short of high art. Offering new readings of a wide range of Michael Field texts, this book asks: how do ambitious experiments with a joint diary, closet drama, ekphrasis, elegy and nature, devotional and love poetry help these women navigate the paradox of looking backward in order to achieve their goal 'to make all things new'? How do their revisionary poetics help the co-authors, as queer, female Aesthetes, cope with late-Victorian modernity? Through an interdisciplinary approach to their passionate and sometimes eccentric life and work, this book provokes thought about the fin-de-si cle and invites readers, like Michael Field themselves, to engage the past in order to create transtemporal community and to make sense of the present.

All authors try to do something new, or tell an old story in a new way; but for Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who wrote as Michael Field and called themselves 'Poets and Lovers', rewriting old stories, history and traditional literary forms with extraordinary innovation was nothing short of high art. Offering new readings of a wide range of Michael Field texts, this book asks: how do ambitious experiments with a joint diary, closet drama, ekphrasis, elegy and nature, devotional and love poetry help these women navigate the paradox of looking backward in order to achieve their goal 'to make all things new'? How do their revisionary poetics help the co-authors, as queer, female Aesthetes, cope with late-Victorian modernity? Through an interdisciplinary approach to their passionate and sometimes eccentric life and work, this book provokes thought about the fin-de-siecle and invites readers, like Michael Field themselves, to engage the past in order to create transtemporal community and to make sense of the present.

Literary Illusions explores the dialogue between Victorian literature and one of the nineteenth century's most popular modes of performance: conjuring. It explores the ways in which Victorian literature frequently deployed the figure of the magician to explore performance magic as a metaphor for writing itself, and the ways in which conjurors themselves were authors (of highly fictionalised biographies), while authors explored the narrative opportunities offered by magic (most notably Charles Dickens). The book theorises magic as a manifestation of Victorian concerns with authorship and the intellectual property debate, with the magician often deployed as a privileged and occasionally parodied figure in debates on textuality. Literary Illusions offers a reconceptualisation of the relationship between popular culture and literature in the nineteenth century, bringing canonical figures such as Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell into dialogue with lesser known Victorian bestsellers such as Henry Cockton and Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin, and innovatively blends performance history with literary criticism.