Victorian and Edwardian Studies – serie

This volume presents a collection of original and interconnected essays which aim to chart Elizabeth Gaskell’s literary imagination by focusing on diverse aspects of her short stories. It includes the papers read at the conference on «Elizabeth Gaskell and the art of the short story», organized by the Centre for Victorian and Edwardian Studies (CUSVE, «G. d’Annunzio» University, Pescara, 2010), to celebrate the bicentenary of her birth. While offering fresh insights into Gaskell’s shorter fiction, this collection provides an introduction to the many issues that absorbed her literary attention. Most importantly, by considering the growing significance of some neglected aspects of her works and the cultural and ideological context in which she lived, the contributions collectively delineate Gaskell’s artistic tensions, ethical sensibility and social commitment in a rapidly changing world. In their overall critical design, the contributors intend to shed light on the complex web of dialogic suggestions underlying her fiction, while at the same time revealing the extraordinary and multifaceted inventiveness of one of the most important Victorian writers.

This volume offers a critical insight into the life and work of the controversial Victorian explorer and translator Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890). Analysis focuses on his travel accounts and erotic translations, which both re-elaborated and challenged dominant Victorian discourses on race, gender and sexuality, generating controversies in the fields of anthropology, sexology and medicine. The premise of the study is that Burton entertained an ambiguous relationship with the colonial institutions: on the one hand, he pursued the colonial project, while on the other, he was an irreverent outsider who clashed with the imperial authorities. As this investigation reveals, he defied British sociocultural norms by appropriating and importing the rituals and languages of the colonial subjects. The volume examines Burton’s ‘impersonations’ of multiple masculine identities in the countries that he visited, which involved elaborate processes of both identification and dis-identification. The author argues that these impersonations enabled a series of queer encounters which broke down the barriers between imperial Self and colonised Other, and led Burton to embody several self-conscious, performative constructions of masculinity. Burton’s life and works are analysed in light of recent critical and theoretical debates.

The Victorian era was one that teemed with multitudinous and sometimes opposing visions of polity yet rarely questioned the very existence of the State. What might be called the pragmatism of the elite gave rise to a form of democratic compromise, allowing the growth of political ideas that may still be found in contemporary political thought. Have reformist, socialist, liberal or utilitarian ideas avoided the dogmatism of twentieth century politics or paved the way to other forms of ideology? To what extent has the organization or gradual obliteration of the State been influenced by evolutionary theories, the quest for effective government and expertise or, more generally, refusal of the past? What was the impact of Victorian thinkers and ideas on the mutation of contemporary political ideas? Have we reached a post-Victorian period or are we still using a Victorian rhetoric as well as Victorian theories? Have we not, also, reached a stage in which retrieving some of those ideas might help to solve some of our contemporary political problems? The essays presented in this book all attempt to answer some of these questions and try to show how nineteenth century thought and culture have shaped British modern political debate and, for some, still continue to do so. It will prove useful to academics and the general public interested in contemporary politics as well as the history of ideas and political philosophy.

This book explores the extent to which four sensation novelists responded to the Victorian theorizing of professionalism. A crucial period of redefinition of the professional ideal, the third quarter of the nineteenth century also witnessed the rise and the decline of the sensation novel, a scandalous and electrifying form that challenged aesthetic and socio-cultural standards. Owing to their controversial position in the literary marketplace, novelists like Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Reade and Ellen Wood developed a keen interest in professional issues, which occupy centre stage in their 1850s-70s narratives. By drawing on a variety of sociological, cultural and philosophical theories, Costantini skilfully assesses the ideological implications of the genre’s fictionalization of professionalism. She shows how sensation novelists provocatively represented the challenges faced by both elite and rising professionals, who are used as narrative vehicles for thorny discourses on authorship, ethicality, aestheticism and sociocultural identity.

This study traces the poetic development of Arthur Hugh Clough through a methodological approach based on close readings of his most important works with separate chapters devoted to the three great poems of his maturity: The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich, Amours de Voyage and Dipsychus. Attention is also given to the socio-cultural context and the religious and political debates which contributed in shaping Clough’s artistic and ideological vision, particularly through the influential figures of Thomas Arnold, John Henry Newman and Ralph Waldo Emerson. That Clough remains to this day one of the most neglected nineteenth-century writers is all the more remarkable given the importance of his intellectual contribution to his times and his radical questioning of religious faith, traditional values and poetic norms.

Mario Praz: Voice Centre Stage is the first collection of essays in English on Italian writer Mario Praz (1896-1982), a central figure of twentieth-century culture and international literary relations. Praz’s formidable oeuvre spanned six decades and covered such topics as comparative literature, interior design, history of art and culture, collecting, interart and intermedial studies, translation, journalism, travelling and autobiography. His colossal erudition encompassed an enthusiasm for the eccentric, the interstitial, the erotic and the macabre. This book, based on pluri- and interdisciplinary critical approaches by a variety of specialists, sheds ample light on an author who still awaits full appreciation as a unique cross-cultural ‘voice inside the scene’ of literature and art.

This monograph is focused on the fictional works of Arnold Bennett whose literary role was very important in the history of the late nineteenth and early twentiethcentury novel in light of the debate between modernism and the traditional approach to the craft of fiction. After a long period of critical silence, this book reaffirms Bennett’s centrality through a sociohistorical and semiotic analysis of his most famous novels and short stories. In this sense, it offers a new reading of Bennett which may be a groundbreaking contribution to the discussion of the function of British fiction in the context of a multifaceted epistemic change.