Writing and Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century – serie

«This is a rich, suggestive, and long overdue study of a life cut tragically short, and an insightful study of the intellectual intersections of multiple disciplines in the 1880s. Stainthorp achieves a powerful recalibration of Naden’s life and career, and promises to inspire a slew of further studies on this fascinating figure. Equally, it yields an important case study on the issue of interdisciplinarity at a critical period in its history, and a specific and particularly ambitious approach to the longheld problem of achieving ‘unity in diversity’.» (Adelene Buckland, Women: A Cultural Review, 31:3)«It offers a deft mixture of archival research, historicism, and close reading, introduces readers to previously unknown writing by Naden, carefully reconstructs the details of late-Victorian science education, and provides a useful overview of late-Victorian philosophical debates.» (Monique R. Morgan, Victorian Studies 64:3)«This book represents a much-needed, full-length study of the brilliant intellectual trail Constance Naden blazed as a student and scholar: of the many facets of her brilliant career, and of her expansive synthetic mode of thinking. Naden’s career interlaced so many issues and disciplines in such a fascinating way that, in this timely work, she acts as a case study for thinking about the value and practice of interdisciplinarity itself. This is an astute, lucid and illuminating analysis.» (Marion Thain, Professor of Literature and Culture, King’s College London)«Stainthorp’s study of Constance Naden both reveals and revels in the interdependence of disciplines that was her subject’s tragically short-lived contribution to nineteenth-century thought. In doing so she thoughtfully synthesizes the variant parts of Naden’s intellectual life. The result is a book of insightful combinations and cross-readings which illuminate the unity in diversity that was Naden’s driving force.» (Martin Willis, Professor of English Literature, Cardiff University and editor of the Journal of Literature and Science)«This is an important, meticulously researched book. Stainthorp is marvellously alert to Naden’s desire to find unity in diversity in her writing. She puts Naden’s poetry, prose and unpublished notebooks to work and the result is a ground-breaking analysis of Naden’s synthetic thinking. A boon to scholars working on Naden.» (Ana Parejo Vadillo, Reader in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Birkbeck College, University of London) Constance Naden (1858–1889) is a unique voice in Victorian literature and science. This book, the first full-length critical account of her life and works, brings into focus the reciprocal nature of Naden’s poetry, philosophical essays and scientific studies. The development of Naden’s thinking is explored in detail, with newly discovered unpublished poems and notes from her adolescence shedding important light upon this progression.Close readings of Naden’s wide-ranging corpus of poetry and prose trace her commitment to an interdisciplinary world-scheme that sought unity in diversity. This book demonstrates how a rigorous scientific education, a thorough engagement with poetry and philosophy of the long nineteenth century, an involvement with the Victorian radical atheist movement, and a comic sensibility each shaped Naden’s intellectual achievements. Naden sought to show how the light of reason is made even brighter by the spark of poetic creation and how the imagination is as much a tool of the scientist and the philosopher as the artist.Taking a comprehensive approach to this complex and overlooked figure of the Victorian period, Stainthorp demonstrates how Naden’s texts provide a new and important vantage point from which to consider synthetic thinking as a productive and creative force within nineteenth-century intellectual culture.This book was the winner of the 2017 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Nineteenth-Century Studies.

Cast in the shadow of the soldier-poets of the First World War, Victorian war poets have often been disparaged as «armchair patriots» glorifying military action in an unthinking fashion. Challenging this long-standing assumption, The Crimean War in Victorian Poetry considers the evolution of the figure of the homefront poet and explores the daunting task of representing war from a civilian perspective.By virtue of the medium of modern reportage, the Crimean War (1854-1856) witnessed the inauguration of the civilian spectatorship of distant suffering, provoking a heated debate over the concept of the war poet and the function of war poetry during moments of national crisis. Confronted with news of soldiers’ hardships and of the distress caused by the government’s mismanagement of war, the so-called armchair poet sought ways of addressing the problem of pain and adversity from a distance and of engaging with the politics of war by composing lines of verse at home.This is the first book-length study to examine the predicaments and achievements of mid-Victorian war poets. It provides historically nuanced readings of how a diverse group of British poets – ranging from the Poet Laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson to the highly acclaimed female poet Louisa Stuart Costello – fought a literary war as they reworked the established traditions of war poetry and experimented with poetic forms in response to news of distant combat.

«Adopting an interdisciplinary approach to a range of visual and textual material, this engaging and illuminating collection compels twenty-first-century readers to take a fresh look at the multiple ways in which readers and reading were represented in the long nineteenth century.» (Professor Julia Thomas, Cardiff University)The long nineteenth century saw a prolific increase in the number of books being produced and read and, consequently, in the number of visual and textual discourses about reading. This collection examines a range of visual and textual iconographies of readers produced during this period and maps the ways in which such representations engaged with crucial issues of the time, including literary value, gender formation, familial relationships, the pursuit of leisure and the understanding of new technologies.Gauging the ways in which Victorians conceptualized reading has often relied on textual sources, but here we recognize and elaborate the importance of visual culture – often in dialogue with textual evidence – in shaping the way people read and thought about reading. This book brings together historians, literary scholars and art historians using a range of methodologies and theoretical approaches to address ideas of readership found in fine art, photography, arts and craft, illustration, novels, diaries and essays. The volume shows how the field of readership studies can be enriched and furthered through an interdisciplinary approach and, in particular, through an exploration of the visual iconography of readers and reading.

The Edwardian era is often romanticised as a tranquil period of garden parties and golden afternoons in which everyone knew their place and nobody questioned the order of things. The reality, however, was quite different. The years between 1901 and 1914 were a highly turbulent period of intense social conflict marked by a heightened awareness of class consciousness, inequality and poverty. The increasing mobilisation of the lower classes and women was often countered with violent means, while anybody considered to be the «other» – immigrants, lunatics, the poor, homosexuals – became the target of widespread discrimination. For many of these groups, the only way to fight back was through writing, which they used to voice resistance and contest traditional power structures.This volume aims to draw attention to the importance of «ordinary writing» – that is, «writing that is typically unseen or ignored and is primarily defined by its status as discardable» – as a form of rebellion for marginalised Edwardians. Using a multidisciplinary perspective to explore a range of material artefacts, from postcards and diary entries to pamphlets and book inscriptions, it aims to unearth voices that have been silent throughout history, transmitting new narratives on such important issues as suffragism, Irish nationalism, the working-class movement and pauper insanity.

This new study provides fresh readings of Thomas Hardy’s work and illuminates the social and cultural history of dress in the nineteenth century. The book argues that Hardy had a more detailed and acute understanding of the importance of dress in forming and regulating personal identity and social relations than any other writer of his time. Structured thematically, it takes into account both nineteenth-century and modern theoretical approaches to the significance of what we wear.The author gives an extended analysis of individual works by Hardy, showing, for example, that A Pair of Blue Eyes is central to the study of the function of clothing in the expression and perception of sexuality. The Hand of Ethelberta, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and The Woodlanders are examined in order to show the extent to which dress obscures or reveals the nature of the self. Hardy’s other novels, as well as the short stories and poems, are used to confirm the centrality of dress and clothing in Hardy’s work. The book also raises issues such as the gendering of dress, cross-dressing, work clothes and working with clothes, dress and the environment, the symbolism of colour in clothes, and the dress conventions relating to death.

This is the first book-length study of literary censorship in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. While in recent years the aesthetics and politics of British Modernism have been re-evaluated and the concept and function of censorship redefined, Modernism’s privileged status in the struggle against and ultimate defeat of censorship remains largely unquestioned. This book contests that the vital role played by Realist writers in the battle against censorship and the dominant sexual ideologies that bolstered it has been significantly underestimated. It contends that many Realist writers not only produced transgressive sexual representations within the confines of an existent culture of censorship, but also reflexively incorporated themes and issues of censorship into their fiction. Through its focus on censorship, the book explores a number of narratives to reveal their complex sexual politics and show how texts that ostensibly oppose traditional morality can also reinforce dominant sexual ideologies in new paradigms of scientific rationality. Moreover, reading these fictions through the lens of censorship offers fresh insights into the novels and short stories of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods.

William Morris’s last romances are strikingly original stories written in his final years, but they remain relatively neglected in both Morris studies and nineteenth-century literary studies. This book provides a full-length critical account of these works and their essential role in promoting the continuing importance of Morris’s ideas. Approaching these romances through the concept of wonder, this book provides a new way of understanding their relevance to his writings on art and architecture, nature and the environment, and politics and Socialism. It establishes the integral connection between the romances and Morris’s diverse cultural, social and political interests and activities, suggesting ways in which we might understand these tales as a culmination of Morris’s thought and practice. Through a comprehensive analysis of these remarkable narratives, this book makes a significant contribution to both work on William Morris and to nineteenth-century studies more generally.

This collection offers new perspectives on the connections between politics, identity and representation in art and poetry in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain and Europe. Contributions explore questions such as the following: what was the effect of the reciprocity of political, religious and artistic influence in nineteenth-century Britain and Europe? How were key political moments or movements influenced by or influential on literary and artistic form? How did the styles and forms of the past shape the political expressions of the nineteenth-century present? By what means did politically inflected art and literature shape the emerging construction of national, class or religious identities in the nineteenth century? Ranging across not only Britain but also France, Germany, Belgium, Finland, Spain and Italy, the essays draw on different discourses and art forms. They all utilise concepts of cultural materialism to shape an understanding of the contingent relationships between national and international public discourse and identity, political change and cultural production as well as the reproduction, translation, influence and dissemination of both politics and culture in art and literature.