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"Dickens and Democracy in the Age of Paper: Representing the People" by Carolyn Vellenga Berman is a book that explores the relationship between Charles Dickens's writing and parliamentary representation. The author examines how novels, periodicals, and state publications were used as different forms of representation in Victorian society. The book analyzes specific works by Dickens, such as "David Copperfield," "Oliver Twist," and "Bleak House," to illustrate the reproduction of parliamentary discourse and its connection to social and political issues of the time. The study also highlights the relevance of Dickens's work in understanding contemporary issues of democracy and surveillance. [Extracted from the article]

This essay argues that George Gissing's novel New Grub Street (1891)—long noted for its powerful, if gloomy, representation of late-Victorian authorship and publishing—not only presupposes but also critically incorporates the era's epochal transition from rag paper to paper made from harvested esparto grass and wood pulp. In Gissing's treatment of industrialized publishing, the trade in printed writing takes on central features of the thriving paper industry carefully placed in the novel's background, including its linking of overproduction via inexpensive inputs to the specter of wholesale devastation. Reading New Grub Street as a novel on paper draws our attention to the resource ecologies and even the natural histories of late-nineteenth-century authorship, media, and print capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the papers presented during the 2017 NAVSA Conferenec held in Banff, Alberta, which focus on the problem of futurity. It discusses the late-Victorian time travel narratives by Sara C. Alexander, the topos of stopped time in two late-Victorian Gothic narratives "The Beetle," by Richard Marsh and "Dracula," by Bram Stoker, and literary works that seek to complicate ecocriticism with insights drawn from queer theory.

This article argues that the Victorian novel is governed by the logic of storage: the accumulation of data and the deferral of action. Focusing on Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), I demonstrate that the sensation novel is caught between the winnowing directive of the detection plot and the capaciousness of Victorian literary form. The novel's many objects register information and delay narrative, but they never quite get activated as clues. I track three kinds of paper objects—files, memoranda, and keepsakes—all of which linger in storage, declining in value and awaiting an opportunity for transmission that might never arrive. Disposable yet persistent, paper evokes the cultural confusion over how to save and what, if anything, to discard. I contextualize the novel with government records and journalism from the period, all of which express similar archival anxieties. Braddon's novel ultimately muddles the distinction between clue and litter, keepsake and junk, archive and hoard, as well as between significant and insignificant narrative information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

edited by Alan H. Jutzi; pp. xii + 141. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1993, 516.00 paper, £11.50 paper. In the present volume, the Huntington Library offers a selection of [...]

Discusses issues of trust and gold standards in monetary exchanges. Reason for the trust placed by Victorians in gold; Concerns about the relationship between paper money and gold; Significance of paper money under a gold standard.

This article discusses the relationship between the past, present, and future in Victorian literature. The author analyzes three papers that explore how nineteenth-century texts, such as Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities and Joseph Conrad's Nostromo, navigate complex temporalities and address themes of violence and historical amnesia. The papers highlight concepts such as foreshadowing, anachronism, amnesia, and bridging to understand how the past influences the present and shapes the future. The author emphasizes the importance of considering these temporal complexities in Victorian scholarship and engaging with the violent past and uncertain future. [Extracted from the article]

This essay argues against the historicist tendency to grant interpretive priority to a text's narrowly construed, originary historical context, and in favor of greater attention to historical processes and acts of de- and recontextualization. Taking as my example 'The Charge of the Light Brigade,' I explore the uses to which this quintessentially topical poem was put in Frederick Douglass' Paper, where it was reprinted and mobilized in African American debates over antislavery violence and the relationship between race and culture. Interesting in their own right, these deployments of ' The Light Brigade' shed light on the poem as well, relocating it within Tennyson's oeuvre and making visible its own strategy of deracializing recontextualization., 'Slightly contemptible.' That, in Jerome McGann's apt phrase, was the prevailing critical judgment of 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' for much of the twentieth century. Alfred Tennyson's 1854 poem [...]

This paper examines the creation of a feminine, untimely relationship to history in two late Victorian ghost stories, Vernon Lee's "Oke of Okehurst" (1886) and E. Nesbit's "Man-Size in Marble" (1887). Nineteenth-century ghost stories, I argue, perform a radical mode of historical thinking and narration, one that rebukes conventional linear time and empiricist historicism. As ambassadors from the past, these literary ghosts confirm the doctrine of historical continuity while simultaneously undercutting it through their subversion of the orthodox frame narrative. Lee's and Nesbit's female protagonists exploit the anachronistic potential of ghostliness, shattering their husbands' deterministic mode of nationalist historical reasoning. In this way, this paper refigures the genre as more than an antiquated diversion from the realist fiction of the period, revealing the ghost story's serious intervention in conventional historical imaginaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we argue that propinquity–physical proximity leading to frequent interaction with publishers, artists, and each other–aided the careers of both the subjects and the essayists represented in Women Novelists of Queen Victoria's Reign (1897). Focusing on Mornington Crescent in the 1850s, we draw on new modes of digital mapping that allow us to reconstruct the influence of propinquity on popular women writers, opening up new understandings of the literary networks that made their careers possible. We reanimate the personal and geographic connections amongst the subjects and authors in WNQVR, to demonstrate the reverberations of propinquity and early-career literary connections throughout the long careers of women writers who first flourished in the mid-nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that in the mid-nineteenth century, practitioners of the nascent discipline of racial science sought to create an empiricist praxis that was divorced from feelings to describe the so-called facts of race. And yet, while scientific race was framed as a taxonomic system that might label, order, and know what race is, this knowledge system depended upon an understanding of how certain races feel. This paper examines the works of James Hunt and Robert Knox, prominent race scientists whose writings suggest a future of empirical mastery over the racialized and their allegedly chaotic affects. Unruly racial feeling, however, is also essential to the structure of this ostensibly empirical discipline. While race science suggests the eventual containment of disruptive racial feeling, this promise is forever deferred because the foundation of the praxis relies on the very emotion it disavows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship on George Eliot's 1860s Condition-of-England novel Felix Holt has been divided on whether it signals the racist nativism of its decade or advocates for inclusive, willed national belonging. This paper proposes that it accomplishes both, promoting what I call "willed ethnonationalism." A counterintuitive phrase, willed ethnonationalism captures how Eliot's novel both defines the nation-form against race belonging and encourages modern nationals to perform racial self-identification. I argue that this stance emerged from Eliot's engagement with Ernest Renan's philological career. Recalling how theories of racial-linguistic inheritance influenced a zeitgeist of thinking around constructed nations (epitomized by Renan's 1882 essay on nationalism), I show how mythic ideas about racial roots informed the ostensibly rational form of the nation-state as expressed in late nineteenth-century fiction and essayistic prose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rob Breton, however, contends that the penny press engages with, and helps to create, broader and more ambivalent cultural and political confrontations than critics have hitherto recognized. Breton's articulation of his own critical position is admirably precise, although readers less familiar with the history of the penny press would benefit from a more broad-brush overview of the genre and the current debates surrounding it. I The Penny Politics of Victorian Popular Fiction i rethinks the interactions among popular, commercial, and radical approaches during the 1830s and 1840s, including "the way penny literature pinched political content from radical papers" (2). [Extracted from the article]

Arthur Machen: Critical Essays, edited by Antonio Sanna; pp. viii + 268. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2021, $111.00, $39.99 paper, $38.00 ebook, 85.00 [pounds sterling], 30.00 [pounds sterling] paper, 30.00 [...]

Carlyle, Emerson, and the Transatlantic Uses of Authority, by Tim Sommer; pp. x + 270. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021, $110.00, $29.95 paper, 85.00 [pounds sterling], 24.99 [pounds sterling] paper. [...]

The article offers a review of several articles published in the issue of the journal including "Spectrally Illuminating the Hidden Material History of David Livingstone's 1870 Field Diary" by Adrian S. Wisnicki, "Lake District Online: Studies in Book Ecology and Digital Migration" by Margaret Linley, and "Victorian Memes" by Karen Bourrier.

This paper reassesses previous accounts of the distinction between mid-nineteenth-century “regional” and “provincial” novels through an analysis of their appearances as fragmented, pirated extracts in the non-metropolitan press. Using two of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novels as exemplars and drawing on digitized newspapers, it demonstrates that in order fully to understand the relationship between these two subgenres and the radical or conservative politics that often have been assumed to attend them, we must analyze their creative reuse by small newspapers as part of local identity-building. By taking into account the embedding of fragments of fiction within local, provincial, and regional print cultures, we can arrive at a more nuanced reading of their politics, and better understand their responsiveness to their own historical moments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heidi Kaufman's book, "Strangers in the Archive: Literary Evidence and London's East End," explores the life and work of Maria Polack, an openly Jewish Englishwoman who published the first novel by a Jewish woman in 1830. Kaufman's research reveals that Polack's novel, "Fiction without Romance, or The Locket-Watch," targeted a broad Jewish readership across various communities, including readers in British colonies like Jamaica and Barbados. Kaufman expands Polack's archive by consulting the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership website, comparing subscriber data with other publications, and incorporating private papers from the Lyon family, who had connections to the West Indies. Kaufman's work highlights the interconnectedness of East and West End literary culture and challenges stereotypes of urban degeneration. [Extracted from the article]

Combating London's Criminal Class: A State Divided, 1869-95, by Matthew Bach; pp. x + 191. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020, $112.50, $35.95 paper, $28.76 ebook, 28.99 [pounds sterling] paper, 26.09 [pounds [...]

Tennyson and Goethe's Faust, by Tom Baynes; pp. xvii + 236. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021, $120.00, $27.95 paper, $24.95 ebook, 90.00 [pounds sterling], 20.99 [pounds sterling] paper, 19.99 [pounds [...]

In his 1895 short story "The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes", H. G. Wells dwells on what it means to be physically at home but cognitively away. Both our collective experience of distanced visiting and our shared engagement with the processes and legacies of colonization prompted me to think about Wells's depiction of Davidson's mysterious ocular injury. More fortunate than Davidson in the matter of laboratory accidents, participants in the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) 2022 online conference were, in our own way, both at home and away, visiting the conference's virtual spaces at the same time that we were present for the day-to-day of our home lives. [Extracted from the article]

The affective turn has prompted literary scholars to take interest in neuroscientific and philosophical approaches to the materiality of bodyminds, even while often insisting on the immaterial qualitativeness of feeling. This paper examines the prehistory of this divided investment, which reinscribes affect into the atom, the cell, the fiber, and the molecule. The Victorian fascination with newly imaginable physical worlds creates unsettling scales of existence that were understood as formative of human identity, emotion, and moral capacities, but were seemingly fungible, nonindividual, and depthless. Examining George Eliot's treatment of the material basis of feeling in Middlemarch (1871–72), I argue that Victorian science insisted on the metaphorical bearing of materialist concepts, presenting materiality itself as affectively charged to avoid grappling with the threat of a noninteriorized reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the nineteenth century, a new term emerged for moral disgust, which then, as now, sat uneasily within physiologically and socially based models of emotions. The history of "antipathy"—antagonist of that politically and aesthetically important emotion, sympathy—reveals tensions in liberal society around the role of moral disgust. Often invoked with disclaimers about its imprecision, antipathy's revival evidences efforts to grapple with a newly puzzling feeling. Examining the term's use by theorists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries including Jeremy Bentham, David Hume, John Hey, and Alexander Bain, this paper shows how an initially neutral term came to describe an emotion thought dangerous to social cohesion, and was then in turn revalorized in the service of racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores one of organicism's longstanding sources of incoherence and contradiction: the problematic afterlife of mechanism. Putting pressure on the narrative that announces the end of mechanism around 1800, this paper considers how mechanism continued to haunt the Victorian organism by turning to Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872) and its depiction of machine evolution. Reading Butler's novel as a paradigmatic expression of the afterlife of mechanism, this paper constructs a brief genealogy of the mechanical underpinnings of Victorian organicism as viewed through the lens of decay. With an eye toward the scalar implications of organicism, I argue that Butler's novel, written under the looming threat of Victorian mineral depletion, demands a reckoning with the extractive economies of inorganic history and encourages us to reimagine the hinge point between natural and cultural systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"New Media and the Rise of the Popular Woman Writer, 1832–1860" by Alexis Easley is a comprehensive study that challenges traditional scholarly analysis of women's relationship to print culture in the Victorian era. Easley examines the use and reuse of texts and illustrations by women writers in popular periodicals, volume publications, and scrapbooks. She argues that the rise of inexpensive magazines and weekly papers provided opportunities for women writers to publish their works, while scrapbooks allowed women readers to engage with and preserve these texts. Easley's work also highlights the importance of studying short verse and prose extracts in Victorian periodicals and reevaluates the literary success and influence of authors like Mary Anne Evans and the Brontë sisters. The book offers new methodologies for researching women's writing in the Victorian era and encourages readers to apply these techniques to their own research. [Extracted from the article]

This paper explores the ways in which tracts and periodicals circulated by the Religious Tract Society worked in tandem to encourage a style of reading that emphasized the need for a reader to apply the moral of a narrative first and foremost to themselves. This style of reading did not prioritize sympathy. Instead it attenuated the possibility that the lower-class and imperially subjected readers addressed by the material might come to see themselves as part of a reading audience united by a shared print culture. At the same time, this style of reading helped preserve the reader's sense that there remained, in the bewildering flood of mass-media information, a possibility for reading to lead to undiluted ethical action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on toxic masculinity of Christina Rossetti's frustrated goblins and feminist scholars and rethinking the ways that nineteenth-century women configure power. It mentions Caolan Madden's reading recasts poem "Aurora Leigh" as a commentary not only the Poetess in the context of its complicated relationship to a perceived theatrical audience. It also mentions how to recognize these historically relevant details inside and outside the poems.

The article focuses on several papers of literary scholars that discuss the formal specificity of their objects presented during the 2006 North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) conference. It states that the work of Mary Orr may be historically inaccurate but the methods she performs in examining the constraints imposed by genre are both accurate and illuminating. It mentions that the paper of Nancy Marshall invokes physiognomy.

Most strikingly, Webb's research in Foreign Office diplomatic papers provides a new context for the most notorious of all British accounts of Haiti, Spenser St. John's I Hayti, or the Black Republic i (1884). As a newly arrived diplomat, Vansittart brought with him the story about Haiti that was repeated endlessly in nineteenth-century Britain: that it was a place of permanent instability and rebellion. Webb convincingly argues, "From the "margins", Haiti repeatedly returned to the forefront of British debates, providing a powerful example of a decolonised alternative to British imperial systems" (5). [Extracted from the article]

The twenty-first annual conference will be held in Bloomington, Indiana, November 9-11, 2023, exploring the theme of "Revision, Return, Reform." The nineteenth annual conference of the North American Victorian Studies Association met virtually in March of 2022 to explore the theme of "Unsettling Victorians." We invited Dennis Denisoff and Vanessa Warne to select a cluster of three compelling papers from the conference. [Extracted from the article]

The article examines papers presented during the 2017 NAVSA conference held in Banff, Alberta, which focus on preservation as a Victorian issue or a 21st-century problem. These papers include "William Morris and the Uses of Nostalgia: Memory in the Early and Late Poetry," by Veronica Alfano. It discusses ways to sustain an engaged Victorian Studies.

"The Great Famine in Ireland and Britain's Financial Crisis" by Charles Read and "Dublin and the Great Irish Famine" edited by Emily Mark-Fitzgerald, Ciarán McCabe, and Ciarán Reilly are two books that explore the Great Famine in Ireland. The Famine, also known as An Gorta Mór or the Irish potato famine, occurred between 1845 and the early 1850s and resulted in the loss of around two million lives and a significant decline in Ireland's population. The books examine the economic and political factors that contributed to the Famine, including the British government's response and the impact on Dublin. They also discuss the cultural memory and legacy of the Famine. These books provide valuable insights into this devastating event and its lasting effects on Ireland. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the twentieth annual conference of the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA), which took place in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in October 2022. The theme of the conference was "Just Victorians," and the article highlights the publication of work presented at the conference. The article also mentions the upcoming special issue on NAVSA's twenty-first annual conference, which will be published in the 66.3 issue of Victorian Studies. Additionally, it provides information about the twenty-second annual conference, titled "EVENT 2024," which will be a Flightless Conference with NAVSA and its regional hubs, featuring sustainable global conferencing methods. [Extracted from the article]

Focuses on the inaugural meeting of the North American Victorian Studies Association held in October 2003 at the Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. Information on the papers presented at the meeting; Web site that provides information on the events during the gathering; Collections of papers from the conference.

The author discusses three articles in this special issue arising from the 14th annual November 2016 conference of the North American Victorian Studies Association entitled "Social Victorians" in Phoenix, Arizona, on topics related to fictional characters.

Agathocleous has done remarkable work in the archive of colonial print and ably shows the widespread impact of attempts to curtail sedition and disaffection on Indian and British print cultures. This framing allows Agathocleous to explore opposition to the 1891 Act and sedition laws as a site where an orthodox Hindu position and scriptures clashed with supposed colonial interference and laws. Where Neti excels in her analysis of law, legal cultures, and legal imagination, in Agathocleous's book, sedition law itself takes a back seat, as the focus is on print cultures and how such cultures and editors navigated and responded to anti-sedition laws in colonial India. [Extracted from the article]

The author discusses the writings of philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in response to papers delivered by Rae Greiner, Jonathan Farina, and John Plotz at the 2010 conference of the North American Victorian Studies Association . He analyzes many of Hegel's books such as "Philosophy of History," and "The Phenomenology of the Spirit." The author also examines the ethical, epistemological, and geopolitical aspects of the papers presented to the conference, particularly Farina's use of analogy.

This paper uses Algernon Blackwood's weird tale "The Willows" (1907) to argue that the genre of weird fiction is characterized by a disproportionate investment in descriptive modes of writing. The weird tale's fascination with description contravenes narratology and conventional reading practices alike, as both privilege narration over description. Tales such as "The Willows" insist that significant subjects and agents have been overlooked in anthropocentric modes of storytelling and that description itself has been instrumental in this oversight, as scene-setting and other descriptive modes effectively cast such subjects as static backgrounds to more important human affairs. By repeatedly dramatizing the discovery of subjects and agents hidden within apparently static descriptive passages, weird tales offer a critique of anthropocentric modes of storytelling and point the way toward a more ecological understanding of interconnection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]