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Over the last few decades, in the wake of the ‘Ethical Turn’, contemporary literature has been examined through the prism of the ethics of alterity. Yet, this may not be consis­tently the case with Victorian and Modernist literature, since relatively few of the authors of those periods have elicited such critical and ­theoretical scrutiny. The articles in this volume set off to re-read Victorian and Modernist literature in the light of the ethics of alterity and investigate whether the post-Auschwitz, contemporary period breaks away from or favours lines of continuity with the productions of the earlier era. It also strives to address works which do not belong to the canon, focusing alternately on great authors and less known artists, on what has been termed ‘minor’ texts or genres that are less visible than the novel. Approaching literature by examining the relations between ethics and aesthetics, even while adopting an ethical approach, helps the authors in this volume contribute to revising the contemporary, Modernist and Victorian canon in English Literature.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit was first published in 1985 by Pandora Press, a small imprint launched by Routledge and Kegan Paul in response to the growing demand for women’s books by feminist activism. This fact forcefully conditioned the reception of Winterson’s first novel. Its reviewers described it as a heavily autobiographical Bildungsroman representing the process of individuation of a lesbian heroine at odds with the roles allotted to her by her family and religious community. After ...

The publication of her first three novels, Tipping the Velvet (1998) Affinity (1999) and Fingersmith (2002), classified Sarah Waters as a neo-Victorian writer with the open agenda of tracing back the history of lesbianism to the late nineteenth century, when the existence of homosexual practices among women was rendered invisible by its sheer inconceivability. The dominant Victorians’ refusal to make the ideological leap needed to imagine lesbianism into existence condemned lesbian women to lead an angst-ridden and ghostly—or in Terry Castle’s often repeated term, ‘apparitional’—existence at the margins of a patriarchal society ruled by compulsory heterosexuality, while the centre was reserved to the ‘angelic’ women ready to fulfil the prescribed roles of dutiful daughter, wife and mother. The essay argues that, in Affinity, Waters provides a critique of the bleak conditions of these apparitional Victorian lesbians by parodying two utterly opposed literary models of woman: while her representation of Margaret Prior, an upper-class closeted lesbian, takes to a point of parodic saturation and excess the sentimental and Romantic model inaugurated by Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa and further developed by Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, the representation of Selina Dawes, a spirit-medium convicted for fraud and assault and, most crucially, that of her partner, Ruth Vigers, the humble servant whose presence in the novel is rendered doubly invisible by her condition as a maidservant and as a male spirit’s impersonator, responds to the older, picaresque model of the poor woman as an amoral social climber, presented in novels like Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Roxana, or Henry Fielding’s satiric Shamela.

Through its take on ‘the humble’, this volume attempts to reveal the depth and philosophical relevance of literature, its ethical and political dimension as well as its connection to life. Because it can be associated with social class, religion, psychology or ethics, the notion of ‘the humble’ lends itself to diverse types of studies. The papers collected in this volume argue that in the course of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, artists and writers have revisited the term ‘humble’ and, far from treating it as a simple motif, have raised it to the status of an aesthetic category. This category can first foster a better understanding of fiction, poetry, painting, and their representation of precarious lives through various genres and modes. It may also draw attention to neglected or depreciated humble novels or art forms that developed from the Victorian to the contemporary period, through the Edwardian and the modernist eras. Finally, it helps revise assumptions about the literature and art of the period and signals to a poetics of the humble. The works of art examined here explore the humble as a possible capacity and ethical force, a way of being and acting.

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