Search

This short essay traces my own path to what we might call Victorian race studies. I begin with an account of how nineteenth-century Afghanistan exceeds Said's Orientalism and the wider frames of the postcolonial. I then turn to some thoughts on how a more extensive and complex account of racialization from critical race theory might help our field confront the brutalities of white supremacy in the nineteenth century through to the present. Michel Foucault's lectures on governmentality and the biopolitical remind us that these brutalities began to structure everyday life in the nineteenth century and have become formalized and normalized institutionally into the present. The case of Afghanistan shows how re-engaging postcolonial studies through an engagement with critical race theory allows us to address more fully the historical realities of racialization and empire working in concert in the nineteenth century., This essay unfolds as a series of thoughts, scenes, and events that traces my own path to what we might call Victorian race studies. I begin with an account of [...]

What business do we have to speak of Bronte novels in relation to ourselves? For scholars of color, how do we engage with canon without reifying our own marginality within the rubric of Victorian empire and exclusion? This essay performs what I call 'reading in the aftermath,' akin to Christina Sharpe's reading 'in the wake': a willingness to confront a racist past and its distorting aftereffects on life today. Turning to contemporary afterlives of Victorian texts, this article applies Asian and Asian Americanist critique, such as Anne Cheng's Ornamentalism, to explore a recent Bronte adaptation, Patricia Park's Re Jane. In her novel, Park uses the language of Jane Eyre as a tool to critique the classic's own critical legacy, ridiculing the pedantry of Anglo-American feminism imposed upon younger women of color. Multicultural afterlives and adaptations, I suggest, present opportunities to conjoin past and present, drawing Bronte studies into current discussions on race, racism, and ethnic American literatures., One late night of research, I came across the image of Afong Moy, 'The Chinese Lady,' featured in a historic lithograph of 1835. The first known Chinese woman to be [...]

This article explores the relationship between seriality, miscellaneity, and compression in nineteenth-century print. Thinking about seriality and miscellaneity raises questions about form and format (aesthetics) alongside mechanism (technology). I argue that, taken together, seriality and miscellaneity are the twin engines that drive a compressive dynamic of print in the period, in which we see the pressures of expansion and spread. They are also, however, engines of reduction and contraction. I discuss several print media examples--including newspaper press directories, G. W. M. Reynolds's serial The Mysteries of London (1844-56), and literary miscellanies--to complicate our understanding of both seriality and miscellaneity and to posit a more enmeshed understanding of both., By the 1840s, an explosion in print had come to define print culture in Britain, enabled by such technological and institutional developments as the railways and postal system, and by [...]

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., Organicism offered nineteenth-century writers a potent ideological model for explaining the relationship between the processes of life and human artifice. (1) Through an analogy that likened all systems to living [...]

Throughout the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century, white poets on both sides of the Atlantic wrote hundreds of dramatic monologues in the voices of non-white speakers, particularly those of enslaved black people. This practice deserves more attention within critical studies of the dramatic monologue, especially as related to the literary expression of women's anger. For white women authors in the nineteenth century, the dramatic monologue's most central convention, the creation of a fictional or historical speaker radically different from the author, could be a liberating and exciting way to articulate a bitter social critique. At the same time, these white-authored poems written in the voices of angry black women also embed within the heart of the genre the distinctive and unreciprocated power of white voices to seize control over black ones. This dynamic suggests that the dramatic monologue bears a striking resemblance to the nineteenth-century minstrelsy show., One of the angriest women in Victorian poetry is the speaker of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point' (1848)--a poem that Barrett Browning worried might be 'too [...]

Scholarship on women poets from 2018 sees a renewed interest in archival materials. A number of works this year deal compellingly with unpublished and undiscovered works both by the poets [...]

Six books feature in the general materials section. Three essays from a chronologically expansive, inclusively Victorian, collection on children's poetry in English are succeeded by the second edition of one [...]

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., Robert Audley, the reluctant detective of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), gathers clues from the litter of the archive. While investigating Lady Audley's past life, Robert visits her [...]

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., When we imagine others reading the same print materials that we read, is it always an affiliative act? Benedict Anderson famously sidesteps questions about the limits that can be placed [...]

Central to the dialect poetry of William Barnes (1801-1886) is an evocation of emotion that criticism has for half a century struggled to explain, a discomfiting burden of feeling. Writing [...]

Lady Annie Brassey (1839-1887) was a well-known Victorian travel writer who was also a collector, photographer, ethnographer, zoologist, and botanist and who traveled around the world aboard the privately owned yacht the Sunbeam. During these voyages she amassed a collection of approximately six thousand objects. Much more than tourist souvenirs, the collection shows a rigorous academic understanding of the disciplines she was collecting within. The ethnographic material, which makes up one-third of the collection, has gained little attention. Using her travel writing as a primary source, this article will interrogate Brassey's role as the maker of this collection, someone whose class allowed her to travel and to pursue museum collection, curation, and education to a near-professional level. Through three case studies this article will consider how she collected and curated her own museum and used her collection for public benefit. Keywords: Asia-Pacific, collecting, gender, material culture anthropology, museum studies, Pacific Island studies, travel writing, From about 1870 onwards more women than ever before or perhaps since undertook journeys to remote and savage countries ... their moral and intellectual standards were extremely high and they [...]

The last year of publications on Victorian women's poetry attests that 'women's poetry' is no longer a mere niche category but a full, diverse, developing field of study. Books in [...]

Rereading Robert Browning's anomalous, much-analyzed poem 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came' (1852), I was surprised to discover what I had somehow failed to perceive in prior readings: an [...]

Abstract: This paper explores the contingent and affective dimensions of genre in Victorian criticism on the ballad. Aesthetic judgments comprise an important part of the historical meta-discourse surrounding literary genres, [...]

ABSTRACT: In this essay, i argue that transfictional characters are most explicitly a function of seriality. I ask how the Victorian serialized novel and adaptations across media can provoke literary [...]

Thomas Hardy INDY CLARK After a short time in the wilderness, the Guide to the Year's Work for Hardy returns. Having arrived a little late to the party, I will [...]

General Materials Albert D. Pionke Five books are featured in the general materials section. Three monographs reconnect Victorian lyric practices with various forms of musical thinking, the Scottish reception of [...]

Palaces tremble down, or reel To ruin, while the stars in dread Fade far into their quiet deeps, Before the deep destroying roar: Heavenward the costliest incense leaps, And madness [...]