{"title":"The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare: Bardology in the Nineteenth Century by Charles LaPorte (review)","authors":"Marija Reiff","doi":"10.1353/vcr.2022.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vcr.2022.0014","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40377,"journal":{"name":"Victorian Review-An Interdisciplinary Journal of Victorian Studies","volume":"48 1","pages":"131 - 134"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45840730","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"Is Victoria Actually Human?\": Posthuman (Pre)histories","authors":"Lara Karpenko","doi":"10.1353/vcr.2022.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vcr.2022.0022","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This introduction presents an overview of the contents of this special issue while also complicating posthuman chronologies, making a case for the importance of the Victorian period in understanding posthumanism. The introduction focuses on the myriad and complex ways Victorians thought through material (the human body, printing presses) and immaterial (love, sympathy, desire) phenomena, inviting readers to consider how the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries remain in conversation, defying a strict chronological progression.","PeriodicalId":40377,"journal":{"name":"Victorian Review-An Interdisciplinary Journal of Victorian Studies","volume":"48 1","pages":"45 - 52"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45396720","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature by Winter Jade Werner (review)","authors":"Denae Dyck","doi":"10.1353/vcr.2022.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vcr.2022.0021","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40377,"journal":{"name":"Victorian Review-An Interdisciplinary Journal of Victorian Studies","volume":"48 1","pages":"134 - 136"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43316252","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Looking Back: Posthumanism and Sympathy in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland","authors":"Sandy M. Burnley","doi":"10.1353/vcr.2022.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vcr.2022.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:When young Alice meets a rabbit and a caterpillar in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), she does not meet metaphorical or racialized humans but encounters posthumanist characters who challenge Victorians' humanist notions, especially when it comes to sympathetic engagement. Audrey Jaffe and Rae Greiner propose that Victorians deployed sympathy to construct the imaginary self, suggesting that sympathy became a mode of representation that mirrored liberalism's ideals. As a result, their work focuses on how Victorians represented themselves and other beings. Yet their scholarship has not been deployed in more posthumanist conversations and so does not fully articulate the consequences of how sympathy, for Victorians, can make one human. The implications of this mechanism then suggest that sympathetic representations truncate the possibilities for other ways of being in the world. In this essay, I argue that Alice's Adventures in Wonderland can be used as a case study of posthumanist possibilities, especially as they pertain to critiquing sympathetic engagement and signalling Victorians' nascent frustrations with humanist constructs.By inviting Alice to encounter a quotidian yet relatively alien species, such as a caterpillar, Wonderland encourages readers to question the benevolence of Victorian sympathy, regardless of the novel's intention. Instead of proposing the caterpillar as an anthropomorphized, sympathetic, and racialized character, Wonderland underscores the caterpillar's unique and posthumanist identity, signals gardeners' attempts at eradicating this species because of misidentification, and admonishes readers against transforming Wonderland into a homogenous nation of sympathetic humanoids.","PeriodicalId":40377,"journal":{"name":"Victorian Review-An Interdisciplinary Journal of Victorian Studies","volume":"48 1","pages":"107 - 123"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42680695","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination by Leila Neti (review)","authors":"Lucky Issar","doi":"10.1353/vcr.2022.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vcr.2022.0016","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40377,"journal":{"name":"Victorian Review-An Interdisciplinary Journal of Victorian Studies","volume":"48 1","pages":"136 - 139"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43160859","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Posthuman Ecology and Immersive Materiality in M.P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud","authors":"R. Pasquini","doi":"10.1353/vcr.2022.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vcr.2022.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:M.P. Shiel's novel The Purple Cloud (1901) spectacularly dramatizes the material processes of becoming. Its protagonist, Adam Jeffson, travels an earth ravaged by poisonous gas as a Last Man figure, setting fire to cities and reflecting on a physical world no longer oriented toward the species. Taking up contemporary discourses concerning ecology and extinction, the novel points to the regenerative potential of catastrophe. The ecological rather than the eschatological matters most; it is not a matter of being last but of becoming new.Ecological imagery charges the novel's recurring posthuman fantasies. The dialogical give-and-take between object/subject, human/non-human, and body/world draws attention to the relatability between the unbounded individual self and the immense external world. This brand of posthumanism stems from the ecological, requiring deep observations of radical ontology within an expansive network of affinities and kinships. These visions depict the immediate experience of becoming from first-person accounts of the phenomenological body, thereby providing access to the inner phenomena of a subject who experiences the linked states of interconnected biota and matter.However,The Purple Cloud also demonstrates the limits of posthumanism as evidenced by Jeffson's misogynist and xenophobic musings on a remodelled species. This failure to absolutely embrace the radical ontology of becoming establishes the persistence of humanist thinking in the period's evolutionary and ecological imaginaries, as well as the period's fraught relationship to the prospect of posthumanism due to competing anthropocentric and materialist frameworks.","PeriodicalId":40377,"journal":{"name":"Victorian Review-An Interdisciplinary Journal of Victorian Studies","volume":"48 1","pages":"106 - 91"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47755653","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion by Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (review)","authors":"Sebastian Lund","doi":"10.1353/vcr.2022.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vcr.2022.0015","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40377,"journal":{"name":"Victorian Review-An Interdisciplinary Journal of Victorian Studies","volume":"48 1","pages":"128 - 131"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44786379","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Photographic Enlargements and Ethical Looking: Fingerprints from Hooghly","authors":"Mira Rai Waits","doi":"10.1353/vcr.2022.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vcr.2022.0020","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40377,"journal":{"name":"Victorian Review-An Interdisciplinary Journal of Victorian Studies","volume":"48 1","pages":"36 - 40"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46850730","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}