Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal最新文献

{"title":"Unremarkable as “the bridge … or the butcher’s wife”: pregnancy, illegitimacy, and realism in Ellen Wood’s <i>A Tale of Sin</i>","authors":"Mary Elizabeth Leighton, Lisa Surridge","doi":"10.1080/08905495.2023.2274244","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2023.2274244","url":null,"abstract":"Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 The authors of this article gratefully acknowledge the editorial advice of Alexandra Wettlaufer and the NCC’s anonymous readers, as well as the research assistance of Joe Diemer.2 After Wood’s death on 10 February 1887, the last stories were published posthumously.3 The byline appears for Wood’s serial novel Bessy Rane in the Argosy’s table of contents for volume 10 (July–December 1870): iii.4 For the series’ setting, Wood drew on her own childhood experiences of growing up in Worcestershire (“Ellen Wood”).5 See Malone (Citation2000, 370).6 See Cox (Citation2023) Confinement.7 All further references to A Tale of Sin are to the Argosy serial.8 When Wood revised and expanded Parkwater for 1875 serialization in the Argosy (Allan Citation2011, 9), she substantially altered its plot details, showing her attention to audience and social context.9 See Dau and Preston (Citation2015).10 With studied irony, Wood uses her schoolboy voice to complain about the constraints imposed by imperious magazine editors: Johnny frequently laments the length limitations that require him to curtail his storytelling, at one point avowing “that’s all I can put in” (Wood Citation1870b, 58).11 The quotation is from Wood Citation1870b, 298.12 Notably, Wood never explains how Duffham came into possession of Mary Layne’s diary and says that Mrs. Layne failed to burn Susan’s letters to her mother, which made their way into Duffham’s hands.13 Ironically, Lady Chavasse bears the same surname as one of the most famous medical advice writers.14 Whereas in sensation fiction the em-dash typically represent unspeakable emotions, here it represents the pragmatic interruption of the doctor by the night bell.15 See, for example, “Misfortune,” the first panel in Augustus Egg’s Past and Present triptych (1858).16 See Pettitt (Citation2012), “Time Lag.”17 Hetty’s confession to Dinah in Adam Bede is another such example.18 His ignorance replays Carlton’s failure to recognize his infant son in Lord Oakburn’s Daughters.Additional informationNotes on contributorsMary Elizabeth LeightonMary Elizabeth Leighton is Professor of English at the University of Victoria, co-author of The Plot Thickens: Illustrated Victorian Serial Fiction from Dickens to Du Maurier (Ohio UP, 2019), co-editor of The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Prose 1832–1901 (2012), and former co-editor of Victorian Review (2006–2016). With Lisa Surridge, she is working on Great Expectations: Pregnancy in Victorian Fiction, a project that includes a co-edited collection of short articles on the Victorian Web titled Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Age of Victoria. With Andrea Korda and Vanessa Warne, she co-organizes Crafting Communities, an award-winning resource hub about nineteenth-century material culture for educators and makers.Lisa SurridgeLisa Surridge is Professor of English and ","PeriodicalId":43278,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135341746","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Anthony Trollope: an Irish writer","authors":"Dinah Birch","doi":"10.1080/08905495.2023.2273695","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2023.2273695","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43278,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135869182","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Postsecularism, burial technologies, and <i>Dracula</i>","authors":"Carlie Wetzel","doi":"10.1080/08905495.2023.2274229","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2023.2274229","url":null,"abstract":"Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size AcknowledgementsThank you to the faculty advisors who so generously gave their time to help with the development of this article.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 D. Bruno Starrs adds, “In analyzing Stoker’s characterization of his eponymous star, both Ken Gelder and Judith Halberstam argue the Count is antisemitically modeled on stereotypical images (Gelder 13, Halberstam 248)” (Citation2004, 1).2 D. Bruno Starrs offers a reading of Stoker’s Dracula that is explicitly pro-Catholicism. The arc of the novel seems to promote the “proselytization of Protestants to Catholicism” even though such a theme might endanger Stoker in a tense religious climate (Citation2004, 1).3 It is worth noting the similarities between Lucy’s un-dead appearance and Dracula’s own uncanny appearance in the novel. First, Arthur observes that Dracula appears both dead and alive laying in a box of earth, noting his “eyes were open and stony, but without the glassiness of death – and the cheeks had the warmth of life through all their pallor; the lips were as red as ever. But there was no sign of movement, no pulse, no breath, no beating of the heart” (Stoker [Citation1897] Citation1997, 51). Second, Arthur observes the uncanny seeming reversal of age when he sees Dracula after feeding on blood, noting that the Count looked “as if his youth had been half renewed, for the white hair and moustache were changed to dark iron-grey; the cheeks were fuller, and the white skin seemed ruby-red underneath; the mouth was redder than ever” (54).4 Much debate about cremation refers to the burial service text in The Book of Common Prayer, which reads, “Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ, who shall change out vile body, that it may be like unto his glorious body, according to the might working, whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself” (Church of England Citation1758, 305).5 Even in part of the cancelled manuscript the Count’s castle explodes like a volcano; there was “black and yellow smoke volume upon volume in rolling grandeur” and “From where we stood it seemed as though the one fierce volcano burst had satisfied the need of nature and that the castle and the structure of the hill had sank again into the void. We were so appalled with the suddenness and the grandeur that we forgot to think of ourselves” (Stoker [Citation1897] Citation1997, 325, note 5).Additional informationNotes on contributorsCarlie WetzelCarlie Wetzel earned her B.A. from Colgate University and her Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests include nineteenth-century ","PeriodicalId":43278,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135820201","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fictions of depersonalization: inauthentic feeling at the <i>fin-de-siècle</i>","authors":"Josh Powell","doi":"10.1080/08905495.2023.2273176","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2023.2273176","url":null,"abstract":"Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 For Stephen, feeling and emotion have their proper place (largely in the private, domestic realm); he is worried that they are beginning to exert too much influence outside of this, “in literature, in politics, in religion” (1864, 74). It’s hard to ignore the gendered aspect of Stephen’s argument here. He is clearly suggesting the “injurious” repercussions of female influence on “robust” male culture and this culture’s inevitable effeminization.2 See Mayer (Citation2008) on scientific experimentation and Kehler (Citation2008) on class. Elsewhere, Furneaux (Citation2016) has written on the role emotions played in the construction of Victorian masculinity. On sentiment and emotion in relation to empire, see recent studies by Lewis (Citation2018) and Lydon (Citation2020).3 It was Mary Augusta Ward who translated Amiel’s original French coinage, dépersonnalisé, into “depersonalized”, now the accepted English term.4 Philip Gerrans (Citation2019), for example, draws on Dugas’s work when formulating an affect-based model of selfhood. For Gerrans, “the self to which experience is attributed is a predictive model made by the mind to explain the modulation of affect as the organism progresses through the world” (401). The self, here, is constructed through an accumulation of “characteristic” affective responses to perceptions and thoughts; depersonalization, the feeling that one is “no longer present in experience”, emerges when familiar perceptions and thoughts fail to produce the characteristic affective responses that are expected (401).5 There has been some discussion of literary writing’s connection with depersonalization. Simeon and Abugel (Citation2006) devote a chapter of their book on depersonalization to literary representations of the phenomenon. And Francis (Citation2022) has recently considered depersonalization in relation to creative writing. These works, though, do not consider nineteenth-century literature.7 In their introduction to Moore (Citation2007), Heilman and Llewellyn note that the “aesthetic tastes, sexual oddities and nervous condition of Moore’s spectator protagonist [Norton] are transparently adapted from his reading of Joris-Karl Huysmans, Walter Pater and Arthur Schopenhauer” (I).6 Early in the story Norton’s mother and Kitty’s father agree that Norton is “quite different” from other men with regards to his disinterest in women (119). He also stumbles into his engagement with Kitty through a moment of uncontrolled passion and, just before the tramp’s attack hopes that an “accident might lead him out of the difficulty into which a chance moment had betrayed him” (151).8 In contemporary psychiatry, Depersonalization Disorder is commonly defined as a type of dissociation, related to but distinct from other dissociative disorders such as what we now call Dissociative Identity Disorder","PeriodicalId":43278,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135819512","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A club of “murder-fanciers”: Thomas De Quincey’s essays “On Murder” and consuming violence in <i>Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine</i>","authors":"Sarah Sharp","doi":"10.1080/08905495.2023.2273081","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2023.2273081","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43278,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134907321","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Two new letters from Thomas Carlyle’s Irish journey in 1849","authors":"Alexander Jordan","doi":"10.1080/08905495.2023.2241996","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2023.2241996","url":null,"abstract":"The month-long journey to Ireland undertaken by the great Victorian man of letters Thomas Carlyle (1795","PeriodicalId":43278,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41354982","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Underground climate: infrastructure, Hollow Earth, and the Anthropocene","authors":"Sebastian Egholm Lund","doi":"10.1080/08905495.2023.2241993","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2023.2241993","url":null,"abstract":"Early in his meditation on inhumation and history, Urne-Buriall (1658), English polymath Thomas Browne describes the discovery of “between fourty and fifty Urnes” ([1658] 2012, 103) in the sandy soil near Walsingham in the 1650s. Browne refers to the dark interiors of these buried urns as “conservatories” – spaces of conservation, insulated from what he calls “the piercing Atomes of ayre that corrupt the upper world” ([1658] 2012, 112). Browne regarded the underground as a place wherein the law of natural change, the piercing atoms of air was deferred. In the nineteenth century, Browne’s remarks were gradually integrated into the general imaginary of the subsurface: step by step, tunnel after tunnel, literary work after literary work, the underground was perceived as a place where humanity could suspend the corruption of natural change, degeneration, and decay. The underground came to be understood as a conservatory – not for exotic plants and flowers – but for the human; a strictly anthropogenic sphere where the chaos of nature could be suspended. The chaos of nature was in this context often understood as the chaos of climate: global atmospheric events such as the Year Without a Summer in 1816, growing air pollution in the greater cities, the Great Stink of London in 1858, the 1884 eruption of Krakatoa, and the nascence of anthropogenic climate change makes the nineteenth century a fundamental period in the cultural history of climate. In this article, I argue that the desire to control the climate system by artificialisation and insulation begins to be speculatively acted out in the material and symbolic carving out of the new underground. Interrogating representations of underground infrastructure made by popular authors such as Bayard Taylor, engineers such as Louis Simonin, scientists such as Émile Gérards, and painters such as George Jones, we see in the British and French nineteenth century an intensifying image of the underground as a rational, inorganic, and strictly anthropogenic sphere with a controllable climate. No longer a site for imaginary encounters with mythological hellholes, it is perceived as a metaphor for a future world where the climate can be controlled, linearised, and regularised – opposed to the chaotic climate of the surface. Other than the popular sources speculating on the space of underground infrastructure, speculation on the subterranean atmosphere was, most fervent in the","PeriodicalId":43278,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47576101","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The plight of the figure of the child-woman in David Copperfield and A Pair of Blue Eyes","authors":"Junjie Qi","doi":"10.1080/08905495.2023.2241989","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2023.2241989","url":null,"abstract":"Despite the dis-affinities of Charles Dickens’s and Thomas Hardy’s literary genius, and the dissimilarities in generic form and fictional style between David Copperfield (1850) and A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), each text features a child-woman, Dora Spenlow and Elfride Swancourt respectively. This affinity amid sundry dis-affinities between these two novels looks less surprising when considering the fact that the Victorian novel seems to be populated by child-women, that is, grown-up women who possess physical and mental features normally assumed to be unique to children. The ubiquity of the figure of the child-woman in the Victorian novel is a literary corollary of the Victorian fascination with childhood and girlhood. The cherished assets of girls – innocence, dependence, naïve charm, tenderness – all conform to the Victorian feminine ideal. This idealised conception of girls inevitably leads to the prolongation of girlhood at the expense of mature femininity, thereby bringing forth a multitude of grown-up girls. Victorian girlhood and the child-woman as a category of age inversion have received considerable critical attention over the past four decades. While much critical attention has been devoted to issues of gender inversion and class inversion in the heterosexual relationships in A Pair of Blue Eyes, few critics have examined the issue of age inversion in the novel. Whereas Dickens’s Dora is a familiar example in critical inquiry into these issues, the study of Elfride as a child-woman in relation to issues of gender and social class interrogated in the novel remains largely a neglected quarry. When read in tandem with each other, each text sheds extra exegetical light upon the fictional treatment of the child-woman in the other. This essay argues that the two novels offer a compelling case for comparative analysis, which will contribute new insights to the ongoing scholarly conversation about the figure of the child-woman and provide a reading of Hardy’s text, in particular, that fills a hole in Hardy scholarship. The selection of these two novels for comparison is not random. In both texts, the representation of the figure of the child-woman is considerably inflected by Victorian conceptions of gender and social class. Both texts demonstrate the ambiguity inherent in the winning characteristics of child-women which initially enhance their desirability but eventually turn out to be detrimental and even death-dealing. The plight of both childwomen is intimately bound up with the instability of male adulthood and masculinity. The autobiographical dimension of both novels invites us to move beyond the level of","PeriodicalId":43278,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45849020","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Antagonistic boundaries: the professional New Woman’s retro-progress in The Odd Women","authors":"Riya Das","doi":"10.1080/08905495.2023.2241990","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2023.2241990","url":null,"abstract":". For a detailed analysis of fi n-de-siècle print culture, the New Woman novel, and Gissing, see Menke (2019).","PeriodicalId":43278,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42889969","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“To have no work to do [is] strange”: the performance of leisure in Little Dorrit","authors":"Houliang Chen","doi":"10.1080/08905495.2023.2241992","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2023.2241992","url":null,"abstract":"In his classic work The Theory of the Leisure Class ([1899] 2007), Thorstein Veblen argues that the conspicuous consumption of leisure is essential for people, typically the middle class, to demarcate their social status. Wealth in itself will not automatically grant respectability to rich people. Rather, it must be publicly exhibited so as to earn honorable status for its owners, and one way to exhibit wealth is by engaging in manifest leisure. Veblen expounds:","PeriodicalId":43278,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46548605","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}