VICTORIAN STUDIESPub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.05
Rachel Ablow
{"title":"Unsettling Sympathy","authors":"Rachel Ablow","doi":"10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.05","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Discussions of politics and the novel often turn to sympathy, or the imagination of the thoughts and feelings of others, in spite of widespread recognition of sympathy’s limitations. This essay uses Harriet Martineau’s historical romance of the Haitian Revolution, The Hour and the Man (1841), to consider how novels might seek to move or even motivate readers in ways that do not rely on sympathy. Rather than asking readers to feel for or with her characters, Martineau encourages readers to experience how slavery complicates or even precludes the possibility of sympathy.","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"64 1","pages":"573 - 578"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43030665","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
VICTORIAN STUDIESPub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.36
Roger Luckhurst
{"title":"The Cambridge History of The Gothic, Volume II: Gothic in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Dale Townshend and Angela Wright","authors":"Roger Luckhurst","doi":"10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.36","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.36","url":null,"abstract":"of the setting (the official world of the adult) and a more imaginative world in which the children create and possess the territory on their own terms (164). This map connects the double perspective of the child’s reappropriation of space and the adult’s nostalgia for a place in memory. When she turns her discussion to Tolkien’s fiction, Bushell concentrates upon the author’s cartographic imagination that never serves as a background to the fiction but rather initiates the creative process. The maps enable and inhabit his fiction. Given the fear that a map might not be accurate, Bushell returns to nineteenthcentury fiction and wonders why authors such as Anthony Trollope and Thomas Hardy chose to use maps in their fiction. After a discussion of the positive value for them concerning the interconnection between maps and their novels, she distinguishes between the two by pointing out that Trollope’s sense of place and mapping depended upon his sensitivity to who owned what property in Barchester and Hardy’s upon the different kinds of topography in the landscape of Wessex. The last portion of this study leaves behind specific narratives and engages larger theoretical concepts, particularly the process of reading as a form of mapping and the phenomenon of respatializing the text by the reader. This exploration takes Bushell into the nature of the inner readerly map and the new kind of literary mapping offered by studies in neurology and her own work in digital literary cartography. Here is where I have some concern, for, as stodgy as it sounds, this form of mapping seems almost to contradict what Bushell admits at the end of her study about the mapping of Neverland in Peter Pan (1911), which is constantly in flux and moves “toward a collective map filled with imaginative generic elements of children’s play”—a figure “for childhood creativity and externalization of the inner cognitive map” (305). As correct as she may be, however, the question remains whether cognition and the imagination (no matter how neurologists attempt to find the source in the brain) can ever be mapped or targeted. Like the map itself, something always eludes such efforts, no matter how many layers of response one places on or combines with another. Something inevitably slips away and refuses to be collected, identified, or definitively marked. This is an ambitious, far-ranging, thorough, appropriately illustrated, and suggestive study of an interesting topic. The book is second in a series in which Bushell wants to “enlarge the boundaries of what we understand ‘the literary work’ to be” (15). Ann C. Colley SUNY Buffalo State University","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45940171","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
VICTORIAN STUDIESPub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.28
Lindsay Katzir
{"title":"Jews in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Charity, Community and Religion, 1830–1880 by Alysa Levene (review)","authors":"Lindsay Katzir","doi":"10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.28","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.28","url":null,"abstract":"dialecticism is fittingly employed in the chapter on the Arcades Project, where Freedman confronts Benjamin’s soft-pedalling of French economic antisemitism, which identified Jews with usury and capitalism. He argues that Benjamin’s Marxism, together with his affection for Paris and for French culture, impelled him to romanticize the Arcades at the expense of the semiotically Jewish, putatively decadent department stores that displaced them, and to soft-pedal the antisemitism of Charles Baudelaire and the socialist Charles Fourier. In a brilliant tour de force, Freedman stages a conflict within Benjamin in which the Jewish thinker ultimately gains the upper hand over the Francophile. The brilliance involves Freedman’s uncovering a kabalistic subtext in the letter of Benjamin’s text and locating in it a “Judeocentric” theory of writing and a messianic hope (205). This Derridean move is especially resonant because it echoes the deconstructive reversals by which Freedman reads Sigmund Freud’s engagement with Arthur Schopenhauer in the previous chapter, but this time making hope, rather than pessimism, the dominant note. At times it may seem as though the connections to decadence in these layered analyses are tenuous. But I am willing to accept the premise of a long fin de siècle that precedes the Yellow Nineties of England, because decadence emerges earlier in Paris and later writers continued to engage with it. Occasionally, Freedman identifies Jews who aren’t Jews. I don’t mean figures like Proust or the novelist Reginald Turner, but Wilde’s Salomé and her royal parents, who are not represented in the play as the Jews that they were in fact; or (I smile as I write) Max Fleischer’s Betty Boop in his 1932 cartoon Minnie the Moocher, Freedman’s final example of the modern Jewish slender female body popularized by “Salomania.” Suffice it to say that the hasenpfeffer her parents are forcing upon her, being made from rabbit, is not kosher; moreover, to interpret the bald pate of Boop père as a yarmulke is surely wishful. But I am almost sorry to disown Betty as the last in a line of decadence-influenced Jewish female icons whom Freedman has joyfully identified. Beth Newman Southern Methodist University","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"64 1","pages":"700 - 702"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48270040","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
VICTORIAN STUDIESPub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.26
W. Hughes
{"title":"Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815-1848, by Clare Pettitt","authors":"W. Hughes","doi":"10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.26","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.26","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48486727","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
VICTORIAN STUDIESPub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.06
P. Gilbert
{"title":"Antipathy","authors":"P. Gilbert","doi":"10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.06","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: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.","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"64 1","pages":"579 - 585"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45896485","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
VICTORIAN STUDIESPub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.19
Sally Barnden
{"title":"The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare: Bardology in the Nineteenth Century by Charles LaPorte (review)","authors":"Sally Barnden","doi":"10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.19","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.19","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"64 1","pages":"679 - 681"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44661479","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
VICTORIAN STUDIESPub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.18
Adela Pinch
{"title":"Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction, by Talia Schaffer","authors":"Adela Pinch","doi":"10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.18","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.18","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45194612","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
VICTORIAN STUDIESPub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.22
J. Cranfield
{"title":"How Sherlock Pulled the Trick: Spiritualism and the Pseudoscientific Method by Brian McCuskey (review)","authors":"J. Cranfield","doi":"10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.22","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.22","url":null,"abstract":"In her mid-1890s biographical dictionary, Zaynab Fawwaz ended her biography of Cleopatra with relish: “Cleopatra always loved revelry and debauchery, and frequenting places of pleasure. . . . Her days were sweet, her nights a treat. Her life held times of delight, and her tales sate the appetite” (Booth, Classes, 333). Arabophone readers, like their Anglophone peers but also differently, conjured “deathly queens and empowered womanhood” as they wrote ancient Egypt into contemporary preoccupations, and as they made and consumed products in their daily lives, whether cigarettes in London or hair pomades in Alexandria (Dobson 2). Marilyn Booth University of Oxford","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"64 1","pages":"687 - 689"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42743321","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
VICTORIAN STUDIESPub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.41
Rebecca Earle
{"title":"Many Mouths: The Politics of Food in Britain from the Workhouse to the Welfare State, by Nadja Durbach","authors":"Rebecca Earle","doi":"10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.41","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.41","url":null,"abstract":"undistinguished mass, I think there are further questions to ask about which people. As Jones and King themselves note, we need to know more about the “pauper self” (114). This study suggests many promising paths for further research, and scholars of the Poor Law, poverty, welfare, and the press will find it valuable reading. I think it would also be an excellent book to teach about historiography, historical methods, and, of course, the Poor Law. Marjorie Levine-Clark University of Colorado Denver","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48008522","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}