VICTORIAN STUDIES最新文献

{"title":"Affect Theory’s Colonial Sources","authors":"Zachary Samalin","doi":"10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.03","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this article I consider the debt that contemporary theories of affect owe to nineteenth-century universalizing theories of emotion. I ask how and to what extent affect theory, as a late-twentieth-century intellectual formation, remains connected to the race-thinking and civilizational ideology of the nineteenth century which contributed to the emergence of the modern psychological study of the emotions. In order to take up these questions about the triangulation of affect, civilization, and race, I examine the colonial sources on which Charles Darwin drew in his 1872 The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Turning to the responses that Darwin received to his 1867 questionnaire, “Queries About Expression,” sheds light on the so-called raw data that still forms the scientific and ideological basis of affect theory today.","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"64 1","pages":"561 - 566"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48775853","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}

{"title":"Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, by Winter Jade Werner","authors":"Kimberly Vanesveld Adams","doi":"10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.29","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.29","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 3 maps Jewish settlement patterns within the three largest cities under consideration. Evidence gathered from Manchester, Liverpool, and Birmingham shows that Jews tended to settle in specific areas of town adjacent to synagogues and communal centers. Levene surmises that they saw some advantages in living among themselves. Chapter 4 retains the focus on Manchester, Liverpool, and Birmingham, exploring occupations and incomes. Levene finds less poverty among Jews than among other minority groups, such as the Irish. Jews also gravitated toward certain occupations, particularly the provision and sale of small goods. Levene points to evidence of the existence of networks of knowledge about job opportunities among provincial Jews. Despite the differences among these communities, Levene draws similar conclusions about each of them, revealing evidence of community networks. Chapters 5 and 6 deal with issues of poverty and philanthropy. Chapter 5 looks at charity from 1840 to 1865 and argues that Jews relied more upon the Jewish community for support than on public welfare. Community leaders felt responsible for helping the Jewish poor, and Levene finds that synagogues spent more on poor relief than did the government. Judging from synagogue charity logs, relief often included Passover groceries and free matzah. Levene surmises that Jews of this period saw Judaism’s emphasis on charity as both a mitzvah and an expectation. Chapter 6, which focuses on communal charity from 1865 to 1880, presents the challenges brought about by increasing immigration from Europe. Finally, chapter 7 proffers one of many interesting conclusions: traditional observance remained important to Victorian Jews, as evidenced by synagogue records. Most scholars claim that religious observance had already waned by this point in Anglo-Jewish history, so Levene’s analysis of these records would be of interest to someone studying religious and orthodox history and practices. Overall, the book does not overturn most previously held assumptions about Victorian Jewry, but it provides clarity and insight into details of everyday life. It also challenges assumptions about British communities generally, especially in relation to the Industrial Revolution. And while the book excels at extrapolating meaning from data and using data to reconstruct the provincial Jewish populations of the era, Levene does not present a compelling narrative about that data until the end of the book, a missed opportunity to situate some of the data in its historical context. What is new and novel is Levene’s focus on life outside of London, and that is the book’s critical importance. Lindsay Katzir Langston 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":"48793026","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}

{"title":"How Books, Reading and Subscription Libraries Defined Colonial Clubland in the British Empire by Sterling Joseph Coleman, Jr (review)","authors":"B. Black","doi":"10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.33","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.33","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"64 1","pages":"711 - 713"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43420870","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}

{"title":"Gertrude Bell in the Fin-de-Siècle Near East: Decadent Landscapes and Political Ecologies","authors":"Angie Blumberg","doi":"10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.09","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.09","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay recovers travel writing by Gertrude Bell, a well-known British explorer and archaeologist whose work is seldom examined in literary studies. Building on recent efforts to contextualize Bell’s early texts within late-Victorian Aestheticism and Decadence, this article examines Bell’s meditations on three landscapes and historical sites across Persian Pictures (1894) and The Desert and the Sown (1907), teasing out their rich engagement with political ecologies. Suggesting that in these meditations on Near Eastern landscapes, Bell offers a Decadent political ecology that anticipates her later diplomatic endeavors, this essay offers new ways of understanding the politics of aesthetics at the fin de siècle.","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"64 1","pages":"595 - 604"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46352589","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}

{"title":"The Masses are Revolting: Victorian Culture and the Political Aesthetics of Disgust by Zachary Samalin (review)","authors":"J. Plotz","doi":"10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.39","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.39","url":null,"abstract":"into this model, in which “everything slides into a hungry homogeneity,” including the personalities of the eponymous characters (26). This interpretation is belied by the stories themselves, in which the strongly individuated personalities of Morella and Ligeia transcend death rather than lose their selfhood within an undifferentiated totality. Similarly, in his chapter on Lovecraft, Newell represents the self-defined atheist and mechanistic materialist as actually a closet metaphysician, whose speculations about ontology in his fiction closely resembled that of Arthur Schopenhauer’s Will. It is true that Lovecraft was familiar with Schopenhauer, sharing his pessimistic outlook about the inevitability of human suffering as well as his embrace of art as a coping mechanism. However, Newell ignores Lovecraft’s primary allegiance to Friedrich Nietzsche’s anti-metaphysical philosophy and avowal of aesthetic artifice; Lovecraft explicitly endorsed Nietzschean perspectivism against metaphysics. Further, Newell claims that Lovecraft’s alleged pursuit of metaphysics entailed a corresponding depiction of the universe in his fiction as a “malignant force” (19). This may be how it appears to the many victims in Lovecraft’s stories, who impose their limited human categories on an amoral cosmos, but it overlooks the sense of wonder that Lovecraft found as he scrutinized the stars, a sentiment that is also found in his fiction. Newell’s account of the weird as a genre that expresses its metaphysical preoccupation with the nonhuman through the affect of disgust has much to commend it. His clear definition of a literary category that eschews definitions is stimulating, often persuasive, and particularly useful in providing a feasible alternative to the shape-shifting gothic. Michael Saler University of California, Davis","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"64 1","pages":"724 - 726"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42098176","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}

{"title":"EcoGothic Gardens in the Long Nineteenth Century: Phantoms, Fantasy and Uncanny Flowers, edited by Sue Edney","authors":"Lindsay Wells","doi":"10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.37","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.37","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":"45370365","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}

{"title":"Home and Away: On Visiting and Distanced Vision","authors":"Vanessa Warne","doi":"10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.16","url":null,"abstract":"In his 1895 short story “The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes,” H. G. Wells dwells on what it means to be physically at home but cognitively away. The story’s protagonist, Sidney Davidson, is injured when lightning strikes the laboratory in London where he works. Unable to see his surroundings, his visual sense relocated to the other side of the world, Davidson watches penguins nesting on an island he has never visited, his viewpoint on this distant and unfamiliar scene shifting as he moves around London. While he knows from the sound of familiar voices and the feel of surfaces that he is still at home, both his vision and attention are far away. More fortunate than Davidson in the matter of laboratory accidents, participants in the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) 2022 online conference were, in our own way, both at home and away, visiting the conference’s virtual spaces at the same time that we were present for the day-to-day of our home lives. As we presented and heard work proposed many months earlier, we also became involved in the goings-on of each other’s homes. People we had met with previously in a series of interchangeable conference rooms spoke with us from their kitchen tables. We opened up temporary windows into our living spaces where, in addition to the predictable piles of books, piles of laundry waited to be folded. Dogs and cats gained conference-celebrity status, and we prefaced papers with apologies for the piano lesson happening in the next room. While we habitually both develop our ideas and write them up at home, the domestic origins of our conference papers tend to be obscured by their presentation in public spaces. This conference was an exception. We did our visiting, talking, and thinking while sitting in our most comfortable chairs and wearing shabby slippers; at least, I did.","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"64 1","pages":"656 - 659"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49153331","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}

{"title":"Materializing Feeling and the Limits of Metaphor","authors":"Elisha Cohn","doi":"10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.07","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The affective turn has prompted literary scholars to take interest in neuroscientific and philosophical approaches to the materiality of bodyminds, even while often insisting on the immaterial qualitativeness of feeling. This paper examines the prehistory of this divided investment, which reinscribes affect into the atom, the cell, the fiber, and the molecule. The Victorian fascination with newly imaginable physical worlds creates unsettling scales of existence that were understood as formative of human identity, emotion, and moral capacities, but were seemingly fungible, nonindividual, and depthless. Examining George Eliot’s treatment of the material basis of feeling in Middlemarch (1871–72), I argue that Victorian science insisted on the metaphorical bearing of materialist concepts, presenting materiality itself as affectively charged to avoid grappling with the threat of a noninteriorized reality.","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"64 1","pages":"586 - 591"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46705203","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}

{"title":"Victorian Trauma: War, Railway Accidents, and the Vulnerable Body","authors":"Martin Danahay","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911107","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: In Balaclava (1876) by Elizabeth Thompson (later known as Lady Butler) the central figure of a traumatized survivor of the Charge of the Light Brigade, modeled after real-life veteran of the Charge William Henry Pennington, was criticized as being over-dramatic. The criticism of Pennington's pose and demeanor shows the inability of the Victorian definition of \"shock\" to encompass what today would be termed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). A shift in the Victorian model of trauma has been connected to railway travel; unrecognized has been the connection between the discourses on trauma in railway accidents and from warfare based on the vulnerability of the body. The mechanization of transport led to new anxieties about the precarity of the railway passenger's body and engendered an analogy between railway accident trauma and warfare. Surgeon Edwin Morris's A Practical Treatise on Shock After Surgical Operations and Injuries: With Especial Reference to Shock Caused by Railway Accidents (1867) made this connection explicit. Morris considered physical war wounds specific and verifiable but criticized claims against railway companies for the psychological aftereffects of accidents as unverifiable. Morris expressed the fear that both railway passengers and soldiers could simulate the effects of trauma in the absence of any physiological injury that would make their symptoms verifiable, revealing the shortcomings of the Victorian diagnosis of shock and the privileging of physical over psychological wounds.","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135448333","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}

{"title":"Ruling the World: Freedom, Civilisation and Liberalism in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire by Alan Lester, Kate Boehme, and Peter Mitchell (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911114","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911114","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Ruling the World: Freedom, Civilisation and Liberalism in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire by Alan Lester, Kate Boehme, and Peter Mitchell Nathan K. Hensley (bio) Ruling the World: Freedom, Civilisation and Liberalism in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire, by Alan Lester, Kate Boehme, and Peter Mitchell; pp. xii + 403. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021, $95.00, $31.99 paper, $31.99 ebook. When scholars of Victorian England and its empire in the year 2023 read this book's title and see, on the cover, a pith-helmeted lieutenant raising the Union Jack over a crowd of white soldiers, they will be forgiven for experiencing a flash of concern. But despite activating the genre signals of the steamship-and-saber histories it superficially resembles, this volume is not a blustering yarn about imperial liberators. Neither is it straightforwardly critical toward that narrative, alas still persuasive to Tory nostalgists and Brexiteers today. Rather it is marked by a tonal restraint whose effect gathers force as the criminal evidence amassed here piles up over almost four hundred pages. Ruling the World: Freedom, Civilisation and Liberalism in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire \"is based,\" the authors explain, \"on an appreciation of what it was to govern the most diverse and extensive empire that there has ever been\" (2). Here \"appreciation\" pings like a tuning fork and resonates differently at the beginning of the book than it does at the end, after the dispossession, famine, kidnapping, and genocide have unfolded, in chapter after chapter, scene after scene, all through the direct statements of the architects themselves. Land wars, frontier lynchings, and military violence made the vision of these Great Men tangible. Accounts of such events share space here with details of state-run narcotics cartels and the regimes of coerced labor required to keep the plantations churning after the much-bragged-about abolition of slavery. These included Indian and Chinese indentureship, so-called apprenticeship in Africa, bondage of Tamil and Mauritian peasants, and the outright abduction of Pacific Islanders for the purposes of slave labor, among other flavors of conscription. Famines eradicated whole populations; [End Page 312] reservation systems marked ethnic groups for death while the policy of \"amalgamation\" promised what one under-secretary called \"euthanasia for savage peoples\" (198). Taken together, \"the extent of the violence inflicted upon people of colour by the agents of British imperial governance\" is, the authors write, \"astonishing\" (9). On the cover and title page, Ruling the World is described as a collaboratively written monograph by Alan Lester, Kate Boehme, and Peter Mitchell, but the acknowledgements are given in first person, from Lester's perspective, and thank Boehme and Mitchell for \"lay[ing] its foundations\" (xi). The book's contribution is to combine a biographically grounded focus on elite male actors with an ","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135448334","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}