VICTORIAN STUDIES最新文献

{"title":"The Penny Politics of Victorian Popular Fiction by Rob Breton (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911129","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911129","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Penny Politics of Victorian Popular Fiction by Rob Breton Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton (bio) The Penny Politics of Victorian Popular Fiction, by Rob Breton; pp. vii + 234. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021, £85.00, $130.00, $29.95 paper. The Penny Politics of Victorian Popular Fiction rethinks the interactions among popular, commercial, and radical approaches during the 1830s and 1840s, including \"the way penny literature pinched political content from radical papers\" (2). Case studies include Jack Sheppard (1839–40), Sweeney Todd (1846–47), Varney the Vampire (1845–47), Mysteries of London (1844–46), and the Newgate Calendars, as well as journals including Howitt's (1847–48) and Douglas Jerrold's Shilling Magazine (1845–47). The penny press of this period has often been seen as cashing in on working-class readers' demand for violence and melodrama, while at the same time ultimately reinforcing middle-class ideology. Rob Breton, however, contends that the penny press engages with, and helps to create, broader and more ambivalent cultural and political confrontations than critics have hitherto recognized. The introduction subtly dissects generic strands and interpretive differences, while tracing connections among the various modes of writing. Breton's articulation of his own critical position is admirably precise, although readers less familiar with the history of the penny press would benefit from a more broad-brush overview of the genre and the current debates surrounding it. Here and in chapter 1, there is a tendency to assume an [End Page 344] in-depth knowledge of early Victorian commercial, popular, or political writing (a gap that the rest of the book addresses admirably). The trend for publishing across a spectrum of popular and radical journals creates a complex picture, and this perspective complements recent work by Alexis Easley (New Media and the Rise of the Popular Woman Writer, 1832–1860 [2021]) on women authors' engagement with new modes of literary production during the 1830s and 1840s. Breton writes authoritatively on cultural and political contestations, and provides a meticulous examination of where the party line is drawn both across and within journals. The combination of wide survey with sustained analysis of particular titles makes for some unexpected findings. While Sweeney Todd remains one of the most notorious serials of the period, it transpires that penny journals often depended for their success on irreproachably moral tales, with stories of improbable violence providing little more than occasional seasoning. Meanwhile journals such as Howitt's seemingly refereed their authors, including radical voices familiar from other publications, but only allowed them to assume a modified political stance. But notwithstanding these checks and compromises, shifts in Howitt's's editorial position over time can be seen in the journal's strategic \"multiplication of audience\" (182). Breton also notes that ","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"24 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":"135448328","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 Ethical Vision of George Eliot by Thomas Albrecht (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911119","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911119","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Ethical Vision of George Eliot by Thomas Albrecht Summer J. Star (bio) The Ethical Vision of George Eliot, by Thomas Albrecht; pp. x + 207. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2020, $127.50, $39.71 paper, $37.06 ebook. Thomas Albrecht's 2020 monograph The Ethical Vision of George Eliot comes at a timely moment in Eliot studies. While anniversaries of George Eliot's life and novels have prompted numerous conferences, special editions, and books in recent years, scholars also find themselves at a high and interesting watermark for debates on a particular issue: ethics. Albrecht's book is ambitious in its foray into this subject, particularly in its broad embrace of Eliot's writing (not limited to novels, but including essays, letters, [End Page 323] reviews, and translations as well). Even more impressive—and helpful—however, is the way he addresses the specific landscape of ethical criticism of her works. Albrecht's view of Eliot's ethical thought is, as he writes, \"dialectal\" (20). Over the course of her career, two imperatives, as Albrecht claims, define Eliot's vision of ethical motive and action, and can be critically used to assess how that vision develops over time. These are the communion imperative and the difference imperative. The former is defined \"as an ethics of connecting and communing with other persons across differences and apartness\" (4). Such connecting—of, say, Dinah Morris with Hetty Sorrel in her cell, Dorothea with Rosamond, or even the reader with characters in the text—is grounded in the conceit of a general shared humanity, \"the assumption that there is fundamental continuity between one-self and what is outside of oneself\" (54). Counterpart to communion is the difference imperative. Albrecht describes this as \"a love and potential connection based on recognizing and reverencing … the other's insularity, his or her essential remoteness from oneself, and recognizing one's own inability ever fully to comprehend his or her thoughts and feelings\" (11). If these two imperatives resonate with readers from the start, it is for a critical reason that interests Albrecht as much as the tracing of these ideas through Eliot's writing. The communion and difference imperatives also correlate with two tendencies in Eliot studies, among critics from F. R. Leavis to the present, who have sought to define the nature of Eliot's ethics. While readers might take issue with some of Albrecht's sorting of scholars, even this arguability seems important. Just as Albrecht is claiming a movement toward the difference imperative, but still in relation to communion, so the ethical critics he considers fall into more general than hardline camps. What is helpful about the distinction between these critical tendencies (which is also mapped in a fairly linear way, over time) is the way it allows readers to see dialectic in action, as well as how trends in readers' perspectives are conditioned by changes in scholarly atmosphere. Albrecht hi","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"45 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":"135448329","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 Art of Ruskin and the Spirit of Place by John Dixon Hunt (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911123","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911123","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Art of Ruskin and the Spirit of Place by John Dixon Hunt Christiana Payne (bio) The Art of Ruskin and the Spirit of Place, by John Dixon Hunt; pp. 286. London: Reaktion Books, 2020, $50.00, $50.00 paper, $50.00 ebook. John Ruskin drew constantly and compulsively throughout his life, only ceasing to do so after his final mental collapse in 1889. Several thousand of his drawings survive, covering the vast range of his interests. The Art of Ruskin and the Spirit of Place sets out to consider him as a topographer, responding to the spirit of a place—its genius loci. Familiar from the history of landscape gardening, this term can be appropriately applied to Ruskin's drawings, both because he was very much aware of the way geology, climate, and historical events shaped places, but also because the places he drew aroused his own deep emotions. Some of his favorite locations, such as Chamonix, were associated with happy travels in his youth with his parents; others, such as Abbeville and Venice, mingled pain and pleasure. They gave him pleasure in the achievements of the Gothic and early Renaissance builders and craftsmen, pain in the knowledge of the decay wrought by neglect and ill-judged renovation. Other landscapes, such as mountain peaks and passes, induced a melancholy born of the knowledge of the human tragedies they so often witnessed. John Dixon Hunt, Emeritus Professor of the History and Theory of Landscape at the University of Pennsylvania, is well placed to write on this topic. He has had a long and distinguished career as an authority on English literature and garden design. His biography of Ruskin, The Wider Sea: A Life of John Ruskin, was published in 1982 (the dust jacket erroneously dates it to 1992), and in 1985 he founded the academic journal Word & Image (1985–present), which focuses on the relationship between the visual and the verbal. In this book he sets out to show that Ruskin's drawings should be considered not merely illustrative of what he wrote, but as the evidence of practices that shaped his way of thinking and writing. They represent \"one means of access to his astonishing imagination\" (11). The chapters cover the relationship between drawing and writing in Ruskin's work, his idea of the picturesque, his education as a draughtsman, and his own teaching of drawing. There are separate chapters on Venice and on two of Ruskin's major concerns in landscape: geology and water, the latter including clouds and climate change. Hunt [End Page 331] emphasizes the importance of Ruskin's early experiences. On travels with his parents, he was encouraged to record his impressions both verbally and visually, leading to a constant interplay in his work between writing and drawing. In 1829, when he was ten, his father gave him a set of fifty minerals of the Lake District, beginning his lifelong interest in geology. For his thirteenth birthday, his father's business partner gave him Samuel Rogers's Italy, a Poem (1822), with","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"67 12 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":"135448335","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 Moxon Tennyson: A Landmark in Victorian Illustration by Simon Cooke (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911139","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911139","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Moxon Tennyson: A Landmark in Victorian Illustration by Simon Cooke Richard L. Stein (bio) The Moxon Tennyson: A Landmark in Victorian Illustration, by Simon Cooke; pp. xvii + 236. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2021, $80.00, $79.99 ebook. Simon Cooke's detailed account of the famous 1857 illustrated edition of Alfred Tennyson's works, \"the Moxon Tennyson,\" as it has long been known in tribute to its organizer and publisher, sets out to \"modernize\" our understanding of the book (3). This means, in part, acknowledging the work of the \"multiple hands\" that contributed to its making, including the publisher, engravers, binding designer, and \"the technicians who produced the material object\" (34, 3). It also means recognizing the edition as a product of consumer culture, an elegant volume that helped create the market for lavish gift books in the decades to come. Primarily, modernization means reconsidering what often has been called (by me, among others) the Pre-Raphaelite Tennyson, replacing a traditional narrative of Pre-Raphaelite \"dominance\" of its visual contents with a balanced survey of a book \"illustrated by eight, rather than three, artists\" (3). The result is impressive. The Moxon Tennyson: A Landmark in Victorian Illustration thoroughly considers all the contributing artists, analyzing all fifty-four engravings and exploring how they respond to and illuminate qualities of Tennyson's verse. Emphasizing those qualities (rather than, for instance, following an illustrator-by-illustrator or illustration-by-illustration approach) produces a new sense of the book's significance. Cooke considers particular examples and cumulative effects, connected patterns of illustration that comprise \"an extended visual montage designed to complement and enrich the writer's messages in the form of a binary or dual text\" (189). If \"designed\" seems too intentional (I will return to it below), the strategy is nuanced: reading illustrations in sequences, as related series of extended commentary. The sense of sequence produces some of the best readings of the book—of individual illustrations, groups of related images, even poems that require reconsideration in light of the emphases illustrations create. The Moxon artists were \"remarkably unified in their approach to Tennyson's primary concerns and provide a coherent interpretation of key aspects of the verse\" (55). Cooke reads back and forth between poems and images, not so much to determine the accuracy of visual details as to recognize elements of Tennyson's work that stimulated and profited from visual representation. Cooke organizes his book around those elements: motifs like time or light, medievalism or landscape, Englishness or gender. The illustrations highlight and explore these patterns in the poetry. Cooke's approach makes it possible to appreciate how even a painter like John Callcott Horsley, \"often disparaged as the weakest of the Moxon [End Page 367] artists,\" develops an inte","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"31 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":"135448344","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 Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett: In \"the World of Actual Literature\" by Thomas Recchio (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911138","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911138","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett: In \"the World of Actual Literature\" by Thomas Recchio Frances E. Dolan (bio) The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett: In \"the World of Actual Literature\", by Thomas Recchio; pp. vii + 230. London and New York: Anthem, 2020, $125.00, $40.00 paper, $40.00 ebook, £80.00, £25.00 paper, £25.00 ebook. As The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett: In \"the World of Actual Literature\" demonstrates, Frances Hodgson Burnett commands our attention not only as an enduringly popular children's author but also as a writer who defies categorizations that still structure curricula and bestseller lists. Born in Manchester, she emigrated with her widowed mother to Tennessee in 1865, when she was sixteen years old. Throughout her career, Burnett was as much an American writer as a British one. She wrote plays as well as novels and stories. Although she wrote more novels for adults than she did for children, those novels have been relatively little discussed. Thomas Recchio's book aspires to correct this oversight and to make the case for Burnett's worth as a serious novelist, a case that he argues has been stalled by her very success and visibility as a writer for children. The phrase in the book's subtitle, \"in 'the world of actual literature,'\" is one Recchio adopts from Burnett, and it suggests that children's literature is not actual literature, a dated assumption but still one against which the authors, teachers, and critics of children's literature must contend (23). Whether Burnett's adult fiction is actually more literary than her novels for children, the novels repay sustained attention. Recchio offers detailed readings of most of Burnett's fourteen adult novels (by his count), which he organizes into five roughly chronological clusters grouped by genre and topic (including British, mid-Victorian domestic realism in Burnett's first novels; regional American social realism in the 1880s; historical fiction in the 1890s; novels about transatlantic marriages in the early twentieth century; and, finally, her post-World War I modernist romances). Simply summarizing Recchio's structure suggests how Burnett wrote across genres and across periods. Recchio bookends his study by reading Burnett against Elizabeth Gaskell in the first chapter and T. S. Eliot in the last. Recchio is particularly concerned with challenging two widely repeated narratives about Burnett. First, he challenges the notion that critics lost respect for Burnett [End Page 365] following the boom and bust of her children's novel Little Lord Fauntleroy (1885–86), which was hugely popular upon its publication but later disdained as sentimental. While the novel has not stood the test of time quite as well as A Little Princess (1905) or The Secret Garden (1911), it also was not, he argues, a watershed in terms of critical reception of Burnett's work. Second, Recchio is at pains to argue that Burnett did not lose her creative ambition as a writer or shift he","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"72 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":"135448355","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 Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century ed. by Elizabeth Ludlow (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911120","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911120","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century ed. by Elizabeth Ludlow Alison Jack (bio) The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Elizabeth Ludlow; pp. xvii + 276. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2020, £79.99, $119.99, $89.00 ebook. The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century is a rich collection of responses to the complex question of the significance of Jesus Christ in creative contexts across the long nineteenth century. The interdisciplinary range is extensive, covering multiple genres of literature and the visual arts, and the critical tools used to explore the topic are equally diverse. Throughout, contributors resist easy responses to the question and chart shifting, nuanced positions in illuminating ways. Elizabeth Ludlow offers an overview of her edited volume in the first chapter, which highlights the structure and approach of what is to follow. The chapters are organized roughly in chronological order, under eight thematic sections made up of two chapters each. The themes covered offer a clear indication that this volume is seeking understandings of Christ in contexts that are both well-trodden and novel. The eight sections are entitled: \"William Blake and Visionary Revelation\"; \"Textual and Visual Fragmentation and the Form of the Vortex\"; \"The Incarnation and the Redemptive Role of Art\"; \"The [End Page 325] Figure of Christ in Tractarian Theology\"; \"The Ecological Jesus and the Good Shepherd\"; \"Figures of Christ in the Victorian Novel\"; \"Renewing the Social Order and Imagining the Church of the Future\"; and \"Christological Fictions of the Late Nineteenth Century.\" Within these sections, the work of canonical figures such as George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell is well represented, but so too is the less well-known work of writers such as Felicia Hemans (\"Casabianca\" [1826]), Gerald Massey (Voices of Freedom and Lyrics of Love [1851]), Marie Corelli (The Master-Christian [1900]), and Edmund Gosse (The Secret of Narcisse: A Romance [1892]). Many of the chapters draw on the recently published work of major scholars of Victorian studies. A good example of this is Emma Mason's chapter on Christina Rossetti's ecological perspective, which offers an accessible and focused development of aspects of her 2018 volume, Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith. Here Mason argues persuasively that Rossetti's fascination with Christ's Sermon on the Mount, and the phrase \"consider the lilies\" (Matthew 6:28) in particular, offers a case study that illuminates Rossetti's ahead-of-her-time approach to Christ as ecological hero (149). As Mason asserts, in her poetry, \"Rossetti ultimately elevates Jesus as a being who is both human and lily, and who directs the former to consider the latter as an epitome of compassion and peace\" (151). The language of flowers is transformed into a Christological call to defend the weak against those in power. A particular strength of the volume is its determinedly dialogical ra","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":"135448326","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":"Censorship and the Representation of the Sacred in Nineteenth-Century England by Jan-Melissa Schramm (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911121","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911121","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Censorship and the Representation of the Sacred in Nineteenth-Century England by Jan-Melissa Schramm Christopher Hilliard (bio) Censorship and the Representation of the Sacred in Nineteenth-Century England, by Jan-Melissa Schramm; pp. xii + 266. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, £74.00, $99.00. Plays were subject to official censorship in Britain until 1968. The Lord Chamberlain vetoed some plays outright and demanded changes to many others before granting a license. One of the rules of theater censorship, grounded in the traditions of the Lord Chamberlain's office rather than any express provision in the statutes of 1606 and 1737 that still authorized the licensing of plays at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was a prohibition on representations of divinity. This ban spilled over into plays based on biblical stories that did not explicitly feature God or Christ. The Lord Chamberlain was not guided by public opinion, but many nineteenth-century critics without a stake in the licensing system expressed variations on Elizabethan and Jacobean concerns about the sensuous power of drama and countervailing Elizabethan and Jacobean objections that representing the sacred on stage, with all-too-human actors impersonating Christ or scriptural figures, was inescapably trivializing and blasphemous. The Reformation's expulsion of God and the Bible from the English stage persisted through the nineteenth century alongside the profusion of fictional and poetic treatments of biblical subjects, including bestselling novels like Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur (1880), flagrantly subtitled \"A Tale of the Christ,\" and Marie Corelli's Barabbas: A Dream of the World's Tragedy (1893). The novelist Hall Caine told one of the periodic and largely inconsequential inquiries into theater censorship that, in an age of mass literacy, \"a delicate scene in a novel is immeasurably more dangerous than it could be on stage. … The novel gets very much closer to the reader than the scene on stage gets to its spectator\" (Caine qtd. in Schramm [End Page 327] 196). Jan-Melissa Schramm is interested in \"exactly what the Victorians still found provocative about dramatic form\" (10). Despite its title, Schramm's Censorship and the Representation of the Sacred in Nineteenth-Century England is not primarily about censorship (or self-censorship). Her guiding themes are, first, the larger Protestant cultural complex militating against the theatrical representation of the sacred—or the biblical—and the ways this complex was challenged by the mid-nineteenth-century revival of religious ceremonies by the Tractarians and newly emancipated Catholics; and, second, the ways dramatic conventions and Catholic traditions registered in the Victorian novel. Critics wary of Catholicism, like Anna Jameson in Sacred and Legendary Art (1848), began to consider the recuperation of pre-Reformation Catholic forms of beauty. Playwrights and those who might anachronistically be called cultural hist","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"85 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":"135448354","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":"Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination by Leila Neti, and: Disaffected: Emotion, Sedition, and Colonial Law in the Anglosphere by Tanya Agathocleous (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911110","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911110","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination by Leila Neti, and: Disaffected: Emotion, Sedition, and Colonial Law in the Anglosphere by Tanya Agathocleous Laura Lammasniemi (bio) Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination, by Leila Neti; pp. xi + 230. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021, £75.00, $103.00, $29.99 paper, $29.99 ebook. Disaffected: Emotion, Sedition, and Colonial Law in the Anglosphere, by Tanya Agathocleous; pp. xx + 211, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2021, $125.00, $26.95 paper, $17.99 ebook. How were colonial laws depicted in Victorian press, literature, and cartoons? How did these cultural depictions shape the British colonial project, and what impact did they have on the ways in which imperial legal expansion was imagined? Recently, two important books have been published that explore these questions, as well as the cultural and literary dimensions of British colonial expansion and the expansion of colonial law in the Indian context: Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination (2021) by Leila Neti and Disaffected: Emotion, Sedition, and Colonial Law in the Anglosphere (2021) by Tanya Agathocleous. Both books focus on the Victorian imagination, legal or cultural, and Neti's book in particular reveals the limits of that imagination when it comes to colonial law and judiciary. In Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination, Neti reads carefully selected appeal cases heard in the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council together with a series of classic Victorian literary texts such as Great Expectations (1861) by Charles Dickens to analyze three distinct themes: criminality, temporality of caste, and adoption and inheritance. By reading judgments as text and focusing on the narratives within judgments and colonial law, she is able to show us the cultural connotations of these laws and their long-lasting impact. In relation to the first theme, Neti explores different representations of criminality in the wake of colonial legal expansion. As laws and notions of punishment in colonial India became unmoored from those in England, so did ideas and imagination regarding criminality. Indian criminality, such as that in Philip Meadows Taylor's Confessions of a Thug (1839), was represented as inherent and irredeemable, whereas English criminality, represented by Magwitch from Great Expectations, was more humanized, with the potential for redemption and rehabilitation. These perceptions of criminality had, of course, wider ramifications in justifying the colonial project and in the denial of legal and other forms of subjecthood to those colonized due to the \"inability of the Indian to develop into the citizen\" (90). This notion of subjecthood and relation to one's family as much as to the state that governs us comes to the fore again in the final theme, adoption and inheritance. Yet, as compelling as the ideas of subjecthood and belonging are, I must focus on the second theme:","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"15 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":"135448356","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":"Ordinary Masochisms: Agency and Desire in Victorian and Modernist Fiction by Jennifer Mitchell (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911125","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911125","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Ordinary Masochisms: Agency and Desire in Victorian and Modernist Fiction by Jennifer Mitchell Alison M. Downham Moore (bio) Ordinary Masochisms: Agency and Desire in Victorian and Modernist Fiction, by Jennifer Mitchell; pp. x + 216. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2020, $85.00. Jennifer Mitchell's Ordinary Masochisms: Agency and Desire in Victorian and Modernist Fiction systematically applies the sexological category of masochism to eight nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary works, following the recent trend in literary studies of using such terms to parse fiction referring to the torturous aspects of love and attraction. Doing so, though, risks reducing the intricacies, subtleties, and plenitude of Victorian portraits of paradoxical motive, internal conflict, and sensory tension. While masochism and sadomasochism were downgraded in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association in 2013 in the view that such things were no longer to be considered necessarily pathological, masochism is still held to have exquisite heuristic value among literary scholars influenced by Gilles Deleuze's ahistorical reading of the historian and novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch in the 1967 essay Coldness and Cruelty. From the 1940s to the 1970s, masochism became an important concept for Austrian and German psychoanalysts migrating to the United States, and in the 1980s and 1990s it re-emerged as an object of American feminist critique before blossoming as a symbol of postmodern sexuality in Anglophone critical theory. Mitchell leans on all these [End Page 335] twentieth-century iterations of the concept of masochism, \"ahistorically\" reading it back onto works of Victorian fiction (33). Intriguing though the idea is of a\"transhistorical lineage of masochistic subjectivities,\" this book provides little sense of how writers such as Charlotte Brontë and George Moore could have engaged in an \"anticipation of clinical discourse,\" how Brontë \"theorizes masochism even before it is named,\" or even more anachronistically, how Octave Mirbeau \"mimics many of what Deleuze claims as the core components of masochism\" (16, 41, 56, 97). The chapters on Brontë's Villette (1853), Moore's A Drama in Muslin (1886) and D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow (1915) are those most likely to interest readers of this journal, while those on Jean Rhys's Quartet (1928) and on Ian McEwan's The Comfort of Strangers (1981) fall outside the Victorian era. Mitchell's claim is that all these works are related through their common inheritance of a masochistic genealogy, which also includes two renowned French works, Mirbeau's The Torture Garden (1899) and Pauline Réage's The Story of O (1954), as well as Sacher-Masoch's novel Venus in Furs (1870), which originally inspired the Viennese psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing's slanderous medical neologism of 1886, using Masoch's name. There are several references to the \"literary roots\" of masochism and \"t","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"72 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":"135448358","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":"Victorians on Broadway: Literature, Adaptation, and the Modern American Musical by Sharon Aronofsky Weltman (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911131","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911131","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Victorians on Broadway: Literature, Adaptation, and the Modern American Musical by Sharon Aronofsky Weltman Sara E. Lampert (bio) Victorians on Broadway: Literature, Adaptation, and the Modern American Musical, by Sharon Aronofsky Weltman; pp. ix + 321. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2020, $75.00, $37.50 paper, $37.50 ebook, £67.95, £34.50 paper, £28.60 ebook. Over the second half of the twentieth century, Victorian literature found new life in the Broadway musical. In this fascinating study, Sharon Aronofsky Weltman demonstrates how conceptions of the Victorian have been informed by the Broadway musical, which in turn reveals the theatricality of much Victorian literature. While musicals since the 1940s interpreted a range of texts, Dickensian characters and concerns recur, such that conceptions of the Victorian have become thoroughly Dickensian. Even as musicals adapting Victorian texts use them to speak to contemporary issues, Weltman shows, they more often blunt the social critiques of their originals or offer audiences a comforting sense of superiority relative to the distant Victorian past—with important exceptions. In Victorians on Broadway: Literature, Adaptation, and the Modern American Musical, the musical emerges as a major site of interpretation of Victorian literature and culture that draws on a longer history of adaptation and intertextuality. Each chapter focuses on a different musical, beginning with One Touch of Venus (1943), which took an 1885 novel as source material, but rejected a Victorian setting and [End Page 348] \"establish[ed] its identity as a thoroughly Modern musical,\" unlike those that followed (47). From The King and I (1951) to Jane Eyre: The Musical (2000), musicals embrace their Victorian settings even as they engage contemporary concerns, raising questions about the cultural work of historical literary adaptation and the ways the stage is distinct from film. Victorians on Broadway is part of a scholarly turn toward more \"rigorous academic analysis\" of Broadway musicals, which are often \"the only live theater most Americans ever see,\" a further argument for their scholarly importance (13). Weltman shows musicals to be theoretically complex and intertexual, \"meta-theatrical\" in ways that trouble conceptions of the \"middlebrow\" as \"critically uninteresting\" and peripheral stuff (230). Broadway musicals offer interpretive insights into Victorian literature, particularly in the way they have exploited its inherent theatricality in the choice of scenes and characterizations. These choices led to the most significant contribution of the Broadway musical, its thorough equation of the Victorian with the Dickensian, beginning with the runaway success of Oliver! (1968) and reaching a peak in the metatheatrical The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1985). Oliver! achieved a major departure from a century of adaptations of Dickens's novel that further influenced the direction of musical theater.","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"25 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":"135448336","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}