Victorians Institute journal最新文献

{"title":"<i>Queer Kinship After Wilde: Transnational Decadence and the Family</i>, by Kristin Mahoney","authors":"Jo Mikula","doi":"10.5325/victinstj.50.2023.0289","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/victinstj.50.2023.0289","url":null,"abstract":"Much ink has been spilled on the subject of the Decadents and Bloomsbury, both in academia and in popular culture. In Queer Kinship after Wilde: Transnational Decadence and the Family, Kristin Mahoney uses published works as well as personal archival material to “disinter” another artistic circle, one made of “queer and Decadent modernists who operated alongside and often in conversation with high modernism, but who thought, wrote, and made community in a slightly different fashion” (11). Mahoney’s unnamed circle is looser than those two well-established ones but traces a clear web of shared concerns among the early twentieth-century British and American artists it encompasses. In six chapters, each one devoted to an individual or couple, Mahoney explores the distinct ways in which her subjects drew on Decadence and cosmopolitanism as they theorized new forms of kinship. Her work participates in a larger movement, taken up by scholars like Jessica Feldman, Kate Hext, and Alex Murray, to challenge the disciplinary boundaries of Victorian and Modernist studies, calling us to see these periods as more porous and to recognize the continued influence of the Victorian period “long after the century turned” (8).Even as she makes this intervention in the field, Mahoney is careful to recognize that her radical subjects also remain in many ways “attached to and delimited by traditional structures of feeling,” embodying both “radical desires and conventional tendencies” (12). She retains an admirable commitment to seek out rather than to write over the many tensions embedded in the projects of transnational decadence. Such tensions emerge when artists seek out the cosmopolitan to liberate themselves from one set of oppressive power structures, and, in the process, reify another set of power structures through their interactions with other individuals, groups, or cultures. This is manifest in Oscar Wilde’s own predilection for sex with underage boys, often from the working class. It is also apparent in his Orientalist tendencies, both in the artistic realm and in the concrete realm as a sex tourist in Algeria. Mahoney explicitly acknowledges the “political and ethical shortcomings of the Decadent model” and seeks to at least name the places where her artists play out these shortcomings in their quest for liberated kinship (148). In doing so, she is responding explicitly to Kadji Amin’s recent call to “deidealize” queer studies with his reminder that “queer possibility” is also “inextricable from relations of power” (13).Our first entry point into the queering of kinship is Wilde’s son, Vyvyan Holland. The choice to begin here is a testament to the scope and function of the word “queer” in Mahoney’s project. As she notes, there is no evidence that Holland himself ever experienced or acted on same-sex attraction. “Queer” is an expansive and fluid term for Mahoney, one that in its broadest sense designates a nonnormative practice inflected with something “purpo","PeriodicalId":499402,"journal":{"name":"Victorians Institute journal","volume":"69 32","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135061598","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Editor’s Note","authors":"Albert D. Pionke","doi":"10.5325/victinstj.50.2023.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/victinstj.50.2023.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Nearly ready to join the cast of the Alice books, perhaps, at a tea party celebrating fifty years of Victoria’s reign, John Tenniel’s British Lion appropriately preens on the cover of this, the golden jubilee volume of the Victorians Institute Journal. Inside are articles that approach Victorian and Edwardian literature, art, and culture from the disciplinary perspectives of literary studies, economic history, philosophy, cultural history, and periodical studies. Novels, short fiction, poetry, lectures, criminal trials, and international news stories all receive critical and, at times, pedagogical attention.Both the Texts and Digital Deliverables sections also return with exciting new material. The former features part 1 of a new English translation and accompanying illustrated critical introduction of a Danish-language travel narrative written by a female painter originally from Poland, with part 2 to come next year. The latter includes profiles of two mature digitization efforts in Victorian poetry, the Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry project and the Periodical Poetry Index. Rounding out the volume are eight reviews of recent publications in the field.If this robust and diverse set of contributions makes this milestone anniversary issue a cause for celebration, then it is also an occasion for somber memorialization. Late last year, VIJ’s longtime co-editor, Dr. Maria K. Bachman, passed away after a long illness. The author of over two dozen peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and the recipient of Coastal Carolina University’s HTC Distinguished Teacher Scholar Lecturer Award (2012), George Mason University’s Distinguished Alumna of the Year Award (2012), and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching South Carolina Professor of the Year Award (2006), Maria was also a prolific and generous collaborator, co-editing three collections of essays and three scholarly editions, in addition to her work on the journal. In fact, the three final articles in VIJ 50 were submitted in her memory by former colleagues and collaborators, appropriately making this golden jubilee issue of the journal to which she gave so much of her energy and attention also a Gedenkschrift in her honor.","PeriodicalId":499402,"journal":{"name":"Victorians Institute journal","volume":"69 19","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135061601","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Russian Nihilists in British Periodicals, 1880–1900","authors":"Meri-Jane Rochelson","doi":"10.5325/victinstj.50.2023.0159","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/victinstj.50.2023.0159","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The late-nineteenth-century Russian nihilist movement was popularized by the portrait of Bazarov in Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. But despite Turgenev’s nuanced and poignant portrayal, nihilism became associated with Russian revolutionary activities and especially terrorism. Discussions of the nihilist ethos were not limited to Russia but pervaded print culture in Western Europe. The orientalizing rhetoric of British journalism placed Russia firmly in the Eastern camp, so that it offered both the spectacle of exotic, retrograde monarchy and the equally fascinating or threatening vision of revolution in Europe. Revolutionary activities in Russia became part of the “dynamite theme” in British fiction of the fin de siècle, when terrorism also accompanied anarchist movements in continental Europe and Fenian bombings in support of Irish independence. Additionally, Russians became part of the London population through the immigration of Jews, a movement that increased significantly after around 1880. Russian dissidents themselves were welcomed in Britain after the Extradition Act of 1870. This article surveys a range of periodical writings, both reportage and fiction, in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Periodical articles and stories reflect the pervasiveness and varied presentation of Russian revolutionary movements and ideas in late Victorian British publications.","PeriodicalId":499402,"journal":{"name":"Victorians Institute journal","volume":"61 41","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135062574","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Social Work of Lying: Medicine and Murder in 1865","authors":"Marlene Tromp","doi":"10.5325/victinstj.50.2023.0105","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/victinstj.50.2023.0105","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Research suggests that we may engage in cultural self-deception to maintain community. More strikingly, we may be willing to tolerate grave violence by and against some individuals in order to strengthen social constructs that are perceived to benefit the broader community. Some social beliefs, such as faith in medicine and doctors, might have such a high value that, to preserve them, the community might engage in collective self-deception that lets someone get away with murder. Engaging in collective self-deception can foster high-value cultural narratives perceived (whether consciously or unconsciously) as more important to maintain, even at the cost of human lives. To explore this concept, this article examines the sensational Scottish Dr. Pritchard murders of the mid-1860s. Here, self-deception seemed to play a key role for the murderer, for the professionals associated with the case, and, just as significantly, at scale for the culture at large. Such inquiry has become increasingly important during a cultural moment in which we face new and constantly evolving lies on a massive social scale. As humanists, we have a responsibility to explore these questions in ways that will add our voices, insights, and methodologies to those of our colleagues in the social and natural sciences.","PeriodicalId":499402,"journal":{"name":"Victorians Institute journal","volume":"61 34","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135062580","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"John Ruskin on Reading","authors":"René Van Woudenberg","doi":"10.5325/victinstj.50.2023.0029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/victinstj.50.2023.0029","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Victorians read a lot, and they reflected on reading: Why read? What to read? Reading to what goal? After some stage setting, this article discusses four of John Ruskin’s thoughts on reading as expounded in Sesame and Lilies (1865) and that have never received much attention. (1) There are two species of books, “books of the hour” and “books of all time.” (2) The selection of which books to read is an ethical matter. (3) The norm for reading that readers should aim to comply with is the author’s meaning. (4) Readers should love the authors they are reading in order to understand them truly. This article discusses these claims and argues for a qualified endorsement of (1) in favor of (2), argues that (3) constitutes the commonsense view of reading, and defends it against various criticisms. The article finally argues against (4).","PeriodicalId":499402,"journal":{"name":"Victorians Institute journal","volume":"61 32","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135062582","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Discipline of Economics and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism in the Late Nineteenth Century","authors":"Ronald Schleifer","doi":"10.5325/victinstj.50.2023.0078","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/victinstj.50.2023.0078","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article examines the formation of the discipline of “Economics,” emerging from “Political Economy,” in relation to the transformation of industrial (or “entrepreneurial”) capitalism into finance (or “corporate”) capitalism in the late nineteenth century. In so doing, it explores the creation of the structure and goals of the modern disciplines of higher education in the Euro-American Victorian era. The contrast between “classical” economics of Political Economy, which was individualist and “unincorporated,” and the discipline of “neoclassical” Economics articulated by Alfred Marshall at Cambridge (among others in the late nineteenth century), which was collaborative and “incorporated” in higher education, is notable as a reflection of intellectual and cultural values in the Victorian era. Thus, the article describes the renovations and innovations of institutions of higher education as part and parcel of the rise of corporate capitalism in the late nineteenth century, particularly in Britain and the United States. More specifically, it analyzes the collaborative understanding in the emerging discipline of Economics in the late nineteenth century; the anonymous understanding of knowledge in Economics; and the institutional understanding and structure of Economics as a discipline in the emerging consumerist culture of the late nineteenth century.","PeriodicalId":499402,"journal":{"name":"Victorians Institute journal","volume":"67 17","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135061416","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"<i>The Science of Character: Human Objecthood and the Ends of Victorian Realism</i>, by S. Pearl Brilmyer","authors":"Andrew Petracca","doi":"10.5325/victinstj.50.2023.0284","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/victinstj.50.2023.0284","url":null,"abstract":"The most traditional history of the novel proclaims that the genre progressed inward. Exit the caricatures of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, enter the interiority of George Eliot that culminates in James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. If only we could map the history of the novel so neatly, replies S. Pearl Brilmyer in her new monograph, The Science of Character: Human Objecthood and the Ends of Victorian Realism. Brilmyer takes John Stuart Mill’s failed science, “ethology,” or “the particular and circumstantial processes through which character takes shape,” as her starting point (1). Although ethology never gained traction in the scientific community, Brilmyer asserts that it has a home in literature, “especially as transformed in the hands of realist authors at the turn of the twentieth century” who cultivate a “narrative science of human nature” (4).Brilmyer claims this narrative science relies on late Victorian writers cultivating a “dynamic materialist” approach to character (16). Character is found not in interiority but in materiality; matter is not inert but dynamic—resulting in “a new characterological paradigm, in which the human being no longer stood above the physical world but rather was a particularly complex knot in a webbed reality” (16–17). Brilmyer’s argument depends on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s conception of “weak theory” to postulate a theory of character based on particular descriptive instances (43). Here, Brilmyer begins to navigate the thorny path of claiming that the novel develops alongside, and even theorizes, the humanistic sciences, that literary character theorizes human character. To her credit, Brilmyer avoids some of the sharper thorns along this path, for example, by sidestepping the anachronistic Object-Oriented Ontologists whose thought might seem dynamic materialist. Instead, Brilmyer references the science and philosophy of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with Mill, George Henry Lewes, Charles Darwin, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Karl Marx being the most frequent touchstones alongside other important thinkers like Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William James.With the exception of chapter 4, which I will turn to shortly, each chapter of The Science of Character analyzes a single author in conjunction with an impressive array of nineteenth-century philosophical and scientific texts; however, it can be difficult to keep track of Brilmyer’s claim about the author. Chapters 1 and 2 both examine George Eliot, while chapters 3 and 5 engage Thomas Hardy and Olive Schreiner, respectively. The introduction and the coda are essential to understanding the general argument and how it complicates the traditional history of the novel. In these chapters, Brilmyer argues that writers from the 1870s to the 1920s replaced interiority as the hallmark of realist character with a new “materialist set of ideals,” namely plasticity, impressibility, spontaneity, impulsivity, relationality, and vitality (6","PeriodicalId":499402,"journal":{"name":"Victorians Institute journal","volume":"61 39","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135062575","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"<i>Strangers in the Archive: Literary Evidence and London’s East End</i>, by Heidi Kaufman","authors":"Sharon Weltman","doi":"10.5325/victinstj.50.2023.0299","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/victinstj.50.2023.0299","url":null,"abstract":"An exciting work of research that is partly a story of the investigative process itself, Strangers in the Archive: Literary Evidence and London’s East End by Heidi Kaufman both documents and theorizes the tension between insider and outsider status in Victorian depictions of the East End. Kaufman documents archival materials offering traces of what the East Enders themselves thought and wrote about their neighborhoods as insiders within their community but marginalized by ethnicity, class, gender, education, religion, and civic liberties. Their accounts offer glaring contrasts to the more canonical, readily available, and largely negative representations of the East End by well-known figures such as Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew, who are outsiders in the East End community, but much better connected to the privileges of mainstream English culture according to the same categories. After first presenting the construction of our still pervasive but stereotyped and incomplete notions of the East End, this book brings to light a robust set of previously unknown collections of materials by Victorian East Enders themselves. One goal is to augment their “voices of dissent, dissonance, and resistance, many of which have been occluded by narratives from the periodical press and popular novels that tend to flatten the East End’s qualities with images depicting universal poverty and pervasive crime” (5). Another is to reveal a burgeoning but overlooked intellectual culture thriving within the generally reviled community. These aims are accomplished in the subsequent chapters through a series of case studies of separate and distinct archives that are interestingly linked through unexpected historical circumstances. In addition, Kaufman has created a corresponding set of digital archives (https://eastendarchives.net) to continue her intervention in the prevailing reductive views of the East End and to demonstrate how building freely accessible online archives can offset enduring damage.The introduction lays out the project’s unusual focus on what might seem an obscure topic (though one I’m very interested in myself): the difficulty in learning with any certainty much about an early Jewish woman writer, in this case the first Anglo-Jewish novelist, Maria Polack. She is the linchpin that unites all the apparently disconnected parts of this investigation. What often begins as a seemingly fruitless exertion becomes the story itself when a small archival victory (such as finding Polack’s name mentioned as the author of a passage recited by a schoolgirl) becomes the breakthrough that signifies not just a detail about Polack but the beginning of a whole trend: in this example, discovering that supposedly ignorant East End Jewish schoolgirls—stereotypically perceived as poverty-stricken and unschooled—routinely received institutional scholastic accolades for their performances of poetry. Indeed, recounting such moments as part of the book’s project makes Kaufman’s ","PeriodicalId":499402,"journal":{"name":"Victorians Institute journal","volume":"69 17","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135061602","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Things to Die For: The Affective Power of Objects in E. W. Hornung’s Tales of A. J. Raffles, Amateur Cracksman","authors":"Keaghan Turner","doi":"10.5325/victinstj.50.2023.0130","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/victinstj.50.2023.0130","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract A. J. Raffles—fashionable man-about-town, international cricket star, and amateur cracksman—was E. W. Hornung’s most famous and longest-lived creation, appearing in twenty-six tales between 1898 and 1909. A prolific writer of novels, short fiction, and poetry, Hornung is remembered today as Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law and Raffles as an inverted Sherlock Holmes. Throughout his criminal career, Raffles risks his life to collect forbidden objects—a disordered version of Victorian collecting culture. Through three stories that locate Raffles within various repositories of “extraordinary” objects, this article analyzes how late Victorian crime fiction engages central issues of modernity by interrogating the emotional power material objects exert over human subjects. Excavating the objects embedded in the tales and attending to Raffles’s role as a collector suggest that the adventures address more serious issues at the center of modern life, including fragmented identities, compulsive consumption, and the overlapping narratives surrounding material objects displayed in cultural institutions and pervasive media coverage. The tales are as much about collecting as about safecracking, with Raffles sharing more in common with the avid collector than with the average cracksman. The article takes special note of the parallel emotional experience of reading about collecting and collected objects.","PeriodicalId":499402,"journal":{"name":"Victorians Institute journal","volume":"61 42","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135062573","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, Constantinople 1869–70: Public Spaces","authors":"Julia Kuehn, David D. Possen","doi":"10.5325/victinstj.50.2023.0221","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/victinstj.50.2023.0221","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Polish-born, trained in Germany, with a studio in Rome and a second home in Denmark following her marriage to sculptor and academician Jens Adolf Jerichau, Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann (1818–81) was a true nineteenth-century cosmopolite. She painted Europe’s elite and counted Princess Alexandra, Hans Christian Andersen, Ibsen, the Grimm brothers, and Dickens among her well-wishers. She was invited by Queen Victoria to Buckingham Palace, and her portrait of Alexandra remains in the Royal Collection today. Her travelogue Brogede Rejsebilleder (Motley Images of Travel; 1881) is centered around two journeys to “the Orient” (Constantinople and Smyrna), undertaken in 1869–70 and 1874–75. The present chapters, translated by David D. Possen and introduced by Julia Kuehn, are Jerichau-Baumann’s record of the first of two journeys to Constantinople, in 1869–70. The chapters are published in two parts—“Public Spaces” and “The Harem”—in consecutive numbers of the VIJ. The painter vividly describes the sites of and life in Constantinople. Jerichau-Baumann’s temporary friendship with the young Princess Nazlı Hanım would lead to a number of paintings now considered emblematic of and unique in (female) Orientalist art. Nazlı would become a well-known literary salon hostess and arts supporter in Istanbul, Paris, Cairo, and Tunis.","PeriodicalId":499402,"journal":{"name":"Victorians Institute journal","volume":"61 46","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135062800","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}