{"title":"Review: Not Even Past: The Stories We Keep Telling about the Civil War, by Cody Marrs","authors":"Timothy Sweet","doi":"10.1525/ncl.2023.78.3.241","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2023.78.3.241","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54037,"journal":{"name":"NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"105 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138626097","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Review: Feminine Singularity: The Politics of Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century Literature, by Ronjaunee Chatterjee","authors":"Emily Harrington","doi":"10.1525/ncl.2023.78.3.234","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2023.78.3.234","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54037,"journal":{"name":"NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"116 22","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138608237","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Beatrice Cenci’s Ghost","authors":"Mattias Pirholt","doi":"10.1525/ncl.2023.78.3.211","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2023.78.3.211","url":null,"abstract":"Mattias Pirholt, “Beatrice Cenci’s Ghost: Ekphrasis, Spectrality, and the Art of Copying in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun” (pp. 211–233)\u0000 This article investigates the spectrality of ekphrases and art reproductions, the haunting presence of the original work’s aura and the copyist’s self-sacrifice. Focusing on the ekphrastic description of the Baroque painting Beatrice Cenci (1599), earlier attributed to Guido Reni, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860), the article argues that the ekphrastic representation of the copy of the painting embodies the dialectic of enargeia and ekplexis, that is, of the vivifying presence-making of the ekphrasis and its sublime and disturbing absence. In The Marble Faun, the aura of Guido’s original painting haunts the copy, made by one of the romance’s female protagonists, Hilda, whose art is both creative and imitative. The copy retains the aura of the original but only in the shape of a haunting presence of absence, a ghost, which perpetuates rather than eliminates tradition. Thus, as a paradoxically original imitation of Guido’s masterpiece, Hilda’s uniquely beautiful copy, whose most salient feature is that is it visibly different from the original, creates an Emersonian unity of beauty and usefulness. Furthermore, the copy is haunted by the copyist’s necessary sacrifice of her own individual talent as an artist. The copyist must submit to the genius of the original artist in order to perpetuate the original work’s aura, which produces tradition by means of copying and which exists only thanks to the copyist’s self-sacrifice.","PeriodicalId":54037,"journal":{"name":"NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":" 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138615885","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Death in his hand”","authors":"Chris Murray","doi":"10.1525/ncl.2023.78.3.179","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2023.78.3.179","url":null,"abstract":"Chris Murray, “‘Death in his hand’: Theories of Apparitions in Coleridge, Ferriar, and Keats” (pp. 179–210)\u0000 On a chance meeting in 1819, Samuel Taylor Coleridge told John Keats about his theory of “double touch.” This hypothesis is key to the famous accounts in which each poet mythologizes the other. In his writings on double touch, Coleridge surmises that we engage with our world simultaneously by sensory perception and an energetic connection derived from Mesmerism. Disruption to either aspect of double touch results in the pathological state of “single touch,” symptoms of which can include hallucination. Coleridge developed his theory in dialogue with physician and author John Ferriar. Each theorized that ghost-sightings occur when the mind articulates disease as strong imagery and each used literature, particularly Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1603), as a source of evidence for psychological speculations. Coleridge’s double-touch theory pervades his notebooks and his lectures on drama, and his verbal account provided Keats with a new means to explore the supernatural in narrative verse. Hence, double touch receives its most significant literary treatment in Keats’s compositions over the weeks following his conversation with Coleridge. In particular, “La Belle Dame sans Merci” (1819) proceeds from an initial impulse to parody Coleridge to a serious exploration of double touch. Conversely, Coleridge’s claim to have foretold Keats’s death is influenced by double-touch theory and “La Belle Dame sans Merci.”","PeriodicalId":54037,"journal":{"name":"NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"40 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138622636","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Review: American Mediterraneans: A Study in Geography, History, and Race, by Susan Gillman","authors":"Melissa Gniadek","doi":"10.1525/ncl.2023.78.3.246","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2023.78.3.246","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54037,"journal":{"name":"NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":" 11","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138617705","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Review: Conversing in Verse: Conversation in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry, by Elizabeth K. Helsinger","authors":"Erik Gray","doi":"10.1525/ncl.2023.78.3.250","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2023.78.3.250","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54037,"journal":{"name":"NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":" 18","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138613914","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“The less said the soonest mended”","authors":"Jody Griffith","doi":"10.1525/ncl.2023.78.2.142","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2023.78.2.142","url":null,"abstract":"Jody Griffith, “‘The less said the soonest mended’: Time and Etiquette in The Way We Live Now” (pp. 142–163) Anthony Trollope’s novels were usually popular, but his 1875 novel The Way We Live Now was an exception. Contemporary readers and critics alike considered the novel unpleasant, or even rude. This article argues that reception was not only a response to the novel’s unlikable characters, but also to its uncomfortable temporal disruptions. The novel’s frequently repeated maxim “the less said the soonest mended” connects saying too much with incivility; to say less means to move quickly back to the status quo. The novel says “too much” by slowing down the present moment into its fragmented parts. The “now” in the title The Way We Live Now emphasizes the temporality of its narrative form, especially the tension of stabilizing a discrete present moment within the forward momentum of a novel. The instability of the “now” is a thematic focus of the novel, with characters unsettled by changing etiquette expectations. Similarly, as timelines slow down and speed up, skip ahead and reverse, the novel leaves us as temporally disoriented as the characters.","PeriodicalId":54037,"journal":{"name":"NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"114 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135255671","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Setting Fires with Hawthorne","authors":"Daniel Diez Couch","doi":"10.1525/ncl.2023.78.2.87","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2023.78.2.87","url":null,"abstract":"Daniel Diez Couch, “Setting Fires with Hawthorne: ‘Earth’s Holocaust’ and Book Burning in Nineteenth-Century America” (pp. 87–113) Nathaniel Hawthorne burned pages and pages of his own writing over the course of his life and investigated the topic in two tales, “The Devil in Manuscript” (1835) and “Earth’s Holocaust” (1844). While the former borrows from his own life experiences, the latter presents a cataclysmic vision of the destruction of all literature. Yet Hawthorne does not offer a typical lament—based in liberal ideologies of the progress of knowledge and the sanctity of the written word—for the all-consuming holocaust. Rather, he argues that the pyre yields a transformative and unexpected effect on the aesthetic and temporal qualities of the texts. Drawing on contemporary accounts of book burnings, Hawthorne generates a productive vision of the act by which the fire transforms texts into a visible spectacle of beauty. “Earth’s Holocaust” thus offers an aesthetic avenue for understanding literary bonfires. Moreover, Hawthorne rejects the premise that such events end the temporal lifecycle of texts. Throughout the tale, he contends that even though book burnings will occur time and again regardless of human reformation, books can surpass the effects of the flames even if such a process only occurs imaginatively. In the dematerialization of books—in turning them from a complete, bounded whole into embers and particles of dust—Hawthorne finds a redemptive energy.","PeriodicalId":54037,"journal":{"name":"NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"307 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135255666","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}