{"title":"Recent Books Received","authors":"Oscar Wilde","doi":"10.1525/ncl.2019.73.4.569","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2019.73.4.569","url":null,"abstract":"B a r o n , S a b r i n a A l c o r n , E r i c N. L i n d q u i s t , and E l e a n o r F. S h e v l i n , eds. Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein. Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book Series. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, in association with The Center for the Book, Library of Congress, 2007. Pp. xii 442. $80 cloth; $29.95 paper.","PeriodicalId":54037,"journal":{"name":"NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48788495","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":"Love the Live Oak","authors":"W. Bond","doi":"10.1525/ncl.2022.76.4.427","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2022.76.4.427","url":null,"abstract":"William Bond, “Love the Live Oak: Sidney Lanier’s Ecopoetics and the Critique of Mediation” (pp. 427–454)\u0000 Sidney Lanier’s poetry has long been read as an exercise in the poetics of pure sound (and as either an escape from or an affront to a poetics of subjective lyric expression). As this essay shows, in an early phase of Lanier’s poetic career, his poetics of pure sound is tied to a late-Romantic form of nature poetry, which anticipates the new materialist ecotheory of the twenty-first century: specifically, in the 1872 essay “Nature-Metaphors,” Lanier lays out a model of nature poetry founded on the belief that poetic form can embody an ontological continuity between human and nonhuman being. This essay argues that Lanier’s ontological model of ecopoetics negates the need for mediation in the experience of nature. This is, at bottom, a fantasy of immediacy that demands the erasure of human-nonhuman difference. In the final section of the essay, Lanier’s last poem “Sunrise” is examined; there, we can see Lanier outlining an alternative ecopoetics that, rather than trying to circumvent poetic mediation, relocates it within experiences of rhythm.","PeriodicalId":54037,"journal":{"name":"NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44029118","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: Stoic Romanticism and the Ethics of Emotion, by Jacob Risinger","authors":"Denise Gigante","doi":"10.1525/ncl.2021.76.3.396","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2021.76.3.396","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54037,"journal":{"name":"NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47892680","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: Founded in Fiction: The Uses of Fiction in the Early United States, by Thomas Koenigs","authors":"S. Roberts","doi":"10.1525/ncl.2021.76.3.388","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2021.76.3.388","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54037,"journal":{"name":"NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46459469","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":"Anthony Trollope’s Leap in the Dark","authors":"Michael Vignola","doi":"10.1525/ncl.2021.76.3.321","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2021.76.3.321","url":null,"abstract":"Michael Vignola, “Anthony Trollope’s Leap in the Dark: The Temporality of Victorian Political Reform and Victorian Women’s Suffrage” (pp. 321–353)\u0000 Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Finn (1867; 1869) depicts the seminal expansion of democracy under the Second Reform Act, an event that had yet to conclude when he finished composing the novel. This unique circumstance gives rise in the novel to anticipations that await real-world contingencies to become legible. Phineas Finn’s thick particularities thus bring into focus the temporality of reform characterized by the indeterminacy encoded in the phrase “a leap in the dark.” Attention to the circulation of the phrase and its evocation in Phineas Finn reveals the centrality of women’s suffrage to the project of democratic reform, particularly in its promise to realign the boundaries of political and private life.","PeriodicalId":54037,"journal":{"name":"NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43720152","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 Language of Transcendentalism","authors":"Danny Luzon","doi":"10.1525/ncl.2021.76.3.263","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2021.76.3.263","url":null,"abstract":"Danny Luzon, “The Language of Transcendentalism: Mysticism, Gender, and the Body in Julia Ward Howe’s The Hermaphrodite” (pp. 263–290)\u0000 This essay studies the idea of a “third” sex adapted by Julia Ward Howe and other American transcendentalists from the language and theology of European mysticism. It explores Howe’s design of a nonbinary gender category through her dialogue with the figure of the hermaphrodite in the mystic tradition. Specifically, I look at Howe’s unfinished “Laurence manuscript” (written throughout the 1840s and first published in 2004 under the title The Hermaphrodite), tracing how it gives shape to unique intersex modes of knowledge and expression. The novel’s intersex protagonist, who repeatedly claims “I am no man, no woman, nothing,” allows Howe to productively utilize a language of negation and multiplicity, making the apophatic quality of mystic speech, as well as her protagonist’s denial of intelligibility, into a means of spiritual transcendence. In doing so, Howe marks gender categories as dwelling beyond social expression, away from phallocentric discursive constraints and their production of fixed dualistic concepts. Her mystic phenomenology elucidates the indeterminacy of gender, revealing it as something that cannot be adequately conceptualized in language. Howe’s prose thus produces complex dynamics between the spirit and the flesh, in order to free both the self and the body from the sociolinguistic restrictions of social intelligibility.","PeriodicalId":54037,"journal":{"name":"NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43043449","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":"Hamlin Garland’s “Problem of Individual Life”","authors":"Erik Fredner","doi":"10.1525/ncl.2021.76.3.354","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2021.76.3.354","url":null,"abstract":"Erik Fredner, “Hamlin Garland’s ‘Problem of Individual Life’” (pp. 354–383)\u0000 This essay returns to the problem of representativeness in politically committed literature by analyzing Hamlin Garland’s advocacy for Henry George’s single tax in three different forms: Garland’s most famous short story (“Under the Lion’s Paw” [1889]), a dramatization of that story’s core themes (Under the Wheel [1890]), and a novelization of that drama (Jason Edwards: An Average Man [1892]). As Garland attests in his autobiography, the conclusion of George’s treatise Progress and Poverty (1879), which considers the possibilities for collective action despite what George calls “The Problem of Individual Life,” inspired Garland’s political message as well as his method of representation. After several prior attempts to balance his work’s “reform motive” with its “art motive,” Garland ultimately uses the emerging concept of the “average person” to address the problem of representativeness. By considering the aesthetic and political transformations that led from “Under the Lion’s Paw” to Jason Edwards, this essay reframes the problem of representativeness in nineteenth-century literature in relation to the rising centrality of statistical thinking.","PeriodicalId":54037,"journal":{"name":"NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44630815","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: Cross-Racial Class Protest in Antebellum American Literature, by Timothy Helwig","authors":"D. Emerson","doi":"10.1525/ncl.2021.76.3.391","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2021.76.3.391","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54037,"journal":{"name":"NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46744460","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":"George Eliot’s Wetland Form","authors":"M. A. Miller","doi":"10.1525/ncl.2021.76.3.291","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2021.76.3.291","url":null,"abstract":"Margaret A. Miller, “George Eliot’s Wetland Form” (pp. 291–320)\u0000 This essay relies on the 1747 Lincolnshire bog-woman and her porosity of bodily boundaries as a useful heuristic to historicize the ontological unity between gender unconformity and the environment. George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), which shares its setting with the Lincolnshire bog-woman, is a novel of wetlands and women, of gender and drainage, and of femininity and floods. This essay reads the novel’s bog-women, including protagonist Maggie Tulliver and an oft-forgotten minor character, the widowed Mrs. Sutton, alongside nineteenth-century agricultural records of Lincolnshire, including manuals on the locally specific land-improvement technique—warping—used to drain the county’s various wetlands. In doing so, the essay argues that The Mill on the Floss reveals land improvement, particularly the postenclosure acts of drainage and warping, as a negative form for female Bildung. In negotiating how to write female development within a patriarchal society, Eliot exposes the violent limitations that ideas of arbitrarily redefining and reclaiming environments as arable and usable “land” during an era of enclosure and nascent global capitalism impose upon female futurity. Ultimately, Maggie’s alignment with wetland ecologies renders her an anachronistic figure of a preindustrial, predrainage past. In a present climate crisis moment of increased urgency to restore wetlands worldwide for their carbon storage capacities, what does it mean to read Maggie’s story not in spite of her death and foreshortened life, but instead as that of an incipient bog-woman who refuses to be drained?","PeriodicalId":54037,"journal":{"name":"NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47978303","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}