Members' Recent Publications

The Number Sense of Nineteenth-Century British Literature
Stefanie Markovits

The Number Sense of Nineteenth-Century British Literature considers how the avalanche of printed numbers characterizing the period affected its literature. While it touches on the rise of statistics and developments in politics and mathematics, this book takes as its starting point the presence of actual numbers—ordinal and cardinal, Arabic, Roman, or spelled out in words—within the century’s literary texts. It is through the deployment of such figures that texts display their number sense; similarly, readers develop the faculty of number sense by paying attention to their presence. And while it often takes us back to a specific historical context, attention to a text’s use of numbers also enables more fundamental recognitions about how literature makes meaning.

The book asks what kinds of work, intellectual and ethical, literature’s numerical figures perform. Why are some writers especially numbery? What affordances do numbers wield in various literary environments and against a specific historical backdrop? How do they relate to aspects like plot and character, narrative and lyric? How do they interact with seriality, so central to nineteenth-century publication? When do the numbers really count, and when do they ask us to keep count? Lingering over texts’ measures illuminates the way numbers help shape literary works into the recognizable forms we call genres; one marks both lyric and the Bildungsroman but looks very different in each setting. Number sense uncovers how numbers can serve both as valves, releasing cultural pressures, and as fulcrums, places where pressures coincide to create new forms of literary agency.

Stefanie Markovits is a professor of English at Yale University. She researches and teaches literature of the long Nineteenth Century: both Romantic and Victorian, both poetry and the novel. Other areas of interest include German classical literature (especially Goethe and Schiller), aesthetic theory, war and literature, and genre theory.

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Victorian Poetry: An Anthology
Edited by Erik Gray and Veronica Alfano

The first new anthology of its kind in over twenty years, this book includes all the poetry found in the Victorian volume of the Broadview Anthology of British Literature but adds hundreds of new poems and nearly two dozen new poets. It also includes a new introduction, expanded annotation, and a companion website featuring additional poetry, critical prose, and thematic appendices.

Additionally, as a teaching tool that many will find useful, Broadview has made our annotated selection of Hopkins’s poetry freely available online. You can access and download it here.

Erik Gray specializes in poetry, particularly of nineteenth-century Britain. In addition to numerous books, he has published articles on a range of poets, including Homer, Virgil, Sidney, Milton, Pope, and Gray, as well as Romantic and Victorian poets. For many years he has taught Columbia’s introduction to the English major (Literary Texts and Critical Methods), as well as lectures and seminars on nineteenth-century British literature and transhistorical courses on poetry.

Veronica Alfano is a Lecturer in the Discipline of Literature at Macquarie University. She specializes in Victorian poetry and poetics, with particular interests in lyric theory, gender and sexuality, memory, and media studies. Her first book is titled The Lyric in Victorian Memory: Poetic Remembering and Forgetting from Tennyson to Housman; she is currently working on a monograph that examines neologisms in the work of Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edward Lear, and others. From 2020 until 2023, she led the NAVSA Poetry Caucus. 

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The Lost Orchid: A Story of Victorian Plunder and Obsession
Sarah Bilston

The forgotten story of a decades-long international quest for a rare and coveted orchid, chronicling the botanists, plant hunters, and collectors who relentlessly pursued it at great human and environmental cost.

In 1818, a curious root arrived in a small English village, tucked―seemingly by accident―in a packing case mailed from Brazil. The amateur botanist who cultivated it soon realized that he had something remarkable on his hands: an exceptionally rare orchid never before seen on British shores. It arrived just as “orchid mania” was sweeping across Europe and North America, driving a vast plant trade that catered to wealthy private patrons as well as the fast-growing middle classes eager to display exotic flowers at home. Dubbed Cattleya labiata, the striking purple-and-crimson bloom quickly became one of the most coveted flowers on both continents.

As tales of the flower’s beauty spread through scientific journals and the popular press, orchid dealers and enthusiasts initiated a massive search to recover it in its natural habitat. Sarah Bilston illuminates the story of this international quest, introducing the collectors and nurserymen who funded expeditions, the working-class plant hunters who set out to find the flower, the South American laborers and specialists with whom they contracted, the botanists who used the latest science to study orchids in all their varieties, and the writers and artists who established the near-mythic status of the “lost orchid.” The dark side of this global frenzy was the social and environmental harm it wrought, damaging fragile ecologies on which both humans and plants depended.

Following the human ambitions and dramas that drove an international obsession, The Lost Orchid is a story of consumer desire, scientific curiosity, and the devastating power of colonial overreach.

Sarah Bilston is a British author and professor of English literature at Trinity College, Hartford. She currently resides in Connecticut with her husband and three children. She has written four other books: The Awkward Age in Women’s Popular Fiction, 1850-1900, The Promise of the Suburbs: A Victorian History in Literature and Culture, and two novels, Bed Rest and Sleepless Nights. 

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Temples of Luxury, 2 Vols.
Edited by Susanne Schmid and Lise Shapiro Sanders

This two-volume collection of British primary sources examines institutions such as hotels, inns, arcades, bazaars, co-operatives, shops and department stores in the long nineteenth century, which were often coded as ‘luxurious’. This period was marked not only by an increase of individual consumerism but also by the institutionalisation of opulent, often purpose-built spaces such as the much-admired new grand hotels, supposedly an American invention, and department stores, modelled on the French grands magasins. These environments were tied to leisure (no longer a prerogative of the upper classes) and thus to modernity. In addition to addressing the luxurious side of these institutions, including architectural innovation and interior decoration, we also consider the other side of luxury, examining the experience of staff and period debates over the morality of consumption.

This edition seeks to explore a fascinating but hitherto often neglected side of the British nineteenth century by bringing together a collection of annotated primary texts and visual material documenting these ‘temples of luxury’ as they were seen by their contemporaries.

Dr. Susanne Schmid has taught British literature and culture at several universities, among them FU Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, Princeton, Greifswald, Mainz, Salford and Regensburg.

Dr. Lise Shapiro Sanders is Professor of English literature and cultural studies at Hampshire College, MA, USA.

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Dress, Feminism, and New Woman Writing
Claire Allen-Johnstone

Dress, Feminism, and New Woman Writing explores the connections between dress, feminism, and New Woman writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a focus on Britain. It reveals how dress, tied to Victorian gender norms and stereotypes, became key in feminist literary culture. Authors and publishers used dress strategically, from cross-dressing storylines and dress-based critiques to fashionable attire. Concentrating on Olive Schreiner, Sarah Grand, George Egerton, and Grant Allen while bringing in other writers including Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the book offers interdisciplinary sartorial biographies, literary interpretation, and analysis of book covers. Through dress it reexamines topics including gender views and the New Woman character, proposing a new approach to feminist writing. This book is essential for those interested in feminist literature, dress history, and gender studies.

Further topics covered by Dress, Feminism, and New Woman Writing include Artistic and Rational dress reform, bicycling, class, pseudonyms, sexuality, the working New Woman, writing style, and the impact of form on writers’ engagement with dress. (Amherst, New York: Cambria Press, 2025)

Claire Allen-Johnstone is an Assistant Curator in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Performance, Furniture, Textiles, and Fashion Department and a Trustee of the Museum of Cambridge.  

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Imagining Otherwise: How Readers Help to Write Nineteenth-Century Novels
Debra Gettelman

As novel publication exploded in nineteenth-century Britain, writers such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot learned from experience—sometimes grudgingly—that readers tend to make their own imaginative contributions to fictional worlds. Imagining Otherwise shows how Victorian writers acknowledged, grappled with, and ultimately enlisted the prerogative of readers to conjure alternatives and add depth to the words on the page.

Debra Gettelman provides incisive new readings of novels such as Sense and Sensibility, Little Dorrit, and Middlemarch, exploring how novelists known for prescriptive and didactic narrative voices were at the same time exploring the aesthetic potential for the reader’s independent imagination to lend nuance and authenticity to fiction. Modernist authors of the twentieth century have long been considered pioneers in cultivating the reader’s capacity to imagine what is not said as part of the art of fiction. Gettelman uncovers the roots of this tradition of novel reading a century earlier and challenges literary criticism that dismisses this spontaneous, readerly impulse as being unworthy of serious examination.

As readers demand novels with relatable characters and fan fiction grows in popularity, the reader’s imagination has become a determining element of today’s literary environment. Imagining Otherwise takes a deeper look at this history, offering a critical perspective on how we came to view fiction as a site of imaginative appropriation.

Debra Gettelman is associate professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross.

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Trans-imperial Feminism in England and India: Catherine Dickens, Marie Corelli, and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain
Kellie Holzer

Trans-imperial Feminism in England and India: Catherine Dickens, Marie Corelli, and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain demonstrates the trans-imperial dimensions of gender-based oppression and traces the emergence of trans-imperial feminist consciousness between England and India. The book identifies a “new constellation” for literary studies that links the demise of Charles and Catherine Dickens’s marriage in the midst of an imperial crisis, the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion; Marie Corelli’s use of elements of the Dickens Scandal in her 1896 novel The Murder of Delicia; and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s 1922 translation and critical adaptation of Corelli’s novel, Delicia Hatya. Further, the book also offers a richly contextualized reading of Hossain’s 1924 New Woman novel Padmarag to demonstrate the culmination of trans-imperial feminist consciousness.

Kellie Holzer coins the term “trans-imperial feminism” to denote a dispersed feminist formation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries characterized by ambivalent agency, asymmetry, “feminist snaps” that resound across empire, and partisanship forged through storytelling. Combining the methods of area studies and critical comparativism, Holzer’s analysis demonstrates how the trans-imperial circulation and citation of women’s stories, both lived and fictional, rescripts women’s lives and imagines new feminist constituencies. Ultimately, Holzer suggests that such trans-imperial aesthetic pairings have the potential to revivify Victorian Studies.

Kellie D. Holzer is professor of English and affiliate faculty in the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies Program at Virginia Wesleyan University.

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Temporal Forms and the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean: Writing British Heritage in Ancient Lands
Lindsey Chappell

The Mediterranean is ubiquitous in nineteenth-century British literature, but this study is the first to fully recover and explore the region's centrality to Romantic and Victorian constructions of the past, the present, and the shape of time itself. Placing regions central to the making of Western cultural heritage, such as Italy and Greece, into context with one another and with European imperialism, Lindsey N. Chappell traces the contours of what she terms 'heritage discourse'–narrative that constructs or challenges imperial identities by reshaping antiquity–across nineteenth-century British texts. Heritage discourse functions via time, and often in counterintuitive and paradoxical ways. If assertions of political, cultural, and eventually racial supremacy were the end of this discourse, then time was the means through which it could be deployed and resisted. Chappell shows how historical narratives intervened in geopolitics, how antiquarianism sparked scientific innovation, and how classical and biblical heritage shaped British imperialism.

This project:

• Proposes a new understanding of time in the nineteenth century as a constitutive element of narrative, a feature of lived experience, and a historical concept,
• Shows how historical narratives intervened in geopolitics, how antiquarianism sparked scientific innovation, and how classical and biblical heritage shaped British imperialism,
• Recovers the Mediterranean's centrality to Romantic and Victorian constructions of cultural, political, and racial identities and to the radical reinventions of time that defined the period.

Lindsey N. Chappell is Associate Professor of English at Georgia Southern University. She has published articles in Victorian Literature and Culture, ELH, SEL, Literature Compass, Victorian Review, and elsewhere. Her research has been funded by numerous organizations, including the Council for European Studies and the Armstrong Browning Library.

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Victorian Literature & Culture Infrastructure
Volume 52, Special Issue 2, Summer 2024
Zarena Aslami and Tim Watson, co-editors

The nineteenth century is the period when so many of the infrastructures on which we rely for the transmission and distribution of ideas, people, and goods were, on one hand, established and standardized and, on the other, contested and transformed in practice. We argue that literary and cultural scholars of the nineteenth century can make major contributions to the transhistorical and transimperial work of critical infrastructure studies.

The pieces in this special issue give us a picture of Victorian infrastructure that we have loosely organized into four major themes: Water and Waste; Death and Bodies; Periods and Punctuation; and Care and Aid. Whether close-reading literary representations of infrastructure or close-reading literature as infrastructure, these essays collectively show how Victorian literature moved people. Our contributors address the following questions, among others: How did the material structures that moved people, goods, and ideas make people feel? How did people's feelings, libidinal energies, and practices affect how infrastructures were imagined, designed, built, used, and transformed—in literature and in the world?

Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
Lauren Gillingham

Revealing how a modern notion of fashion helped to transform the novel and its representation of social change and individual and collective life in nineteenth-century Britain, Fashionable Fictions offers a revisionist history of the novel. With particular attention to the fiction of the 1820s through 1840s, this study focuses on novels that use fashion's idiom of currency and obsolescence to link narrative form to a heightened sense of the present and the visibility of public life. It contends that novelists steeped their fiction in date-stamped matters of dress, manners, and media sensations to articulate a sense of history as unfolding not in epochal change, but in transient issues and interests capturing the public's imagination. Reading fiction by Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Mary Shelley, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, W. H. Ainsworth, Letitia Landon, and others, Fashionable Fictions tells the story of a nineteenth-century genre commitment to contemporaneity that restyles the novel itself.

Lauren Gillingham is Associate Professor of English at the University of Ottawa. Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture series, edited by Kate Flint and Clare Pettitt.

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