Members' Recent Publications

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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Novel-Poetry: The Shape of the Real and the Problem of Form
Emily Allen and Dino Franco Felluga

Novel-Poetry examines the verse-novel—a hybrid genre that emerged in the middle decades of Britain's nineteenth century—to make a larger claim about the nature of genre and formal structures for time, action, and identity that cross genres. The volume uncovers trajectories of literary influence that structure our approach to literature and affect how we shape our lives, lives which are often constrained by cause-and-effect and narrative-driven ways of approaching time and possibility.

Emily Allen specializes in nineteenth-century British literature, especially the Victorian novel, and is an affiliated faculty member in Purdue University's programs for Comparative Literature and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Professor Allen is also the author of Theater Figures: The Production of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (The Ohio State University Press).

Dino Franco Felluga is an Associate Professor of English at Purdue University. His first book, The Perversity of Poetry: Romantic Ideology and the Popular Male Poet of Genius was published by SUNY Press in 2005. It was followed by the 4-volume, million-word Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature and Critical Theory: The Key Concepts.

The book has been made available open access. 

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Digital Victorians: From Nineteenth-Century Media to Digital Humanities
Paul Fyfe

Perhaps no period better clarifies our current crisis of digital information than the nineteenth century. Self-aware about its own epochal telecommunications changes and awash in a flood of print, the nineteenth century confronted the consequences of its media shifts in ways that still define contemporary responses. In this authoritative new work, Paul Fyfe argues that writing about Victorian new media continues to shape reactions to digital change. Among its unexpected legacies are what we call digital humanities, characterized by the self-reflexiveness, disciplinary reconfigurations, and debates that have made us digital Victorians, so to speak, struggling again to resituate humanities practices amid another technological revolution.

Engaging with writers such as Thomas De Quincey, George Eliot, George du Maurier, Henry James, and Robert Louis Stevenson who confronted the new media of their day, Fyfe shows how we have inherited Victorian anxieties about quantitative and machine-driven reading, professional obsolescence in the face of new technology, and more—telling a longer history of how writers, readers, and scholars adapt to dramatically changing media ecologies, then and now. The result is a predigital history for the digital humanities through nineteenth-century encounters with telecommunication networks, privacy intrusions, quantitative reading methods, remediation, and their effects on literary professionals. As Fyfe demonstrates, well before computers, the Victorians were already digital.

Paul Fyfe is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and program faculty in the Communications, Rhetoric, and Digital Media program at North Carolina State University. He earned a PhD from the University of Virginia and developed specialties in Victorian literature as well as book and media history.

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The Location of Experience: Victorian Women Writers, the Novel and the Feeling of Living
Adela Pinch

We tend to feel that works of fiction give us special access to lived experience. But how do novels cultivate that feeling? Where exactly does experience reside?

The Location of Experience argues that, paradoxically, novels create experience for us not by bringing reality up close, but by engineering environments in which we feel constrained from acting. By excavating the history of the rise of experience as an important category of Victorian intellectual life, this book reveals how experience was surprisingly tied to emotions of remorse and regret for some of the era’s great women novelists: the Brontës, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, and Elizabeth Gaskell. It shows how these writers passed ideas about experience—and experiences themselves—among each other.

Drawing on intellectual history, psychology, and moral philosophy, The Location of Experience shows that, through manipulating the psychological dimensions of fiction’s formal features, Victorian women novelists produced a philosophical account of experience that rivaled and complemented that of the male philosophers of the period.

The Location of Experience: Victorian Women Writers, the Novel, and the Feeling of Living is available from Knowledge Unlatched on open-access basis.

Adela Pinch is Professor of English at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (1996), and Thinking about Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing (2010).

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Empire of Culture: Neo-Victorian Narratives in the Global Creative Economy
Waiyee Loh

Empire of Culture brings together contemporary representations of Victorian Britain to reveal how the nation’s imperial past inheres in the ways post-imperial subjects commodify and consume “culture” in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The globalization of English literature, along with British forms of dress, etiquette, and dining, in the nineteenth century presumed and produced the idea that British culture is a universal standard to which everyone should aspire. Examining neo-Victorian texts and practices from Britain, the United States, Japan, and Singapore—from A. S. Byatt’s novel Possession and its Hollywood film adaptation to Japanese Lolita fashion and the Lady Victorian manga series—Waiyee Loh argues that the British heritage industry thrives on the persistence of this idea. Yet this industry also competes and collaborates with the US and Japanese cultural industries, as they, too, engage with the legacy of British universalism to carve out their own empires in a global creative economy. Unique in its scope, Empire of Culture centers Britain’s engagements with the US and East Asia to illuminate fresh axes of influence and appropriation, and further bring Victorian studies into contact with various sites of literary and cultural fandom.

Waiyee Loh is an Associate Professor of World Literature at Kanagawa University, Japan.

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Queer Books of Late Victorian Print Culture
Frederick D. King

Brings together queer theory and textual studies to revise our understanding of nineteenth-century print culture.

• Examines the collaboration of queer writers and artists: Aubrey Beardsley, Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper (Michael Field), John Gray, Charles Ricketts, Charles Shannon, and Oscar Wilde are central figures of concern.
• Brings together important criticism from the fields of Victorian studies, queer theory, and Textual studies (postmodern approaches to bibliography, archives, etc).
• Revises our conception of nineteenth-century print culture through both popular printing as well as the beautiful work of William Morris at the Kelmscott Press to differentiate heteronormative experiences from the queer book.
• Focuses on queer lives, their influence on book history and their contributions to the Revival of Printing, serving as a reassessment of print culture outside of heteronormative boundaries.
• Based on primary research that examined, in addition to the books being studied by accounting ledgers, correspondence, diaries, and contemporary criticism from the late-Victorian age.

Queer books, like LGBTQ+ people, adapt heteronormative structures and institutions to introduce space for discourses of queer desire. Queer Books of Late-Victorian Print Culture explores print culture adaptations of the material book, examining the works of Aubrey Beardsley, Michael Field, John Gray, Charles Ricketts, Charles Shannon and Oscar Wilde. It closely analyses the material book, including the elements of binding, typography, paper, ink and illustration, and brings textual studies and queer theory into conversation with literary experiments in free verse, fairy tales and symbolist drama. King argues that queer authors and artists revised the Revival of Printing’s ideals for their own diverse and unique desires, adapting new technological innovations in print culture. Their books created a community of like-minded aesthetes who challenged legal and representational discourses of same-sex desire with one of aesthetic sensuality.

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The Selected Letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle: A Victorian and A Contemporary
Richard Lansdown, editor

Jane Carlyle’s letters are among the crown jewels of English epistolary literature and give us wonderful insights into literary England from the 1830s to the 1860s, as well as providing a unique record of social change and the condition of women at the time. This is the first selection entirely drawn from the standard Duke/Edinburgh edition and largely presents the letters complete, as she wrote them.

Presents an image of Victorian life—especially women’s lives—that uniquely and surprisingly anticipates our own in the present.

• A modern, complete, and accessible selection of letters from an edition of nearly fifty volumes
• Respects the integrity of the materials; letters mostly printed complete, without ‘cherry-picking’
• Edited and annotated for a contemporary readership at both the scholarly and the general level
• Supported by an overall biographical and critical introduction, separate chapter introductions to form the life story, annotation as required, and an appendix listing correspondents and personalities
  

This book is a modern edition of an Anglo-Scottish epistolary classic, drawn from the authoritative scholarly edition. The letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle are works of art in themselves but also shed light on the Victorian age and the experience of women within it. They are arranged chronologically alongside biographical summary and include her correspondence concerning a large range of Victorian intellectuals and other identities, from Mazzini to Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Ruskin, and Tennyson to George Eliot. The letters are commonly regarded as among the liveliest in the language, alongside those of Byron, Keats, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf, and are a key document in feminist history, and the history of female authorship.

Edinburgh University Press, hardback, £125, 978 1 3995 2346 2. (A paperback edition will follow in 2025.) 

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