The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, ed. Andrew Smith and William Hughes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012
For all of you with an interest in Victorian Studies and/or the Gothic, I would recommend this new book. It includes chapters on an array of Gothic topics, including science, medicine, gender, queer history, drama, poetry, death, imperialism and the fin de siecle. For a full contents list check out the page at Edinburgh University Press, link below (view at eup publishing).
My own chapter in this volume deals with the relations between Gothic and Victorian Realism. I have added a sample from that chapter here as a taster!
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Download (.docx) Vision, Science and Literature, 1870-1920: Ocular Horizons (Pickering and Chatto, 2011)
Winner of the British Society for Literature and Science Book Prize 2011
My publisher, Pickering and Chatto, have made available the introduction to my recent book - which I share with you... more
My publisher, Pickering and Chatto, have made available the introduction to my recent book - which I share with you here. The index is also available as a free file, and you can find that on the publisher's page for my book, which is:
http://www.pickeringchatto.com/monographs/vision_science_and_literature_1870_1920
Problem Novels: Victorian Fiction Theorizes the Sensational Self
Published in the Victorian Critical Interventions Series (Ohio State UP, 2007)
The Forgotten Writings of Bram Stoker: A Collection (1890-1913) (Palgrave Macmillan, expected 2012)
Foreword, Elizabeth Miller. Afterword, Dacre Stoker.
Presented here, for the first time since their publication over a century ago, are thirteen previously unknown... more
Presented here, for the first time since their publication over a century ago, are thirteen previously unknown published works of fiction, poetry, and journalistic writing by Bram Stoker (1847-1912), two works by Stoker never before reprinted, ten obscure period writings about Stoker, and the exceptionally rare 1913 estate sale catalogue of Stoker’s personal library.
Through both the original works and extensive archival research presented, this vital collection sheds new light on an enigmatic writer and rejects the view that Dracula is Stoker’s only legacy worth consideration. The Forgotten Writings of Bram Stoker underscores not only the intertexuality between
Dracula and the other works, but supports the exciting prospect that Stoker’s periodical writings account for a much greater force in his literary repertoire than previously accepted.
A must-read for Stoker fans and scholars, this collection offers an important window into fin-de-siècle Gothic literature.
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La Sicilia dei Viaggiatori - Messina Taormina Catania L'Etna Siracusa Ispica
Autori Vari, intr. di Giovanni Salmeri, Catania 1999
cm 24,5x25, pagg. 104,30 ill.
http://www.maimone.it/schedadinam1.asp?CodLib=19996
I resoconti di viaggio relativi alla Sicilia rappresentano per coloro che oggi la visitano un prezioso strumento di... more
I resoconti di viaggio relativi alla Sicilia rappresentano per coloro che oggi la visitano un prezioso strumento di conoscenza, e nel caso di testi come quelli di Brydone, Denon e Goethe grazie al potere della letteratura rendono più essenziale e profondo il godimento delle bellezze naturali e artistiche dell’isola. Questo volume, riccamente illustrato con stampe della collezione F. Riccobono, propongono una scelta di testi tratti dalle seguenti opere: B. Berenson, Viaggio in Sicilia; P. Brydone, Viaggio in Sicilia e a Malta; D.V. Denon, Viaggio in Sicilia; G.W. Goethe, Viaggio in Italia; G.H. von Riedesel, Viaggio in Sicilia; D. Sestini, Lettere scritte dalla Sicilia e dalla Turchia.
SOMMARIO
Scoprire la Sicilia nei libri di viaggio
Giovanni Salmeri
MESSINA
“Il posto è stupendo e il porto…eccezionale e impareggiabile
Jahann Hermann von Riedesel
La Fata Morgana
Patrick Brydone
TAORMINA
Natura e arte s’incontrano
Goethe
CATANIA
Lettere della città di S. Agata
Domenico Sestini
L’ETNA
L’alba sul vulcano
Patrick Brydone
La Torre del Filosofo
Dominique Vivant Denon
SIRACUSA
Un passato di grandezza
Johann Hermann von Riedesel
Non è più un’isola
Bernard Berenson
ISPICA
“Tutti mi parlavano delle case di Ispica e nessuno mi diceva mai di averle viste”
Dominique Vivant Denon
Itinerario alla scoperta della storia, dei monumenti e delle tradizioni della Sicilia Orientale
Giovanni Salmeri
Brevi note sui viaggiatori autori dei testi
Catania. Viaggi e viaggiatori nella città del vulcano
Ilaria Di Pietra, Catania 2007
24x30, pagg. 192, ill.
http://www.maimone.it/schedadinam1.asp?CodLib=200707
Il volume, che costruisce un’immagine della città di Catania per mezzo delle testimonianze dei viaggiatori europei... more
Il volume, che costruisce un’immagine della città di Catania per mezzo delle testimonianze dei viaggiatori europei giunti in Sicilia tra il XVI e il XIX secolo, si inserisce nella tradizione di studio della travel literature di cui analizza l’evoluzione attraverso il filtro culturale della classicità. Si tratta di un lavoro in cui l’autrice analizza le testimonianze scritte e figurate che costituiscono una parte del ricchissimo patrimonio costituito dai récits de voyage redatti dai numerosi personaggi dell’alta e media borghesia europea durante i loro viaggi in Italia che si concludevano sempre più spesso con una suggestiva permanenza in Sicilia. Il mito dell’Etna “ignivomo mostro” si delinea ed emerge da queste pagine con chiarezza ed icasticità e i resoconti di viaggio ne disegnano i contorni dando vita a suggestive descrizioni di cui l’autrice dà ampia e documentata testimonianza. La pubblicazione è arricchita da un centinaio di riproduzioni di stampe d’epoca, incisioni, carte topografiche, dipinti, ecc.
SOMMARIO
Premessa
Giuseppe Benanti
Prefazione
Enrico Iachello
Viaggi e viaggiatori
Resoconti di viaggio
Note
Bibliografia
Women and Belief, 1852-1928
Edited by Jessica Cox, Mark Llewellyn and Nadine Muller. 6 Vols. History of Feminism Series (London: Routledge, 15 September 2012), ISBN 0415472180
Over recent years, research into religious belief during the Victorian period and the early twentieth century has... more
Over recent years, research into religious belief during the Victorian period and the early twentieth century has grown in diversity and importance. The centrality of faith-based discourses to women of the period has long been recognized by scholars in the field. But until now relatively little significance has been attached to the fundamental relationship between women’s faith and women’s rights. This new title in the History of Feminism series remedies that omission. Women and Belief, 1852–1928 is a six-volume collection of primary materials covering a wide range of opinions about women, their self-identity, and the combination of their spiritual and political beliefs.
Addressing the most debated aspects of women’s religious, social, cultural, and political rights, the collection adopts an historical overview of the period and provides an authoritative representation of the wide body of literature written by and about women’s faith. Beginning with an example of how religious discourse provided a model for acceptable female behaviour and a satirical take on women’s rights and spiritualism and ending with an economist’s psychoanalytic study of female belief from 1928, Women and Belief, 1852–1928 provides a unique collection of different viewpoints. It brings together the work of women writers, theologians, philosophers, and economic and cultural historians to illustrate the multiplicity of voices and opinions on the issues of suffrage and religious faith. This diversity is equally reflected in the broad geographical coverage of the collection which draws on works not only from the United Kingdom and United States but also includes materials from Canada and India, and moves beyond the Christian into the spheres of theosophy, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism. The gathered materials include works of non-fiction, poetry, analytical works, satires, pamphlets, sermons, spiritual (auto)biography, and periodical articles.
Making readily available such materials—which are currently very difficult for scholars, researchers, and students across the globe to locate and use—Women and Belief, 1852–1928 is a veritable treasure-trove. The gathered works are reproduced in facsimile, giving users a strong sense of immediacy to the texts and permitting citation to the original pagination. And with detailed and comprehensive introductory, biographical, and contextual material in each volume illustrating the ways in which the materials chart the gradual evolution of feminist thinking about belief, spirituality, and faith that directly fed into the emerging discourses of political and social rights for women, the collection is destined to be welcomed as a vital reference and research resource.
Unfolding the South: Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers and Artists in Italy
Co-edited with Jane Stabler
Elizabeth Siddal. Di rivi e gigli, Bari, Palomar, 2009
This book offers a critical analysis of Elizabeth Siddal's poetry. It is also a critical edition of Siddal's complete... more This book offers a critical analysis of Elizabeth Siddal's poetry. It is also a critical edition of Siddal's complete poetry and letters, based on the original manuscripts kept at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. The Italian translation is provided on the opposite page of the original English text.
Erotic Biography: Reading Intimate Lives
by Janine Utell
My current project, tentatively titled Erotic Biography: Reading Intimate Lives, examines the ways we use narrative to construct, reconstruct, and access stories of intimate lives. Using dual biographies of romantic couples (married and not), I analyze erotic emplotments, the creation of couplehood and its movements over time, the making of shared collaborative storyworlds, and the roles of bodies and minds in narrative. (This is a draft prospectus; licensed under Creative Commons.)
One of the most poignant moments in Edith Gelles’ dual biography of John and Abigail Adams is when Gelles shows... more
One of the most poignant moments in Edith Gelles’ dual biography of John and Abigail Adams is when Gelles shows Abigail realizing that to sustain her faith in her marriage, she must willingly and consciously participate in a shared narrative and vision of what that marriage is supposed to be, even in the face of extended separation and vast distance during the American Revolution. She must tell herself, and share with John, a story of their life together in order to give it meaning. In “Erotic Biography: Reading Intimate Lives,” I demonstrate that we can use narrative to understand intimacy: how intimate worlds are created, how erotic couples share experience and know each other, how individual members of a couple come together in a collaborative process of meaning-making around that shared experience and knowledge. Through study and analysis of the couple biography, I show how narrative techniques and theories shape the representation of intimacy and the kinds of knowledge it might generate. Narrative lets people know each other in the most private ways, and then allows them to share that knowledge.
Narrative theory might help us understand the construction and reading of a shared story, the fabrication of the world of the couple, and the shifting perspectives of the couple biography. The couple biography, a subgenre I am the first to define, is a dual biography, a dual portrait, of an erotic couple. These biographies, which emerged in their contemporary form in the 1990s, tell the individual and shared stories of each member of a couple. They begin with the single life, each moving along parallel lines, until the intersection, joining, and forming of a unit, a “we.” The biography then takes the life story of the couple itself as its focus: the creation and duration of the erotic unit and its changes over time, key shared events, the connections of mind and body, and the overall shaping of a collaborative and coherent life together.
My work expands the fields of literature and biography, as well as the humanities more broadly, by addressing the ethical implications of imagining ways of knowing and the complexities of negotiating emotional closeness and distance through narrative. Intimacy allows individuals to connect across different experiences and build a world together. It permits each member of a couple to recognize and appreciate the other’s subjectivity, past, weirdness, and then to share a life and a life story; such recognition, via imaginative and affectual work, is the foundation of postmodern ethics, especially the thinking of Emmanuel Levinas. Narrative can provide the equipment for such ethical endeavor, offering readers the tools to engage emotionally and imaginatively with others. Thus my work here is twofold: I claim that narrative is a crucial part of building a couplehood, in that it helps the members of that couple share a life and a vision of who they are together. And, I claim that understanding how narrative works in this regard, how it gives the means of shaping a shared experience, offers a way for readers to think about their own intimacies and the ethical landscape of their erotic world.
While the field of life writing has been opened up to a willingness to engage with the erotic, thanks to Michael Holroyd’s groundbreaking 1971 biography of Lytton Strachey and to feminist and queer studies more generally, literary critics are still reticent when it comes to romantic and erotic love and intimacy. Theorists of the genre of biography and life writing more generally, such as Paula Backscheider, Sidonie Smith, and Nigel Hamilton have not engaged with the particular subgenre of the couple biography; and while critics focus attention on desire and discourse, gender and sexual identity, the world of the love life goes unexplored. However, “Erotic Biography: Reading Intimate Lives,” building on my first book James Joyce and the Revolt of Love: Marriage, Adultery, Desire, shows that the investigation of couplehood and the epistemology and ethics of intimacy is in fact very much the purview of the literary critic and humanities scholar. In my first book, I formulated a framework from narrative theory and postmodern ethics to read Joyce’s drama and fiction, and developed the argument that Joyce was using the counterfactual potential of literature to envision an ethical love. Joyce’s vision of erotic life depends on an individual being able to imagine the desires of the beloved other and seek to fulfill them, no matter how painful. The project I propose here extends that research into a new area; the expertise I developed while working on the Joyce book will permit me to apply and expand my framework into the field of life writing and consider how intimate narratives hone in on private spaces and moments, moments of both connection and rupture.
The first chapter of “Erotic Biography,” “Mourning and Victorian Spousal Memoirs,” considers just such a moment of rupture: the death of a spouse. Reading memoirs of deceased spouses by Isabel Burton (of Richard Burton), John Cross (of George Eliot), and Thomas Carlyle (of Jane Carlyle) alongside recently published couple biographies by Mary Lovell, Brenda Maddox, and Rosemary Ashton, I consider the impulse to narrativize the life of a dead spouse as a kind of mourning. Specifically, the writing of a spousal memoir is an attempt to claim the life story of the deceased and by extension the story of the couple itself. By writing the memoir of the deceased, the surviving spouse reconstructs the life, claiming a place of primacy for him or herself, and making the shared world public. The writing becomes a spectacle of intimacy, of intimate knowing of both body and mind, that in another context might be unseemly or even transgressive. The production of textual artifact becomes a way to revivify the marital body. I read recently published couple biographies of each of these subjects in conjunction with the primary materials to illustrate not only the instability of these memoirs but also the difficulty of (re)constructing erotic private lives and the ways narrative provides some strategies for access, albeit incomplete. By reading the memoirs and biographies in dialogue, competing processes of narrativization are revealed: the ordering and arranging of events, movement over time, characterization, and finally the creation or complicating of sympathy. Setting these texts next to one another reveals the knowledge problem at the heart of my study: a reader sees the trouble with accessing intimate lives, while also seeing the ways intimate partners are made strange to each other.
Next, in “Ethics and Epistemology: Bloomsbury and New Biography,” I begin working through the ethical implications of this knowledge problem. Here I take a twin-lens approach: a retrospective or historical look at ethical work of the early 20th century, then moving ahead to incorporate a framework drawn from postmodern ethics, and then reading back again balancing both historical and philosophical conceptualizations. Beginning with Leslie Stephen and John Middleton Murry, I consider the ways these figures rewrite the lives of their departed loved ones through textual monuments: Stephen’s Mausoleum Book and Murry’s extensive excavating and archiving of Katherine Mansfield’s writing. I use these cases as a jumping-off point to trace the influence of G. E. Moore’s ethics, specifically the 1903 Principia Ethica, on the emergence of the “New Biography,” the primary practitioners of which were Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey. From there I read Woolf’s Flush and Strachey’s Elizabeth and Essex as early examples of couple biography, and then consider Woolf herself as the subject of several couple biographies, both with her husband Leonard Woolf and with her lover Vita Sackville-West. I read these more recent biographies through the lens of postmodern ethics, specifically Levinas, thereby setting up the sustained reading of the genre itself in Chapter Three.
“A Meeting of Minds: Contemporary Couple Biographies” uses the vocabulary and method established in the first two chapters to analyze exemplary texts, focusing on the ways biographers arrange textual and archival material to (re)construct intimate lives and provide access to readers through narrative. For this chapter, I take Paula Backscheider’s Reflections on Biography as a model; in that book, Backscheider uses a series of exemplars to trace areas of interest in biographical texts, beginning with external relationships and moving inward to a core of private subjectivity. Considering how narrative helps us understand private erotic life and relationships is central to my reading; thus I look at how events shape couplehood over time, couplehood as private space and the means by which that space is collaboratively created, and the role bodies, minds, and empathy play in understanding intimate life. For my exemplars I concentrate on biographies of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller.
Chapter Four, “Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy: A Case Study,” will extend the work of Chapter One on public and private mourning while also grappling with the ways queer couplehood might complicate the couple biography. This chapter will consider forms of intimate narrativity in other media by analyzing not only Isherwood’s writing but also Bachardy’s drawings and the 2007 documentary film about their life together, Chris and Don: A Love Story. Using Isherwood and Bachardy as a substantive case for this chapter allows me to think specifically about queer couplehood, as well as how narrativity manifests itself in a variety of forms and genres. I begin by reading Isherwood’s biography of his parents’ marriage, Kathleen and Frank, in which he generates the life story of their couplehood from the raw material of letters and diaries. Next, I examine Bachardy’s drawings of Isherwood as he progresses towards death from cancer; these drawings constitute a reinvention of the spousal memoir discussed in Chapter One. Finally, I talk about Chris and Don and look at the ways the documentary film offers a means to narrativize queer couplehood. I conclude by postulating some reasons for the general absence of queer couples (a few examples notwithstanding) from the genre of couple biography.
The final chapter of “Erotic Biography,” “The Problem of the Biographer: Prefaces, Archives, Versionings,” turns the lens to the biographer him/herself. Here I return to the question of intimacy as epistemological problem, and I analyze the relationships among biographer, reader, and subject. Concentrating on the prefaces composed by biographers, their reflections on their own archival work, and the multiple versions through letters, diaries, memoirs, and fiction of such lives as D.H. and Frieda Lawrence and Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland, I close the book by thinking about the slippery nature of intimate knowledge and the ethical implications of a commitment to understanding it.
My work applies the rigorous tools of narrative to questions of how subjects live and love. The serious study of love, intimacy, and empathy meets a need not only in my discipline of English but also in the wider field of the humanities. These most human of impulses and experiences are deeply connected to how we read and write, shape and share stories.
The Sea and Englishness in the Middle Ages: Maritime Narratives, Identity & Culture
(Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2011)
Local and imperial, insular and expansive, both English yet British: geographically and culturally, the sea continues... more Local and imperial, insular and expansive, both English yet British: geographically and culturally, the sea continues to shape changing models of Englishness. This volume traces the many literary origins of insular identity from local communities to the entire archipelago, laying open the continuities and disruptions in the sea's relationship with English identity in a British context. Ranging from the beginnings of insular literature to Victorian medievalisms, the subjects treated include King Arthur's struggle with muddy banks, the afterlife of Edgar's forged charters, Old English homilies and narratives of migration, Welsh and English ideas about Chester, Anglo-Norman views of the sea in the Vie de St Edmund and Waldef, post-Conquest cartography, The Book of Margery Kempe, the works of the Irish Stopford Brooke, and the making of an Anglo-British identity in Victorian Britain.
Constructing Girlhood in the Periodical Press, 1850-1915
Forthcoming from Ashgate, 2012
This work focuses on British middle-class girls’ periodicals published between 1850 and 1915 because it was during... more
This work focuses on British middle-class girls’ periodicals published between 1850 and 1915 because it was during this period that British ideals of middle-class girlhood shifted radically. Girls’ periodicals from as early as 1850 demonstrate how contemporary ideas about girls, their education, and their responsibilities in the home changed, often unevenly, as the century progressed. The challenges raised by the “Girl of the Period,” the “New Woman,” increasing education and literacy, agitation for women’s rights, and the expansion of the Empire meant that girls were under considerable pressure to adapt to the changing needs of British life. Yet just how girls were to adapt remained the subject of fierce debate in the periodical press during this period. The views of the press ranged from nostalgic depictions of feminine perfection to more radical portrayals of girls embracing new opportunities and they highlight the reality that there was not a single unifying “girlhood” experienced by middle-class girls between 1850 and 1915.
This project takes advantage of the critical interest in the periodical press to examine six girls’ periodicals: The Monthly Packet, The Girl of the Period Miscellany, the Girl’s Own Paper, Atalanta, The Young Woman, and The Girl’s Realm. These periodicals are important sites for understanding the debate about the changing nature of girlhood. Their mixed-genre format permits inconsistencies and tensions which highlight the real difficulties encountered by both girls and adults in fashioning girlhood during an era of significant political, social, and economic change. They also demonstrate the challenges of embracing the changing conditions of girls’ lives while also attempting to maintain the traditional feminine ideal of purity and morality. By analysing the competing discourses within girls’ periodicals, this project demonstrates how they were able to frame feminine behaviour in ways which both reinforced and yet also reflected and redefined the changing role of girls in nineteenth-century society, as the value of girls’ contributions as future wives, mothers, workers, and consumers came under fierce discussion in the media.