Victorian Literature

George Eliot's Natural History of Common Life

by Rosalind De Sailly

Victorian Era Women: The Picture Kipling Paints

by Aditi Verma

Co-authored wth Andrew Goh.

A literary analysis on the the portrayal of women by Victorian Era author Rudyard Kipling. Chosen six female... more A literary analysis on the the portrayal of women by Victorian Era author Rudyard Kipling. Chosen six female protagonists from six short stories from his collection "Plain Tales from the Hillls."

“Conservation of Energy, Individual Agency, and Gothic Terror in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle, or, What’s Scarier than an Ancient, Evil, Shape-shifting Bug?”

by Anna Maria Jones

Published in Victorian Literature & Culture 39.1 (2011)

“Eugenics by Way of Aesthetics: Sexual Selection, Cultural Consumption, and the Cultivated Reader in The Egoist.”

by Anna Maria Jones

Published in LIT: LIterature, Interpretation, Theory 16.2 (2005)

This is a feminist novel: the paradox of female passivity in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth

by Marina Cano López

The Gaskell Journal, 25 (2011).
This paper applies Judith Halberstam's theories of passivity, as exposed in Ben Davies's and Jana Funke's Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture (2011), to Gaskell's Victorian novel.

The Poet's Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry 1830-1870

by Gregory Tate

Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming November 2012

The Poet's Mind is a major study of how Victorian poets thought and wrote about the human mind. It argues that... more The Poet's Mind is a major study of how Victorian poets thought and wrote about the human mind. It argues that Victorian poets, inheriting from their Romantic forerunners the belief that subjective thoughts and feelings were the most important materials for poetry, used their writing both to give expression to mental processes and to scrutinise and analyse those processes. In this volume Gregory Tate considers why and how psychological analysis became an increasingly important element of poetic theory and practice in the mid-nineteenth century, a time when the discipline of psychology was emerging alongside the growing recognition that the workings of the mind might be understood using the analytical methods of science. The writings of Victorian poets often show an awareness of this psychology, but, at the same time, the language and tone of their psychological verse, and especially their ambivalent use of terms such as 'brain', 'mind', and 'soul', voice an unresolved tension, felt throughout Victorian culture, between scientific theories of psychology and metaphysical or religious accounts of selfhood. The Poet's Mind considers the poetry of Browning, Tennyson, Arnold, Clough, and George Eliot, offering detailed readings of several major Victorian poems, and presenting new evidence of their authors' interest in contemporary psychological theory. Ranging across lyric verse, epic poetry, and the dramatic monologue, the book explores the ways in which poetry simultaneously drew on, resisted, and contributed to the spread of scientific theories of mind in Victorian Britain.

Women and Madness

by Lindsey Grace

written by Lindsey Rundlett. 2011.

This paper is about the social complexities of women and madness in literature. This paper is about the social complexities of women and madness in literature.

andrew king, origins of ouidas pascarel anglistica pisana VI 2009 77-86

by Andrew King

Originally published in the special number of Anglistica Pisana dedicated to Ouida in 2009, vol VI. 1/2, pp. 77-86

Horace Dorrington, Criminal-Detective: Investigating the Re-emergence of the Rogue in Arthur Morrison’s The Dorrington Deed-Box (1897)

by Clare Clarke

Clues 28.2 (Autumn 2010)

This article examines The Dorrington Deed-Box (1897), Arthur Morrison’s critically neglected second contribution to... more This article examines The Dorrington Deed-Box (1897), Arthur Morrison’s critically neglected second contribution to the post–Sherlock Holmes detective short story genre. The article argues that as Dorrington is both a detective and a criminal, and the victim is the narrator, the stories subvert the usual reassuring moral and formal conventions of the late-Victorian detective genre. The Dorrington Deed-Box therefore contributes to a necessary re-evaluation of the formal, political, and ideological complexity of a genre that is more conventionally concerned with the upholding of law and order.

Imperial Rogues: Reverse Colonization Fears in Guy Boothby's A Prince of Swindlers (1897).

by Clare Clarke

Forthcoming in Victorian Literature and Culture 41.2 (Spring 2013)

This article looks at how the question of late-Victorian imperial decline is contested, formulated, and framed within... more This article looks at how the question of late-Victorian imperial decline is contested, formulated, and framed within Guy Boothby’s A Prince of Swindlers - a popular, yet critically-overlooked, collection of detective stories set in Calcutta and London, that appeared in 1897, the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.

They-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed: Arsake, Rhadopis, and Tabubue; Ihweret and Charikleia

by Steve Vinson

Changing Focus: A case study re-interpreting the roles of texts and translated paratexts in biography

by Anna Strowe

University of Massachusetts-Binghamton Translation Studies Conference. SUNY-Binghamton; Binghamton, NY. 2007.

Brilmyer - Materializing Schopenhauer

by S. Pearl Brilmyer

This is an abstract for a paper extracted from Chapter 2 of my dissertation.

Because I Do: Trollope, Tautology, and Desire

by Danny Wright

Forthcoming in ELH

George Eliot's Sense Impressions

by S. Pearl Brilmyer

This is an abstract for a paper extracted from Chapter 1 of my dissertation.

Rebellious Children of Wales: Amy Dillwyn and the Sons and Daughters of Rebecca

by Rita Singer

forthcoming in 'Journal of Victorian Culture Online'

Between the years 1839 and 1843, South Wales witnessed a number of curious nocturnal events as elshmen with blackened... more Between the years 1839 and 1843, South Wales witnessed a number of curious nocturnal events as elshmen with blackened faces and clad in women's clothes, calling themselves the Daughters of Rebecca, frequently set fire to the toll-gates that littered the roads in the countryside. Although the Rebecca Riots did not immediately return improved conditions for the local farmers, they were, nevertheless, a strong attack on a system of unfair taxation and absentee landlordism by a politically unrepresented peasant class. Amy Dillwyn's novel The Rebecca Rioter: A Story of Killay Life (1880) approaches this critical moment in Victorian history by illustrating the origin of domestic insurgencies. Inspired by her father's detailed eyewitness account of an attack on the Pontarddulais turnpike on 10 September 1843, Dillwyn presents her readers with a re-examination of recent history from below for the protagonist is a participant in the riots. Thereby, Dillwyn challenges contemporary historiography that repeatedly presents the Welsh as a hoard of Celts on the verge of anarchy without glossing over the criminal nature of Rebecca. The historical novel portrays
impoverished Welsh village life not as the result of racial degeneration but, instead, from Anglocentric economic policies that threaten to destabilize the coherence of Britain as a Union of Nations. I want to argue that the social criticism of the novel serves as a contemporary warning about the fragility of the British Empire because the mechanism between disinterested politics and domestic insurrections are easily transferred to a global level.

A Welshman on the Water: The Portrayal of In-Betweener Identities in Richard Doddridge Blackmore’s The Maid of Sker (1872)

by Rita Singer

forthcoming in 'LWU Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht'

Set in Glamorganshire and Devon at the end of the eighteenth century, Richard Doddridge Blackmore's novel The Maid of... more Set in Glamorganshire and Devon at the end of the eighteenth century, Richard Doddridge Blackmore's novel The Maid of Sker (1872) is told from the perspective of a Welsh fisherman and common sailor in the Royal Navy, 'Davy' Llewellyn. Blackmore adds an English dimension by choice of settings and his central character's profession. Although portraying in great detail the rural life of South Wales, only a third of the novel is set in South Wales. The remainder takes Davy to Devonshire and across the British Empire on board a vessel of the Royal Navy. He is particularly proud of his command of the English language which, in combination with what is portrayed as the stereotypical Welsh talent for telling stories, renders him highly verbal. These qualities allow him to reflect at great length about various subjects, such as slavery, savages and the sea.
Living between water and land, Davy is a literary example of what Gustavo Pérez Firmat calls a 'One-and-a-halfer' in his study of Cuban-American identities in his Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way (1994). Davy is part fisherman, who returns to his hut in Glamorganshire every evening to raise two orphaned girls, one of which was brought to him across the sea; he is also part sailor without a home to return to, taking care of three Devonshire savages and 'civilising' them whilst they are out at sea. Firmat talks of national identities in his study, but it can be argued that Davy's identity and the identities of the other characters are not shaped so much by their nationality as by the water surrounding them. Davy takes the role of the negotiator between the lives on land and water and, thus, is enabled to reveal, subvert and create a wide range of identities for his friends and foes.

The Lotus and the Lion: Buddhism and the British Empire, by J. Jeffrey Franklin (Book Review)

by Asaf Federman

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge and the Flight to Lyric

by Alison Chapman

Phantasies of Matriarchy In Victorian Children's Literature

by Alison Chapman