Victorian fiction

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.

To begin with: justifying Marley in A Christmas Carol

by Pete Orford

The Dickensian, forthcoming

This article examines the purpose of Marley's ghost in Dickens's tale. Marley is a vital role within the context of... more This article examines the purpose of Marley's ghost in Dickens's tale. Marley is a vital role within the context of the original, yet this has been minimised with the frequent appropriation of the Carol, so that popular memory of the play's structure and characters has been reduced to the fundamentals of Scrooge and the three spirits of Christmas past, present and yet to come.

The article first considers the role of Marley both as an agent of change alongside the other three spirits, which entails a consideration of Scrooge's experience as a paranormal course of cognitive behaviour therapy; the article then considers the narrative significance of Marley's ghost, in particular the depth of his relationship with Scrooge.

On the origin of the New Woman: Reading Darwin's influence on Sarah Grand's 'Beth Book' (Abstract to the Paper)

by Shantanu Majee

This paper was presented in the international conference on 'The Expanding Universe: Science and Literature in the Nineteenth Century', held at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, between 6th and 8th February, 2010.

This article focuses on the influence that Darwin’s evolutionary theory had generated toward the Victorian... more This article focuses on the influence that Darwin’s evolutionary theory had generated toward the Victorian construction of womanhood with a closed reading of Sarah Grand’s New Woman classic ‘The Beth Book’ (1897). As most of the book deals with the protagonist Beth’s childhood, one explores to realize that the different stages of her transformation presents her body as an object which needs to be formed and developed by the norms of the society. One shall not be quite out of focus to be reminded of Foucault’s study of the modern prison system to illustrate the rethinking of power and its relationship to the body in this context. Foucault called the type of power that he was illustrating “disciplinary power”. We often think of power as operating in a repressive or prohibitive mode, preventing and constraining action. Foucault turns this formulation of power on its head, and argues that contrary to our most held beliefs, power works through our actions making possible certain ways of being and doing. Beth, in a quite similar manner, establishes the very qualities associated with female inferiority as markers of an alternative and equal route to adulthood and grows out of her imposed intellectual infancy to contest the accepted view.

"The Lure of the Fabulous": Gift-Book Beauties and Charlotte Bronte's Early Heroines

by Elaine Arvan Andrews

published in Women's Writing, 2009

Ghostly Histories and Embodied Memories: Photography, Spectrality and Historical Fiction in Afterimage and Sixty Lights

by Kate Mitchell

Published in Neo-Victorian Studies 1:1. (Autum 2008). 81-109

Sixty Lights and Afterimage use the trope of photography to explore the relationship between history, memory and... more Sixty Lights and Afterimage use the trope of photography to explore the relationship between history, memory and fiction as modes of recollection. Employing a lexicon of haunting and spectrality, these novels are concerned with recognising the persistence of the past in a present cut off from linear models of inheritance and memory. Extending and elaborating influential theoretical models of contemporary historical fiction, these novels deploy the ghostly figure of photography in order to posit the persistence of the past as uncanny repetition and as embodied memory. The article closes by considering the implications of these historical fictions as “memory texts,” arguing that they are not, primarily, concerned with metafictional or metahistorical reflections but rather write the period into our cultural memory, offering themselves as the uncanny repetition of the “body” of Victorian culture persisting in the here and now.

Mummymania: mummies, museums and popular culture.

by Jasmine Day

2006, Journal of Biological Research 80(1) (special issue: Proceedings V World Congress on Mummy Studies): 296–300.

The seeds of doom: mummy wheat and resurrection flowers in folklore, poetry and early curse fiction.

by Jasmine Day

2008, In P. Peña, C. Martin and A. Rodriguez (eds) Mummies and Science – World Mummies Research: Proceedings of the VI World Congress on Mummy Studies. Santa Cruz de Tenerife: Academia Canaria de la Historia, pp.623–6.

One of the principal motifs from the formative period of Western mummymania – which has since disappeared – was the... more One of the principal motifs from the formative period of Western mummymania – which has since disappeared – was the “mummified” seed found in an Egyptian tomb which, when planted, miraculously grew after thousands of years. This motif originated from a widespread (but erroneous) early nineteenth century belief that mummy seeds actually existed. Press reports claimed that peas, dahlias and entire crops of wheat had been grown from seeds found in tombs. Writers were quick to invest this phenomenon with meaning; while poets drew analogies with Biblical accounts of life-giving wheat as God’s gift to humanity, authors of early curse fiction depicted seeds that grew into beautiful but poisonous flowers. Yet whether fictional mummies withheld benevolent seeds in their selfish clasp or used them to wreak revenge upon the violators of their tombs, these mummies were almost universally portrayed in seed scenarios as evil.

The rape of the mummy: women, horror fiction and the Westernisation of the curse.

by Jasmine Day

2008, In P. Peña, C. Martin and A. Rodriguez (eds) Mummies and Science – World Mummies Research: Proceedings of the VI World Congress on Mummy Studies. Santa Cruz de Tenerife: Academia Canaria de la Historia, pp.617–21.

In 1998, the late Dominic Montserrat rediscovered the 1869 story "Lost in a Pyramid: or, the Mummy’s Curse"... more In 1998, the late Dominic Montserrat rediscovered the 1869 story "Lost in a Pyramid: or, the Mummy’s Curse" by Louisa May Alcott, which he claimed to be the earliest fiction story with a “mummy’s curse” theme. I have since discovered a number of even earlier works in this genre that confirm Montserrat’s speculation that women made a vital contribution to early Western popular curse lore. Using examples from these forgotten works, I will show that American female authors drew an analogy between the unwrapping of mummies and rape, not only to condemn unwrapping as distasteful, but also perhaps to critique capitalism and patriarchy, which objectified and commodified the bodies of living women and mummies alike. In so doing they Westernised Arabic curse legends by investing them with proto-feminist meanings relevant to their own culture, establishing an analogy that survives, if implicitly, in even the most abstracted contemporary curse scenarios.

The maid and the mummy.

by Jasmine Day

In press, In R. Dann and K. Exell (eds) Approaching Ancient Egypt. New York: Cambria Press Inc.

The Mummy's Curse: Mummymania In the English-Speaking World

by Jasmine Day

2006, London, New York: Routledge.