BiblioVault - Books about English literature

The Vampire in Nineteenth Century English Literature

Carol A. Senf

University of Wisconsin Press, 1988

Carol A. Senf traces the vampire’s evolution from folklore to twentieth-century popular culture and explains why this creature became such an important metaphor in Victorian England. This bloodsucker who had stalked the folklore of almost every culture became the property of serious artists and thinkers in Victorian England, including Charlotte and Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels. People who did not believe in the existence of vampires nonetheless saw numerous metaphoric possibilities in a creature from the past that exerted pressure on the present and was often threatening because of its sexuality.

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Ventures into Childland

Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity

U. C. Knoepflmacher

University of Chicago Press, 1998

Behind the innocent face of Victorian fairy tales such as Through the Looking Glass or Mopsa the Fairy lurks the specter of an intense gender debate about the very nature of childhood. Offering brilliant rereadings of classics from the "Golden Age of Children's Literature" as well as literature commonly considered "grown-up," U. C. Knoepflmacher illuminates this debate, probing deeply into the relations between adults and children, adults and their own childhood selves, and the lives of beloved Victorian authors and their "children's tales." Ventures into Childland will delight and instruct all readers of children's classics, and will be essential reading for students of Victorian culture and gender studies.

"Ventures into Childland is acute, well written and stimulating. It also has a political purpose, to insist on the importance of protecting and nurturing children, imaginatively and physically."—Jan Marsh, Times Literary Supplement

"A provocative and interesting book about Victorian culture."—Library Journal

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VIA CRUCIS

ESSAYS ON EARLY MEDIEVAL SOURCES AND IDEAS

THOMAS N. HALL

West Virginia University Press, 2002

This book originated as a series of papers delivered at a Symposium on Irish and Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture in Honor of J. E. Cross, held in conjunction with the 30th International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo in May 1996. The purpose of that symposium was to bring together a number of friends and admirers of Professor Cross to celebrate his remarkably rich career as a scholar of Old English and Insular Latin literature; Anglo-Saxon manuscripts; and medieval sermons, saints’ lives, and apocrypha.

Just over a decade earlier, a group of colleagues had honored Professor Cross with a Festschrift published as a special volume of Leeds Studies in English, but in the years since that collection appeared, Professor Cross had managed to launch into the most productive period of his entire career, producing over thirty new articles and books since 1984, including his ground-breaking monograph on the Pembroke 25 homiliary, a facsimile edition of the Copenhagen Wulfstan manuscript for the series Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile, a book on the Gospel of Nicodemus and Vindicta Salvatoris apocrypha from the St Omer 202 homiliary, and an edition and translation of Archbishop Wulfstan’s canon laws.

Surely these achievements were worthy of fresh recognition, we reasoned, and a small cohort of Professor Cross’s friends accordingly began conspiring to host a symposium in his honor with an eye toward producing a second Festschrift. Kalamazoo was the logical site for this event. Professor Cross had frequented the Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo for as long as any of us could remember, had chaired and presented in numerous sessions, and was a plenary speaker in 1990. It was also at Kalamazoo that Professor Cross initiated discussions of a plan to revise and update J. D. A. Ogilvy’s Books Known to the English, 597-1066, an ambitious project that has since given rise to two large collaborative ventures to which many Anglo-Saxonists around the world now contribute: Fontes Anglo-Saxonici and Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture.

Kalamazoo was thus a perfect match for Professor Cross, and with the kind indulgence of the Medieval Congress program committee, we proceeded to organize five sessions for the 1996 meeting on Irish and Anglo-Saxon studies as a tribute to Professor Cross’s work in these areas. The timing, as it turned out, proved meaningful: Professor Cross died unexpectedly the following December, just seven months after the symposium, and the Kalamazoo conference was consequently the last opportunity most of us had to see him.

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Victorian Afterlife

Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century

John Kucich

University of Minnesota Press, 2000

Victorian Art Criticism and the Woman Writer

John Paul M. Kanwit

The Ohio State University Press, 2013

Victorian Art Criticism and the Woman Writer by John Paul M. Kanwit examines the development of specialized art commentary in a period when art education became a national concern in Britain. The explosion of Victorian visual culture—evident in the rapid expansion of galleries and museums, the technological innovations of which photography is only the most famous, the public debates over household design, and the high profile granted to such developments as the Aesthetic Movement—provided art critics unprecedented social power. Scholarship to date, however, has often been restricted to a narrow collection of male writers on art: John Ruskin, Walter Pater, William Morris, and Oscar Wilde.

By including then-influential but now lesser-known critics such as Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake, and Emilia Dilke, and by focusing on critical debates rather than celebrated figures, Victorian Art Criticism and the Woman Writer refines our conception of when and how art criticism became a professional discipline in Britain. Jameson and Eastlake began to professionalize art criticism well before the 1860s, that is, before the date commonly ascribed to the professionalization of the discipline. Moreover, in concentrating on historical facts rather than legends about art, these women critics represent an alternative approach that developed the modern conception of art history. In a parallel development, the novelists under consideration—George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, Anne Brontë, and Elizabeth Gaskell—read a wide range of Victorian art critics and used their lessons in key moments of spectatorship.

This more inclusive view of Victorian art criticism provides key insights into Victorian literary and aesthetic culture. The women critics discussed in this book helped to fashion art criticism as itself a literary genre, something almost wholly ascribed to famous male critics.

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Victorian Hands

The Manual Turn in Nineteenth-Century Body Studies

Peter J. Capuano and Sue Zemka

The Ohio State University Press, 2020

Until recently, the embodied hand has paradoxically escaped the notice of nineteenth-century cultural and literary historians precisely because of its centrality. The essays in Peter J. Capuano and Sue Zemka’s new collection, Victorian Hands: The Manual Turn in Nineteenth-Century Body Studies, join an emerging body of work that seeks to remedy this. Casting new light on an array of well-known authors—Charlotte Brontë, Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, William Morris, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde—the volume explores the role of the hand as a nexus between culture and physical embodiment. The contributors to this volume address a wide range of manual topics and concerns, including those related to religion, medicine, science, industry, paranormal states, language, digital humanities, law, photography, disability, and art history. Examining hands, language, materiality, and agency, these contributors employ their expertise as Victorianists in order to understand what hands have to tell us about the cultural preoccupations of the nineteenth century and how the unique conditions of Britain at the time shaped the modern emergence of our cultural relationship with our hands.

Contributors
James Eli Adams, Karen Bourrier, Aviva Briefel, Peter J. Capuano, Jonathan Cheng, Kate Flint, Pamela K. Gilbert, Tamara Ketabgian, J. Hillis Miller, Deborah Denenholz Morse, Daniel A. Novak, Julianne Smith, Herbert F. Tucker, and Sue Zemka

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Victorian Lessons in Empathy and Difference

Rebecca N. Mitchell

The Ohio State University Press, 2011

Victorian Sacrifice

Ilana M. Blumberg

The Ohio State University Press, 2013

In Victorian Sacrifice: Ethics and Economics in Mid-Century Novels, Ilana Blumberg offers a major reconsideration of the central Victorian ethic of self-sacrifice, suggesting that much of what we have taken to be the moral psychology of Victorian fiction may be understood in terms of the dramatic confrontation between Christian theology and the world of modern economic theory. As Victorian writers Charlotte Mary Yonge, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins, and Mary Augusta Ward strove to forge a practicable ethics that would reconcile the influences of an evangelical Christianity and its emphasis on selfless charity with the forces of laissez-faire capitalism and its emphasis on individual profit, they moved away from the cherished ideal of painful, solitary self-sacrifice in service of another’s good. Instead, Blumberg suggests, major novelists sought an ethical realism characterized by the belief that virtuous action could serve the collective benefit of the parties involved. At a mid-century moment of economic optimism, novelists transformed the ethical landscape by imagining what the sociologist Herbert Spencer would later call a “measured egoism,” an ethically responsible self-concern which might foster communal solidarity and material abundance.

Bringing the recent literary turns to ethics and to economics into mutual conversation, Blumberg offers us a new lens on a matter as pressing today as 150 years ago: the search for an ethics adequate to the hopes and fears of a new economy.

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Victorian Sexual Dissidence

Edited by Richard Dellamora

University of Chicago Press, 1999

Recent critical and historical work on the late-Victorian period has furnished a vocabulary for discussing gender and sexuality. These popular terms include categories such as homo/hetero, patriarchal/feminist, and masculine/effeminate. This collection exploits this framework—while refining and resisting it in places—to show how certain Victorians imagined difference in ways that continue to challenge us today.

One essay, for example, traces the remarkable feminist appropriation of male-identified fields of study, such as Classical philology. Others address the validation of male bodies as objects of desire in writing, painting, and emergent modernist choreography. The writings shed light on the diverse interests served by a range of cultural practitioners and on the complex ways in which the late Victorians invented themselves as modern subjects.

This volume will be essential reading for students of British literary and cultural history as well as for those interested in feminist, gay, and lesbian studies.

Contributors are: Oliver Buckton, Richard Dellamora, Dennis Denisoff, Regenia Gagnier, Eric Haralson, Andrew Hewitt, Christopher Lane, Thaïs Morgan, Yopie Prins, Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Julia Saville, Robert Sulcer, Jr., Martha Vicinus.

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Victorian Subjects

J. Hillis Miller

Duke University Press, 1991

Written over a thirty-five year period, these essays reflect the changes in J. Hillis Miller’s thinking on Victorian topics, from an early concern with questions of consciousness, form, and intellectual history, to a more recent focus on parable and the development of a deconstructive ethics of reading.
Miller defines the term “Victorian subjects” in more than one sense. The phrase identifies an historical time but also names a concern throughout with subjectivity, consciousness, and selfhood in Victorian literature. The essays show various Victorian subjectivities seeking to ground themselves in their own underlying substance or in some self beneath or beyond the self. But “Victorian subjects” also discusses those who were subject to Queen Victoria, to the reigning ideologies of the time, to historical, social, and material conditions, including the conditions under which literature was written, published, distributed, and consumed.
These essays, taken together, sketch the outlines of ideological assumptions within the period about the self, interpersonal relations, nature, literary form, the social function of literature, and other Victorian subjects.

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Victorian Women Writers, Radical Grandmothers, and the Gendering of God

Gail Turley Houston

The Ohio State University Press, 2013

If Victorian women writers yearned for authorial forebears, or, in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s words, for “grandmothers,” there were, Gail Turley Houston argues, grandmothers who in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries envisioned powerful female divinities that would reconfigure society. Like many Victorian women writers, they experienced a sense of what Barrett Browning termed “mother-want” inextricably connected to “mother-god-want.” These millenarian and socialist feminist grandmothers believed the time had come for women to initiate the earthly paradise that patriarchal institutions had failed to establish.

Recuperating a symbolic divine in the form of the Great Mother—a pagan Virgin Mary, a female messiah, and a titanic Eve—Joanna Southcott, Eliza Sharples, Frances Wright, and others set the stage for Victorian women writers to envision and impart emanations of puissant Christian and pagan goddesses, enabling them to acquire the authorial legitimacy patriarchal culture denied them. Though the Victorian authors studied by Houston—Barrett Browning, Charlotte Brontë, Florence Nightingale, Anna Jameson, and George Eliot—often masked progressive rhetoric, even in some cases seeming to reject these foremothers, their radical genealogy reappeared in mystic, metaphysical revisions of divinity that insisted that deity be understood, at least in part, as substantively female.

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The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror

Simon Joyce

Ohio University Press, 2007

When Margaret Thatcher called in 1979 for a return to Victorian values such as hard work, self-reliance, thrift, and national pride, Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock responded that “Victorian values” also included “cruelty, misery, drudgery, squalor, and ignorance.”

The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror is an in-depth look at the ways that the twentieth century reacted to and reimagined its predecessor. It considers how the Victorian inheritance has been represented in literature, politics, film, and visual culture; the ways in which modernists and progressives have sought to differentiate themselves from an image of the Victorian; and how conservatives (and some liberals) have sought to revive elements of nineteenth-century life. Nostalgic and critical impulses combine to fix an understanding of the Victorians in the popular imagination.

Simon Joyce examines heritage culture, contemporary politics, and the “neo-Dickensian” novel to offer a more affirmative assessment of the Victorian legacy, one that lets us imagine a model of social interconnection and interdependence that has come under threat in today’s politics and culture.

Although more than one hundred years have passed since the death of Queen Victoria, the impact of her time is still fresh. The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror speaks to diverse audiences in literary and cultural studies, in addition to those interested in visual culture and contemporary politics, and situates detailed close readings of literary and cinematic texts in the context of a larger argument about the legacies of an era not as distant as we might like to think.

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Victorians Reading the Romantics

Essays by U. C. Knoepflmacher

U. C. Knoepflmacher and Linda Shires

The Ohio State University Press, 2016

Victorians Reading the Romantics: Essays by U. C. Knoepflmacher, edited by LindaM. Shires, offers a compelling new perspective on the long and influential publishing career and thought of Knoepflmacher, a leading critic of the novel and Victorian poetry. This volume draws together essays on nineteenth-century literature written between 1963 and 2012.An introductory essay and new scaffolding emphasize the interrelations among the essays, which together form a consistent approach to literary criticism.

Knoepflmacher’s vision of texts and readersstressesthe emotional knowledge afforded by reading, writing about, and teaching literary texts.Each chapter links Romantic texts to those of later writers. Shelley and Keats try to revise Wordsworth, but they are themselves recast by Browning and Hardy. Similarly, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf’s reliance on Romantic tropes are fruitfully examined. Above all, however, these chapters stress the impact of Wordsworth on his many contemporaries and successors. Knoepflmacher probes into their texts to find, as Wordsworth did, a momentaryfusionof opposites.He posits a reader who is flexible—able to move in multiple directions by paying attention to spatial, verbal, and imagistic coordinates, across and down a page.Given the attention paid tothe translation of affect into thought,this collectionwillcontribute to Victorian studiesas well as enhance our understanding of the affective dynamics of nineteenth-century literature.

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Violent Belongings

Partition, Gender, and National Culture in Postcolonial India

Kavita Daiya

Temple University Press, 2008

Focusing on the historical and contemporary narration of the Partition of India, Violent Belongings examines transnational South Asian culture from 1947 onwards. Spanning the Indian subcontinent and its diasporas in the United Kingdom and the United States, it asks how postcolonial/diasporic literature (eg., Rushdie, Mistry, Sidwa and Lahiri), Bollywood film, personal testimonies and journalism represent the violence, migration and questions of national belonging unleashed by that pivotal event during which two million people died and sixteen million were displaced.

In addition to challenging the official narratives of independence and Partition, these narratives challenge our contemporary understanding of gender and ethnicity in history and politics. Violent Belongings argues that both male and female bodies, and heterosexual coupledom, became symbols of the nation in public life. In the newly independent Indian nation both men and women were transformed into ideal citizens or troubling bodies, immigrants or refugees, depending on whether they were ethnically Hindu, Muslim, Jewish or Sikh. The divisions set in motion during Partition continue into our own time and account for ethnic violence in South Asia.

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Virtuous Necessity

Conduct Literature and the Making of the Virtuous Woman in Early Modern England

Jessica C. Murphy

University of Michigan Press, 2015

While many scholars find the early modern triad of virtues for women—silence, chastity, and obedience—to be straightforward and nonnegotiable, Jessica C. Murphy demonstrates that these virtues were by no means as direct and inflexible as they might seem. Drawing on the literature of the period—from the plays of Shakespeare to a conduct manual written for a princess to letters from a wife to her husband—as well as contemporary gender theory and philosophy, she uncovers the multiple meanings of behavioral expectations for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women. Through her renegotiation of cultural ideals as presented in both literary and nonliterary texts of early modern England, Murphy presents models for “acceptable” women’s conduct that lie outside of the rigid prescriptions of the time.

Virtuous Necessity will appeal to readers interested in early modern English literature, including canonical authors such as Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, as well as their female contemporaries such as Amelia Lanyer and Elizabeth Cary. It will also appeal to scholars of conduct literature; of early modern drama, popular literature, poetry, and prose; of women’s history; and of gender theory.

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