{"title":"Rediscovering Ellen Wood: New Italian Translations","authors":"Paolo Miccoli","doi":"10.46911/nbhe2445","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46911/nbhe2445","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":34865,"journal":{"name":"Victorian Popular Fictions","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47442989","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article analyses two portrayals of the nineteenth-century female sex worker: Madeleine, An Autobiography, written from the endo-perspective of the anonymous narrator, and Mary Barton, written from the exo-perspective of Elizabeth Gaskell. By placing these two texts in conversation, this project aims to illuminate the range of discourses that emerged about female sex workers during this period, and more broadly, the difficulties that arise when writers attempt to represent subalternity in the depiction of historically occluded identity groups. Through a comparison of the “outcast prostitute” Esther Barton in Gaskell’s novel with the first-person autobiographical account of Madeleine Blair, the article offers a comprehensive account of the lives of these women and explores the discursive specificities of the authors’ construction of the female sex worker in relation to other accounts of sex work. Attention is also given the ideologemes surrounding sex work that prevail in Western culture and the consequences they have for people within that community today.
{"title":"“To whom shall the outcast prostitute tell her tale!”: Endo/Exo-Writer Perspectives of Nineteenth-Century Sex Workers in Madeleine, An Autobiography and Mary Barton","authors":"Katie Brandt Sartain","doi":"10.46911/guil7181","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46911/guil7181","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyses two portrayals of the nineteenth-century female sex worker: Madeleine, An Autobiography, written from the endo-perspective of the anonymous narrator, and Mary Barton, written from the exo-perspective of Elizabeth Gaskell. By placing these two texts in conversation, this project aims to illuminate the range of discourses that emerged about female sex workers during this period, and more broadly, the difficulties that arise when writers attempt to represent subalternity in the depiction of historically occluded identity groups. Through a comparison of the “outcast prostitute” Esther Barton in Gaskell’s novel with the first-person autobiographical account of Madeleine Blair, the article offers a comprehensive account of the lives of these women and explores the discursive specificities of the authors’ construction of the female sex worker in relation to other accounts of sex work. Attention is also given the ideologemes surrounding sex work that prevail in Western culture and the consequences they have for people within that community today.","PeriodicalId":34865,"journal":{"name":"Victorian Popular Fictions","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41939732","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
While Wilkie Collins’ novels The Moonstone (1868) and The Woman in White (1859-60) have long been accepted as part of the early mystery canon, Collins’ earlier novel The Dead Secret (1857) is rarely included. The Dead Secret is here reconsidered as one of the earliest English female detective novels, revealing its heretofore unrecognised significance to the genre of detective fiction and the evolution of the literary female detective. The Dead Secret’s protagonist, Rosamond, is almost Holmesian in her methodical collection of evidence and tactical lines of questioning to arrive at the solution of the mystery, but she also employs techniques more often attributed to female detectives, demonstrating the importance of emotion, intuition, surveillance, and proximity. In solving the mystery, Rosamond also disrupts the status quo, as is more typical of sleuthing heroines of sensation fiction. The Dead Secret demonstrates Collins’ innovations to the emerging genre of detective fiction, before its tropes become typified by Sherlock Holmes, and reveals the overlap of tropes that originate with sensation novels.
{"title":"“The mystery of the Myrtle Room”: Reading Wilkie Collins’ The Dead Secret as an Early Female Detective Novel","authors":"Elizabeth Steere","doi":"10.46911/yrrl8350","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46911/yrrl8350","url":null,"abstract":"While Wilkie Collins’ novels The Moonstone (1868) and The Woman in White (1859-60) have long been accepted as part of the early mystery canon, Collins’ earlier novel The Dead Secret (1857) is rarely included. The Dead Secret is here reconsidered as one of the earliest English female detective novels, revealing its heretofore unrecognised significance to the genre of detective fiction and the evolution of the literary female detective. The Dead Secret’s protagonist, Rosamond, is almost Holmesian in her methodical collection of evidence and tactical lines of questioning to arrive at the solution of the mystery, but she also employs techniques more often attributed to female detectives, demonstrating the importance of emotion, intuition, surveillance, and proximity. In solving the mystery, Rosamond also disrupts the status quo, as is more typical of sleuthing heroines of sensation fiction. The Dead Secret demonstrates Collins’ innovations to the emerging genre of detective fiction, before its tropes become typified by Sherlock Holmes, and reveals the overlap of tropes that originate with sensation novels.","PeriodicalId":34865,"journal":{"name":"Victorian Popular Fictions","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45866429","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Welcome","authors":"H. Ifill, M. Costantini","doi":"10.46911/dmsx8826","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46911/dmsx8826","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":34865,"journal":{"name":"Victorian Popular Fictions","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48442090","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Grant Allen’s Philistia (1884) is a naturalist novel that provides a critical commentary on sociopolitical idealism and London’s literary scene. The novel’s original ending was revised and replaced during the publication process in favor of a happier ending. The original ending is published here in print for the first time, with a contextual introduction and textual note. The manuscript has previously been accessible to scholars only in the Paterno Library in University Park, Pennsylvania.
{"title":"Philistia: Final Chapter (1884) by Grant Allen. Edited with an Introduction and Note by Scott C. Thompson","authors":"Thompson Scott","doi":"10.46911/jayn7052","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46911/jayn7052","url":null,"abstract":"Grant Allen’s Philistia (1884) is a naturalist novel that provides a critical commentary on sociopolitical idealism and London’s literary scene. The novel’s original ending was revised and replaced during the publication process in favor of a happier ending. The original ending is published here in print for the first time, with a contextual introduction and textual note. The manuscript has previously been accessible to scholars only in the Paterno Library in University Park, Pennsylvania.","PeriodicalId":34865,"journal":{"name":"Victorian Popular Fictions","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48680819","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Review of Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany: Cross-Cultural Freedoms and Female Opportunity by Linda K. Hughes","authors":"Flore Janssen","doi":"10.46911/rrug9839","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46911/rrug9839","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":34865,"journal":{"name":"Victorian Popular Fictions","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49323089","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article presents newly uncovered archival materials which necessitate a rewriting of the early life of Marie Corelli. The many biographies on her are focussed on rumours surrounding Corelli being illegitimate, her eccentricities, and the exposure of lies she told about her age. The most recent biographies, the latest of which was published in 1999, reformulated what had already been written about her and additionally employed analogue genealogical research methods to investigate Corelli’s parentage. They created an account of Corelli’s life which has been subsumed into twenty-first century scholarship. However, the digitisation of genealogical records, as well as of nineteenth and twentieth-century newspapers, has enabled research which renders the twentieth-century biographers’ findings inaccurate and incomplete. This article uncovers Corelli’s working-class origins; it reveals that she spent a lengthy period in America; it finds the likely location of the convent school she attended; and details that she had a fuller performing career than previously understood. It finds truth in the stories that Corelli told about herself, forcing a re-evaluation of her character and her motivation for the concealment of her early life, paving the way for future study.
{"title":"“The most accomplished liar in literature”? Uncovering Marie Corelli’s Hidden Early Life","authors":"Joanna Turner","doi":"10.46911/cwxj9793","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46911/cwxj9793","url":null,"abstract":"This article presents newly uncovered archival materials which necessitate a rewriting of the early life of Marie Corelli. The many biographies on her are focussed on rumours surrounding Corelli being illegitimate, her eccentricities, and the exposure of lies she told about her age. The most recent biographies, the latest of which was published in 1999, reformulated what had already been written about her and additionally employed analogue genealogical research methods to investigate Corelli’s parentage. They created an account of Corelli’s life which has been subsumed into twenty-first century scholarship. However, the digitisation of genealogical records, as well as of nineteenth and twentieth-century newspapers, has enabled research which renders the twentieth-century biographers’ findings inaccurate and incomplete. This article uncovers Corelli’s working-class origins; it reveals that she spent a lengthy period in America; it finds the likely location of the convent school she attended; and details that she had a fuller performing career than previously understood. It finds truth in the stories that Corelli told about herself, forcing a re-evaluation of her character and her motivation for the concealment of her early life, paving the way for future study.","PeriodicalId":34865,"journal":{"name":"Victorian Popular Fictions","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44600897","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In “Reading the Women’s Sentimental Novel: A Romance,” Tabitha Sparks considers a large and diffuse body of mass-market fiction written by and for Victorian women. She argues that the author-focused interpretive approach that underwrites the study of the canon neglects the attraction of formula fiction, and even the robust recovery efforts of Victorian scholars have largely avoided a taxonomic reading of these novels. In an effort to uncover their objectives and appeal, Sparks reads periodical reviews and discussions of the professional woman writer to better understand the commercial – not artistic – standards assigned to the prosaic “lady’s novel.” She examines a subset of novels by Annie S. Swan, Sarah Doudney, Emily Jolly, and Adeline Sergeant to uncover a repeated subplot in which these novels’ heroines become best-selling authors. The complete elision of the content of their best-sellers reveals and confirms the sentimental novel’s self-conscious withdrawal from the literary caste wars of the day.
{"title":"Reading the Women’s Sentimental Novel: A Romance","authors":"T. Sparks","doi":"10.46911/flwg9098","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46911/flwg9098","url":null,"abstract":"In “Reading the Women’s Sentimental Novel: A Romance,” Tabitha Sparks considers a large and diffuse body of mass-market fiction written by and for Victorian women. She argues that the author-focused interpretive approach that underwrites the study of the canon neglects the attraction of formula fiction, and even the robust recovery efforts of Victorian scholars have largely avoided a taxonomic reading of these novels. In an effort to uncover their objectives and appeal, Sparks reads periodical reviews and discussions of the professional woman writer to better understand the commercial – not artistic – standards assigned to the prosaic “lady’s novel.” She examines a subset of novels by Annie S. Swan, Sarah Doudney, Emily Jolly, and Adeline Sergeant to uncover a repeated subplot in which these novels’ heroines become best-selling authors. The complete elision of the content of their best-sellers reveals and confirms the sentimental novel’s self-conscious withdrawal from the literary caste wars of the day.","PeriodicalId":34865,"journal":{"name":"Victorian Popular Fictions","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48585557","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
By offering a critical discourse analysis of selected Victorian travelogues of the second half of the nineteenth century, the paper aims to demonstrate to what extent Victorian discursive representations of Italy carried in themselves a highly standardised representation of Southern Europe as both an imaginary geography and as a political culture in a perceived state of moral and political decadence. In Victorian travelogues, the European South was imagined as a counter-geography of modernity and, as such, it was ideologically utilised for legitimising the specific trajectory of Northern modernity, seen as the antipode to the perceived state of backwardness of the European South. The myth of decadence of the European South served the purpose of constituting the South as a premodern moral geography embedded in a state of decadence, while at the same time legitimising British modernity as the only proper organic trajectory of historical evolution. This paper aims to demonstrate how Victorian travelogues, as channels for dissemination of Victorian political imagination, became platforms for consolidation of a specific moral geography of the European South built upon the myth of decadence. In addition, this paper argues that the unification of Italy in 1871 signalises a turning point in development of the myth of decadence of the European South in Victorian travelogues. While pre-1871 Victorian travelogues perceived signs of decadence as the ultimate proof of the country’s incompatibility with Northern or Protestant modernity, post-1871 travelogues conceived decadence as the quintessence of the idealised Romantic or even Gothic nature of Italy and critiqued modernisation as desacralisation of Italy as a place of memorialisation of the past. The travelogues critically analysed in the paper are: T. A. Trollope’s Impressions of a Wanderer in Italy, Switzerland, France and Spain as well as his A Lenten Journey in Umbria and the Marches, William Baxter’s The Tagus and the Tiber, Frances Elliot’s Diary of an Idle Woman in Italy, and George Gissing’s By the Ionian Sea.
{"title":"The Splendour of Decadence: The Moral Geography of the European South in Victorian Travelogues","authors":"Sebastian Kukavica","doi":"10.46911/mxnr9140","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46911/mxnr9140","url":null,"abstract":"By offering a critical discourse analysis of selected Victorian travelogues of the second half of the nineteenth century, the paper aims to demonstrate to what extent Victorian discursive representations of Italy carried in themselves a highly standardised representation of Southern Europe as both an imaginary geography and as a political culture in a perceived state of moral and political decadence. In Victorian travelogues, the European South was imagined as a counter-geography of modernity and, as such, it was ideologically utilised for legitimising the specific trajectory of Northern modernity, seen as the antipode to the perceived state of backwardness of the European South. The myth of decadence of the European South served the purpose of constituting the South as a premodern moral geography embedded in a state of decadence, while at the same time legitimising British modernity as the only proper organic trajectory of historical evolution. This paper aims to demonstrate how Victorian travelogues, as channels for dissemination of Victorian political imagination, became platforms for consolidation of a specific moral geography of the European South built upon the myth of decadence. In addition, this paper argues that the unification of Italy in 1871 signalises a turning point in development of the myth of decadence of the European South in Victorian travelogues. While pre-1871 Victorian travelogues perceived signs of decadence as the ultimate proof of the country’s incompatibility with Northern or Protestant modernity, post-1871 travelogues conceived decadence as the quintessence of the idealised Romantic or even Gothic nature of Italy and critiqued modernisation as desacralisation of Italy as a place of memorialisation of the past. The travelogues critically analysed in the paper are: T. A. Trollope’s Impressions of a Wanderer in Italy, Switzerland, France and Spain as well as his A Lenten Journey in Umbria and the Marches, William Baxter’s The Tagus and the Tiber, Frances Elliot’s Diary of an Idle Woman in Italy, and George Gissing’s By the Ionian Sea.","PeriodicalId":34865,"journal":{"name":"Victorian Popular Fictions","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41528365","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper will examine the representation of the criminal body in detective fiction from the popular Victorian story magazine The Strand in its relationship to modernist experimental fiction which draws on the detective genre. Offering a broad survey of the Sherlock Holmes and other detective stories published in the first fourteen years of The Strand (1891-1904), the paper will argue that the period’s theories of criminal anthropology and hereditary criminality are consistently called into question in the popular magazine, suggesting that late-Victorian detective fiction was ambivalent toward theories of biologically determined criminality and was alive to problems of racial and class prejudice, corruption, and misidentification in criminal detection. Moving from the popular press to the canon, the paper will then make a claim for reading literary texts like G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare and Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale alongside the classic detective fiction of the popular press. To understand these novels in their engagements with classic detective fiction is to reconceptualize the notion of a neat divide between the period’s genres of fiction and to reach for a broader frame of literary responses to early criminology.
{"title":"Criminal Bodies in Popular Victorian and Modernist Detective Fiction","authors":"K. Hart","doi":"10.46911/wayw2876","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46911/wayw2876","url":null,"abstract":"This paper will examine the representation of the criminal body in detective fiction from the popular Victorian story magazine The Strand in its relationship to modernist experimental fiction which draws on the detective genre. Offering a broad survey of the Sherlock Holmes and other detective stories published in the first fourteen years of The Strand (1891-1904), the paper will argue that the period’s theories of criminal anthropology and hereditary criminality are consistently called into question in the popular magazine, suggesting that late-Victorian detective fiction was ambivalent toward theories of biologically determined criminality and was alive to problems of racial and class prejudice, corruption, and misidentification in criminal detection. Moving from the popular press to the canon, the paper will then make a claim for reading literary texts like G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare and Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale alongside the classic detective fiction of the popular press. To understand these novels in their engagements with classic detective fiction is to reconceptualize the notion of a neat divide between the period’s genres of fiction and to reach for a broader frame of literary responses to early criminology.","PeriodicalId":34865,"journal":{"name":"Victorian Popular Fictions","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45937175","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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