{"title":"Julian Wolfreys, Haunted Selves, Haunting Places in English Literature and Culture: 1800–Present","authors":"Monika Kosa","doi":"10.3366/VIC.2021.0423","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/VIC.2021.0423","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47386086","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}
At the close of the nineteenth century, amid pervasive fears of decadence and widespread pessimism, Frederic Leighton (1830–96) completed Flaming June (1895). Taking as its starting point Victorian responses to the work that seem incomprehensible to viewers today, this paper examines the possible meaning behind Flaming June's more impenetrable iconography. The following discussion highlights the significance of thermodynamics in the work's cultural context. It examines the impact of an implication of the second law of thermodynamics, known as the Sun's heat death – a fated apocalyptic event – and suggests that this resonated with late Victorian audiences plagued by concerns of degeneration and decadence. Considered within this context, this paper reveals further layers of meaning embedded within the imagery of Flaming June available to a Victorian audience, but which have since been eclipsed by a dominant focus on other aspects of the painting's cultural milieu.
{"title":"Frederic Leighton's Flaming June, Thermodynamics, and the Heat Death of the Sun","authors":"Laura Franchetti","doi":"10.3366/VIC.2021.0418","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/VIC.2021.0418","url":null,"abstract":"At the close of the nineteenth century, amid pervasive fears of decadence and widespread pessimism, Frederic Leighton (1830–96) completed Flaming June (1895). Taking as its starting point Victorian responses to the work that seem incomprehensible to viewers today, this paper examines the possible meaning behind Flaming June's more impenetrable iconography. The following discussion highlights the significance of thermodynamics in the work's cultural context. It examines the impact of an implication of the second law of thermodynamics, known as the Sun's heat death – a fated apocalyptic event – and suggests that this resonated with late Victorian audiences plagued by concerns of degeneration and decadence. Considered within this context, this paper reveals further layers of meaning embedded within the imagery of Flaming June available to a Victorian audience, but which have since been eclipsed by a dominant focus on other aspects of the painting's cultural milieu.","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42896953","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}
The more Victorian physicians deepened their research into female sexuality, the more a culture of lust infected the hypocritical façade of a nation strictly attached to social norms of order, formality, and bigotry. Lascivious sexual desire and carnal appetite – here embodied in female masturbation – were taboos that had to be forcibly silenced. Yet, late-Victorian pornography mocked medical discourses on female onanism, as well as fears related to female sexuality, and revealed ‘unspeakable’ secret domestic settings marred by ‘dangerous’ practices, scandalous carnality and deviant desires. Furthermore, contemptuous of literary censorship and strict morality, the plenteous erotic literature, represented here by William Lazenby's pornographic magazine The Pearl, not only dared to taunt physicians’ concerns about female ‘self-pollution’ circulating at that time, but also found a great inspiration in the huge domestic success of some innovative medical tools – specifically patented to assuage women's nerves – being produced in those years: electric vibrators. Those ‘engines’ rapidly invaded pornographic literature of the late nineteenth century and became central to a great number of erotic stories, titillating fables and poems, as clearly demonstrated by the contents of The Pearl.
{"title":"Female Onanism: Condemned Pleasures, Medical Probes, and Late-Victorian Pornography","authors":"S. Rossi","doi":"10.3366/VIC.2021.0420","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/VIC.2021.0420","url":null,"abstract":"The more Victorian physicians deepened their research into female sexuality, the more a culture of lust infected the hypocritical façade of a nation strictly attached to social norms of order, formality, and bigotry. Lascivious sexual desire and carnal appetite – here embodied in female masturbation – were taboos that had to be forcibly silenced. Yet, late-Victorian pornography mocked medical discourses on female onanism, as well as fears related to female sexuality, and revealed ‘unspeakable’ secret domestic settings marred by ‘dangerous’ practices, scandalous carnality and deviant desires. Furthermore, contemptuous of literary censorship and strict morality, the plenteous erotic literature, represented here by William Lazenby's pornographic magazine The Pearl, not only dared to taunt physicians’ concerns about female ‘self-pollution’ circulating at that time, but also found a great inspiration in the huge domestic success of some innovative medical tools – specifically patented to assuage women's nerves – being produced in those years: electric vibrators. Those ‘engines’ rapidly invaded pornographic literature of the late nineteenth century and became central to a great number of erotic stories, titillating fables and poems, as clearly demonstrated by the contents of The Pearl.","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47029586","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":"Anna Kornbluh, The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space","authors":"Benjamin D. O'Dell","doi":"10.3366/VIC.2021.0426","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/VIC.2021.0426","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69534018","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 shows that the Middle Ages Virginia Woolf imagines in her 1906 short story ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’ are influenced by the staging of the medieval in late-Victorian museums and reflects late-Victorian medievalism. From the perspective of material culture studies, Woolf's tale reflects the representation and fabrication of the medieval by the British Museum and the South Kensington Museum and shapes a similar narrative of the Middle Ages. Relying on Michel Foucault's definitions of ‘heterotopia’ as well as on Tony Bennett's analysis of Victorian museums, this article argues that Woolf's fictionalisation of the medieval evidences a new, complex temporality of knowledge and consciousness of the past which also defines late-Victorian curatorial philosophy and practices. It analyses each regime of that new temporality: first, the archaeological gaze and its contribution to the grand national narrative via the literary canon and, second, the theatrical gaze, with its focus on spectacularly displayed artefacts, that partakes of an image's mystique. In temporal terms, this results in a tension between the tangible remains of a past clearly separated from the present and the mystical fusion of past and present reinscribing Woolf's poetics of the moment within a sense of history.
{"title":"Virginia Woolf's Imaginary Museum of the Medieval in ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’","authors":"Caroline Marie","doi":"10.3366/VIC.2021.0421","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/VIC.2021.0421","url":null,"abstract":"This article shows that the Middle Ages Virginia Woolf imagines in her 1906 short story ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’ are influenced by the staging of the medieval in late-Victorian museums and reflects late-Victorian medievalism. From the perspective of material culture studies, Woolf's tale reflects the representation and fabrication of the medieval by the British Museum and the South Kensington Museum and shapes a similar narrative of the Middle Ages. Relying on Michel Foucault's definitions of ‘heterotopia’ as well as on Tony Bennett's analysis of Victorian museums, this article argues that Woolf's fictionalisation of the medieval evidences a new, complex temporality of knowledge and consciousness of the past which also defines late-Victorian curatorial philosophy and practices. It analyses each regime of that new temporality: first, the archaeological gaze and its contribution to the grand national narrative via the literary canon and, second, the theatrical gaze, with its focus on spectacularly displayed artefacts, that partakes of an image's mystique. In temporal terms, this results in a tension between the tangible remains of a past clearly separated from the present and the mystical fusion of past and present reinscribing Woolf's poetics of the moment within a sense of history.","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42775701","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 explores the links between the early verse of Arthur Symons and his definitions of impressionism, particularly as they are outlined in ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’ (1893). It begins by discussing the ideas of ‘unwholeness’ and insanity in which the essay’s conception of impressionism is grounded, as well as its theoretical underpinnings in the writings of Walter Pater and the artworks of James Abbot McNeill Whistler. The article argues that this theory of impressionism – with its emphasis on the partial and the personal – furnished Symons with a rationale for his lyric experiments of the 1890s and early 1900s, which in turn provided models for some of the most recognisable forms of early modernist poetry. But it also draws attention to a hitherto unacknowledged shift in the manner and matter of Symons’s writings in the years leading up to his nervous breakdown in 1908, when a theory of literary form self-consciously preoccupied with the unstable and the fragmentary, and with the breaking open of rigid or outworn forms, seemed to pull apart under the pressure of its own impulse to fracture. The article concludes by considering the causal link Symons retrospectively drew between his conceptions of impressionism and his experience of mental instability.
{"title":"‘Insane Thinking’: The Impressionism of Arthur Symons","authors":"Robert Harris","doi":"10.3366/VIC.2021.0419","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/VIC.2021.0419","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the links between the early verse of Arthur Symons and his definitions of impressionism, particularly as they are outlined in ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’ (1893). It begins by discussing the ideas of ‘unwholeness’ and insanity in which the essay’s conception of impressionism is grounded, as well as its theoretical underpinnings in the writings of Walter Pater and the artworks of James Abbot McNeill Whistler. The article argues that this theory of impressionism – with its emphasis on the partial and the personal – furnished Symons with a rationale for his lyric experiments of the 1890s and early 1900s, which in turn provided models for some of the most recognisable forms of early modernist poetry. But it also draws attention to a hitherto unacknowledged shift in the manner and matter of Symons’s writings in the years leading up to his nervous breakdown in 1908, when a theory of literary form self-consciously preoccupied with the unstable and the fragmentary, and with the breaking open of rigid or outworn forms, seemed to pull apart under the pressure of its own impulse to fracture. The article concludes by considering the causal link Symons retrospectively drew between his conceptions of impressionism and his experience of mental instability.","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49192744","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}
Sheri Holman’s neo-Victorian novel The Dress Lodger (1999 ) depicts the beginning of the 1831 cholera epidemic in Britain. The novel skilfully manipulates the conventions of nineteenth-century realism and neo-Victorian fiction to test the limits of readerly empathy and its foundations in the conception of the liberal subject as disembodied and disinterested. Although the novel seems ‘faux-Victorian’ and apparently encourages immersion in the story and identification with the central characters, metaphorical uses of language and shifting points of view disrupt such comfortable ways of reading, challenging the readers’ tendency to derive pleasure from representations of working-class suffering. Through complex characterisation of the protagonists, the factory and sex worker Gustine and the doctor Henry Chiver, the narrative exposes the violence of representation through parallels with medical discourse. This essay argues that Holman’s experimentation with narrative strategies ultimately suggests the need for a pandemic consciousness that transcends the clashing responses to the cholera epidemic and cultivates an awareness of global interdependence. The possibility of such pandemic consciousness is conveyed through ‘the Great Narration’ by the novel’s unconventional intradiegetic narrator, the working-class Dead, whose bodies were stolen by doctors for the purposes of dissection.
{"title":"Pandemic Consciousness and Narrative Perspective in Sheri Holman’s The Dress Lodger","authors":"Katarina Gephardt","doi":"10.3366/VIC.2021.0422","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/VIC.2021.0422","url":null,"abstract":"Sheri Holman’s neo-Victorian novel The Dress Lodger (1999 ) depicts the beginning of the 1831 cholera epidemic in Britain. The novel skilfully manipulates the conventions of nineteenth-century realism and neo-Victorian fiction to test the limits of readerly empathy and its foundations in the conception of the liberal subject as disembodied and disinterested. Although the novel seems ‘faux-Victorian’ and apparently encourages immersion in the story and identification with the central characters, metaphorical uses of language and shifting points of view disrupt such comfortable ways of reading, challenging the readers’ tendency to derive pleasure from representations of working-class suffering. Through complex characterisation of the protagonists, the factory and sex worker Gustine and the doctor Henry Chiver, the narrative exposes the violence of representation through parallels with medical discourse. This essay argues that Holman’s experimentation with narrative strategies ultimately suggests the need for a pandemic consciousness that transcends the clashing responses to the cholera epidemic and cultivates an awareness of global interdependence. The possibility of such pandemic consciousness is conveyed through ‘the Great Narration’ by the novel’s unconventional intradiegetic narrator, the working-class Dead, whose bodies were stolen by doctors for the purposes of dissection.","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44166269","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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