Marjorie Coughlan, Jason Edwards, Gregory Sullivan
In our introduction, we establish the original conference context of the 15 following position papers, emphasizing that the papers represent a conversation between participants, each of whom had been allocated a single monument from St Paul’s Cathedral in the period between c. 1796 and 1913, to think about the memorial’s visual and material richness and complexity, as well as its immediate and wider cathedral location, and broader discursive contexts. We map out the historiographical contexts of the papers, within the contexts of sculpture studies, studies of church monuments, interdisciplinary studies of the nineteenth century, and histories of Victorian Christianity – and especially Anglicanism – as it intersects with other world religions, and seeks to evangelize both at home and abroad.
{"title":"Sculpture and Faith at St Paul’s Cathedral, c. 1796–1913: Introduction","authors":"Marjorie Coughlan, Jason Edwards, Gregory Sullivan","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcac046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcac046","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In our introduction, we establish the original conference context of the 15 following position papers, emphasizing that the papers represent a conversation between participants, each of whom had been allocated a single monument from St Paul’s Cathedral in the period between c. 1796 and 1913, to think about the memorial’s visual and material richness and complexity, as well as its immediate and wider cathedral location, and broader discursive contexts. We map out the historiographical contexts of the papers, within the contexts of sculpture studies, studies of church monuments, interdisciplinary studies of the nineteenth century, and histories of Victorian Christianity – and especially Anglicanism – as it intersects with other world religions, and seeks to evangelize both at home and abroad.","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44318514","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Light and Devotion: Heber, Middleton and the Iconography of Conversion: J. G. Lough, Monument to Bishop Middleton (1832), and Francis Chantrey, Monument to Bishop Heber (1828–35)","authors":"M. Sullivan","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcac048","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcac048","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41533973","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article examines the Minervian Library, an extraordinary collection of children’s manuscript stories produced in mid-Victorian Orkney. Established in 1866 by sisters Mary and Clara Cowan and their cousin Isabella Bremner, the collaborative project had ambitions beyond its beginnings as a family literary endeavour: the girls envisaged a working library complete with membership and borrowing records. On offer to the ‘Library Damsels of the Minervian Library’, as they dubbed their members, were 50 of their own original compositions, mostly comprising fairy tales, domestic dramas, and stories of European nobility. In this article, we argue that an analysis of these manuscripts and the social networks in which they were produced and circulated challenges our understanding of literary juvenilia and its relationship to wider cultural processes. We posit that the manuscripts offer a striking example of juvenile ‘social authorship’, not only in the sense of their circulation among a community of readers, but also in the ways that the authors actively engaged with developing literary trends, such as the emergence of the European literary fairy tale, and responded to contemporary debates about girlhood and girls’ lives. In this way, the Minervian Library demonstrates that children were not simply passive consumers of cultural activities, but could also be participants in the creation of collective meanings and discourses.
{"title":"‘A Library of Our Own Compositions’: The Minervian Library and Children’s Social Authorship in Victorian Orkney","authors":"Kathryn Gleadle, B. Rodgers","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcac035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcac035","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article examines the Minervian Library, an extraordinary collection of children’s manuscript stories produced in mid-Victorian Orkney. Established in 1866 by sisters Mary and Clara Cowan and their cousin Isabella Bremner, the collaborative project had ambitions beyond its beginnings as a family literary endeavour: the girls envisaged a working library complete with membership and borrowing records. On offer to the ‘Library Damsels of the Minervian Library’, as they dubbed their members, were 50 of their own original compositions, mostly comprising fairy tales, domestic dramas, and stories of European nobility. In this article, we argue that an analysis of these manuscripts and the social networks in which they were produced and circulated challenges our understanding of literary juvenilia and its relationship to wider cultural processes. We posit that the manuscripts offer a striking example of juvenile ‘social authorship’, not only in the sense of their circulation among a community of readers, but also in the ways that the authors actively engaged with developing literary trends, such as the emergence of the European literary fairy tale, and responded to contemporary debates about girlhood and girls’ lives. In this way, the Minervian Library demonstrates that children were not simply passive consumers of cultural activities, but could also be participants in the creation of collective meanings and discourses.","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44892241","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula is replete with religious symbolism, from devotional objects to sacred imagery. Despite the novel’s theological richness, little has been written on Stoker’s theology, and most criticism has focused on interpreting the novel as an affirmation of either Anglicanism or Catholicism. Building on Alison Milbank’s argument in God and the Gothic, this essay shows how Stoker’s theology eschews the boundaries of rigid dogmatism, seeking instead an ecumenical and eccentric theology. It is through such theological exploration, I argue, that the novel discovers and frames questions of ontological hierarchy. Stoker’s use of the Host, in particular, enables him to engage with sacramental presence, and to subvert tropes associated with the Gothic in a manner which plunges the novel into a mode of free theological exploration grounded in the physicality of both sinfulness and grace. Focusing on the implications of the Host in the novel, this article provides an in-depth analysis of theological meaning, showing how the novel’s premise refuses to fit into any particular doctrinal framework, and demonstrates that what lies at the core of Stoker’s vision is an ontological system which reaffirms divine primacy over the human.
{"title":"Ecumenism to Ontology: Stoker’s Theology of the Host","authors":"Madeleine Potter","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcac031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcac031","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula is replete with religious symbolism, from devotional objects to sacred imagery. Despite the novel’s theological richness, little has been written on Stoker’s theology, and most criticism has focused on interpreting the novel as an affirmation of either Anglicanism or Catholicism. Building on Alison Milbank’s argument in God and the Gothic, this essay shows how Stoker’s theology eschews the boundaries of rigid dogmatism, seeking instead an ecumenical and eccentric theology. It is through such theological exploration, I argue, that the novel discovers and frames questions of ontological hierarchy. Stoker’s use of the Host, in particular, enables him to engage with sacramental presence, and to subvert tropes associated with the Gothic in a manner which plunges the novel into a mode of free theological exploration grounded in the physicality of both sinfulness and grace. Focusing on the implications of the Host in the novel, this article provides an in-depth analysis of theological meaning, showing how the novel’s premise refuses to fit into any particular doctrinal framework, and demonstrates that what lies at the core of Stoker’s vision is an ontological system which reaffirms divine primacy over the human.","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44424047","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hot Off the Press","authors":"Meghna Sapui","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcac039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcac039","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47770087","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Masculinity and Vulnerability: Frederick William Pomeroy’s Memorial to Archbishop Frederick Temple (1905)","authors":"A. Lepine","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcac032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcac032","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43045437","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The anti-vaccination campaign of the late nineteenth century has attracted the attention of historians in recent decades. The campaign against compulsory vaccination for smallpox gained the support of hundreds of thousands of people in Victorian Britain. Many objected to vaccination on scriptural grounds. Many others claimed that it was contradictory to their belief in mesmerism, Swedenborgianism or hydropathy. Still others argued that the Vaccination Acts of 1867 and 1871 represented a violation of individual liberties. One overlooked aspect of this movement relates to the use of anti-Catholic rhetoric in the speeches and literature which its leaders produced. A significant proportion of these leaders were drawn from the community of medical dissent. These individuals lived through a period when anti-Catholicism began to wane as a political force in England. Confronted with the new phenomenon of medical professionalization, they sought to style themselves as the inheritors of a Protestant tradition. In doing so, this article suggests that they attempted to repurpose the frailties of their movement – its reputation as crankish, plebeian or marginal – as strengths, and the avowed expertise of medical professionals as a weakness.
{"title":"‘Medical Popes’ and ‘Vaccination Protestants’: Anti-Catholicism and the Campaign against Compulsory Vaccination in Victorian England","authors":"Aidan Cottrell-Boyce","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcac044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcac044","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The anti-vaccination campaign of the late nineteenth century has attracted the attention of historians in recent decades. The campaign against compulsory vaccination for smallpox gained the support of hundreds of thousands of people in Victorian Britain. Many objected to vaccination on scriptural grounds. Many others claimed that it was contradictory to their belief in mesmerism, Swedenborgianism or hydropathy. Still others argued that the Vaccination Acts of 1867 and 1871 represented a violation of individual liberties. One overlooked aspect of this movement relates to the use of anti-Catholic rhetoric in the speeches and literature which its leaders produced. A significant proportion of these leaders were drawn from the community of medical dissent. These individuals lived through a period when anti-Catholicism began to wane as a political force in England. Confronted with the new phenomenon of medical professionalization, they sought to style themselves as the inheritors of a Protestant tradition. In doing so, this article suggests that they attempted to repurpose the frailties of their movement – its reputation as crankish, plebeian or marginal – as strengths, and the avowed expertise of medical professionals as a weakness.","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43609509","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article fleshes out the various ways Isabella Bird performs the self in her travel account, Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan (1891), mainly in her engagement with the Kurdish people. Deploying Judith Butler’s theory of performativity of gender, we argue that travel writing is empowering for Bird because it offers her a viable platform to perform a variety of selves through which she can voice her complicated and nuanced socio-political views and promote her image. Moreover, we contend that Bird’s representation of the Kurds and their region is informed by Orientalist ideology of the time as well as her own complex subject position. The fluidity of Bird’s identity, which is represented through performing a rich diversity of masculine and feminine selves in her account, exposes the constructed nature of gender. Bird not only undermines the prescribed gender boundaries of her time, but also demands the right for herself, as a woman writer, to be both caring and daring by playing the roles of a brave traveller, intellectual explorer, devoted Hakim, shrewd political analyst, religious commentator, and receptive ethnographer in Journeys.
{"title":"Performing the Self through Orientalizing the Kurds in Isabella Bird’s Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan","authors":"F. Ghaderi, H. Heidari","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcac036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcac036","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article fleshes out the various ways Isabella Bird performs the self in her travel account, Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan (1891), mainly in her engagement with the Kurdish people. Deploying Judith Butler’s theory of performativity of gender, we argue that travel writing is empowering for Bird because it offers her a viable platform to perform a variety of selves through which she can voice her complicated and nuanced socio-political views and promote her image. Moreover, we contend that Bird’s representation of the Kurds and their region is informed by Orientalist ideology of the time as well as her own complex subject position. The fluidity of Bird’s identity, which is represented through performing a rich diversity of masculine and feminine selves in her account, exposes the constructed nature of gender. Bird not only undermines the prescribed gender boundaries of her time, but also demands the right for herself, as a woman writer, to be both caring and daring by playing the roles of a brave traveller, intellectual explorer, devoted Hakim, shrewd political analyst, religious commentator, and receptive ethnographer in Journeys.","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48784675","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In 2015, the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth curated an important exhibition to commemorate the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo and the Brontë family’s engagement with its politics and legacies. Bringing together military-orientated books that were owned by the family (such as Walter Scott’s Life of Napoleon), drawings and watercolour paintings by the children (such as Branwell’s disturbing depiction of conflict simply entitled Terror), and intriguing artefacts from the Museum’s collection (including a bust of Wellington and a fragment of Napoleon’s original coffin which was given to Charlotte by Monsieur Heger), the exhibition beautifully depicted the multiple ways in which Haworth’s most famous family were fascinated by, and responded to, ideas of war and conflict throughout their lives and careers. The exhibition was housed in a smallish room separated from the main exhibition area, which created both an intense viewing experience – the walls and cases were full of objects and information – and suggested that, after our immersion in the domestic and literary lives of the Brontës in the key exhibition rooms, we also need to bear in mind how engaged the family were in the wider world and in debates about history and socio-political transformation. For as Terry Eagleton neatly phrased it in Myths of Power, his ground-breaking Marxist study of the sisters’ mature writings, ‘the Brontës lived through an era of disruptive social change, and lived that disruption at a particularly vulnerable point’.1 The instigator of this exhibition was Emma Butcher, whose important research on the Brontë family’s understanding and manipulation of military conflict is the subject of her first monograph, The Brontës and War: Fantasy and Conflict in Charlotte and Branwell Brontë’s Youthful Writings. Taking as its key focus the Glass Town and Angria sagas which were developed by Charlotte and Branwell across the 1820s and 1830s, Butcher’s engaging analysis builds upon the work of critics like Christine Alexander, Heather Glen, and Victor Neufeldt, who have established the centrality of the siblings’ early writings to their literary careers.2 By focusing on a specific topic running throughout these writings, Butcher demonstrates again how fertile the material is for serious critical consideration. For in addition to providing some of the foundations for the siblings’ mature writings, this youthful work effectively reveals the
2015年，霍沃斯的布朗特牧师博物馆策划了一场重要展览，以纪念滑铁卢战役200周年以及布朗特家族参与其政治和遗产。将家族所有的军事书籍（如沃尔特·斯科特的《拿破仑的一生》）、孩子们的绘画和水彩画（如布兰威尔对冲突的令人不安的描述，简称《恐怖》）汇集在一起，以及博物馆收藏的有趣文物（包括惠灵顿半身像和黑格先生送给夏洛特的拿破仑原棺碎片），展览完美地描绘了霍沃斯最著名的家族在其一生和职业生涯中对战争和冲突的想法着迷并做出回应的多种方式。展览被安置在一个与主展区分离的小房间里，这创造了一种强烈的观看体验——墙壁和箱子里充满了物品和信息——并表明，在我们沉浸在主要展厅中布朗特人的家庭和文学生活中之后，我们还需要记住，这个家庭是如何融入更广阔的世界，参与关于历史和社会政治变革的辩论的。正如特里·伊格尔顿（Terry Eagleton）在《权力的神话》（Myths of Power）一书中巧妙地表达的那样，他对这对姐妹成熟作品进行了开创性的马克思主义研究，“勃朗特一家经历了一个破坏性社会变革的时代，并在一个特别脆弱的时刻经历了这种破坏”，她的第一本专著《勃朗特与战争：夏洛特的幻想与冲突》和《布兰维尔·布朗特的青春写作》的主题是她对勃朗特家族理解和操纵军事冲突的重要研究。布彻将夏洛特和布兰威尔在19世纪20年代和19世纪30年代创作的《玻璃城》和《安格里亚传奇》作为其重点，其引人入胜的分析建立在克里斯汀·亚历山大、希瑟·格伦和维克托·诺伊费尔特等评论家的作品之上，他们确立了兄弟姐妹早期作品在他们文学生涯中的中心地位。2通过关注贯穿这些作品的特定主题，布彻再次证明了这些材料是多么丰富，值得认真的批判性思考。因为除了为兄弟姐妹成熟的作品奠定一些基础外，这部年轻的作品有效地揭示了
{"title":"War at t’ Parsonage: The Brontës and Military Conflict","authors":"Simon Avery","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcac043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcac043","url":null,"abstract":"In 2015, the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth curated an important exhibition to commemorate the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo and the Brontë family’s engagement with its politics and legacies. Bringing together military-orientated books that were owned by the family (such as Walter Scott’s Life of Napoleon), drawings and watercolour paintings by the children (such as Branwell’s disturbing depiction of conflict simply entitled Terror), and intriguing artefacts from the Museum’s collection (including a bust of Wellington and a fragment of Napoleon’s original coffin which was given to Charlotte by Monsieur Heger), the exhibition beautifully depicted the multiple ways in which Haworth’s most famous family were fascinated by, and responded to, ideas of war and conflict throughout their lives and careers. The exhibition was housed in a smallish room separated from the main exhibition area, which created both an intense viewing experience – the walls and cases were full of objects and information – and suggested that, after our immersion in the domestic and literary lives of the Brontës in the key exhibition rooms, we also need to bear in mind how engaged the family were in the wider world and in debates about history and socio-political transformation. For as Terry Eagleton neatly phrased it in Myths of Power, his ground-breaking Marxist study of the sisters’ mature writings, ‘the Brontës lived through an era of disruptive social change, and lived that disruption at a particularly vulnerable point’.1 The instigator of this exhibition was Emma Butcher, whose important research on the Brontë family’s understanding and manipulation of military conflict is the subject of her first monograph, The Brontës and War: Fantasy and Conflict in Charlotte and Branwell Brontë’s Youthful Writings. Taking as its key focus the Glass Town and Angria sagas which were developed by Charlotte and Branwell across the 1820s and 1830s, Butcher’s engaging analysis builds upon the work of critics like Christine Alexander, Heather Glen, and Victor Neufeldt, who have established the centrality of the siblings’ early writings to their literary careers.2 By focusing on a specific topic running throughout these writings, Butcher demonstrates again how fertile the material is for serious critical consideration. For in addition to providing some of the foundations for the siblings’ mature writings, this youthful work effectively reveals the","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46913930","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
When Jude the Obscure (1895) was published as a single volume novel, Hardy added the biblical epithet ‘the letter killeth’ to the title page. In Jude and across his works, Hardy revels in moments in which literacy seems to undo itself. This article traces Hardy’s attempts to ‘kill the letter’ through non-standard engagements with orthography as part of a larger proto-modernist approach that destabilizes the fixity of meaning. There are several concerns linked to the growing primacy of literacy that appear time and again in Hardy’s novels, specifically: the alternative literacies of the lesser educated, semiotic multiplicities, and the transformative potential of spelling mistakes. I suggest that Hardy’s treatment of these themes demonstrates a sustained effort to ‘kill the letter’ and challenge the assumption of progress made by the various educational reforms that had taken place in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
{"title":"Killing the Letter: Alternate Literacies and Orthographic Distortions in Jude the Obscure","authors":"Louise Creechan","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcac034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcac034","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 When Jude the Obscure (1895) was published as a single volume novel, Hardy added the biblical epithet ‘the letter killeth’ to the title page. In Jude and across his works, Hardy revels in moments in which literacy seems to undo itself. This article traces Hardy’s attempts to ‘kill the letter’ through non-standard engagements with orthography as part of a larger proto-modernist approach that destabilizes the fixity of meaning. There are several concerns linked to the growing primacy of literacy that appear time and again in Hardy’s novels, specifically: the alternative literacies of the lesser educated, semiotic multiplicities, and the transformative potential of spelling mistakes. I suggest that Hardy’s treatment of these themes demonstrates a sustained effort to ‘kill the letter’ and challenge the assumption of progress made by the various educational reforms that had taken place in the latter half of the nineteenth century.","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41378982","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：