Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.40
Peter Scholliers
family life,” in which the father filled the breadwinner role and the mother was a homemaker (188). The book’s study of breadwinning as ideology, however, implies potential contradictions between the social expectations generated by this template and writers’ experiences. Griffin describes the skepticism toward the political creed of individualism expressed by a woman autobiographer, Louie Stride, who had grown up homeless in the streets of Bath (296). This reference suggests that a more concentrated focus on such critical thinking might have revealed counternarratives centered on women as independent breadwinners. The book’s conclusion would have benefitted from a summary analysis of the range of autobiographers’ critical awareness of the social causes of their poverty and personal struggles. Did writers ever reject the family values enforced by the breadwinner model as hypocritical or oppressive? Did they ever allude to intimacies or partnerships outside the heterosexual norm that impacted household income? The book also lacks the perspectives of immigrant writers from the Caribbean, India, East Asia, or continental Europe, suggesting that a more intricate story about the working-class family’s economic life remains to be told. Sarah Winter University of Connecticut, Storrs
{"title":"The Science of Starving in Victorian Literature, Medicine, and Political Economy by Andrew Mangham (review)","authors":"Peter Scholliers","doi":"10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.40","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.40","url":null,"abstract":"family life,” in which the father filled the breadwinner role and the mother was a homemaker (188). The book’s study of breadwinning as ideology, however, implies potential contradictions between the social expectations generated by this template and writers’ experiences. Griffin describes the skepticism toward the political creed of individualism expressed by a woman autobiographer, Louie Stride, who had grown up homeless in the streets of Bath (296). This reference suggests that a more concentrated focus on such critical thinking might have revealed counternarratives centered on women as independent breadwinners. The book’s conclusion would have benefitted from a summary analysis of the range of autobiographers’ critical awareness of the social causes of their poverty and personal struggles. Did writers ever reject the family values enforced by the breadwinner model as hypocritical or oppressive? Did they ever allude to intimacies or partnerships outside the heterosexual norm that impacted household income? The book also lacks the perspectives of immigrant writers from the Caribbean, India, East Asia, or continental Europe, suggesting that a more intricate story about the working-class family’s economic life remains to be told. Sarah Winter University of Connecticut, Storrs","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"64 1","pages":"530 - 532"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42540898","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.02
Will Glovinsky
Abstract:This essay considers the phenomenon of Victorian narrators who express compunction or uneasy conscience about the ways in which they portray characters. In novels by Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, the narrative guilt accompanying the treatment of antagonists reflects the period's contradictory cultural priorities of sociological analysis and melodramatic aesthetics. Where the emerging field of sociology viewed crime as socially contingent—therefore encouraging a systemic account of responsibility—melodramatic aesthetics required villains who could concentrate social responsibility in a single malign figure. The fusing of these political and aesthetic impulses in Victorian realism resulted in a narrative structure both highly dependent on individual culprits and highly ambivalent about scapegoating. This essay proposes that the narrative guilt arising from this impasse, and efforts to redress it through reparative sympathy, contribute to the distinctive affective texture of Victorian realism.
{"title":"Narrative Guilt and the Victorian Novel","authors":"Will Glovinsky","doi":"10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.02","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay considers the phenomenon of Victorian narrators who express compunction or uneasy conscience about the ways in which they portray characters. In novels by Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, the narrative guilt accompanying the treatment of antagonists reflects the period's contradictory cultural priorities of sociological analysis and melodramatic aesthetics. Where the emerging field of sociology viewed crime as socially contingent—therefore encouraging a systemic account of responsibility—melodramatic aesthetics required villains who could concentrate social responsibility in a single malign figure. The fusing of these political and aesthetic impulses in Victorian realism resulted in a narrative structure both highly dependent on individual culprits and highly ambivalent about scapegoating. This essay proposes that the narrative guilt arising from this impasse, and efforts to redress it through reparative sympathy, contribute to the distinctive affective texture of Victorian realism.","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"64 1","pages":"401 - 424"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48969380","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.31
M. Meranze
{"title":"Execution Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain: From Public Spectacle to Hidden Ritual, edited by Patrick Low, Helen Rutherford, and Clare Sandford-Couch","authors":"M. Meranze","doi":"10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.31","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.31","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47341525","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.23
Heidi Kaufman
{"title":"Walter Besant: The Business of Literature and the Pleasures of Reform, edited by Kevin A. Morrison","authors":"Heidi Kaufman","doi":"10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.23","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.23","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48901438","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.14
David Vincent
express female trauma, especially marital trauma, is compelling. This chapter returns to The Woman in White, arguing that the abusive and unhappy marriages in the novel lend themselves to contemporary discussions of trauma and the #MeToo movement, as seen in the 2018 BBC television adaptation. Indeed, this is an important point, and a reminder that while sensation novels do depict ways in which the past haunts the present, they were also considered to be up-to-date stories about the present moment, with their depictions of proto-feminism and new technologies. The book demonstrates the continued need to reassess our assumptions about popular fiction and canon formation, implying that the work done by feminist scholars in the 1970s and 80s is far from over. Written in clear prose, and with good knowledge of both Victorian and neo-Victorian scholarship, the book presents a convincing argument for the study of the popularity and legacy of the sensation novel beyond the nineteenth century. Tara MacDonald University of Idaho
{"title":"The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative: Autobiography, Sensation, and the Literary Marketplace, by Sean Grass","authors":"David Vincent","doi":"10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.14","url":null,"abstract":"express female trauma, especially marital trauma, is compelling. This chapter returns to The Woman in White, arguing that the abusive and unhappy marriages in the novel lend themselves to contemporary discussions of trauma and the #MeToo movement, as seen in the 2018 BBC television adaptation. Indeed, this is an important point, and a reminder that while sensation novels do depict ways in which the past haunts the present, they were also considered to be up-to-date stories about the present moment, with their depictions of proto-feminism and new technologies. The book demonstrates the continued need to reassess our assumptions about popular fiction and canon formation, implying that the work done by feminist scholars in the 1970s and 80s is far from over. Written in clear prose, and with good knowledge of both Victorian and neo-Victorian scholarship, the book presents a convincing argument for the study of the popularity and legacy of the sensation novel beyond the nineteenth century. Tara MacDonald University of Idaho","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44083984","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.36
E. Courtemanche
American South were orthodox Christians. Similarly, polygenesis often mattered to polemicists such as Charles Bradlaugh mainly as a stick with which they could poke holes in Genesis. That belief did not weaken, but might actually have supported, a relativist defense of the right of distinct races to live free from interference or oppression. As a Member of Parliament, Bradlaugh became the crusading “member for India” (127). Moreover, the racial payoff of theories of human evolution was hardly straightforward: Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley were abolitionists and committed to monogenesis, but in describing the gradations through which the human race had passed, they often sounded like believers in a hierarchy of distinct races. In any event, freethinkers resembled their Christian foes in preferring more optimistic and teleological visions of evolution than the hard gospel of natural selection. The freethinkers studied here were largely “racial optimists” (160) who argued, admittedly with much condescension, that Black and brown people might deserve social and political inclusion; by the early twentieth century, some explicitly condemned “race prejudice” as superstition (175). By this time, some American freethinkers were Black, undermining the suspicion that secularism was just a mask for white arrogance. Alexander’s research has produced something more interesting than an apology for the kind of secularization still championed by such Victorian rationalist throwbacks as Sam Harris (215). His analysis suggests that Victorian racism was less a solid mentality, ascribable to or blamable on particular social or intellectual formations, than a fluid element which ebbed or flowed with the riptides of political and especially religious controversies. It sometimes suited freethinkers to identify with the shrewd Africans or sophisticated Chinese and Japanese atheists who had apparently seen through missionaries. But there was more ventriloquism than solidarity in that tactic, as when one writer posed as the Confucian tourist “Whang Chang Bang” to ridicule the “English Christian barbarian” (130). Where freethinkers lived in places hostile to Chinese immigration, they abruptly changed tune. One British Columbian atheist attacked the clergy for wanting to “flood this fair land with hordes of yellow boys in order to pump Christ into them” (139). While some American freethinkers stood up for Black people, others sneered that God was a “negro” or Jesus a “darky” to stir up the revulsion of fellow whites against the Bible (152). If controverted by other freethinkers, such utterances were always publishable, which suggests that racism was neither a doctrine nor a taboo, but a vocabulary whose usefulness to the movement varied with time and place. Perhaps the same was true for the churches they abhorred? Michael Ledger-Lomas St Mark’s College
{"title":"From Political Economy to Economics Through Nineteenth-Century Literature: Reclaiming the Social, edited by Elaine Hadley, Audrey Jaffe, and Sarah Winter","authors":"E. Courtemanche","doi":"10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.36","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.36","url":null,"abstract":"American South were orthodox Christians. Similarly, polygenesis often mattered to polemicists such as Charles Bradlaugh mainly as a stick with which they could poke holes in Genesis. That belief did not weaken, but might actually have supported, a relativist defense of the right of distinct races to live free from interference or oppression. As a Member of Parliament, Bradlaugh became the crusading “member for India” (127). Moreover, the racial payoff of theories of human evolution was hardly straightforward: Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley were abolitionists and committed to monogenesis, but in describing the gradations through which the human race had passed, they often sounded like believers in a hierarchy of distinct races. In any event, freethinkers resembled their Christian foes in preferring more optimistic and teleological visions of evolution than the hard gospel of natural selection. The freethinkers studied here were largely “racial optimists” (160) who argued, admittedly with much condescension, that Black and brown people might deserve social and political inclusion; by the early twentieth century, some explicitly condemned “race prejudice” as superstition (175). By this time, some American freethinkers were Black, undermining the suspicion that secularism was just a mask for white arrogance. Alexander’s research has produced something more interesting than an apology for the kind of secularization still championed by such Victorian rationalist throwbacks as Sam Harris (215). His analysis suggests that Victorian racism was less a solid mentality, ascribable to or blamable on particular social or intellectual formations, than a fluid element which ebbed or flowed with the riptides of political and especially religious controversies. It sometimes suited freethinkers to identify with the shrewd Africans or sophisticated Chinese and Japanese atheists who had apparently seen through missionaries. But there was more ventriloquism than solidarity in that tactic, as when one writer posed as the Confucian tourist “Whang Chang Bang” to ridicule the “English Christian barbarian” (130). Where freethinkers lived in places hostile to Chinese immigration, they abruptly changed tune. One British Columbian atheist attacked the clergy for wanting to “flood this fair land with hordes of yellow boys in order to pump Christ into them” (139). While some American freethinkers stood up for Black people, others sneered that God was a “negro” or Jesus a “darky” to stir up the revulsion of fellow whites against the Bible (152). If controverted by other freethinkers, such utterances were always publishable, which suggests that racism was neither a doctrine nor a taboo, but a vocabulary whose usefulness to the movement varied with time and place. Perhaps the same was true for the churches they abhorred? Michael Ledger-Lomas St Mark’s College","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49053512","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.35
Michael Ledger‐Lomas
{"title":"Race in a Godless World: Atheism, Race, and Civilization, 1850–1914 by Nathan G. Alexander (review)","authors":"Michael Ledger‐Lomas","doi":"10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.35","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.35","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"64 1","pages":"520 - 521"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42898956","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.39
Sarah A. Winter
{"title":"Bread Winner: An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy by Emma Griffin (review)","authors":"Sarah A. Winter","doi":"10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.39","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.39","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"64 1","pages":"528 - 530"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41630944","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.08
Kimberly J. Stern
help us think about these larger intertwined institutional and social issues it is William Morris, making this a most timely and important collection. Crucially for Morris, intellectual specialization must be seen as part and parcel of a capitalist system in which the division of labor reigns supreme, mental labor is privileged over manual labor, and our alienation from our own world and its making is profound—so much so today that students struggle to wrap their minds around the idea that labor could be pleasurable, or utopian ideals worth desiring and collectively working toward. In this light, the wealth of hands-on strategies here would be very much to Morris’s liking. We so rarely talk about the nuts and bolts of teaching and our wildest hopes and dreams when teaching what we love; this collection does that. It begins with Martinek and Miller identifying Morris as a “tonic to the political conditions of Trumpism and neoliberalism” and someone who “should be an integral part of the twenty-first-century classroom” (2). By the time I finished the collection, I could not agree more. Carolyn Lesjak Simon Fraser University
帮助我们思考这些更大的、相互交织的制度和社会问题的是威廉·莫里斯，使这本书成为一本最及时、最重要的合集。对莫里斯来说，至关重要的是，智力专业化必须被视为资本主义体系的一部分，在这个体系中，劳动分工至高无上，脑力劳动比体力劳动享有特权，我们与自己的世界及其形成的疏离感是深刻的——以至于今天的学生们很难将自己的思想包裹在劳动可以是愉快的想法上，或值得渴望和共同努力实现的乌托邦理想。有鉴于此，这里丰富的动手策略将非常符合莫里斯的喜好。我们很少谈论教学的细节，在教授我们热爱的东西时，我们最疯狂的希望和梦想；这个系列就是这么做的。它始于Martinek和Miller认为Morris是“特朗普主义和新自由主义政治条件的补品”，是“应该成为21世纪课堂不可或缺的一部分”的人（2）。当我完成收集时，我完全同意。Carolyn Lesjak Simon Fraser大学
{"title":"A Defence of the Humanities in a Utilitarian Age: Imagining What We Know, 1800–1850 by Paul Keen (review)","authors":"Kimberly J. Stern","doi":"10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.08","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.08","url":null,"abstract":"help us think about these larger intertwined institutional and social issues it is William Morris, making this a most timely and important collection. Crucially for Morris, intellectual specialization must be seen as part and parcel of a capitalist system in which the division of labor reigns supreme, mental labor is privileged over manual labor, and our alienation from our own world and its making is profound—so much so today that students struggle to wrap their minds around the idea that labor could be pleasurable, or utopian ideals worth desiring and collectively working toward. In this light, the wealth of hands-on strategies here would be very much to Morris’s liking. We so rarely talk about the nuts and bolts of teaching and our wildest hopes and dreams when teaching what we love; this collection does that. It begins with Martinek and Miller identifying Morris as a “tonic to the political conditions of Trumpism and neoliberalism” and someone who “should be an integral part of the twenty-first-century classroom” (2). By the time I finished the collection, I could not agree more. Carolyn Lesjak Simon Fraser University","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"64 1","pages":"461 - 463"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44739101","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.41
Susannah Ottaway
{"title":"Diet for a Large Planet: Industrial Britain, Food Systems, and World Ecology by Chris Otter (review)","authors":"Susannah Ottaway","doi":"10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.41","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.41","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"64 1","pages":"532 - 534"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48708216","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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