Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.5325/victinstj.50.2023.0186
Alison Chapman
Abstract This article introduces the Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry project and explores its indexing and encoding principles as well as edge cases that help to redefine the era’s most read poetry.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.5325/victinstj.50.2023.0270
Parama Roy
In The Way of the World (1987), Franco Moretti identifies the bildungsroman as “the ‘symbolic form’ of modernity,” one that allows a culture both to register the new and revolutionary aspect of an emergent European sociohistorical reality and to function as a vehicle of its legitimation.1 The modernity to which the bildungsroman responded, though, brought in its wake an array of tensions and hardships. Industrial capitalism, increased urbanization, and new opportunities for economic advancement were shadowed by the specter of affliction, marginalization, failure, and disillusionment. As Gretchen Braun notes, “Even as an increasingly literate populace eagerly consumed stories of self-actualization [as emblematized in the bildungsroman], many individuals whose gender and class limited their agency must surely have struggled to fully identify with the heroes of triumphant fictional accounts of individual success and community integration” (3). What forms of narrative embodiment, she wonders, might have been available to those unaccommodatable within the normative and teleological impetus of the bildungsroman, which she identifies as one of the two preeminent literary genres in the period? (The other is the marriage plot, the bourgeois feminine equivalent of the “male ambition plot” that is the bildungsroman.)Advances in the sciences of the mind, Braun proposes, generated new understandings of psychic disorder or injury and new vocabularies of diagnosis—“nerves,” “nervous exhaustion,” “neurasthenia,” “hysteria,” and “rail shock”—that enabled the relatively sympathetic representation of those outside the ambit of the normative or progressive life trajectory of the bildungsroman or the marriage plot. A lucid summary of the study of the mental sciences in a transatlantic context over the course of the century, which forms the core of the first chapter, underlines that the research on nervous disorders was available to physicians as well as to educated laypersons, including novelists. We know, for instance, that George Eliot was familiar with the prevailing scholarship on the mental sciences, which she incorporated into her fiction. The same was true for Thomas Hardy. It is this traffic between the realm of the mental sciences and that of the novel, suggests Braun, that permits the fictional integration of those who exist “on the margins of Victorian social legibility” (10). Such a claim is on the whole engaging and persuasive. But it is also worth noting that the bildungsroman, which the texts showcased in the monograph supposedly confront or resist, is less a self-evident or coherent genre than a convenient critical fiction binding together an extremely heterogeneous array of novels. As in the case of the marriage plot, genre is less a set of definitions than a series of ongoing arguments and recalibrations.The marginalized protagonists of Victorian fiction that Narrating Trauma takes as the objects of its analysis are of two kinds: “the traumatized an
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.5325/victinstj.50.2023.0294
Mary Jean Corbett
Oxymoronic as it may sound, the title of Tabitha Sparks’s study of nineteenth-century “novels about women novelists” that “feature [their] own artistic construction as part of the story” is neither inaptly chosen nor purely polemical—although a subtitle might have been in order (1). Challenging the ongoing association of metafiction mainly with postmodernist experimentation and building on recent criticism that emphasizes realism’s “capacity for model building rather than its declarative power,” Victorian Metafiction locates its chief examples in what might appear the most unlikely of sources (8). Its central sites of analysis, excluding Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), consist of underread nineteenth-century fiction by women, novels not known (if known at all) for taking narrative risks or playing the sort of games to which we have become habituated by Margaret Atwood and Don DeLillo. That the historical antecedents for metafiction don’t include nineteenth-century realism, and certainly not domestic realism, is for some critics axiomatic. Thus, even if scholars outside Victorian studies assert that “metafiction is not a historical phenomenon per se”—Sparks cites the seventeenth-century Don Quixote and the eighteenth-century Tristram Shandy as paradigmatic examples—they all agree that it is decidedly not a feature of the Victorian novel and indeed deploy nineteenth-century realism as a straw man against which the “metafictional self-consciousness and irony” of Umberto Eco or Ishmael Reed can be measured (13). Of course, Sparks challenges the reductive account of realism’s naïve dependence on access to “the real” even as she enriches our understanding of what metafiction might look like in a historical moment other than our own. In the process, she also makes a valuable contribution to rethinking the role that feminist criticism has played in keeping in place some of the assumptions that still consign a significant strand of nineteenth-century women’s fiction to noncanonical status.Sparks’s critical intervention depends on revising the genealogy of metafiction as it was established primarily in the 1970s and 1980s more or less simultaneously with—although at some distance from—the emergence of a feminist literary criticism that emphasized the recovery of women writers whose voices had been suppressed in and by the past. That genealogy itself depends on the usual story, invented by modernists and reinforced by modernist and postmodernist criticism, regarding the break from nineteenth-century realism: “Around or about 1910,” Sparks archly writes, “the artistic imagination changed and novelists like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, tired of the superficiality of novels (and novelists) that described a world of surfaces, turned their attention to experimental representations of consciousness and other ineffable dimensions” (2). Taking these high modernists at their word, second-wave Anglo-American feminist criticism identified feminist aesthetics in
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.5325/victinstj.50.2023.0280
Corey E. Andrews
This companion volume is the third in a series by Scottish Literature International designed to introduce readers to Scottish literature from 1400 to the twentieth century; like earlier volumes, it includes essays that cover a range of authors and genres, written by experts in the field. This particular volume is organized into three parts: Experiments, Consolidations, and Expansions. Each section examines key issues that influenced the development of Scottish literature, with attention paid to social, cultural, religious, and political contexts such as the Reform Act of 1832 and the Great Disruption of 1843, as well as more general developments in print culture and industrialization. The editors’ aim, as stated in their introduction, “The Strangeness of Centuries,” is to explore the nineteenth century as “the great undiscovered country for Scottish literary studies” in order to “remap the century to showcase the complexity of a period and place” (1). The volume achieves this objective, offering detailed and thoughtful analyses of familiar figures such as Walter Scott, John Galt, George MacDonald, and Margaret Oliphant, along with the writings of lesser-known Gaelic authors and urban poets like Evan MacColl, John MacLachlan, Alexander Smith, and James Macfarlan. Trends in genres are also ably assessed, particularly regarding the importance of periodical and newspaper publications in Scotland, along with the development of writing by women and working-class authors throughout the century.The first section, Experiments, highlights the period from 1800 to 1832 as “an age of innovation and expansion in Scottish publishing,” perhaps even a “golden age of print when Scottish cities, particularly Edinburgh, came to rival and sometimes surpass London as the centre of the British book trade” (5). Accordingly, much attention is paid to authors like Walter Scott who “became a phenomenon as the world’s first great literary star” (7) and periodicals such as Edinburgh Review, Quarterly Review, and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. In the chapter “The Novel: Romance and History,” Pam Perkins discusses Scott’s contributions to the novel genre in Scotland and beyond, finding that his use of romance “becomes a means of establishing the appeal of a lost or distant world” (29). This strategy can also be found in works by other Scottish novelists like Jane Porter, James Hogg, and John Galt, but used for much different purposes. In particular, Galt diverges from Scott by employing “elements of romance to reinforce his unromantic approach to historical narrative” (31). Perkins concludes that in novels of this period, “the nostalgic escapism of romance is associated not so much with a specific past culture as with the form of the novel itself” (32). In the chapter “Private Thoughts and Public Display: Gender, Genre, and Lives,” Susan Oliver also examines Scott’s influence as a celebrity, particularly how he became increasingly “distressed by the incursion of public respon
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.5325/victinstj.50.2023.0275
Amy M. King
Stimulating in its details as well as the overarching claim, Timothy Carens’s Strange Gods: Love and Idolatry in the Victorian Novel is one of those rare studies that is convincing precisely because it seems, only in retrospect, obvious—as if we must have, or certainly should have, already known this. It is a significant intervention in our understanding of the representation of Victorian romantic love, and how various mid- to late nineteenth-century marriage plots were impacted by—even derailed by—characters who were anxious about potential “idolatry”: about loving someone more than one’s Creator. What Strange Gods does—elegantly, persuasively, and with sympathy toward its subject—is remind us of the deep religiosity of Victorian culture, and how in recovering the importance of religion to the period, we may need to adjust our sense of cultural discourses that seem firmly within the realm of the secular. Strange Gods demonstrates that the Victorians worried that love for other people—one’s spouse, child, or otherwise beloved—might slip into religious error, and specifically the sin of idolatry. This is one of the central tenets of Abrahamic religions and the first of the biblical Ten Commandments: “I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:2–3). Strange Gods makes a convincing argument that Protestant beliefs about the problem of worshipping someone or something other than God informed the plotting of stories about love and marriage. It is a significant contribution to Victorian studies and an intervention if our thinking about how the Protestant culture of Victorian England looked not only outward to Catholic or “heathen” idolatry but inward, in what Carens evocatively calls a “self-monitoring impulse.”If the mark of an argument’s freshness resides in its ability to get its reader to rethink well-thumbed novels and to reach for other examples from one’s bookshelf, then Strange Gods certainly deserves that accolade. Immersed in what is a particularly lucid introduction to the importance of the language of idolatry to nineteenth-century British culture and narrative, the ideas prompted me to scan my bookshelf in search of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Sylvia’s Lovers (1863), and specifically the climactic scene between the dying Philip Hepburn and the eponymous Sylvia. In a memorable scene set by the sea in which they mutually seek each other’s forgiveness and affirm their love, what is foremost in this scene of reconciliation is his explanation of his religious error of idolatry:“I ha’ made thee my idol”: Philip understands his life’s mistake as having “sinned against Him” in loving Sylvia too much, in turning her into a kind of “graven image.”The transgression of idolatry is what Carens, in another context, describes in theological terms as “the most fundamental of all spiritual transgressions.” Philip’s insistence that his love was idolatrous
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.5325/victinstj.50.2023.0201
April Patrick, Natalie M. Houston, Lindsy Lawrence
Abstract This article describes the latest iteration of the Periodical Poetry Index, an open-access database that reveals the variety and complexity of nineteenth-century periodical poetry and its material presentation on the printed page. The project design, data ontology, and indexing methodology follow a sociohistorical model of the literary text and represent the distinctive features of each periodical printing of a given poem. The database foregrounds this publication context by indexing information about the arrangement of poems within and across periodical issues, variations in contributor signature, and the appearance of different languages, paratextual elements, typography, and page design. This article situates the project in the heritage of periodical studies and demonstrates the importance of new digital tools for research.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.5325/victinstj.50.2023.0003
Shalmi Barman
Abstract Although she was a laboring-class writer who worked in factories all her life, the factory odes of Ellen Johnston, the self-titled “Factory Girl,” have received little consideration as political poems. Yet in “Address to the Factory of Messrs. J. & W. I. Scott & Co.,” Johnston self-consciously manipulates the power dynamics between speaking subject and addressed other through imitation of lyric forms such as panegyric and elegy. Rereading Johnston’s use of rhetorical apostrophe in a poem to, and about, a Scottish textiles factory as politically strategic pushes back against the selection bias in recovery work and canon diversification efforts that predetermines the interpretive frames applied to minoritized writers.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.5325/victinstj.50.2023.0267
Caroline McCracken-Flesher
Patrick Scott is famed through Scottish literary studies for his remarkable service as director of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of South Carolina. Numerous critics and editors have depended on him for access to the rare or the obscure. Is there a little-known poem or an unfindable play? We all turn to Scott and the Thomas Cooper Library. Scott is, too, a scholar of distinction, with numerous edited volumes, editions, and important analyses to his credit. He is particularly distinguished as a Burnsean and as a scholar of Robert Louis Stevenson. Moreover, as successor, with Tony Jarrells, to G. Ross Roy as editor of Scottish literature’s first American journal (Studies in Scottish Literature), Scott has introduced the work of early career scholars and showcased research from far and wide.It is a pleasure, then, to see Scott’s encyclopedic knowledge present a sometimes-unexpected Robert Louis Stevenson in this “documentary” DLB volume from Gale and to know that this is yet another act of service to authors, readers, and critics.For a volume such as this and a modern, thoroughly published author like Stevenson, the challenge is not a paucity of materials but rather an excess. His thoughts and deeds, avidly recorded by an enthusiastic mother and nurse and elaborated by friends and fans, test an editor’s powers of selection.Scott, in this context, performs miracles of focusing yet redirecting our gaze. He honors well-established principles and narratives—sections track “Coming of Age in Edinburgh,” then “Bohemian and Belletrist.” At the same time, Scott prompts us to think about how these categories are constructed, and how far they derive from a later idea of the author. Thus, the section to follow Edinburgh and Stevenson’s youthful attitudes centers the author’s impact on the narratives of space: “Stevenson in America.”The book’s own structure—where volume parameters allow only excerpts, the telling image intervenes, and an unexpected context erupts—plays nicely within and against any tendency to coherent narrativization of Stevenson’s complex life. Scott’s interjections, too, set off in italics, are as prone to disconnect as to suture the stories that surround an author so borne up on myth. For instance, in a section on Stevenson’s university days, against a lively story of Stevenson’s canvassing against Thomas Carlyle as rector and nonetheless admiring his speech, Scott notes the unlikelihood that Stevenson, not yet a student, could have played much of a role (64).At the same time, this incident brings into surprising conjunction the somewhat checkered career of Stevenson as sometime engineer, actor, and student about town and the Sage of Chelsea. Stevenson’s friend is certain the yet-to-be author attended Carlyle’s speech and that he set aside his preference for Disraeli as rector to celebrate what he called “that glorious old Scot.” But what did Stevenson make of Carlyle’s exhortation to be “diligent” and to do “what you h
帕特里克·斯科特在南卡罗莱纳大学担任珍本和特别收藏主任期间，因其卓越的服务而在苏格兰文学研究中闻名。许多评论家和编辑都依赖他来获取稀有或晦涩的作品。是否有不为人知的诗歌或找不到的戏剧?我们都求助于斯科特和托马斯·库珀图书馆。斯科特也是一位杰出的学者，他有许多编辑过的书籍、版本和重要的分析。他作为伯恩肖恩和罗伯特·路易斯·史蒂文森的学者尤其杰出。此外，作为继托尼·贾雷尔斯(Tony Jarrells)之后，g·罗斯·罗伊(G. Ross Roy)担任苏格兰文学第一本美国期刊(苏格兰文学研究)的编辑，斯科特介绍了早期职业学者的作品，并展示了来自各地的研究。因此，看到斯科特的百科全书式的知识在盖尔出版社出版的这本“纪实”DLB卷中呈现出一个有时出乎意料的罗伯特·路易斯·史蒂文森，并知道这是对作者、读者和评论家的又一次服务，这是一件令人高兴的事。对于这样一本书，以及像史蒂文森这样一个现代的、彻底出版的作者来说，挑战不是材料的缺乏，而是材料的过剩。他的思想和行为，被一位热心的母亲和护士热切地记录下来，并被朋友和粉丝详细阐述，考验着编辑的选择能力。在这种情况下，斯科特创造了奇迹，他既能集中注意力，又能重新引导我们的目光。他尊重已经确立的原则和叙述——包括《爱丁堡的成年》和《波西米亚与贝勒特》。与此同时，斯科特促使我们思考这些类别是如何构建的，以及它们在多大程度上源自后来对作者的看法。因此，跟随爱丁堡和史蒂文森的年轻态度的部分集中了作者对空间叙事的影响:“史蒂文森在美国”。这本书本身的结构——体积参数只允许摘录，生动的图像介入，一个意想不到的背景爆发——在史蒂文森复杂生活的连贯叙述中发挥了很好的作用，也反对任何倾向。斯科特的感叹词也是用斜体字写的，既容易断开，也容易将围绕着一个如此依赖神话的作者的故事串联起来。例如，在关于史蒂文森大学时代的一节中，在一个生动的故事中，史蒂文森游说反对托马斯·卡莱尔担任校长，但仍然钦佩他的演讲，斯科特指出，当时还不是学生的史蒂文森不可能发挥多大作用(64)。与此同时，这一事件出人意料地将史蒂文森曲折的职业生涯联系在一起，他曾是工程师、演员、小镇学生和切尔西圣人。史蒂文森的朋友确信，这位即将成为作家的人出席了卡莱尔的演讲，他放弃了对迪斯雷利担任校长的偏爱，以庆祝他所说的“那位光荣的老苏格兰人”。但是斯蒂文森如何理解卡莱尔的劝告:要“勤奋”，并去做“你从你的顾问那里听到的，在许多顾问中有智慧——当你后悔的时候为时已晚”(65)。像这样的书的优点之一就在于它的不可预测性以及由此带来的突如其来的洞见。在这里，标注和图像起着重要的作用。值得表扬的往往不是伟大的作品，而是它的其他作品，或者是一个重要的细节。想想看:当史蒂文森第一次去萨拉纳克旅行时，他不得不乘轮船沿着哈德逊河而上，然后坐火车，然后坐马车;然而，1887年以后，铁路的延伸使他能够接触到东海岸的朋友和出版商。图片显示了一页被大切除的化身——厄特森本可以潜伏更长的时间等待海德先生(292);未出版的《发干》与《一场狂欢》的承诺一起从纸上蹦了出来，约翰逊博士的题词——“先生，约翰逊博士说，让我们建立一个社会吧”——以及令人不安的梅菲斯托菲勒斯。读者肯定会在这里找到一些东西来改变他们的假设，或者鼓励他们在“必读”清单上增加一些东西(132)。其他惊喜还包括进入意想不到的、具有挑衅性的环境。谁知道斯特拉斯佩弗——史蒂文森开始想象一段将成为《绑架》的历史的地方——把自己称为“苏格兰的哈罗盖特”(193)?图中是胡·哈塔奇(Dhu Heartach)的金属工人营房，它的大鼓装在细长的腿上，让人想起一座漂流到海里的水塔(73)。史蒂文森一家将在那里建造一座灯塔，罗伯特·路易斯想象着邻近的厄瑞德岛上的一个漂流者，此时这里是一个工业区。还有史蒂文森在比利时和法国的运河和河流中划着的“罗布·罗伊”独木舟。从1868年《男孩自己的船书》中的图表来看，这是一个奇怪的装置——包括躺椅、帆、三角旗和小狗(137页)。这是为运动中的年轻人设计的最新款式。 虽然照片的质量有时会有所欠缺，但考虑到所选照片的年代和文字复制的变幻莫测，我们只能着迷于1865年史蒂文森一家在皮布尔斯的生活，以及在当代社区和工作的背景下，看到两个女仆和令人敬畏的护士卡米(57岁)在旁边。如果互联网的机会使这类书籍的参考价值不如以前那么重要，那么对于史蒂文森的学者和仰慕者来说，还有很多东西可以从中获得。帕特里克·斯科特的精心策划，加上他广博的知识和包容的精神，使这本书引人入胜，引人入胜。对于我们这些渴望认识一位作家、在他们的作品中获得指导、了解一个时期或启动一个学术项目的人来说，这是一个很好的起点。
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.5325/victinstj.50.2023.0054
Tin Yan Grace Lee
Abstract Villette (1853), Charlotte Brontë’s last novel, is famously riddled with ambiguity: its narrator-protagonist, Lucy Snowe, avoids disclosing details about her childhood, fails to reveal to readers the identity of characters she recognizes from her past, and refuses to confirm if her love interest, M. Paul, has died at sea. Believing Lucy’s ambiguous narrative style to be a tool she uses to train readers to better understand her, many critics have focused on trying to interpret Lucy’s silences and evasions “correctly,” thereby turning themselves into Lucy’s or Brontë’s “ideal” authorial readers. However, throughout her life, Lucy has resisted being read by people who assume they can fully know and fit her into their worldview. Unwilling to impose her views on others, Lucy’s autobiography encourages readers to make their own meaning without deciphering how she intends for it to be read. She maintains that she is ultimately unknowable to her readers, just as they are to her, and preserves, rather than erases, the distance between reader and author. By constructing an authorial reader who does not seek to think as Lucy does, Villette invites readers into an ethical relationship with Lucy in which otherness is respected and intimacy is possible despite differences.
{"title":"Being “Rightly Known”: Otherness and the Ethics of Reading in Charlotte Brontë’s <i>Villette</i>","authors":"Tin Yan Grace Lee","doi":"10.5325/victinstj.50.2023.0054","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/victinstj.50.2023.0054","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Villette (1853), Charlotte Brontë’s last novel, is famously riddled with ambiguity: its narrator-protagonist, Lucy Snowe, avoids disclosing details about her childhood, fails to reveal to readers the identity of characters she recognizes from her past, and refuses to confirm if her love interest, M. Paul, has died at sea. Believing Lucy’s ambiguous narrative style to be a tool she uses to train readers to better understand her, many critics have focused on trying to interpret Lucy’s silences and evasions “correctly,” thereby turning themselves into Lucy’s or Brontë’s “ideal” authorial readers. However, throughout her life, Lucy has resisted being read by people who assume they can fully know and fit her into their worldview. Unwilling to impose her views on others, Lucy’s autobiography encourages readers to make their own meaning without deciphering how she intends for it to be read. She maintains that she is ultimately unknowable to her readers, just as they are to her, and preserves, rather than erases, the distance between reader and author. By constructing an authorial reader who does not seek to think as Lucy does, Villette invites readers into an ethical relationship with Lucy in which otherness is respected and intimacy is possible despite differences.","PeriodicalId":499402,"journal":{"name":"Victorians Institute journal","volume":"61 36","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135062578","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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