Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1017/s1060150323000256
Jayne Hildebrand
This essay focuses on the proliferation of diverse spiritualities in Victorian Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century, including Theosophy, neopaganism, spiritualism, and emerging occult practices. It makes the case that this proliferation of spiritual thought emerged not in opposition to, but rather in harmony with, the ascendancy of scientific naturalist frameworks in the wake of Darwinism, and that the flexibility of “spirituality” as a concept serves a crucial function for understanding this late Victorian religious landscape. As a (very brief) case study, it examines the fusion of the spiritual and scientific in Marie Corelli's late Victorian bestseller, A Romance of Two Worlds (1886). Her work, I suggest, highlights the key role of new popular genres of speculative fiction in navigating the boundaries between spirit and matter at the fin de siècle.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1017/s1060150323000165
Douglas Small
This “Keywords Redux” article examines the significance of drugs (psychoactive substances) in Victorian culture and literature, theorizing their potential for both performance enhancement and for pleasure.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1017/s1060150323000633
Daniel Hack
How much time has passed since the publication of VLC’ s Keywords issue five years ago? This is not a trick question. Students of nineteenth-century British literature and culture are primed to see five years as a long time (“with the length of five long summers”), and events at both national and global scales have encouraged a widespread sense that 2018 is located less in the recent past than on the far side of a divide—in the Before Times. On the other hand, the long view encouraged by a scholarly focus on a period that ended over a century ago may see little or no meaningful time as having passed between 2018 and 2023. Moreover, on a more quotidian level, the very pace of scholarship—the amount of time it typically takes to conceive, research, write, and publish work, even for those without a Casaubonian bone in their bodies—can make five years seem like no time at all (“five summers that flew by,” as Wordsworth might have put it had he been on an academic calendar).
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1017/s1060150323000323
Andrea Selleri
This article makes a case to the effect that the free will vs. determinism dichotomy is relevant for Victorianists.
这篇文章提出了一个案例，其效果是自由意志与决定论的二分法与维多利亚时代有关。
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1017/s1060150323000475
Jessie Reeder
Informal empire is less a settled concept than a vexing category. Scholars disagree on the complicity of individuals, the extent of government oversight, and even whether informal empire is in fact imperial. I argue that informal empire is best approached through the lens of paradox. It is a system with no centralized authority yet which gave Britain a powerful role in the formation of Latin America. It relied on the continuing independence of Latin American nations and yet compromised their sovereignty. It often fostered the economic progress of the new nations and yet strangled their development. It grew out of the labor of thousands of individual migrants and travelers, and yet many of these people had no sense that they were involved in something called empire. What informal empire means is still very much up for debate. However, what it does for scholars of the nineteenth century is quite clear: it calls us to the study of imperialism in new ways, asking us to expand our gaze beyond the usual sites, to more openly conceptualize power relations, and—using all the particular powers of literary study we possess—to be attuned to the strangeness and paradox of imperialism.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1017/s1060150323000116
Jessica Murray
The word “conscience” appears frequently in Victorian writings across realms of discourse, in which it assumed an edge of ambivalence and energy difficult for us to perceive in the twenty-first century. While conscience today may seem a residual concept, recent critical strains in Victorian studies have suggested the possibilities bound up in examining anew this complex and multivalent word. Turning particularly to the writings of Charles Darwin and George Eliot reveals a self-conscious awareness not only of how the fluctuating meanings of conscience capture broader social shifts, but the ways these shifts are registered and enacted in language.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1017/s1060150323000517
Mark Allison
Anglo-American socialism has reached a curious impasse. Levels of economic inequality not seen since the nineteenth century would lead one to anticipate an upsurge in socialist affiliation and activism. Nevertheless, socialism has stagnated as a political force. This essay argues that, as a collectivist ideology, socialism demands a degree of communal identification that modern individuals find uncomfortable, even threatening, to the integrity of the self. Investigating this discomfort leads me to argue that, while socialism is not a religion ( pace the claim of Gareth Stedman Jones), it nonetheless flourishes in eras of spiritual and societal foment. In such periods, communal effervescence softens the boundaries of the self, rendering collectivist ideologies like socialism more intuitive and appealing. Given desacralizing trends in Anglo-America, a contemporary socialist revival would seem unlikely. Consequently, I argue that it is time for progressives to embrace, rather than critique, the strong sense of individual autonomy and deep subjectivity that characterizes bourgeois individualism. The Victorian socialist canon provides many resources for a reconciliation of individualism and collectivism, which I illustrate via reference to H. G. Wells, John Stuart Mill, and Oscar Wilde.
{"title":"Socialism","authors":"Mark Allison","doi":"10.1017/s1060150323000517","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1060150323000517","url":null,"abstract":"Anglo-American socialism has reached a curious impasse. Levels of economic inequality not seen since the nineteenth century would lead one to anticipate an upsurge in socialist affiliation and activism. Nevertheless, socialism has stagnated as a political force. This essay argues that, as a collectivist ideology, socialism demands a degree of communal identification that modern individuals find uncomfortable, even threatening, to the integrity of the self. Investigating this discomfort leads me to argue that, while socialism is not a religion ( pace the claim of Gareth Stedman Jones), it nonetheless flourishes in eras of spiritual and societal foment. In such periods, communal effervescence softens the boundaries of the self, rendering collectivist ideologies like socialism more intuitive and appealing. Given desacralizing trends in Anglo-America, a contemporary socialist revival would seem unlikely. Consequently, I argue that it is time for progressives to embrace, rather than critique, the strong sense of individual autonomy and deep subjectivity that characterizes bourgeois individualism. The Victorian socialist canon provides many resources for a reconciliation of individualism and collectivism, which I illustrate via reference to H. G. Wells, John Stuart Mill, and Oscar Wilde.","PeriodicalId":54154,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135497529","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1017/s1060150322000195
J. McDonagh
Population mobility is an analytic category through which we can reconsider nineteenth-century literature and its locations, and not just through an imperial lens. If we look beyond the geographical boundaries of empire, we get a clearer sense of the stakes of Victorian place-making. In this essay I briefly examine a case of two hundred migrants from Scotland to Venezuela in the 1820s as a model for a different kind of analysis that thinks about the impermanent, or fugitive, elements of migration and the ways these intersect with literary study.
{"title":"Victorians in Dislocation: Migration and Fugitive Place","authors":"J. McDonagh","doi":"10.1017/s1060150322000195","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1060150322000195","url":null,"abstract":"Population mobility is an analytic category through which we can reconsider nineteenth-century literature and its locations, and not just through an imperial lens. If we look beyond the geographical boundaries of empire, we get a clearer sense of the stakes of Victorian place-making. In this essay I briefly examine a case of two hundred migrants from Scotland to Venezuela in the 1820s as a model for a different kind of analysis that thinks about the impermanent, or fugitive, elements of migration and the ways these intersect with literary study.","PeriodicalId":54154,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE","volume":"51 1","pages":"135 - 139"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57170179","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1017/s1060150323000591
Benjamin Morgan
This essay argues that “planet” has recently become an important concept for scholars of nineteenth-century literature and culture. Whereas concepts such as the “globe” or the “world” portray the Earth as a space subject to surveillance and political power, the concept of the planet emphasizes the alien, nonanthropocentric aspects of the Earth and its history.
{"title":"Planet","authors":"Benjamin Morgan","doi":"10.1017/s1060150323000591","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1060150323000591","url":null,"abstract":"This essay argues that “planet” has recently become an important concept for scholars of nineteenth-century literature and culture. Whereas concepts such as the “globe” or the “world” portray the Earth as a space subject to surveillance and political power, the concept of the planet emphasizes the alien, nonanthropocentric aspects of the Earth and its history.","PeriodicalId":54154,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE","volume":"101 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135497517","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-05DOI: 10.1017/S106015032200002X
Zach Fruit
Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native (1878) has been praised for its careful attention to the relationship between humans and their environment. Hardy traces the intricate relationship between local community, ecosystem, economy, and national political structures with surprising fluidity. This essay argues that his attention to detail provides an important account of the function of the wasteland in English historical development. In doing so, it also establishes the category of waste as a functional element of the character networks of narrative fiction. While Hardy's attention to waste emerges from a respect for the English rural laborer and a nostalgia for precapitalist modes of social and economic life, his valorization of English parsimony and imagination nonetheless subtend a form of nationalism coextensive with the production of British imperial ideology.
{"title":"Bleak Prospects: Wasteland and National Identity in Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native","authors":"Zach Fruit","doi":"10.1017/S106015032200002X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S106015032200002X","url":null,"abstract":"Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native (1878) has been praised for its careful attention to the relationship between humans and their environment. Hardy traces the intricate relationship between local community, ecosystem, economy, and national political structures with surprising fluidity. This essay argues that his attention to detail provides an important account of the function of the wasteland in English historical development. In doing so, it also establishes the category of waste as a functional element of the character networks of narrative fiction. While Hardy's attention to waste emerges from a respect for the English rural laborer and a nostalgia for precapitalist modes of social and economic life, his valorization of English parsimony and imagination nonetheless subtend a form of nationalism coextensive with the production of British imperial ideology.","PeriodicalId":54154,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE","volume":"51 1","pages":"31 - 57"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43151221","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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