VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE最新文献

If advanced high school English classrooms remain some of the few spaces where young people, especially young people of color, might read the Victorian novel, what opportunities for political work might we expect, innovate, demand from those encounters? Drawing from experiences directing LitLabs, immersive, site-specific, design-based approaches to studying literature with South LA teens, the author argues for expanding the geographies literary works reference to include readers’ embodiment in place so that Victorian studies can strengthen and nurture a sense of place for readers often displaced by engagements with the Western literary canon. The essay traces the conflicted, but rewarding, processes for reading literature with an agenda for placekeeping, as one avenue for producing a self-affirming communal consciousness among readers as users of urban space. The essay turns to David Copperfield, where a typical mode of individualized, absorptive reading is contrasted to LitLabs’ model of “emplaced reading” through its adaptations of a core urban humanities “fused practice” of thick-mapping.

Victorian activists Mary Carpenter (1807–1877) and Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904) held different standing in their day: the international founder of reform schools, considered a devout “noble worker,” mentored the Theist journalist who is better known today for feminism and animal-rights organizing. The essay draws on contemporary and recent studies of both figures and the short versions collected in books in Collective Biographies of Women, a database with an XML schema annotating the narratives. Examining different treatment of Carpenter and Cobbe in varied texts, the essay especially focuses on keywords and phrases, “noble,” “worker,” “perishing and dangerous classes,” and tropes of a lady entering low or dark places. Evangelical discourse is disparaged in the current climate among academics and activists seeking health care, education, or rights for the poor, but affect and faith-based activism should not be discounted then or now.

The collaboration of William Hyde and Alice Meynell in London Impressions (1898) led to Hyde's photogravure image, “Utilitarian London,” which is a direct critique of Turner's Rain, Steam and Speed (1844), and to a companion essay by Meynell, “The Climate of Smoke,” that is an ecological poetics exploring the deep harms of pollution.

The end of the nineteenth century in Britain saw a range of “newnesses”; New Unionism signified a boom in trade unionism, while the New Woman figure symbolized women's struggle for independence. However, both as literary figures and as real-life writers, such New Women were largely middle class and educated. Where are the working women within the sphere of literary and cultural production, and how are they represented within the New Unionism? Against a dominant trade unionism that argued for a “family wage” and considered women's organizing as a threat, the Women's Trade Union League (1874), the National Federation of Women Workers (1906), the 1888 Match Girls strike, and writers and labor activists such as Annie Besant and Clementina Black noted women's roles within labor. Attempting to locate a working New Woman in the trade union movement, this paper is a reflective work-in-progress, an exploration rather than a finished argument. Written by a precariously employed woman trade unionist in the twenty-first century, struggling to find time to write, examining the works of precariously employed women workers one hundred years earlier, the essay poses questions about what happens to politically engaged scholarship in a time of increasingly precarious working conditions and knowledges.

How can tenure-track allies to adjunct workers contribute in our new era of anti-tenure attacks and surging labor activism? Two of the founders of Tenure for the Common Good find guidance in Elizabeth Gaskell's representations of class relations. Gaskell reveals the pervasive entrapment of exploitative systems and suggests ways that privileged participants can serve as intermediaries, amplifying the voices of those who need to be heard. Drawing on servant relations in Cranford and laborer relations in the North and South, we find warrant for a new visibility in the fight against adjunctification.