Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1017/s1060150323000335
Sezen Ünlüönen
In the nineteenth century, Britain had intense political, economic, and cultural relations with the Ottoman Empire: they were political allies during the Crimean War; for several decades, British creditors ran the Ottoman economy via Ottoman Public Debt Administration; many Ottoman cultural institutions, such as the Imperial Museum, were modeled after their British counterparts. Given this interconnected history, this essay argues that the Ottoman Empire could provide a rich field of inquiry for the Victorian studies as the field tries to “undiscipline” itself.
{"title":"Ottoman Empire","authors":"Sezen Ünlüönen","doi":"10.1017/s1060150323000335","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1060150323000335","url":null,"abstract":"In the nineteenth century, Britain had intense political, economic, and cultural relations with the Ottoman Empire: they were political allies during the Crimean War; for several decades, British creditors ran the Ottoman economy via Ottoman Public Debt Administration; many Ottoman cultural institutions, such as the Imperial Museum, were modeled after their British counterparts. Given this interconnected history, this essay argues that the Ottoman Empire could provide a rich field of inquiry for the Victorian studies as the field tries to “undiscipline” itself.","PeriodicalId":54154,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE","volume":"97 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":"135497255","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/s1060150323000426
Erin Spampinato, Doreen Thierauf
The Victorian period was notorious for its oblique representations of sexual violence. This article argues that rape is a necessary word and concept for Victorian studies and, we contend, a keyword for a growing subfield of literary and cultural scholarship, humanistic rape studies. Without rape as a stable signifier of specific acts, we find ourselves transported back to the nineteenth century, fumbling like Tess Durbeyfield for language that adequately describes what happened. Rape remains an indispensable domain of nineteenth-century literary studies precisely because it is a thoroughly historically contingent phenomenon. It is part of the power of rape, of its current structural pervasiveness, that it is capable of shaping people's expectations to such an extent that it suggests itself as a timeless, eternally recurring fact of life, when it actually amounts to an intensely situated set of behaviors, many of which crystallized into their current forms in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, propelled by changing labor conditions, European imperialism, and shifting family and romantic configurations. Literary scholarship, especially in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies, has traditionally attempted to tether representations of gender-based violence to “objective,” transhistorical frameworks such as “the law” and psychology, a move we wish to counter here.
{"title":"Rape","authors":"Erin Spampinato, Doreen Thierauf","doi":"10.1017/s1060150323000426","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1060150323000426","url":null,"abstract":"The Victorian period was notorious for its oblique representations of sexual violence. This article argues that rape is a necessary word and concept for Victorian studies and, we contend, a keyword for a growing subfield of literary and cultural scholarship, humanistic rape studies. Without rape as a stable signifier of specific acts, we find ourselves transported back to the nineteenth century, fumbling like Tess Durbeyfield for language that adequately describes what happened. Rape remains an indispensable domain of nineteenth-century literary studies precisely because it is a thoroughly historically contingent phenomenon. It is part of the power of rape, of its current structural pervasiveness, that it is capable of shaping people's expectations to such an extent that it suggests itself as a timeless, eternally recurring fact of life, when it actually amounts to an intensely situated set of behaviors, many of which crystallized into their current forms in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, propelled by changing labor conditions, European imperialism, and shifting family and romantic configurations. Literary scholarship, especially in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies, has traditionally attempted to tether representations of gender-based violence to “objective,” transhistorical frameworks such as “the law” and psychology, a move we wish to counter here.","PeriodicalId":54154,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE","volume":"19 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":"135497262","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/s106015032300013x
Emma B. Mincks, Ryan D. Fong
This keyword essay discusses the importance of centering Indigenous perspectives as Victorianists engage in the work of “decolonizing” their research and teaching. It underscores the necessity of citing Native and First Nations scholars and activists and of building reciprocal relations with living Indigenous communities in both local and global contexts.
{"title":"Indigeneity","authors":"Emma B. Mincks, Ryan D. Fong","doi":"10.1017/s106015032300013x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s106015032300013x","url":null,"abstract":"This keyword essay discusses the importance of centering Indigenous perspectives as Victorianists engage in the work of “decolonizing” their research and teaching. It underscores the necessity of citing Native and First Nations scholars and activists and of building reciprocal relations with living Indigenous communities in both local and global contexts.","PeriodicalId":54154,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE","volume":"134 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":"135497521","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/s106015032300027x
Benjamin D. O'Dell
Historicity—that is, a cultural and aesthetic engagement with historical movement—is a crucial term for analyzing and evaluating what we commonly call “realist” fiction. In The Historical Novel (1939), Georg Lukács famously associated literature's historicity with the realist novel's ability to capture historical movement through typical characters, a feature he tied to Walter Scott's historical romances. For Lukács, Scott's “faithfulness” to history does not imply “a chronicle-like, naturalistic reproduction of language, mode of thought, and feeling of the past.” Rather, it comes from the way Scott uses “necessary anachronism” to portray the past “as the necessary prehistory of the present,” primarily through his protagonists’ symbolic movement between warring camps. Although historical romances remained popular in British literature after Scott's death, Victorian historical romances differed from the Waverley novels in important ways. This brief keyword essay considers the nature of those differences and their effect on literature's historicity more generally.
{"title":"Historicity","authors":"Benjamin D. O'Dell","doi":"10.1017/s106015032300027x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s106015032300027x","url":null,"abstract":"Historicity—that is, a cultural and aesthetic engagement with historical movement—is a crucial term for analyzing and evaluating what we commonly call “realist” fiction. In The Historical Novel (1939), Georg Lukács famously associated literature's historicity with the realist novel's ability to capture historical movement through typical characters, a feature he tied to Walter Scott's historical romances. For Lukács, Scott's “faithfulness” to history does not imply “a chronicle-like, naturalistic reproduction of language, mode of thought, and feeling of the past.” Rather, it comes from the way Scott uses “necessary anachronism” to portray the past “as the necessary prehistory of the present,” primarily through his protagonists’ symbolic movement between warring camps. Although historical romances remained popular in British literature after Scott's death, Victorian historical romances differed from the Waverley novels in important ways. This brief keyword essay considers the nature of those differences and their effect on literature's historicity more generally.","PeriodicalId":54154,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE","volume":"23 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":"135497523","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/s1060150323000347
Aviva Briefel
I examine the temporality of disaster through a condition that I term “retroactive hopefulness”: looking back at a time when we could still hope that we would be exempt from imminent catastrophe. I discuss this condition in relation to our current Covid moment and to H. G. Wells's dystopic novel The War of the Worlds (1898).
{"title":"Disaster","authors":"Aviva Briefel","doi":"10.1017/s1060150323000347","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1060150323000347","url":null,"abstract":"I examine the temporality of disaster through a condition that I term “retroactive hopefulness”: looking back at a time when we could still hope that we would be exempt from imminent catastrophe. I discuss this condition in relation to our current Covid moment and to H. G. Wells's dystopic novel The War of the Worlds (1898).","PeriodicalId":54154,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE","volume":"4 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":"135497527","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/s1060150323000049
Kimberly J. Stern
Although grammar is often associated with schematic approaches to education, it was a hotly contested subject in the nineteenth century. Considering nineteenth-century grammar texts, as well as the recent turn to “grammar” as a theoretical lens in nineteenth-century studies, this keywords entry proposes that grammar, far from reflecting fixed and incontrovertible precepts, serves as a powerful tool for querying and renegotiating disciplinary structures.
{"title":"Grammar","authors":"Kimberly J. Stern","doi":"10.1017/s1060150323000049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1060150323000049","url":null,"abstract":"Although grammar is often associated with schematic approaches to education, it was a hotly contested subject in the nineteenth century. Considering nineteenth-century grammar texts, as well as the recent turn to “grammar” as a theoretical lens in nineteenth-century studies, this keywords entry proposes that grammar, far from reflecting fixed and incontrovertible precepts, serves as a powerful tool for querying and renegotiating disciplinary structures.","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":"135497535","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/S1060150322000158
Sutanuka Ghosh
The project Literary Ecology in Nineteenth-Century Bengal has been investigating the representation and interpretation of the relationship between humans and nonhuman nature in the context of the radical transformations in the physical and ideological landscapes that characterized nineteenth-century Bengal. We are examining the diverse political, economic and scientific influences that shaped the narrative trajectory of literary ecology in nineteenth-century Bengal, which subsequently went on to influence understandings, representations, and interpretations of ecological concerns in the twentieth century.
{"title":"Literary Ecology in Nineteenth-Century Bengal","authors":"Sutanuka Ghosh","doi":"10.1017/S1060150322000158","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150322000158","url":null,"abstract":"The project Literary Ecology in Nineteenth-Century Bengal has been investigating the representation and interpretation of the relationship between humans and nonhuman nature in the context of the radical transformations in the physical and ideological landscapes that characterized nineteenth-century Bengal. We are examining the diverse political, economic and scientific influences that shaped the narrative trajectory of literary ecology in nineteenth-century Bengal, which subsequently went on to influence understandings, representations, and interpretations of ecological concerns in the twentieth century.","PeriodicalId":54154,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE","volume":"7 1","pages":"115 - 119"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57170325","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/S1060150322000110
D. Friedman
This essay argues that an antiracist, anticolonialist Victorian studies must remain open to universalizing claims of the kind found in early works of queer theory, particularly Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet (1990). Although recent work in queer studies (as well as literary studies generally) finds inspiration in Sedgwick's late-career turn to the more modest notion of “reparative reading,” strong knowledge claims are necessary to disrupt the colonial matrix of power that systematically renders both racism and heteronormativity invisible. Rereading Epistemology in light of postcolonial theories of comparison, I argue that, although Sedgwick does not address how the late Victorian “crisis of homo/heterosexual definition” takes place within the overall colonial system of power, she nevertheless inhabits a critical position remarkably similar to what Walter Mignolo calls “the border epistemology” of “decolonial thinking.” This entails making universalizing claims that promote the emancipation of disenfranchised groups but also rejecting the imperialist fantasy of critical neutrality in favor of political commitment and historical self-awareness. I end by putting the Sedgwick of Epistemology in dialogue with critical race theorist Sylvia Wynter to suggest how scholars might integrate their respective critical approaches by analyzing the figure of “the human” in Victorian literature and culture.
{"title":"Do Queer Theory and Victorian Studies Still Have Anything to Learn from Each Other?","authors":"D. Friedman","doi":"10.1017/S1060150322000110","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150322000110","url":null,"abstract":"This essay argues that an antiracist, anticolonialist Victorian studies must remain open to universalizing claims of the kind found in early works of queer theory, particularly Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet (1990). Although recent work in queer studies (as well as literary studies generally) finds inspiration in Sedgwick's late-career turn to the more modest notion of “reparative reading,” strong knowledge claims are necessary to disrupt the colonial matrix of power that systematically renders both racism and heteronormativity invisible. Rereading Epistemology in light of postcolonial theories of comparison, I argue that, although Sedgwick does not address how the late Victorian “crisis of homo/heterosexual definition” takes place within the overall colonial system of power, she nevertheless inhabits a critical position remarkably similar to what Walter Mignolo calls “the border epistemology” of “decolonial thinking.” This entails making universalizing claims that promote the emancipation of disenfranchised groups but also rejecting the imperialist fantasy of critical neutrality in favor of political commitment and historical self-awareness. I end by putting the Sedgwick of Epistemology in dialogue with critical race theorist Sylvia Wynter to suggest how scholars might integrate their respective critical approaches by analyzing the figure of “the human” in Victorian literature and culture.","PeriodicalId":54154,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE","volume":"51 1","pages":"141 - 156"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57170269","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/s1060150323000232
Adela Pinch
This essay argues that “experience” is an essential keyword for Victorian studies. The concept spiked in interest in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Causes for this spike include the division of humanistic knowledge into the modern disciplines, and the pressure that idealist philosophy put on British empiricist thought. Shadworth Hodgson's 1898 The Metaphysic of Experience is featured both as a text exemplifying the paradoxes of Victorian experience-talk and as an invitation to further study.
{"title":"Experience","authors":"Adela Pinch","doi":"10.1017/s1060150323000232","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1060150323000232","url":null,"abstract":"This essay argues that “experience” is an essential keyword for Victorian studies. The concept spiked in interest in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Causes for this spike include the division of humanistic knowledge into the modern disciplines, and the pressure that idealist philosophy put on British empiricist thought. Shadworth Hodgson's 1898 The Metaphysic of Experience is featured both as a text exemplifying the paradoxes of Victorian experience-talk and as an invitation to further study.","PeriodicalId":54154,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE","volume":"21 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":"135497242","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/s1060150323000153
Chunlin Men
This essay focuses on “abstraction” as an underresearched keyword in Victorian studies. I argue that the productive ambiguity of abstraction indexes contradictions and tensions in capitalist modernity, statistical thinking, and interdisciplinary mediations that trace significant parts of their histories to the nineteenth century and still heavily inform our current Victorian scholarships.
{"title":"Abstraction","authors":"Chunlin Men","doi":"10.1017/s1060150323000153","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1060150323000153","url":null,"abstract":"This essay focuses on “abstraction” as an underresearched keyword in Victorian studies. I argue that the productive ambiguity of abstraction indexes contradictions and tensions in capitalist modernity, statistical thinking, and interdisciplinary mediations that trace significant parts of their histories to the nineteenth century and still heavily inform our current Victorian scholarships.","PeriodicalId":54154,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE","volume":"69 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":"135497251","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}
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：