Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1017/s1060150323000025
Alex Murray
The conservative—as both a philosophy and a political ideology—was radically unstable in the Victorian period, and so too were its manifestations in the literary sphere. However, as one of the keynotes of Victorian politics, life, and literature, it raises some serious questions about the consequences for our scholarship that it remains relatively neglected and undertheorized. We should train ourselves to read for the conservative alongside the liberal, to see how conservative aesthetics shape writers and texts in myriad ways.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1017/s1060150323000244
Joyce L. Huff
The nineteenth century was pivotal in shaping contemporary Western attitudes toward fat. Victorian representations of fatness participated in the construction of knowledge about bodies in general, intersecting with economic, medical, gendered, and racial discourses. Fatness was thought to make manifest those hidden consumer appetites lurking within all bodies. It thus provided a visual grounding for the impetus toward bourgeois self-management. At the same time, representations of fatness were complicated by intersecting discourses of class, gender, and race. This essay argues for the adoption of new directions for research that foreground the role played by perceptions of body size in the construction of Victorian bodies. Fattening Victorian studies requires an interrogation of the ways in which the normative ideologies and practices associated with bourgeois body management have structured a society that was, and remains, hostile to fat bodies.
{"title":"Fat","authors":"Joyce L. Huff","doi":"10.1017/s1060150323000244","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1060150323000244","url":null,"abstract":"The nineteenth century was pivotal in shaping contemporary Western attitudes toward fat. Victorian representations of fatness participated in the construction of knowledge about bodies in general, intersecting with economic, medical, gendered, and racial discourses. Fatness was thought to make manifest those hidden consumer appetites lurking within all bodies. It thus provided a visual grounding for the impetus toward bourgeois self-management. At the same time, representations of fatness were complicated by intersecting discourses of class, gender, and race. This essay argues for the adoption of new directions for research that foreground the role played by perceptions of body size in the construction of Victorian bodies. Fattening Victorian studies requires an interrogation of the ways in which the normative ideologies and practices associated with bourgeois body management have structured a society that was, and remains, hostile to fat bodies.","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":"135497520","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/s1060150323000062
Kimberly Cox, Shannon Draucker, Doreen Thierauf, Victoria Wiet
This keyword essay on "women" responds to heated debates surrounding the term “pregnant person” in the aftermath of the Supreme Court's 2022 Dobbs decision and argues for the continued usefulness of “women” to Victorian studies. While “pregnant person” allows institutions and thinkers to signal their recognition that the population requiring reproductive services includes trans men and nonbinary people, the curtailment of reproductive rights is often fueled by misogyny, which cannot be conceptualized without “women” as a category. Here, we are witnessing the reemergence of a field of discursive tension: between the coalitional power of the term “women” as used by feminists, on one hand, and the feminist goal to normalize inclusive language to honor and make visible marginalized experiences, on the other. We want to highlight that, first, such categories need not be mutually exclusive and that, second, the category “women” remains relevant to Victorian studies. We advocate not for the ascendancy of the term “women,” nor its dominance over other, crucial terms such as “trans” and “queer,” but simply for keeping “women” in play. Doing so makes space for strategic forms of coalition, historically precise scholarship, the recognition of trans women's identities, and intersectional analyses.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1017/s1060150323000074
Laura Eastlake
Sugar is in the bloodstream of our modern world. We crave it as a treat and fear it as an increasingly urgent health risk. Although sugar had been used for centuries in small quantities as a spice, a medicine, and a foodstuff, it was only in the nineteenth century that it became the omnipresent, mass-produced, habit-forming, and health-impacting commodity we recognize today. This article charts the staggering increase in sugar production in the Victorian period—from 572,000 tons in 1830 to 6.1 million tons by 1890—to suggest that sugar, and acts of consuming it, acquired figurative and culturally contingent meanings that Victorian writers could use to represent and respond to some of the most pressing cultural questions of their day. For scholars of the nineteenth century, sugar affords us a lens for viewing Victorian cultural change and for interrogating the stories that Britain continues to tell itself today about the physical, economic, and moral health of the nation.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1017/s1060150323000529
Meegan Kennedy
The trope of critical reading as diagnosis draws on health humanities scholarship to enable responsive, collaborative readings that pair attention to form (symptoms and signs) with a meticulous address to how author, publisher, text, and reader co-create diverse strands of meaning within different settings. This model can assess how most Victorian texts feature a spectrum of overlapping literary genres, and how these genres are formed in the working partnerships that texts and readers create across changing contexts. The text itself becomes not an inert object to be cataloged but a living, changing organism. Diagnostic reading can address both the ostensible meanings of a passage and other possibilities latent within the text or new meanings that arise as texts circulate to new audiences. It also insists that texts and readers are both embodied, thus bridging literary scholarship and print culture studies by reminding us that readers know texts as cognitive, affective, and physical interlocutors. Medical diagnosis usefully addresses not just disease but many human conformations, and—as with readers and texts—it opens up a relationship between caregiver and patient that evolves as conditions change. Overall, the diagnostic model encourages a more versatile and inclusive understanding of scholarly work.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1017/s1060150323000384
{"title":"VLC volume 51 issue 1 Cover and Front matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/s1060150323000384","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1060150323000384","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54154,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE","volume":"51 1","pages":"f1 - f5"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57170681","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/s1060150323000402
Joanna Hofer-Robinson
This keywords entry proposes that critical infrastructure studies allows us to better understand the cultural lives of nineteenth-century theatrical repertoires and asks: How would conceptualizing theatrical repertoire as an imaginative infrastructure help us understand its cultural legacies in our own day? Nineteenth-century theatrical repertoires functioned in analogous ways to material-technical infrastructure: on one hand, providing routine and taken-for-granted conditions of performance; on the other, encoding asymmetric patterns of belonging and inclusion, proximity and distance, that we see reinforced by infrastructure. Repertoire is thus recast as a means of actively communicating and managing meaning on an enormous scale.
{"title":"Repertoire","authors":"Joanna Hofer-Robinson","doi":"10.1017/s1060150323000402","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1060150323000402","url":null,"abstract":"This keywords entry proposes that critical infrastructure studies allows us to better understand the cultural lives of nineteenth-century theatrical repertoires and asks: How would conceptualizing theatrical repertoire as an imaginative infrastructure help us understand its cultural legacies in our own day? Nineteenth-century theatrical repertoires functioned in analogous ways to material-technical infrastructure: on one hand, providing routine and taken-for-granted conditions of performance; on the other, encoding asymmetric patterns of belonging and inclusion, proximity and distance, that we see reinforced by infrastructure. Repertoire is thus recast as a means of actively communicating and managing meaning on an enormous scale.","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":"135497524","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/s1060150323000207
Victoria Baena
This essay sketches out how “the provinces” became a central (if semi-imagined) geography in nineteenth-century culture, usually opposed to—though ultimately inextricable from—the development of capitalist and colonial modernity. Surveying recent criticism on the Victorian provincial novel, especially its imbrication with broader scales and networks, I suggest that recent scholarship in critical cartography and feminist theory offers a way to reconceptualize the notion of the provincial in (and beyond) Victorian studies. If to be provincial is always to be opposed to some real or imagined center—toggling between countryside, colony, region, and minor capital—we might revise our understanding of the provincial itself as a relational phenomenon, unfolding on multiple scales. Ultimately, I propose the “provincial” as a critical heuristic for the spatial analysis of narrative: one that might offer a more productive means of grasping modernity's uneven production of space beyond city/country, metropole/colony, and even local/global divides.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1017/s1060150323000268
Alexis A. Ferguson
“Trans” offers Victorian studies two different but ultimately intertwined methods for studying sex and gender in a historically bounded discipline: nominal, biographical work and theoretical, conceptual work. While biographical accounts tend to evoke historicist concerns of anachronism, the theoretical potential of “trans” is largely untouched in Victorian studies. This Keywords essay argues that such theoretical work is much needed in analyses of Victorian sex and gender, and makes the case for “trans” as historical method.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1017/s1060150323000293
Benjamin Kohlmann
This short keyword essay begins by turning to the socially progressive “New Liberalism” of the decades around 1900 in order to think about the eclipse of certain traditions of liberal thought from the Cold War onward (this part of the essay takes its cue from Sam Moyn's recent Carlyle lectures on Cold War liberalism). The piece then considers how the (literary, political, social) legacies of this reconstituted liberalism might speak to our own current (“neoliberal” rather than “New Liberal”) moment when, in Bonnie Honig's words, “efficiency is no longer one value among others. . . . It has become rationality itself, and it is the standard by which everything is assessed.”
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