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Introduction Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2024-01-15 Rachel Ablow
Although not focused on the Victorian period, John Guillory's recent Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (2022) might seem to provide a bracing counter to the premise of this special issue. According to Guillory, framing our scholarly projects in political terms may ultimately be delusional, for whatever our aspirations or intentions, scholarship is rarely politically
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“Three Cheers for the United Aggregate Tribunal!”: Confronting Anti-Union Discourse, Then and Now Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2024-01-15 Ruth M. McAdams
In this piece, I discuss Charles Dickens's Hard Times (1855) in the context of my experience as one of the lead organizers of the successful campaign to unionize Skidmore College's non-tenure-track faculty. Dickens's novel outlines several claims that directly comprise modern anti-union discourse and that I saw straightforwardly rehearsed in 2022 as we sought to unionize. As an organizer and a Victorianist
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Gaskell, Ghosts, and the Common Good Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2024-01-15 Carolyn Betensky, Talia Schaffer
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
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Gender and Precarity across Time: Where Are the Writing Working Women? Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2024-01-15 Lena Wånggren
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
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Nuts and Bolts: Collective Action, the Divestment Movement, and Jane Addams Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2024-01-15 Caroline Levine
This essay describes the author's quest for effective, large-scale political actions to stop the burning of fossil fuels. What are the nuts and bolts of collective organizing at scales large enough to effect substantial change? Frustrated both by widespread public pessimism and by the politics most often articulated in literary studies, Levine finds a working political model in the divestment movement;
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Alice Meynell and the Politics of an Image: “The Climate of Smoke” Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2024-01-15 Isobel Armstrong
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.
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Novel Wayfinding: LitLabs and the Activism of Place Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2024-01-15 Jacqueline Barrios
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
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Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom: Activism as Community-Building in Action Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2024-01-15 Pearl Chaozon Bauer, Ryan D. Fong, Sophia Hsu, Adrian S. Wisnicki
This essay reflects on the first three years of Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom's work. While we initially perceived our project and corresponding website as a space to develop and circulate pedagogical materials, it has become clear that what we have accomplished since our launch goes far beyond mere content creation. In fact, the community-building portion of our project has become the driving
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“What I Did at Vassar Stayed with Me”: Victorian Studies and Activism, a Case Study Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2024-01-15 Lydia Murdoch, Susan Zlotnick
Vassar College was one of the few North American undergraduate institutions to offer a concentration in Victorian studies. From 1970 until 2021, when the program transformed into Global Nineteenth-Century Studies, nearly ninety majors and minors passed through the program. Drawing on surveys and interviews with the program's graduates, the essay contends that Vassar's Victorian studies program engendered
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Mary Carpenter, Frances Power Cobbe, “Noble Workers,” and Evangelical Discourse in Action Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2024-01-15 Alison Booth
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
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Accidents at Home in the Victorian Novel: Auguries, Probability, and Charlotte Yonge's Household Advice Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2024-01-04 Tamara S. Wagner
This article explores the narrative functions of domestic accidents in Victorian fiction. Taking Charlotte Yonge's The Pillars of the House (1873) as a case study, it critically parses how popular fiction engaged with competing explanations of how or why accidents occur. As a new understanding of chance, risk, and statistical likelihood in the nineteenth century began to reshape the representation
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The Serial as Episteme Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2024-01-04 Linda K. Hughes
In the epilogue to Serial Forms, Clare Pettitt identifies key elements of the “form” she investigates in her massively detailed, deeply original study: The serial is both form and process, and, to stay true to its form, it has to continue. Escaping form just as it is formed, the serial “begins again to begin.” . . . [S]eriality appears in different but related guises: it can be a form; a genre; a system;
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Feeling the Malthusian Empire: Martineau's Reformulation of Population in Illustrations of Political Economy Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-11-07 Seohyon Jung
Population was a socially significant yet politically precarious concept in nineteenth-century Britain. In order to highlight the affective implications of “population,” this essay examines Harriet Martineau's fiction in the context of early Victorian concerns over population growth and contemporary thoughts of political economy. As an avid supporter of Thomas Malthus, Martineau maintains that “proportionate
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Dandy Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 James Eli Adams
The article surveys the significance of the dandy as a central figure in nineteenth-century constructions of masculinity and social class.
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Free Will Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Andrea Selleri
This article makes a case to the effect that the free will vs. determinism dichotomy is relevant for Victorianists.
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Spirituality Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 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
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Oceanic Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Mark Celeste
This entry expands upon the “oceans” entry from the original Keywords issue. In moving from “oceans” to the “oceanic,” I call for a hydrographic remapping of the nineteenth century, offering a new perspective of networked culture, geopolitics, and ecology via maritime circulation and exchange. Noting selected recent projects as examples in this critical turn, I emphasize the stakes, affordances, and
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Journalism Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Anne Humpherys
Focusing on the introduction of the word “journalism” to the British reader in the early 1800s demonstrates the growing importance of the so-called Fourth Estate and the newspaper press in British media history. The word is borrowed from the French journalisme, which had been introduced into France much earlier.
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Paper Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Richard Menke
Paper represents a potent but underexplored keyword for Victorian studies today. Not only is it the unacknowledged techno-material a priori of Victorian studies itself, but its histories also offer material connections that link literary texts, bureaucracy, and consumer culture to global ecologies and resource extraction.
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Care Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Talia Schaffer
This keyword introduces readers to the theory of ethics of care, arguing that it is both a historically appropriate metric for Victorian studies and a theoretical form grounded in the experience of marginalized subjects. Moreover, care is a way of thinking that encourages us to interrogate our own scholarship.
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Indigeneity Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 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.
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Environmentalism Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Dennis Denisoff
In the mid-twentieth century, the term environmentalism became commonly used to refer to efforts to protect the natural environment from human abuse and disrespect. Attitudes to safeguarding the environment, however, had already been taking shape for some time, based on interpretive practices that affirmed the values, needs, and desires of some people and not others, and rarely those of nonhuman animals
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Meaning/fulness Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Daniel Hack
Talk of meaning and meaningfulness, ubiquitous today, only emerges in the nineteenth century. This emergence remains to be explained and calls into question accounts of modernity that treat “meaning” as a stable, timeless concept.
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Sugar Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 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
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Repertoire Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 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
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Vegetable Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Sophia C. Jochem
Human life under Queen Victoria was built on—or, more accurately, with—vegetables, from sugarcane, tea, and spices to cotton and indigo, tobacco and opium poppies. While the intricate and multiple economies of some of these vegetable staples have been explored in considerable detail, the highly uneven power dynamics of the Victorians’ complex, drawn-out encounters with the vegetable world mostly continue
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Autonomy Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Dustin Friedman
In Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), Walter Pater asks if “modern art” can “represent men and women in these bewildering toils so as to give the spirit at least an equivalent for the sense of freedom?” I discuss how the notions of both subjective and aesthetic autonomy that Pater refers to here have gotten a bad rap for the past century or so for helping facilitate the liberal, capitalist
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Ottoman Empire Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 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
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Secular Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Sebastian Lecourt
This essay argues that secular is an important keyword for Victorian studies because it foregrounds the particularity of universal concepts. Victorian narratives of secularization and colonial regimes of religious toleration can all be shown to have roots in the Protestant conception of religion as private individual belief and voluntary association. They therefore raise the question of how and whether
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Liberal Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 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
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New Woman Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Riya Das
The ideal of the British New Woman, variously representing feminist, activist, fashion reformer, and writer, has been the subject of renewed critical interest since the late twentieth century. Although symptomatic of its situation in the fin de siècle, which “names those things that were never quite assimilated into the high-Victorian moment,” since the 1980s the New Woman has transcended its polemical
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Conservative Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 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
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Ta‘āruf Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Niloofar Sarlati
Most readers of this journal will not have seen this word before. How, then, can it claim a spot in this Keyword issue of Victorian Literature and Culture? How can a non-English word—not even a loan word in English—become an English keyword? Ta‘āruf’s presence here can be justified through the now less-familiar definition of the term “keyword” itself: “a word that serves as the key to a cipher or code
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Piracy Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Monica Cohen
Nineteenth-century piracy expressed a winking attitude toward many widespread forms of unauthorized reuse and thus conditioned the emergence of vast, innovative, and dynamic pan-media and transnational networks of aesthetic communications.
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Historicity Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 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
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Grammar Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 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
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Neo-Victorian Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Felipe Espinoza Garrido
Despite neo-Victorianism's theoretical awareness of how colonial structures continue to infuse imaginations of the long nineteenth century, and how neo-Victorian culture might challenge both Victorian and contemporary ideological structures, common practices of neo-Victorian scholarship too often remain constricted in their geographical and conceptual breadth. In thinking about the structural convergences
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Tolerance Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Nina Engelhardt
In this article I argue for the relevance of examining tolerance in Victorian literature in its specificity and particularly as distinct from sympathy. Following a recent reconceptualization of tolerance in philosophy and political theory, I argue for recovering the relevance of its roots in the Latin term tolerare, which means “to suffer,” “to endure,” and suggest that Victorian novels explore the
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Rape Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 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
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“Women” Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 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
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Provincial Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 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
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Trans Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 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
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Cosmopolitanism Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Yasmin Akhter
This article argues that the field of Victorian cosmopolitanisms has largely neglected accounts of migrants, exiles, and nomads in explorations of the nineteenth-century cosmopolitan world of empires. A focus on these hypermobile figures draws attention to the ways in which mobility, in all forms, disrupts our understandings of place, home, and world as they are conceived in cosmopolitan thought. These
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Planet Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 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.
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Redux Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 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
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Informal Empire Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 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
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Extraction Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Elizabeth Carolyn Miller
In Victorian studies, the term “extraction” helps us express the nineteenth-century emergence of a society fully reliant on finite underground materials and thereby describe the material and value relations at the heart of imperialism and at the heart of the provincial-metropole dynamic. Much of the recent attention to extraction in Victorian studies and beyond returns us to the sites of removal, to
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Abstraction Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 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.
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Experience Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 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
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Fat Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 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
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Disaster Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 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).
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Translation Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Joshua Brorby
Translations are often imagined, through spatial metaphors, to expand fields of interest, to broaden national literatures, or to bridge diverse cultural traditions. This essay considers a few nineteenth-century views on translation to show how intellectual expansions are indelibly linked to material ones, and to suggest a more complex critical perspective on the layers of historicity and self-interest
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Life-Size Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Dehn Gilmore
This entry posits the life-size as a form of “technology” for collapsing time and space and closes by suggesting some ways in which literary authors were inspired by the proliferation of life-size forms in culture.
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Conscience Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 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
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Girl Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Lauren Byler
This essay surveys the variant meanings and uses of the term “girl” caused by gender, age, class, race, and etymological differences. It argues that the extremes of idealization and contempt expressed toward girls and through the figure of the girl accentuate the girl's use as a fulcrum for assigning value in Victorian literature and culture.
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International Law Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Evan Radeen
This keyword essay establishes the significance of international law for the study of Victorian globalization. The history of international law has not really been registered yet by scholars in Victorian studies, but we might obtain a number of dividends by remedying that deficit.
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Drugs Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 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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Urban Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Christopher Ferguson
In this essay, I argue for the importance of employing the concept of the urban when analyzing Victorian Britain, given the status of the British Isles as the most urbanized place on the planet during the nineteenth century.
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Knowable Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Ben Parker
Raymond Williams influentially claimed that the history of the English novel could be organized through the problem of the “knowable community.” This keyword entry rehearses, clarifies, and extends the idea of the “knowable” in Williams's theory of the novel. I argue that the dialectical (neither entirely subjective nor entirely objective) dimension of the concept has been overlooked, with attendant
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Mediating Whiteness: Triangular Racialization in the Anglo-Indian Picaresque Victorian Literature and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-14 Jacob Romanow
This article takes up the social production of race in nineteenth-century India through picaresque fiction. Through readings of Rudyard Kipling, Dion Boucicault, and W. M. Thackeray, it shows how picaresque form served as a specific mechanism of racial stabilization, a means of producing a consciously stopgap racial binary through the intervention of a third, triangulating racial term: Irishness. Understanding