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Standpipes, Chimmeys, and Memorialization in the Caribbean Victorian Literature and Culture (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-09-13 Faith Smith
In this essay I read debates about amenities of water and waste in the British Caribbean in the late and immediate post-Victorian period through histories of intimacy and kinship centered in fiction by Caribbean writers of the last twenty years. In these novels and short stories, collecting water at a stream or a standpipe or emptying a chamber pot are actions that produce or recall moments of desire
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The Politics of Plant Life: Transatlantic Animisms in Leslie Marmon Silko's Gardens in the Dunes Victorian Literature and Culture (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-09-12 Diana Rose Newby
This essay argues that Leslie Marmon Silko's 1999 historical-fiction novel Gardens in the Dunes enables Indigenous-centered interventions into Victorian studies, ecocriticism, and their intersection. Dramatizing an animistic Native American view of nature as agentic and enspirited, Silko's novel critiques Victorian plant hunting as rooted in settler-colonial logic that treats nature as inert. In turn
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Strange Forms: Higher Space and Flatland’s Theology of Character Victorian Literature and Culture (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-09-12 Jayne Hildebrand
This essay argues that Edwin Abbott's 1884 science fiction novel, Flatland, engages Victorian theological debates about the dimensionality of spiritual beings to reexamine the epistemological relationship between readers and literary characters. Liberal theologians at the fin de siècle turned to mathematical models of higher dimensions to reconcile the existence of immaterial spirits with a rational
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Songs for the Empress: Queen Victoria in the Music History of Colonial Bengal Victorian Literature and Culture (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-04-15 Pramantha Tagore
In the final decades of the nineteenth century, music significantly occupied the cultural and social life of the Bengali people. As the epicenter of British political and economic influence in the subcontinent, Calcutta witnessed the emergence of schools offering instruction in Indian and Western art music. The flourishing city housed private and public printing presses, which ensured the circulation
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The Impress of the Empress: Provincializing the Queen in the Telugu Desa Victorian Literature and Culture (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-04-15 Vijay Kumar Tadakamalla
In late nineteenth-century Telugu desa, “Victoria” was more than the name of the queen of Great Britain. It was, in Homi Bhabha's famous formulation, a “sign taken for wonder” the signification of which, however, remained ambivalent. As soon as she was proclaimed the empress of India, the queen's name acquired emblematic connotations that were exploited in both reform and counterreform discourses.
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The Queen's Urdu: Translating Colonial Secularity in Victoria's 1858 Proclamation Victorian Literature and Culture (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-04-15 Brannon D. Ingram
This article argues that Queen Victoria's Proclamation of 1858, marking the transfer of power from the East India Company to the crown, ushered in a new era of colonial secularity. “Colonial secularity” refers to the myriad ways that normative distinctions between religion and not-religion emerged and proliferated in colonial contexts. The proclamation committed not to interfere in religion, but “religion”
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Mourning the Mother: Death and Feminine Authority in Odia Commemorations of Queen Victoria Victorian Literature and Culture (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-04-15 Pritipuspa Mishra
The death of Queen Victoria occasioned the publication of commemorative narratives in early twentieth-century Odisha. They serve as site for understanding how feminine authority was imagined as the Odia literati engaged in a fraught movement for the formation of a separate province of Odisha. They imagined an Odia motherland in relation to figures of maternal authority such as mother India and mother
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Preface Victorian Literature and Culture (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-04-15 Siddharth Satpathy, Mandakini Dubey, Miles Taylor, Sharif Youssef
Vernacular Victoria: The Queen in the Languages of South Asia began life as an international online colloquium hosted by the Department of English at Ashoka University, Haryana, in collaboration with the Department of English at the University of Hyderabad (India). Participants were invited to give papers based on an archive of vernacular eulogies, addresses, memorials, and biographies collected by
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“Subjects,” “Liberty,” and “Equity”: Queen Victoria's Proclamations and Bengali Writers Victorian Literature and Culture (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-04-15 Swapan Chakravorty
Starting with Queen Victoria's address to the Proclamation Durbar in 1877, this article surveys how Bengali writers critiqued British colonialism in India through their stories, songs, poetry, journalism, and lectures, sometimes directly about the queen herself, more often when discussing governance, social reform, and the desire for political liberty.
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Queen Victoria, M. M. Bhownaggree, and the “Gujaratee-Speaking Community of India” Victorian Literature and Culture (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-04-15 John Mcleod
This essay examines an 1877 Gujarati translation of Queen Victoria's Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands. It was the work of M. M. Bhownaggree, later a British MP. The essay explores the circumstances under which Bhownaggree undertook the translation, its content, and its intended audience. It closes with some observations on the book's place in the history of Indian royalism, the
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Victoria Maharani: Queen Victoria and the Princely State of Travancore Victorian Literature and Culture (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-04-15 Ellen A. Ambrosone
This article surveys works from Kerala related to Queen Victoria and situates M. R. Madhava Warrier's (1893–1952) biography, Victoria Maharani (1931), against the backdrop of early twentieth-century Travancore. It draws on threads related to the position of women on the Malabar coast, the actions of the maharani regent at the time, Sethu Lakshmi Bayi (r. 1924–31), and the political and social climate
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Rajabhakti: Languages of Political Belonging in Colonial Odisha Victorian Literature and Culture (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-04-15 Siddharth Satpathy
This essay studies the formation of a political language of rajabhakti or monarchical loyalty in the Odia-language print sphere in the second half of the nineteenth century. This language revolved around the key terms of Providence, market rationalism, and character. The article traces the provincial careers of these crucial Victorian terms and explores their entanglement with local histories and discourses
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Epilogue: The Postscripts of Vernacular Victoria Victorian Literature and Culture (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-04-15 Mandakini Dubey
“Aajkal Agra ka mausam kaisa hai?” Queen Victoria asks herself, alone in her sumptuous quarters at Osborne House.1 How is the weather in Agra these days? Polite small talk, the loose change of a British monarch's verbal currency, recasts itself in unfamiliar phonemes as the empress of India practices her Hindustani. Soon, Agra will retreat from the imperial consciousness; it will be time to go to the
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Introduction: Monarchism, Print Culture, and Language in Colonial India Victorian Literature and Culture (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-04-15 Siddharth Satpathy
The collected essays in this “Vernacular Victoria” issue explore representations of Queen Victoria in Indian languages. They study how complex practices of loyalty to monarchical forms of authority enabled Indians to create and inhabit their diverse lifeworlds. They analyze how the uneven socialization of print and the complex cultures of literary production in colonial India shaped articulations of
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Royals in Maharashtrian Writings: A Polyphony of Narratives Victorian Literature and Culture (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-04-15 Shraddha Kumbhojkar
This article examines a range of texts produced by authors from different caste-class backgrounds in the Bombay Presidency in Western India between the 1850s and the 1920s. They were composed for commemorating special occasions such as the diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria's accession to the throne (1897) or the visits to India of the Prince of Wales (1876, 1922) and King George V (1911). These texts
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“Qayṣar-i Hindūstān Vīktūriyā”: Negotiating Loyalty in Late Nineteenth-Century Parsi Laudatory Verse Victorian Literature and Culture (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-04-15 Ayesha Mukherjee
To mark Queen Victoria's jubilee celebrations, many Indian authors composed laudatory literature and music in their vernacular languages. Although these works were often dismissed as “enthusiastic effusions” from poets of dubious ability, they offer intricate examples of the varied meanings the queen's presence had for Indian writers. They illustrate the subtle manipulation of laudatory verse for purposes
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Queen Victoria through Punjabi Eyes: The Travel Writings of Hardevi Victorian Literature and Culture (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-04-15 Arti Minocha
This essay examines two travel narratives written by Hardevi, a woman from Lahore who traveled to London for Queen Victoria's jubilee in 1887. The accounts contain Hardevi's narration of her journey by ship and describe the celebrations. Hardevi showcases the queen's marital home and her conjugal life, seamlessly accommodating them within reformist constructions of a modern, educated, pativrata (conjugally
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Introduction Victorian Literature and Culture (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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 (IF 0.6) 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