SUNY series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century

Explores Victorian writers' conception of the novel's potential to become serious knowledge and differentiate itself from other educational genres.

Is the novel a category of knowledge that merits serious study? Even if the novel has shed the stigma of being mindless entertainment, one might easily assume that reading a novel is not "studying," unless one reads closely and carefully, preferably from a scholarly edition or for a scholarly purpose. Novel Pedagogy explores how Victorian writers envisioned the novel's potential to become knowledge long before the form's ascendence into the ivory tower. Liwen Zhang argues that Victorian novelists' constant critique of schooling, on the one hand, and their frequent invocation of deep knowledge, on the other, are not self-contradictory. Instead of offering a blissful escape from education, writers such as William Thackeray, Charles Kingsley, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and George Gissing seek to offer uniquely novelistic pathways to knowledge. Novel Pedagogy offers a new model of novelistic epistemology by showing how the novel, unlike other educational genres, reflects on the unpleasant realities of learning-and of not learning-amid the ubiquity of ineffective textbooks, reluctant students, and false motivations.

Combines historical, literary, art historical, and archaeological perspectives to explore the idea of the Hindu temple in the British colonial imagination.

A History Today's 2024 Book of the Year

From 1800 onwards, the Hindu temple occupied a fragile and uneasy proximity to Imperial governance in India. The colonial state sought to regulate and extract the wealth of large temples. Imperial scholars classified the extraordinary diversity of architectural forms from across India, and selected temples were defined as monuments and brought into the custody of Imperial archaeology. Over time, the Imperial literary imagination transformed the Hindu temple from a place of worship and devotion into a space of wealth, sensuality, and violence. However, the Hindu temple also tested the Imperial state. Devotees and trustees manipulated and rejected attempts at governance, and the Hindu temple became a site at which the authority of the state was persistently modified or curtailed. Ruling Devotion combines historical, literary, art historical, and archaeological perspectives to explore the idea of the temple in particular localities, through the formation of pan-British-Indian policy and in the broadest of transnational realms of Imperial culture. Drawing on a huge range and diversity of archival materials, the book explores the preoccupations and frailties of the colonial state in India.

Shows how Britain's trans-imperial engagements in the long nineteenth century have come to shape global cultural commodity flows today.

Empire of Culture brings together contemporary representations of Victorian Britain to reveal how the nation's imperial past inheres in the ways post-imperial subjects commodify and consume "culture" in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The globalization of English literature, along with British forms of dress, etiquette, and dining, in the nineteenth century presumed and produced the idea that British culture is a universal standard to which everyone should aspire. Examining neo-Victorian texts and practices from Britain, the United States, Japan, and Singapore-from A. S. Byatt's novel Possession and its Hollywood film adaptation to Japanese Lolita fashion and the Lady Victorian manga series-Waiyee Loh argues that the British heritage industry thrives on the persistence of this idea. Yet this industry also competes and collaborates with the US and Japanese cultural industries, as they, too, engage with the legacy of British universalism to carve out their own empires in a global creative economy. Unique in its scope, Empire of Culture centers Britain's engagements with the US and East Asia to illuminate fresh axes of influence and appropriation, and further bring Victorian studies into contact with various sites of literary and cultural fandom.

Offers a new, Spinozist framework for understanding encounters with otherness in Romantic literature as experiences of immanence.

Romantic Immanence examines literary examples of an alternative experience of otherness-an experience of alterity the Romantics understood as an embodied, immanent encounter with raw reality. The Romantics' enthusiasm for encounters in nature and the imagination that exceeded the limits of rational thought is well known. Yet these encounters have largely been interpreted in terms of the sublime or the Gothic. Drawing attention to the influence of Spinozist and Stoic philosophy on Romantic thought and aesthetics, Elizabeth A. Fay argues that immanence was another, perhaps even more important, form of alterity, particularly during this era of social and political upheaval. Investigating works such as Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journals, and Percy Shelley's Triumph of Life alongside Schelling's unfinished Ages of the World and Schlegel's Athenaeum Fragments, Fay demonstrates how Romantic immanence, despite going largely unrecognized with the loss of its initial context, remains vividly present in these works.

Explores how Victorian women writers used the popular science of phrenology to challenge socially constructed forms of power.

Winner of the 2024 Best Book Award presented by the South Atlantic Modern Language Association

In Equal Natures, Shalyn Claggett argues that Victorian women writers used scientific understandings of the brain to challenge socially constructed forms of power and gender inequality. Focusing on phrenology-the first science of brain localization and the most popular science in nineteenth-century Britain-Claggett shows how these writers leveraged phrenology's premise that the seat of identity is innate rather than acquired to make new claims about women's intellectual abilities and psychological complexity. Whereas male scientists often used phrenology to support racist and colonialist agendas, in the hands of women, an appeal to biology became a tool of subversion. Through historically contextualized analyses of works by Charlotte and Anne Brontë, Harriet Martineau, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and George Eliot, Equal Natures demonstrates how biology was used to contest conventional understandings of individual identity and interpersonal relations. In doing so, it counters a dominant assumption in feminist theory that essentialism has been the exclusive province of patriarchal values and reactionary political aims.

Ranges widely and deeply across William Blake's oeuvre to show how his post-Newtonian vision of space-time anticipates Einsteinian relativity.

What do Einsteinian relativity, eighteenth-century field theory, Neoplatonism, and the overthrow of three-dimensional perspective have in common? The poet and artist William Blake's geometry-the conception of space-time that informs his work across media and genres. In this illuminating, inventive new study, Andrew M. Cooper reveals Blake to be the vehicle of a single imaginative vision in which art, literature, physics, and metaphysics stand united. Romantic-period physics was not, as others have assumed, materialist. Blake's cosmology forms part of his age's deep reevaluation of body and soul, of matter and Heaven, and even probes what it is to understand understanding, reason, and substance. Far from being anti-Newtonian, Blake was prophetically post-Newtonian. His poetry and art realized the revolutionary potential of Enlightened natural philosophy even as that philosophy still needed an Einstein for its physics to snap fully into focus. Blake's mythmaking exploits the imaginative reach of formal abstractions to generate a model of how sensation imparts physical extension to the world. More striking still, Cooper shows how Blake's art of vision leads us today to visualize four-dimensional concepts of space, time, and Man for ourselves.

Illuminates the ways games—from baseball cards to board games, charades to boxing, and croquet to strategies of war—were integral to nineteenth-century life and culture in the United States and Britain.

A vital part of daily life in the nineteenth century, games and play were so familiar and so ubiquitous that their presence over time became almost invisible. Technological advances during the century allowed for easier manufacturing and distribution of board games and books about games, and the changing economic conditions created a larger market for them as well as more time in which to play them. These changing conditions not only made games more profitable, but they also increased the influence of games on many facets of culture. Playing Games in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America focuses on the material and visual culture of both American and British games, examining how cultures of play intersect with evolving gender norms, economic structures, scientific discourses, social movements, and nationalist sentiments.

Examines how Indigenous figures used British Romantic poetry in their interactions with settler governments and publics.

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Indigenous peoples in North America and the Pacific engaged with the latest and most fashionable British Romantic poetry as part of transcontinental and transoceanic cross-cultural negotiations about sovereignty, treaty rights, and land claims. In Sensitive Negotiations, Nikki Hessell uses examples from North America, Africa, and the Pacific to show how these Indigenous figures quoted lines from famous poets like Lord Byron and Felicia Hemans to build sympathy and community with their audience. Hessell makes new connections by setting aside European-derived genre barriers to bring literary studies to bear on the study of diplomacy and scholarship from diplomatic history and Indigenous studies to bear on literary criticism. By connecting British Romantic poetry with Indigenous diplomatic texts, artefacts, and rituals, Hessell reimagines poetry as diplomatic and diplomacy as poetic.

Examines how literature mediated a convergence of militarism and medicine in Victorian culture that continues into the present via a widespread martial metaphor.

Medicine is most often understood through the metaphor of war. We encounter phrases such as "the war against the coronavirus," "the front lines of the Ebola crisis," "a new weapon against antibiotic resistance," or "the immune system fights cancer" without considering their assumptions, implications, and history. But there is nothing natural about this language. It does not have to be, nor has it always been, the way to understand the relationship between humans and disease.

Medicine Is War shows how this "martial metaphor" was popularized throughout the nineteenth century. Drawing on the works of Mary Shelley, Charles Kingsley, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Joseph Conrad, Lorenzo Servitje examines how literary form reflected, reinforced, and critiqued the convergence of militarism and medicine in Victorian culture. He considers how, in migrating from military medicine to the civilian sphere, this metaphor responded to the developments and dangers of modernity: urbanization, industrialization, government intervention, imperial contact, crime, changing gender relations, and the relationship between the one and the many. While cultural and literary scholars have attributed the metaphor to late nineteenth-century germ theory or immunology, this book offers a new, more expansive history stretching from the metaphor's roots in early nineteenth-century militarism to its consolidation during the rise of early twentieth-century pharmacology. In so doing, Servitje establishes literature's pivotal role in shaping what war has made thinkable and actionable under medicine's increasing jurisdiction in our lives. Medicine Is War reveals how, in our own moment, the metaphor remains conducive to harming as much as healing, to control as much as empowerment.

First comprehensive account of the figure of the Irish Celt in modern British and Irish literature.

Emerging at a moment of escalating colonial conflict between England and Ireland, the figure of the Irish Celt enjoyed a long and varied career in both English and Irish literature from the late Victorian era to World War II. While this figure assumes many forms and functions, T. J. Boynton argues that he is consistently cast as inherently resistant to capitalism. Beginning with an innovative reassessment of Matthew Arnold's The Study of Celtic Literature, from which the book also takes its title, Against the Despotism of Fact offers new readings of major works by writers such as Kipling, Conrad, Lawrence, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett. In their writing, Boynton argues, the Irish Celt served as a transnational vehicle of modernist experimentation geared toward interrogating the imperial, social, and pop-cultural dimensions of capitalist modernity. Making a significant contribution to Irish studies, modernist studies, and postcolonial studies, Against the Despotism of Fact draws attention to not only the prevalence but also the critical potential of this fraught figure.

Forges a fresh interpretation of Charlotte Brontë's oeuvre as a response to ecological instability.

Honorable Mention, 2020 Sonya Rudikoff Award presented by the Northeast Victorian Studies Association

In this book, Shawna Ross argues that Charlotte Brontë was an attentive witness of the Anthropocene and created one of the first literary ecosystems animated by human-caused environmental change. Brontë combined her personal experiences, scientific knowledge, and narrative skills to document environmental change in her representations of moorlands, valleys, villages, and towns, and the processes that disrupted them, including extinction, deforestation, industrialization, and urbanization. Juxtaposing close readings of Brontë's fiction with Victorian and contemporary science writing, as well as with the writings of Brontë's family members, Ross reveals the importance of storytelling for understanding how human behaviors contribute to environmental instability and why we resist changing our destructive habits. Ultimately, Brontë's lifelong engagement with the nonhuman world offers five powerful strategies for coping with ecological crises: to witness destruction carefully, to write about it unflinchingly, to apply those experiences by questioning and redefining toxic definitions of the human, and to mourn the dead, all without forgetting to tend the living.

Highlights connections between authors rarely studied together by exposing their shared counternarratives to germ theory's implicit suggestion of protection in isolation.

Kept from All Contagion explores the surprising social effects of germ theory in the late nineteenth century. Connecting groups of authors rarely studied in tandem by highlighting their shared interest in changing interpersonal relationships in the wake of germ theory, this book takes a surprising and refreshing stance on studies in medicine and literature.

Each chapter focuses on a different disease, discussing the different social policies or dilemmas that arose from new understandings in the 1860s–1890s that these diseases were contagious. The chapters pair these sociohistorical considerations with robust literary analyses that assess the ways authors as diverse as Thomas Hardy, Henrik Ibsen, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, among others, grappled with these ideas and their various impacts upon different human relationships-marital, filial, and social.

Through the trifocal structure of each chapter (microbial, relational, and sociopolitical), the book excavates previously overlooked connections between literary texts that insist upon the life-giving importance of community engagement-the very thing that seemed threatening in the wake of germ theory's revelations. Germ theory seemed to promote self-protection via isolation; the authors covered in Kept from All Contagion resist such tacit biopolitical implications. Instead, as Kari Nixon shows, they repeatedly demonstrate vitalizing interpersonal interactions in spite of-and often because of-their contamination with disease, thus completely upending both the ways Victorians and present-day literary scholars have tended to portray and interpret purity.

Argues that the descriptions of buildings frequently encountered in Victorian novels offer more than evocative settings for characters and plot; instead, such descriptions signal these novels' self-reflexive consideration of the structure itself.

Although Victorian novels often feature lengthy descriptions of the buildings where characters live, work, and pray, we may not always notice the stories these buildings tell. But when we do pay attention, we find these buildings offer more than evocative background settings. Victorian Structures uses the architectural writings of Victorian critic John Ruskin as a framework for examining the interaction of physical, social, and narrative structures in Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens, Adam Bede by George Eliot, and The Mayor of Casterbridge and Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. By closely reading their descriptions of architectural structure, this book reconsiders structure itself-both the social structures the novels reflect, and the narrative structures they employ. Weaving together analysis of these three kinds of structure offers an interpretation of Victorian realism that is far more socially and formally unstable than critics have tended to assume. It illustrates how these novels radically critique the limitations, dysfunctions, and deceptions of structure, while also imagining alternative possibilities.

This unique interdisciplinary approach emphasizes structure-in-time: while current conversations about structure focus on its static and fixed properties, this book understands it as various forces in tension, producing meanings that are always in flux. Victorian Structures focuses not only on the way structures shape our perceptions and experiences, but also, more importantly, on the processes through which those structures come to be constructed in the first place, and how they change over time.

Investigates how nineteenth-century British literature grappled with a new understanding of aging as both an individual and collective experience.

Shortlisted for the 2020 BSLS Book Prize presented by the British Society for Literature and Science

The Aesthetics of Senescence investigates how chronological age has come to possess far-reaching ideological, ethical, and aesthetic implications, both in the past and present. Andrea Charise argues that authors of the nineteenth century used the imaginative resources of literature to engage with an unprecedented climate of crisis associated with growing old. Marshalling a great variety of canonical authors including William Godwin, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and George Gissing, as well as less familiar writings by George Henry Lewes, Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland, Agnes Strickland, and Max Nordau, Charise demonstrates why the imaginative capacity of writing became an interdisciplinary crucible for testing what it meant to grow old at a time of profound cultural upheaval. Charise's grounding in medicine, political history, literature, and genre offers a fresh, original, thoroughly interdisciplinary analysis of nineteenth-century aging and age theory, as well as new insights into the rise of the novel-a genre usually thought of as affiliated almost entirely with the young or middle-aged.

Argues that the photographic negative gives a new way of understanding Victorian debates surrounding origins and copies as well as reality and representation.

Victorian Negatives examines the intersection between Victorian photography and literary culture, and argues that the development of the photographic negative played an instrumental role in their confluence. The negative is a technology that facilitates photographic reproduction by way of image inversion, and Susan E. Cook argues that this particular photographic technology influenced the British realist novel and literary celebrity culture, as authors grappled with the technology of inversion and reproduction in their lives and works. The book analyzes literary works by Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, E. W. Hornung, Cyril Bennett, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy, and Bram Stoker, and puts readings of those works into conversations with distinct photographic forms, including the daguerreotype, solarization, forensic photography, common cabinet cards, double exposures, and postmortem portraiture. In addition to literary texts, the book analyzes photographic discourses from letters and public writings of photographers and the nineteenth-century press, as well as discussions and debates surrounding Victorian celebrity authorship. The book's focus on the negative both illuminates an oft-marginalized part of the history of photography and demonstrates the way in which this history is central to Victorian literary culture.

Uses literature, art, and cultural texts from the British Romantic period to explore the age in which biological life and its abilities first became regulated by the rising nation.

In Beasts of Burden, Ron Broglio examines how lives-human and animal-were counted in rural England and Scotland during the Romantic period. During this time, Britain experienced unprecedented data collection from censuses, ordinance surveys, and measurements of resources, all used to quantify the life and productivity of the nation. It was the dawn of biopolitics-the age in which biological life and its abilities became regulated by the state. Borne primarily by workers and livestock, nowhere was this regulation felt more powerfully than in the fields, commons, and enclosures. Using literature, art, and cultural texts of the period, Broglio explores the apparatus of biopolitics during the age of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus. He looks at how data collection turned everyday life into citizenship and nationalism and how labor class poets and artists recorded and resisted the burden of this new biopolitical life. The author reveals how the frictions of material life work over and against designs by the state to form a unified biopolitical Britain. At its most radical, this book changes what constitutes the central concerns of the Romantic period and which texts are valuable for understanding the formation of a nation, its agriculture, and its rural landscapes.

Investigates the ways in which new technologies and theories of photography, phonography, moving images, and digital media engage with a diverse set of texts by British Romantic writers.

Finalist in the 2016 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the Social Sciences category

Romantic Mediations investigates the connections among British Romantic writers, their texts, and the history of major forms of technical media from the turn of the nineteenth century to the present. Opening up the vital new subfield of Romantic media studies through interventions in both media archaeology and contemporary media theory, Andrew Burkett addresses the ways that unconventional techniques and theories of storage and processing media engage with classic texts by William Blake, Lord Byron, John Keats, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and others. Ordered chronologically and structured by four crucial though often overlooked case studies that delve into Romanticism's role in the histories of incipient technical media systems, the book focuses on different examples of the ways that imaginative literature and art of the period become taken up and transformed by-while simultaneously shaping considerably-new media environments and platforms of photography, phonography, moving images, and digital media.

Traces Woolf's persistent yet vexed fascination with nineteenth-century descriptions of English domesticity and female creativity.

In Virginia Woolf and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel, Emily Blair explores how nineteenth-century descriptions of femininity saturate both Woolf's fiction and her modernist manifestos. Moving between the Victorian and modernist periods, Blair looks at a range of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sources, including the literature of conduct and household management, as well as autobiography, essay, poetry, and fiction. She argues for a reevaluation of Woolf's persistent yet vexed fascination with English domesticity and female creativity by juxtaposing the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell and Margaret Oliphant, two popular Victorian novelists, against Woolf's own novels and essays. Blair then traces unacknowledged lines of influence and complex interpretations that Woolf attempted to disavow. While reconsidering Woolf's analysis of women and fiction, Blair simultaneously deepens our appreciation of Woolf's work and advances our understanding of feminine aesthetics.

Examines Romantic poets' and essayists' fascination with the human form.

Based on years of archival research in various British and American libraries, Living Forms examines the early nineteenth century's fascination with representations of the human form, particularly those from the past, which, having no adequate verbal explanatory text, are vulnerable to having their meanings erased by time. The author explores a variety of such representations and responses to them, including Coleridge's Shakespeare lectures, Hazlitt's essays on portraits, Keats's poems on mythic and sculpted figures, meditations by Byron's Childe Harold on the monuments of Italy, Felicia Hemans's verses on monuments to and by women, and Shelley's poems and letters on figures from Italy, Egypt, and other antique lands. Haley argues that in what has been called the "museum age," Romantics sought aesthetically to frame these figures as "living forms," mental images capable of realization in alternate modes or forms.

Considers the role of Spiritualism in Victorian culture.

Altered States examines the rise of Spiritualism-the religion of séances, mediums, and ghostly encounters-in the Victorian period and the role it played in undermining both traditional female roles and the rhetoric of imperialism. Focusing on a particular kind of séance event-the full-form materialization-and the bodies of the young, female mediums who performed it, Marlene Tromp argues that in the altered state of the séance new ways of understanding identity and relationships became possible. This not only demonstrably shaped the thinking of the Spiritualists, but also the popular consciousness of the period. In diaries, letters, newspaper accounts, scientific reports, and popular fiction, Tromp uncovers evidence that the radical views presented in the faith permeated and influenced mainstream Victorian thought.

Examines nineteenth-century scientists' obsession with nerves and the nervous system.

Nervous Conditions explores the role of the body in the development of modern science, challenging the myth that modern science is built on a bedrock of objectivity and confident empiricism. In this fascinating look into the private world of British natural philosophers-including John Dalton, Lord Kelvin, Charles Babbage, John Herschel, and many others-Elizabeth Green Musselman shows how the internal workings of their bodies played an important part in the sciences' movement to the center of modern life, and how a scientific community and a nation struggled their way into existence.

Many of these natural philosophers endured serious nervous difficulties, particularly vision problems. They turned these weaknesses into strengths, however, by claiming that their well-disciplined mental skills enabled them to transcend their bodily frailties. Their adeptness at transcendence, they asserted, explained why men of science belonged at the heart of modern life, and qualified them to address such problems as unifying the British provinces into one nation, managing the industrial workplace, and accommodating religious plurality.

Uncovers the vital role that new scientific discoveries played in Romantic literary culture.

Although "romantic science" may sound like a paradox, much of the romance surrounding modern science-the mad scientist, the intuitive genius, the utopian transformation of nature-originated in the Romantic period. Romantic Science traces the literary and cultural politics surrounding the formation of the modern scientific disciplines emerging from eighteenth-century natural history. Revealing how scientific concerns were literary concerns in the Romantic period, the contributors uncover the vital role that new discoveries in earth, plant, and animal sciences played in the period's literary culture. As Thomas Pennant put it in 1772, "Natural History is, at present, the favourite science over all Europe, and the progress which has been made in it will distinguish and characterise the eighteenth century in the annals of literature." As they examine the social and literary ramifications of a particular branch or object of natural history, the contributors to this volume historicize our present intellectual landscape by reimagining and redrawing the disciplinary boundaries between literature and science.

Contributors include Alan Bewell, Rachel Crawford, Noah Heringman, Theresa M. Kelley, Amy Mae King, Lydia H. Liu, Anne K. Mellor, Stuart Peterfreund, and Catherine E. Ross.

Addresses how Victorian receptions of Romanticism and Romantic writers were shaped by notions of "nervousness."

Nervous Reactions considers Victorian responses to Romanticism, particularly the way in which the Romantic period was frequently constructed in Victorian-era texts as a time of nervous or excitable authors (and readers) at odds with Victorian values of self-restraint, moderation, and stolidity. Represented in various ways-as a threat to social order, as a desirable freedom of feeling, as a pathological weakness that must be cured-this nervousness, both about and of the Romantics, is an important though as yet unaddressed concern in Victorian responses to Romantic texts. By attending to this nervousness, the essays in this volume offer a new consideration not only of the relationship between the Victorian and Romantic periods, but also of the ways in which our own responses to Romanticism have been mediated by this Victorian attention to Romantic excitability.

Considering editions and biographies as well as literary and critical responses to Romantic writers, the volume addresses a variety of discursive modes and genres, and brings to light a number of authors not normally included in the longstanding category of "Victorian Romanticism": on the Romantic side, not just Wordsworth, Keats, and P. B. Shelley but also Byron, S. T. Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, Mary Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft; and on the Victorian side, not just Thomas Carlyle and the Brownings but also Sara Coleridge, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Archibald Lampman, and J. S. Mill.

Contributors include D. M. R. Bentley, Kristen Guest, Joel Faflak, Grace Kehler, Donelle Ruwe, Alan Vardy, Lisa Vargo, Timothy J. Wandling, Joanne Wilkes, and Julia M. Wright.

Presents a new genealogy and synoptic overview of modern Irish fiction.

Terror and Irish Modernism offers a synoptic overview of modern Irish fiction. Covering more than two centuries of literary production, Jim Hansen locates the root structure of modern Irish fiction in the masculine gender anxiety of one of the nineteenth century's most popular literary genres: the Gothic. Addressing both the decolonization of Ireland and the politics of literary form, Hansen sheds new light on canonical works by Maria Edgeworth, C. R. Maturin, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett by reading them all as part of the generic tradition of the Irish Gothic. He focuses in particular on how the Irish Gothic tradition translated the English Gothic's female-confinement narrative into a story about confined, feminized male protagonists. In reading this male gender-disorientation as the foundational condition of modern Irish political identity, Terror and Irish Modernism provides a thoroughly new genealogy of modern Irish fiction.

Uncovers the origins of midlife anxiety in Victorian print culture.

Aging by the Book offers an innovative look at the ways in which middle age, which for centuries had been considered the prime of life, was transformed during the Victorian era into a period of decline. Single women were nearing middle age at thirty, and mothers in their forties were expected to become sexless; meanwhile, fortyish men anguished over whether their "time for love had gone by." Looking at well-known novels of the period, as well as advertisements, cartoons, and medical and advice manuals, Kay Heath uncovers how this ideology of decline permeated a changing culture. Aging by the Book unmasks and confronts midlife anxiety by examining its origins, demonstrating that our current negative attitude toward midlife springs from Victorian roots, and arguing that only when we understand the culturally constructed nature of age can we expose its ubiquitous and stealthy influence.

Examines fantasies of charismatic, virile leaders in British literature from the 1790s to the 1840s.

From the 1790s to the 1840s, the fear that Britain had become too effeminate to protect itself against the anarchic forces unleashed by the French Revolution produced in many British writers of the period a desire to portray strong leaders who could control the democratic and commercial forces of modernization. While it is commonplace in Romantic studies to emphasize that Romantic writers are interested in the solitary genius or hero who separates himself from the community to pursue his own creative visions, Daniela Garofalo argues instead that Romantic and early Victorian writers are interested in charismatic males-military heroes, tyrants, kings, and captains of industry-who organize modern political and economic communities, sometimes by example, and sometimes by direct engagement. Reading works by William Godwin, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Lord Byron, William Hazlitt, Thomas Carlyle, and Charlotte Brontë, Garofalo shows how these leaders, endowed with an inherent virility rather than simply inherited rank, legitimize hierarchy anew for an age suffering from a crisis of authority.

How Victorians reacted to the new sciences of geology and archaeology.

Excavating Victorians examines nineteenth-century Britain's reaction to the revelations about time and natural history provided by the new sciences of geology and archaeology. The Victorians faced one of the greatest paradigm shifts in history: the bottom dropped out of time, and they had to reinvent their relationship to the earth and to time and history. These new sciences took the Victorians by storm, inundating them with fossils, skeletal remains, and potsherds-artifacts, or traces, that served at once as relics from the past, objects in the present, and markers of time's passage. Virginia Zimmerman explores how the Victorians utilized a nexus of literature, excavation, and reflections on time to ease anxieties about the individual's fate in the face of time's overwhelming expanse. The function of artifacts is also considered through careful readings of Tennyson's The Princess and Dickens's Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend. Zimmerman shows how these literary works make use of the language, tropes, and even generic conventions of excavation, and how they participate in the effort to rescue the individual from temporal insignificance.

From explorers' accounts to boys' adventure fiction, how Arctic exploration served as a metaphor for nation-building and empire in nineteenth-century Britain.

Bridging historical and literary studies, White Horizon explores the importance of the Arctic to British understandings of masculine identity, the nation, and the rapidly expanding British Empire in the nineteenth century. Well before Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, polar space had come to represent the limit of both empire and human experience. Using a variety of texts, from explorers' accounts to boys' adventure fiction, as well as provocative and fresh readings of the works of Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and Wilkie Collins, Jen H ill illustrates the function of Arctic space in the nineteenth-century British social imagination, arguing that the desolate north was imagined as a "pure" space, a conveniently blank page on which to write narratives of Arctic exploration that both furthered and critiqued British imperialism.

Explores Victorian responses to death and burial in literature, journalism, and legal writing.

Literary Remains explores the unexpectedly central role of death and burial in Victorian England. As Alan Ball, creator of HBO's Six Feet Under, quipped, "Once you put a dead body in the room, you can talk about anything." So, too, with the Victorians: dead bodies, especially their burial and cremation, engaged the passionate attention of leading Victorians, from sanitary reformers like Edwin Chadwick to bestselling novelists like Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, and Bram Stoker. Locating corpses at the center of an extensive range of concerns, including money and law, medicine and urban architecture, social planning and folklore, religion and national identity, Mary Elizabeth Hotz draws on a range of legal, administrative, journalistic, and literary writing to offer a thoughtful meditation on Victorian attitudes toward death and burial, as well as how those attitudes influenced present-day deathway practices. Literary Remains gives new meaning to the phrase that serves as its significant theme: "Taught by death what life should be."

Examines the importance of fetishism in nineteenth-century cultural theory.

Victorian Fetishism argues that fetishism was central to the development of cultural theory in the nineteenth century. From 1850 to 1900, when theories of social evolution reached their peak, European intellectuals identified all "primitive" cultures with "Primitive Fetishism," a psychological form of self-projection in which people believe everything in the external world-thunderstorms, trees, stones-is alive. Placing themselves at the opposite extreme of cultural evolution, the Victorians defined culture not by describing what culture was but by describing what it was not, and what it was not was fetishism. In analyses of major works by Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and Edward B. Tylor, Peter Melville Logan demonstrates the paradoxical role of fetishism in Victorian cultural theory, namely, how Victorian writers projected their own assumptions about fetishism onto the realm of historical fact, thereby "fetishizing" fetishism. The book concludes by examining how fetishism became a sexual perversion as well as its place within current cultural theory.

Examines the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite movement on art and literature around the world.

Pre-Raphaelitism's influence during the long nineteenth century was far-reaching, affecting artistic and literary thought in places, media, and times far removed from its origins in 1848 London. Worldwide Pre-Raphaelitism examines the movement's development beyond England, from the continental "immortals" glorified by the nascent Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to later reactions against and in sympathy with the ideals of the movement after it had ended. This collection of essays by art historians, literary critics, fashion historians, women's studies scholars, and independent researchers from around the world enhances our understanding of the global impact of Pre-Raphaelitism on the art-historical and literary developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.