Parent-Child Resemblance in Literature Before the Age of Genetics: A Physiognomic Interpretation of the Novels of Zsigmond Kemény and Miklós Jósika

Although Zsigmond Kemény (1814-1875) and Miklós Jósika (1794-1865) inevitably figure among the most significant writers of nineteenth-century Hungarian literature, the interpretation of their novels is embedded within international historical contexts that are often inaccessible to the present-day reader. This study examines the physiognomic meanings of parent-child similarity in nineteenth-century novels and thus situates the examined works within the context of European literary and intellectual history. Such an interpretation of the novels reveals the diverse and strong current in the history of European ideas with which the analyzed texts engage in a lively dialogue.

The International Potential of the Polish Nineteenth-Century Novel – a Review of Grażyna Borkowska and Lidia Wiśniewska’s (eds.) “Another Canon: The Polish Nineteenth-Century Novel in World Context”

The article is a review of “Another Canon: The Polish Nineteenth-Century Novel in World Context”, edited by Grażyna Borkowska and Lidia Wiśniewska, published in 2020 by Lit Verlag, Switzerland within the “Polonistik im Kontext” series. The first part of the monograph includes articles that provide a reinterpretation of selected novels (including Krasicki’s “The Adventures of Mr. Nickolas Wisdom”, Orzeszkowa’s “On the Niemen”, and Sienkiewicz’s “Without Dogma”) in relation to the main currents of world literature. The second part focuses on the reception of selected nineteenth-century Polish novels in Belarus, Bulgaria, Georgia, Russia, France, Spain, the United States, and Great Britain. The publication is aimed at raising the interest of non-Polish recipients in the nineteenth-century novels during a period when twentieth and contemporary Polish literature has already gained relative popularity abroad.

Data, Maps, Networks – Digital Approaches to Reading (in) Nineteenth-Century Literature

Recently, there has been a growing number of scholarly attempts to ‘read’ the 19th century either through digital methods or, more specifically as a precursor to contemporary digital culture. The practice of reading is a category through which the two dimensions of spending time in and with the nineteenth century can be thought together. A focus on reading, as a way to spend time in/with the nineteenth century makes us aware of both the knowledge systems and methodologies of accessing and processing information, both in literary texts of that period and simultaneously in our own work. More specifically, my essay is interested in questions of ‘readability’ and the ‘crisis of reading’, as self-reflexively pronounced in two nineteenth century novels: Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Frank Norris’s The Octopus. These novels, I argue, prefigure debates that are well-known to us and that materialize in the opposition between what Katherine Hayles has called “hyperreading” vs linear or immersive reading, between the New Critic’s formulation of close reading and what Franco Moretti has provocatively called “distant reading”, or the postcritical distinction between symptomatic and surface reading. By discussing different strategies of reading, the novels express the uncontrollability in view of increasing information environments. Yet, even if these webs of signification are elusive and at times dangerous, both novels, in a self-reflexive move, express a desire of writing the human reader into this web of signification and therefore to emphasize the significance of reading in an increasingly automated world.

Clearer Contours

This chapter focuses on free indirect speech in nineteenth-century novels, where providing varied forms of access to characters (their speech, their motivations, their minds more generally) is an overriding concern in employing free indirect speech. Against the background of a broadly constructional model of present-day free indirect speech, nineteenth-century novelistic examples are analysed to show a variety of ways in which writers gradually “free up” indirect speech, using means like punctuation and quotation marks, and eventually clausal structures, some of which look decidedly out of date from the present perspective. Alongside free indirect forms, early forms of a more narrator-oriented counterpart, distancing indirect speech, are also discussed, as providing a subtly different mode of access to characters’ speech.

Weak Whites: Yellow Fever in Three Nineteenth-Century Louisiana Novels

Since the eighteenth century, yellow fever has had a racialized history in New Orleans and elsewhere in the Americas stemming, in part, from the disease’s origins in West Africa. There was a misconception that blacks were less likely to fall victim to the disease. This article establishes the theories around contagion and susceptibility, showing that whites, especially foreigners, were thought to be at greater risk for what was called the “Strangers’ Disease.” It then analyzes three nineteenth-century novels about New Orleans wherein yellow fever plays an important role. Two of the novels are quite well known: The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life (1880) by George Washington Cable and Chita: A Memory of Last Island (1889) by Lafcadio Hearn. The third novel, Amitié et dévouement, ou Trois mois à la Louisiane (1845) by Camille Lebrun, although virtually forgotten, is especially important as it represents the voice of a French woman writer whose views on race differ from those of the two other authors.

Liberalism and Inner Life: The Curious Cases of Mansfield Park and Villette

This article takes up two famously disliked nineteenth-century novels—Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and Charlotte Brontë's Villette—and argues that they are dissatisfying to readers because their protagonists fail to cohere as liberal subjects around a legible interior realm. Mansfield Park initially offers its east room as a spatial analogue for Fanny Price's interior, but it gradually revokes narrative access to the space in order to defer wholly to external status markers. Likewise, Villette's Lucy Snowe creates architectural constructions as a means of representing her inner realm to an outside world. However, each instance results in an impossible space that fails to establish the contours of Lucy's interior. The article reads the failures of subjectivation in the two novels in light of critical accounts that link the nineteenth-century novel to liberalism, a link that is often established through a shared emphasis on the interior. It thus examines what could come next once such a link is broken: a reevaluation of the default political perspective of the nineteenth-century novel but also a renewed understanding of the variety of subjective forms that liberalism is able to capture.

Becoming Foreign in the Victorian Novel: International Migration in Little Dorrit and Villette

This article analyses the representation of migrant workers in Victorian fiction. While exploring the seldom-discussed experience of such migrants, I argue that in the fiction of the time, migration for work outside of the empire expresses the experience of individual isolation as the result of increasing urban anonymity as well as of global exchanges. The figure of the migrant thereby literalizes modern isolation in an emergent society of strangers. In depicting migratory characters as embodiments of loneliness, while establishing it as a shared experience through parallel plots, nineteenth-century novels map out possible connections in a globalizing world. In parsing the interplay of isolation and imaginary sympathy in two texts of the 1850s, Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, I argue that the experience of feeling foreign while working abroad enables characters to seek connections that transcend boundaries of class and national identity, even as the sympathy they imagine might be flawed, warped by projection and identification. In Little Dorrit, Cavalletto’s accident in the streets of London enacts a pivotal moment of imagined sympathy for the recently returned Arthur Clennam that ultimately helps to solve the renegotiation of home and host country in the novel, while in Villette, a female migrant articulates an increasingly widespread experience not only of modern isolation, social invisibility, and cultural disorientation, but also of the power of anonymity. A critical analysis of migratory work in Victorian fiction adds an important new dimension to nineteenth-century global studies.

Jules Vallès’s L’Insurgé and the Narrative of Popular Revolt

In this article, I look at Jules Vallès’s L’Insurgé to argue that its narrative style performs the politics of anonymity at the heart of the Paris Commune. To do this, I analyse three key elements of the novel – its autofictionality, its fragmentation and its ubiquitous present tense. By rejecting the exemplarity inherent in autobiography, this autofiction avant la lettre implies that the I of the narrator Jacques Vingtras, himself a stand-in for the author Jules Vallès, can be substituted with any other I. In the ‘révolution anonyme’ of 1871, there can be no leader; in its narrative, the central character is replaceable. The fragmentary writing further resists the unity of nineteenth-century novels to draw portraits of various actors of revolt; centralised revolution is abandoned in favour of communal politics. Finally, the narration in the present tense creates a sense of immediacy which rejects the glorification of the revolutionary past, and instead underscores the Paris Commune’s new politics in the making. The novel is thus enacting the ‘grande fédération des douleurs’ to which it is dedicated.