“SKINS TO JUMP INTO”: THE SLIPPERINESS OF IDENTITY AND THE BODY IN WILKIE COLLINS'S NO NAME

2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-135
Author(s):  
Kylee-Anne Hingston
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Identity ◽  
Banking System ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
Social Deviance ◽  
The Social ◽  
Physical Response ◽  
The One

Victorian sensation literature was inextricably related to identity and the body: its primary purposes were to elicit a physical response from the senses of readers and to question “the social formation of the self” (Taylor, The Secret 2). Sensation fiction regularly relied on different, deformed, or diseased bodies to provoke fear or unease in its readers, and it created anxiety by juxtaposing the domestic with scandal, crime, and Gothicism to disturb the perceived stability of the home and social identity. Lyn Pykett argues that the genre reproduces the “real mid-nineteenth-century anxiety” that domestic selfhood “could be disrupted by danger, death or disease on the one hand, and the vagaries of the law, the banking system or the stockmarket on the other” (“Collins” 59). Nineteenth-century critics’ reactions to sensation novels connected anxieties about the body to fears about the instability of social identity: contemporary reviews described sensation literature and its works as “feverish” (Smith 141), “a collective cultural nervous disorder” (Taylor, The Secret 4), and as “symptoms of . . . social disease” (Pykett, “Collins” 51). In his 1880–81 series of essays, “Fiction Fair and Foul,” John Ruskin argues that the “[p]hysically diseased, ‘deformed,’ and ignobly dead bodies [in Collins's and Dickens's novels] are symptomatic of diseased and deformed genres, produced by morally and physically ill writers to cater to the tastes of morally and physically diseased urban readers” (Holmes, Fictions 92). These extreme critical responses, as well as the extreme popularity of sensation fiction, call attention to Victorian preoccupation with the body and social identity and with the instability of both. This paper, through analyzing the instability of bodies and identities in Wilkie Collins's sensation novel No Name (1862) and its serial context, challenges readings by both Victorian and more recent critics that distinctly interpret diseased and disabled bodies in the novel as either symbolic of or a result of social deviance.

Resurrection

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leo Tolstoy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

Resurrection (1899) is the last of Tolstoy's major novels. It tells the story of a nobleman's attempt to redeem the suffering his youthful philandering inflicted on a peasant girl who ends up a prisoner in Siberia. Tolstoy's vision of redemption achieved through loving forgiveness, and his condemnation of violence, dominate the novel. An intimate, psychological tale of guilt, anger, and forgiveness, Resurrection is at the same time a panoramic description of social life in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, reflecting its author's outrage at the social injustices of the world in which he lived. This edition, which updates a classic translation, has explanatory notes and a substantial introduction based on the most recent scholarship in the field.

The Body in Theory

1998 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 387-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicity J Callard
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Theoretical Investigations ◽  
The One ◽  
Do So

Geographers are now taking the problematic of corporeality seriously. ‘The body’ is becoming a preoccupation in the geographical literature, and is a central figure around which to base political demands, social analyses, and theoretical investigations. In this paper I describe some of the trajectories through which the body has been installed in academia and claim that this installation has necessitated the uptake of certain theoretical legacies and the disavowal or forgetting of others. In particular, I trace two related developments. First, I point to the sometimes haphazard agglomeration of disparate theoretical interventions that lie under the name of postmodernism and observe how this has led to the foregrounding of bodily tropes of fragmentation, fluidity, and ‘the cyborg‘. Second, I examine the treatment of the body as a conduit which enables political agency to be thought of in terms of transgression and resistance. I stage my argument by looking at how on the one hand Marxist and on the other queer theory have commonly conceived of the body, and propose that the legacies of materialist modes of analysis have much to offer current work focusing on how bodies are shaped by their encapsulation within the sphere of the social. I conclude by examining the presentation of corporeality that appears in the first volume of Marx's Capital. I do so to suggest that geographers working on questions of subjectivity could profit from thinking further about the relation between so-called ‘new’ and ‘fluid’ configurations of bodies, technologies, and subjectivities in the late 20th-century world, and the corporeal configurations of industrial capitalism lying behind and before them.

scholarly journals POETICS OF CYCLIZATION IN THE PROSE OF YURIY BUYDA

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 72-80
Author(s):  
Marina P. Abasheva ◽  
◽  
Mariya V. Kurilenko ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Social Communication ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
General Interest ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Text Generation ◽  
Semiotic Analysis ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One

The article studies the poetics of the contemporary writer Yuriy Buyda in the context of the contemporary Russian short story. The analysis of historically specific forms of Buyda’s cyclization is considered as part of the general tasks of historical poetics in studying the evolution of literary forms. Structural and semiotic analysis of the writer’s works reveals that his prose forms peculiar cycles-clusters, ‘archipelagos’, where a cycle of stories appears to be related to novels. This connection is primarily determined by the setting, but also by recurring heroes and a specific – cumulative rather than cyclical – plot that traces its origin to myth. Through the example of one such cluster of texts – the cycles Zhungli, Gates of Zhungli (Vrata Zhungley) (2011), Lions and Lilies (L’vy i Lilii) (2013), the novel Blue Blood (Sinyaya krov’) and related works – the paper investigates the nature and logic of the depicted world, the mechanisms of its intra-textual connections, as well as the genesis due to both the nature of the author’s artistic thinking and the social, historical and literary, biographical context. Thus, we can observe a tendency of transcending the genre boundaries of a story or novel in favor of hypertext rhizomatic formations – based on mythologizing strategies. These features correlate with the general interest of contemporary Russian literature in collections of short stories, on the one hand, and the contemporary novel’s leaning to disintegration of a single narrative and fragmentation, on the other. It is possible that the tendencies toward hypertext strategies for text generation are determined by the general properties of modern thinking and social communication since today the social morphology of society is built in the form of networks.

The Political Science Discipline in Argentina: The Political Scientist's National Association's Role

2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (03) ◽  
pp. 616-618
Author(s):  
Diego Mazzoccone ◽  
Mariano Mosquera ◽  
Silvana Espejo ◽  
Mariana Fancio ◽  
Gabriela Gonzalez ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Science Discipline ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One

It is very difficult to date the birth of political science in Argentina. Unlike other discipline of the social sciences, in Argentina the first distinction can be made between political thought on the one hand, and political science in another. The debate over political thought—as the reflection of different political questions—emerged in our country in the nineteenth century, especially during the process of constructing the Argentine nation-state. Conversely, political science is defined in a general way as the application of the scientific method to the studies on the power of the state (Fernández 2001).

Youth and Consumption

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Capuzzo
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Consumer Behaviour ◽  
Social Representation ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Deviance ◽  
Symbolic Space ◽  
Conduct Of Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
Consumption Practices ◽  
The Impact

The kaleidoscope of social identity is defined by multiple forces of signification. Gender, ethnicity, and class trace porous borders of the social and symbolic space within which consumption practices unfold, changing, forcing, and sometimes even subverting the apparent fixity of those spaces. The transition from childhood to adulthood is marked by clear biological changes that affect the conduct of life and the ways in which to confront a series of phases in the form of the transformation and maturation of the body. The analysis of consumption practices can be useful in showing how young people define themselves. As part of a discussion on youth and consumption, this article focuses on cultures of consumption among young workers. It also discusses the social deviance and consumer behaviour of young people, the impact of advertising on the social representation of the youth body, films and fantasies, and the emergence of a youth mass market.

A Work of Combat: Mulatto Historians and the Haitian Past, 1847-1867

1974 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Nicholls
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
National Party ◽  
The South ◽  
Liberal Party ◽  
Predominantly Black ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Prejudice And Discrimination ◽  
The One

One of the striking facts about the social and political history of Haiti from independence in 1804 to the present is the deep gulf separating the largely mulatto elite groups from the predominantly black masses. The war of the South in 1799 between Toussaint and Rigaud, and the conflicts between Christophe and Pétion, while not primarily caused by color factors, were reinforced by suspicions and hostilities between black and mulatto, with each group accusing the other of prejudice and discrimination. Politics in the rest of the nineteenth century can generally be seen as a tussle between a mulatto elite centered in the capital and in the cities of the South, on the one hand, and a small black elite often in alliance with army leaders and peasant irregulars, on the other. In the years following 1867 these groups formalized themselves into a largely mulatto Liberal Party, and a preponderantly black National Party.

ANNE BRONTË'S SHAMEFUL AGNES GREY

2013 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Hallemeier
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Social ◽  
Agnes Grey ◽  
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

For much of the twentieth century, literary criticism tended to be relatively dismissive of Anne Brontë's novels. While recent scholarship has argued for the complexity of gender and class dynamics in Agnes Grey (1847), there is little consensus as to what, precisely, those dynamics are. Elizabeth Hollis Berry suggests that Agnes “takes charge of her life” (58), and Maria H. Frawley argues that her narrative is a “significant statement of self-empowerment” (116). Maggie Berg and Dara Rossman Regaignon, however, highlight the continued subjugation of Agnes in the course of her narrative. These scholars’ divergent readings demonstrate how Agnes Grey and Agnes Grey can be read both as illustrative of what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has famously described as the nineteenth century “female individualist” (307), and as instructive of the social strictures that circumscribed this identity. In this essay, I outline how shame works in and through the novel to bridge these opposing readings.

scholarly journals SUBLIME LOVE AND THE ETHICS OF EQUALITY IN A HOMOEROTIC NOVEL OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: PRECIOUS MIRROR OF BOY ACTRESSES

NAN Nü ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith McMahon
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
Late Ming ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Lower Status ◽  
Political Turmoil

AbstractPrecious Mirror of Boy Actresses is the most serious piece of fiction about male love since the late Ming and the lengthiest of all in Chinese literary history. It is remarkable in its extension of the egalitarian implications of the qing aesthetic that it inherits from the late Ming and from earlier Qing literature such as Dream of the Red Chamber. In the homoerotic relationship it idealizes, lovers who are rigidly separated in terms of status nevertheless experience a sublime love which necessarily results in the liberation of the man of lower status. The novel makes unique use of the qing aesthetic's idealization of the feminine to arrive at this ethically pragmatic conclusion whereby liberation is achieved. The foregrounding of this sublime love and the qing-perfected characters who embody it, moreover, link the novel with other works of the period which portray a China that is ultimately a stable and invulnerable entity. Thus Precious Mirror's interpretation of qing carries a historical significance in spite of the novel's obliviousness of the social and political turmoil of China in the mid-nineteenth century.

scholarly journals Plotting Sensation Stories: Affect and Intuition in Short Sensation Fiction

2000 ◽  
pp. 41-58
Author(s):  
Brittany Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Real Life ◽  
The Body ◽  
British Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
Commodity Culture ◽  
Mistaken Identity ◽  
Difficult Time

The British short story is still an understudied form in Victorian studies, and particularly so in studies of sensation fiction. Despite rich and growing scholarship on sensation fiction and its relationship with literary markets and commodity culture, scholars have a had a difficult time shaking off its enduring brand “the novel with a secret,” which has problematically discounted an incredible body of periodical fiction that falls “short” of our expectations about what this kind of fiction looks like. Short periodical works, however, are crucial if we are to understand the nexus of consumerism, mass marketing, social anxiety, and literary production that first peaked in the 1860s, things which have largely come to organise our understanding of what was so sensational about this historical moment in time. This essay compares short and long works from Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Ellen Wood, and J.S. Le Fanu to explore how short stories could take up common themes and features of sensation novels (mistaken identity, unchecked passion, family secrets, shocking revelations, etc.) while also considering how formal considerations of length encouraged greater reliance on impressions and feelings to resolve conflicts in the text. These sensation stories so often suggest that deviance is best discerned through the body rather than the mind, and they create a path to pleasurable revelation where trusting one’s gut offers the most effective form of policing. These supposedly “unimportant” periodical works – sensational not only in the way they glutted periodicals with their sheer volume – could in turn promote suspicion and distrust in readers that were capable of damaging real-life bonds and relationships. Although short fiction could provoke anxieties about shifting roles and hierarchies in an increasingly fast-paced, automated British society, the tremendous visibility of the novel effectively shielded them from comparable criticism.

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