Victorian Plants: Cosmopolitan and Invasive

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-53
Author(s):  
Lynn Voskuil
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Invasive Plants ◽  
Invasion Biology ◽  
Plant Distribution ◽  
Nonnative Species ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The World ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Methodological Reflection

The terms “cosmopolitan” and “invasive” name ideas that have long figured prominently in the practices, the methods, and the unexamined assumptions of Victorian studies. These categories also shape the study of plants, both now and in the nineteenth century, along with related terms like “native,” “exotic,” and “hybrid.” “Invasion biology,” for example, currently describes the study of how nonnative species spread around the world, and the phrase “nativism-cosmopolitanism dichotomy” has been used to describe the impasse between different approaches to global plant distribution and migration. This paper will put these variable disciplinary conceptions of “cosmopolitan” and “invasive” into conversation with each other, offering a methodological reflection with the goal of clarifying their meanings and applications in and for current scholarship of the Victorian period. If ecological uses of these ideas, like aesthetic and political uses, are rooted in the nineteenth century, their disparate strands have not yet been sufficiently disentangled. What difference does it make to speak of invasive plants as compared to human invaders? How does our sense of cosmopolitanism, empire, and invasion change when pressure is exerted from other fields? Perhaps most importantly, what are the ethical dimensions of these concepts, especially when nonhuman entities are included?

Australian and Indian Plants: Making Connexions in Nineteenth-Century Botany

2012 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Maroske
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Distribution Pattern ◽  
Plant Distribution ◽  
Northern Australia ◽  
Species Limits ◽  
The World ◽  
Joseph Hooker

Despite the expectation in nineteenth-century botany that the plants of one country were most similar to those of adjacent countries, by the middle of the century it was accepted that there was a connexion between flora of northern Australia and ?India'. The pattern and reasons for plant distribution around the world were studied in the emerging science of phytogeography, but this paper suggests that the strength of the Indo-Australian connexion was influenced by species limits in the established science of phytography or descriptive botany. This paper also shows that while the botany of Australia and ?India' was predominantly studied in European nations, Ferdinand Mueller used resources obtained from Joseph Hooker in Great Britain, and Friedrich Miquel in the Netherlands to add new details to the distribution pattern of ?Indian' plants in northern Australia. Although Mueller was unwilling to reflect on these findings himself, they seemed to challenge attempts to introduce evolutionary and geological explanations into phytogeography.

scholarly journals “Would You Like Some Victorian Dressing with That?”

2010 ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Margaret Stetz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
The World ◽  
Institute Of Technology

AbstractThis article challenges scholars to look beyond conventional audiences for Victorian studies and to go beyond conventional subjects, into the world of Victorian and Neo-Victorian fashion. It holds up the career of Dr. Valerie Steele, Director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, as a model for how to conduct historical research into Victorian clothing and how to bring the results of that research to a broader public. It encourages academics to use the Internet to connect with a non-academic public that is already engaged with the Victorians through the medium of clothing, and it urges readers in general to see Neo-Victorian “mashup” dressing as an opportunity for serious exchange of knowledge about nineteenth-century culture.

Victorian Aesthetics

2015 ◽  
pp. 560-579
Author(s):  
Jonah Siegel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Elizabeth Barrett Browning ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
Fundamental Characteristic ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
William Morris ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The World ◽  
The Aesthetic

Although the field of aesthetics was consolidated in the nineteenth century, its study has been shaped by two contradictory tendencies: (1) the insistence that the aesthetic realm needs to be autonomous, independent of the world of common experience; (2) the ethical or political insistence that autonomy is impossible. Starting from this characteristic antinomy, and tracing it back to early theoretical formulations in Kant and Schiller, this chapter illuminates the ways in which the constant pull between form and reality, or between art and experience, was a fundamental characteristic of aesthetics in the Victorian period. The writings of Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, George Eliot, Walter Pater, William Morris, John Ruskin, and others show the challenges of negotiating a concept that at times seems the only thing reconciling one to the world and at other times seems to be pulling one away to an impossible realm outside human existence.

Safeguarding the Past: “Presentist” Historicism

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-311
Author(s):  
Francesca Sawaya
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World

AbstractThe V21 Manifesto of 2015 proposes that we revitalize Victorian Studies through the use of presentist historicism, a methodology that recognizes how “the world we inhabit bears the traces of the nineteenth century.” Presentism—once seen by some as a bug in historicism—now becomes, intriguingly, a feature. While scholars such as Dominick LaCapra and Jennifer Fleissner have also explored presentism in historicist work, the V21 Manifesto brings renewed attention to the questions and problems presentism poses. This review explores two books by members of the V21 Collective. Both interrogate vital issues in the present: Anna Kornbluh focuses on financialization and canonical Victorian and modernist texts, Susan Zieger on ephemera and affect and middlebrow texts. Both differently erudite books reinvigorate our thinking about the past. At the same time, both books avoid questions of production in the past and present. Such avoidance creates nondialectical and specialist accounts of the past’s relation to the present and enshrines and safeguards Victorian literary studies’ privileged objects of study and methodologies. Appreciative of the ways the V21 Manifesto has renewed attention to presentist historicism, the review nonetheless argues for more reflexive and contestatory accounts of the past’s relation to the present.

John Lloyd Williams (1854–1945): profile of a Snowdonian botanist

2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Dewi Jones
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Plant Physiology ◽  
Marine Algae ◽  
Plant Distribution ◽  
The Arctic ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Major Study ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Late Nineteenth

John Lloyd Williams was an authority on the arctic-alpine flora of Snowdonia during the late nineteenth century when plant collecting was at its height, but unlike other botanists and plant collectors he did not fully pursue the fashionable trend of forming a complete herbarium. His diligent plant-hunting in a comparatively little explored part of Snowdonia led to his discovering a new site for the rare Killarney fern (Trichomanes speciosum), a feat which was considered a major achievement at the time. For most part of the nineteenth century plant distribution, classification and forming herbaria, had been paramount in the learning of botany in Britain resulting in little attention being made to other aspects of the subject. However, towards the end of the century many botanists turned their attention to studying plant physiology, a subject which had advanced significantly in German laboratories. Rivalry between botanists working on similar projects became inevitable in the race to be first in print as Lloyd Williams soon realized when undertaking his major study on the cytology of marine algae.

The Late-Victorian ‘New Man’ and the Neo-Victorian ‘Neo-Man’

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-121
Author(s):  
Margaret D. Stetz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
New Man ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Victorian Age

The New Man was a crucial topic of discussion and a continual preoccupation in late-Victorian feminist writing, precisely because he was more often a wished-for presence than an actual one. Nevertheless, creators of neo-Victorian fiction and film repeatedly project him backwards onto the screen of literary history, representing him as having in fact existed in the Victorian age as a complement to the New Woman. What is at stake in retrospectively situating the New Man – or, as I will call him, the ‘Neo-Man’ – in the nineteenth century, through historical fiction? If one impulse behind fictional returns to the Victorian period is nostalgia, then what explains this nostalgia for The Man Who Never Was? This essay will suggest that neo-Victorian works have a didactic interest in transforming present-day readers, especially men, through depictions of the Neo-Man, which broaden the audience's feminist sympathies, queer its notions of gender relations, and alter its definition of masculinity.

‘Otherwise in London’ or, the ‘Essence of Things’: Modernity and Estrangement in the Nineteenth-Century Cityscape

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35
Author(s):  
Julian Wolfreys
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Thomas De Quincey ◽  
Urban Centre ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Representation ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

Writers of the early nineteenth century sought to find new ways of writing about the urban landscape when first confronted with the phenomena of London. The very nature of London's rapid growth, its unprecedented scale, and its mere difference from any other urban centre throughout the world marked it out as demanding a different register in prose and poetry. The condition of writing the city, of inventing a new writing for a new experience is explored by familiar texts of urban representation such as by Thomas De Quincey and William Wordsworth, as well as through less widely read authors such as Sarah Green, Pierce Egan, and Robert Southey, particularly his fictional Letters from England.

Mirrors, Masks, and Masculinity: The Homosocial Legacy from Dickens to Machen

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 256-275
Author(s):  
Molly C. O'Donnell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
The World ◽  
Speech Genre

All the narrators and characters in J. Sheridan Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly are unreliable impostors. As the title suggests, this is also the case with Arthur Machen's The Three Impostors, which similarly presents a virtual matryoshka of unreliability through a series of impostors. Both texts effect this systematic insistence on social constructedness by using and undermining the specific context of the male homosocial world. What served as the cure-all in the world of Pickwick – the homosocial bond – has here been exported, exposed, and proven flawed. The gothic is out in the open now, and the feared ghost resides without and within the group. The inability of anyone to interpret its signs, communicate its meaning, and rely on one's friends to talk one through it is the horror that cannot be overcome. Part of a larger project on the nineteenth-century ‘tales novel’ that treats the more heterogeneric and less heteronormative Victorian novel, this article examines how In a Glass Darkly and The Three Impostors blur the clear-cut gender division articulated in prior masculine presentations like The Pickwick Papers and feminine reinterpretations such as Cranford. These later texts challenge binaries of sex, speech, genre, and mode in enacting the previously articulated masculine and feminine simultaneously.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
George E. Dutton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Catholic Mission ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Main Figure

This chapter introduces the book’s main figure and situates him within the historical moment from which he emerges. It shows the degree to which global geographies shaped the European Catholic mission project. It describes the impact of the Padroado system that divided the world for evangelism between the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in the 15th century. It also argues that European clerics were drawing lines on Asian lands even before colonial regimes were established in the nineteenth century, suggesting that these earlier mapping projects were also extremely significant in shaping the lives of people in Asia. I argue for the value of telling this story from the vantage point of a Vietnamese Catholic, and thus restoring agency to a population often obscured by the lives of European missionaries.

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