CULTURAL STUDIES, VICTORIAN STUDIES, AND FORMALISM

1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 537-544 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Loesberg
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Interdisciplinary Studies ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
Critical Response ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
Leigh Hunt ◽  
Aesthetic Form

VICTORIAN STUDIES, in its longstanding resistance to the formalist study of Victorian literature, has to an extent been re-enacting the anxiety of mid-Victorian poets and novelists about being entrapped in a world of art. That anxiety notoriously defined the Victorian resistance to their Romantic forebears (think of Tennyson’s and Arnold’s well-documented, ambiguous attitudes toward Wordsworth and Keats or even Dickens’s satire of Leigh Hunt as Skimpole in Bleak House). And, predictably enough, it led to the backlash of the late-century aestheticism. If one positions the anti-formalism of the various genres of historicism and cultural studies now current in the study of Victorian literature as current versions of that Victorian anxiety at being hermetically enclosed in beautiful but empty forms, then surely an aestheticist and formalist backlash is more than overdue. And, rather than taking an analytical or neutrally critical response to this flux and reflux, I intend to espouse just such a backlash. If backlash implies partialness, the potential partiality of formalism is, I think, one of its less recognized values. Indeed, I will argue, a return to a consideration of aesthetic form may, in its recognition of its own limits, return a genuine interdisciplinarity to Victorian studies, if one intends by interdisciplinary studies not the work of literary scholars treating non-literary texts, but the participation of scholars from different disciplines with different and possibly conflicting grounding questions, concerns and modes of analysis in the study of the same subject matter.

Bleak House, Political Economy, Victorian Studies

1997 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Blake
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Law Reform ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
Know How ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
Hard Times ◽  
Critical Heritage

Dickens is not known as a political economist. He is the critic of workhouse abuses (made topical by Benthamite Poor Law reform) in Oliver Twist and the caricaturist of the father of Adam Smith and Malthus Gradgrind in Hard Times. Students of Victorian literature familiarly take Hard Times as F. R. Leavis does as a condemnation of “The World of Bentham,” of utilitarianism, philosophic radicalism, political economy. It is what we expect when Dickens, The Critical Heritage gives us John Stuart Mill complaining about Bleak House and that “creature” Dickens for a portrait of Mrs. Jellyby that he finds antifeminist (to Harriet Taylor, March 20, 1854, qtd. in Collins, 297–98). But consider: in Bleak House there is a passage where Mr. Skimpole declares his family to be “all wrong in point of political economy” (454). His “Beauty daughter” marries young, takes a husband who is another child; they are improvident, have two children, bring them home to Skimpole's, as he expects his other daughters to do as well, though they none of them know how they will get on. Skimpole is exposed in the course of the novel as one of its worst characters. For a bribe and to save himself from infection he turns the smallpox-stricken Jo out into the night. He cadges loans from those who can't afford to make them. He encourages Richard in his fatal false hopes of a Chancery settlement for a payback to himself for helping the lawyer Mr. Vholes to a client. Esther Summerson ultimately condemns him, and Mr. Jarndyce breaks with him. If Skimpole is all wrong in point of political economy, can there be something all right with political economy for Dickens?

INTRODUCTION: VICTORIAN STUDIES AND CULTURAL STUDIES

1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 355-363 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Williams
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Panel Discussion ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Modern Language Association ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Victorian Literature And Culture ◽  
Selection Of

THE IDEA FOR THIS CLUSTER of work had its origins in a session of the 1996 Modern Language Association Convention in Washington, D. C., where the editors of Victorian Literature and Culture organized a panel devoted to the topic at hand: “Victorian Studies and Cultural Studies.” The panel presentations and the post-panel discussion were extremely stimulating, and it was clear that the rich topic wanted further consideration. The following selection of essays, gathered together under this journal’s special feature, the “Editors’ Topic,” is the result. Here, then, are four articles representing a range of practice — though not, by any means, the entire range of practice — in the intersecting fields of Victorian studies and cultural studies. The articles are followed by fourteen forum essays presenting an array of pressing issues, arguments, and sharp opinions centering in the relations — past, present, and potential — between Victorian studies and cultural studies. Three of the following eighteen pieces were presented (and those in shorter, nascent form) at the MLA: Mary Ellis Gibson’s article on Henry Martyn, Jane Eyre, and Missionary Biography, Kristen Leaver’s consideration of Victorian melodrama, and my brief ruminations on the concepts of “discourse” and “genre.” All the rest were commissioned for this issue of Victorian Literature and Culture.

VICTORIAN STUDIES AND CULTURAL STUDIES: INTERDISCIPLINARITY, THE MARKET, AND A CALL FOR CRITICAL REALISM

1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 481-486
Author(s):  
Linda Shires
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Critical Realism ◽  
Victorian Studies

VICTORIAN STUDIES PRACTITIONERS have often applauded themselves on their openness to views, topics, and approaches not immediately recognizable as already part of the field. I put the formulation this way because Victorian studies scholars and critics also prize the field for its capaciousness; they tend to think of the field as large and already all-inclusive. It houses many genres and sub-disciplines and it first welcomed certain kinds of critical theory when other historical fields moved more slowly to accept them.

Playing with Superheroes: Genre, Aesthetics, and Deconstruction in The Green Hornet

2020 ◽  
pp. 184-194
Author(s):  
Jennifer Kirby
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Visual Effects ◽  
Critical Response

In this chapter, Jennifer Kirby analyses Michel Gondry’s big-budget superhero film The Green Hornet (2011). The film generally provoked a negative critical response due to its seemingly insignificant subject matter. However, Kirby here argues that the vitriolic criticism fails to acknowledge the extent to which this film can be read as a deconstruction of the generic codes and aesthetics of the predominantly American superhero genre from an outsider’s perspective. She demonstrates how, just as The Green Hornet’s incompetent playboy, Britt Reid (Seth Rogen), plays at his childhood ambition of being a super-hero in the film, Gondry plays with the conventions of the superhero movie through both humorous revisionism and, more successfully, the use of analogue visual effects rather than using predominantly digital visual effects as is typical in most Hollywood superhero films.

‘A very Moloch of a baby’

2020 ◽  
pp. 48-106
Author(s):  
Tamara S. Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Child Care ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Social Criticism ◽  
Rescue Work ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
Infant Behaviour

Dickens’s portrayal of babyhood comprises comical creations as well as complex symbols and infants as victims of social injustice, yet, especially his funny babies are often overlooked. The first chapter explores how Dickens satirizes the growing commodification of babyhood in Victorian Britain and, in playing with readers’ expectations, produces comical scenes that strengthen rather than undercut his social criticism. His exposure of failed middle-class projects of child rescue urges his readers to reconsider prevailing ideas of charitable intervention, while he uses comically exaggerated infant behaviour to render working-class practices of child care mundane and familiar without sentimentalizing them. His representation of working-class baby-minding, a practice that Victorian philanthropists notoriously misunderstood, exemplifies how Dickens could combine comedy and social criticism to draw attention to topical issues, upend clichés, and at the same time create individualized infant characters. His Christmas book for 1848, The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, produces a grotesquely comical image of a baby, minded by a small boy, as ‘Moloch’, a deity demanding child sacrifice. While Baby Moloch becomes central to a reassessment of emotional attachment, the narrative complicates middle-class rescue work. The simultaneity of the comical baby and infants as symbols of suffering is then further developed in Bleak House (1853), whereas in Our Mutual Friend (1865), the failed rescue of an orphaned toddler dramatizes pressing issues involving paid child-minding and unregulated adoption. The analysis of Dickens’s fictional infants simultaneously reveals the different narrative roles of the comical baby in Victorian literature.

ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING: AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR 1998

2001 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 553-569
Author(s):  
Sandra M. Donaldson ◽  
Dominic Bisignano ◽  
Melissa Brotton
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Annotated Bibliography ◽  
Elizabeth Barrett Browning ◽  
English Studies ◽  
Victorian Poetry ◽  
Nineteenth Century Literature ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
Victorian Literature And Culture ◽  
Century Literature

The following abbreviations appear in this year’s bibliography:BSN Browning Society Notes. DAI Dissertation Abstracts International. N&Q Notes and Queries. NCL Nineteenth Century Literature. RES Review of English Studies. VLC Victorian Literature and Culture. VP Victorian Poetry. VS Victorian StudiesAn asterisk* indicates that we have not seen the item. Cross references with citation numbers between 51 and 70 followed by a colon (e.g., C68:) refer to William S. Peterson’s Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning: An Annotated Bibliography, 1951–1970 (New York: Browning Institute, 1974); higher numbers refer to Robert Browning: A Bibliography 1830–1950, compiled by L. N. Broughton, C. S. Northup, and Robert Pearsall (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1953).

Hausen außer Haus: Transitorische Räume in Marilynne Robinsons Housekeeping (1980) und Ernst Augustins Robinsons blaues Haus (2012)

2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-319
Author(s):  
Annina Klappert
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Topological Analysis ◽  
Spatial Theory ◽  
Potential Change ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Spatial Turn ◽  
Pass Through

AbstractThe German figura etymologica ‘Hausen außer Haus,’ as ‘dwelling’ or ‘housing outside the house,’ is developed in this paper as a specific figure of thought in two contemporary literary texts in which the respective protagonists’ outside ‘housing’ contrasts with the space of the houses they pass through, thus transforming them into transitory spaces through the reflection of the outside. This dialectical movement challenges the concept of the house as a definable space. In terms of literary-spatial theory, the protagonists are examined as transitory figures; their transgressions of inside/outside and up/down are identified in a topological analysis, and finally the argument is presented that the imagination of the protagonists functions as a transitory modus as they move within the narrative. Both texts show the ability of literature to reflect on space and enable a link to the spatial turn of 1980 s cultural studies. The innovative contribution of my argument occurs in rethinking the concept of the house as a definable space with reliable boundaries and in proposing a conception of the outside as a potential change to the inside. By providing new insights into the concept of the house, literature itself can be seen as a space of thinking ‘outside the house.’

THE ‘ARGONAUTIC’ EXPEDITION OF THE ARGIVES: MODELS OF HEROISM IN STATIUS'THEBAID

2014 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 778-786 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Parkes
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
First Century ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Cross Contamination ◽  
Systematic Treatment ◽  
Apollonius Rhodius ◽  
Valerius Flaccus ◽  
Limited Opportunity ◽  
The Way

While Statius' decision to treat events in landlocked Thebes offered limited opportunity to integrate into his poem a maritime episode, which had become a staple epic ingredient by the first centurya.d.,theThebaidis dotted with references to the Argonauts' quest for the Golden Fleece, including a narrative flashback of the crew's time at Lemnos (Theb. 5.335–498). Following in a long tradition of cross-contamination between Argonautic and Theban literary texts (as shown by, for example, the ApollonianArgonautica's use of Antimachus'Thebaid), Statius' poem also evokes works of literature which narrate the legend, notably theArgonauticasof Apollonius Rhodius and Valerius Flaccus. A lack of scholarly focus on this latter area has generally led to a piecemeal scrutiny of individual allusive passages rather than a systematic treatment. However, Stover's recent paper paves the way for a more productive approach through its contention that theThebaidmakes widespread use of the mythic subject matter: ‘It … appears that Statius frequently appropriates the Argonautic tradition and that he does so largely to present the Argives as quasi Argonauts. This suggests that their adventure to conquer Thebes is analogous to the Argonauts’ voyage to Colchis.'

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