“The Subject Escapes Me”: Spellbinding Lecturers and (In-)Attentive Audiences in Late-Victorian Serialized Sensation Fiction

2015 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne-Julia Zwierlein
Keyword(s):  
Print Culture ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
Mass Cultures ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Sensation Novel

AbstractThis essay investigates the late-Victorian competition between oral and print mass cultures by focusing on the example of the popular lecture. It situates fictional lecturing scenes in the historical contexts of increased literacy rates and the explosion of mass print culture as well as elitist fears about political inclusiveness after the 1867 Reform Act. My lecturing scenes are taken from Wilkie Collins’s sensation novel

‘TALKING POLITICS’: TYRANNY, PARLIAMENT, AND CHRISTOPHER BROOKE'S THE GHOST OF RICHARD THE THIRD (1614)

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHELLE O'CALLAGHAN
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Parliamentary Debates ◽  
Political Discourses ◽  
The Third ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Inns Of Court ◽  
Literary Cultures ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Definition Of

The career of the MP and poet Christopher Brooke, in particular his The ghost of Richard the third (1614) and his activity in the 1614 ‘addled’ parliament, forms the basis of this study of Jacobean political culture. Brooke's career foregrounds the close interaction of political and literary cultures in the period; he was a leading member of the political circle, the ‘Sireniacs’, which had strong parliamentary ties, and was one of the Inns of Court-based ‘oppositional’ Spenserian poets. Together with his fellow ‘Sireniac’ MPs, Brooke vehemently opposed the definition of impositions as the domain of absolute rather than ordinary powers of the crown because of the threat this posed to the rights of parliament and the subject. The ghost of Richard the third provides an example of parliamentary debates entering a wider print culture, where impositions merged with broader civic issues. Political language in this period was not confined to the realms of high theory and Brooke's poem illustrates the complex mediation of political discourses through literary forms. A humanist discourse of tyranny provided Brooke with a coded language, enabling him to articulate his concern for the health of the commonwealth and to address areas of ideological conflict in early Stuart political culture.

Spying in the British Post Office: Letter-Opening, Italy and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White

2019 ◽  
pp. 95-124
Author(s):  
Patricia Cove
Keyword(s):  
Print Culture ◽  
Central Place ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Constitutive Relationship ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
Post Office ◽  
Italian Politics ◽  
Woman In White ◽  
Private Homes ◽  
National Stereotypes

This chapter discusses Wilkie Collins’s sensation novel The Woman in White (1859–60) in relation to the 1844 Post Office Espionage Scandal, which revealed British government spying against Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini. Representations of the Post Office Scandal in Parliament and print predict the revision of the Gothic into sensation fiction, helping to create the imaginative space through which the sensation genre could begin to interrogate Gothic national stereotypes and relocate the Gothic plot within modern Britain’s private homes and institutions. The letter-opening scandal and The Woman in White share a central place in a mid-Victorian moment of evolution in the mutually constitutive relationship between Italian and British national identities, generating and reflecting a crisis in Britishness focused on the secret tyrannies concealed beneath the surface of Victorian liberalism that emerged from the collision of British and Italian politics and print culture.

Secularism, Synthesis, and Antebellum Evangelical Self-Understanding

2015 ◽  
Vol 84 (3) ◽  
pp. 616-620
Author(s):  
Caleb J.D. Maskell
Keyword(s):  
Print Culture ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Media Practices

In Secularism In Antebellum America, John Modern extensively and directly engages with what he calls Mark Noll's “magisterial treatment of evangelicalism” in America's God. In light of this, I have been surprised at what a challenge it has been to bring these books into conversation with one another on the subject of evangelicals and evangelicalism. The central reason for the difficulty, I think, is that Modern's treatment of antebellum evangelical print culture—his chapter entitled “Evangelical Secularism and the Measure of Leviathan”—is not actually about evangelicals. It is about secularism. And that, in a nutshell, is Modern's point. Throughout his book, he works hard to bring what he sees as the background into the foreground, rendering the emergent atmosphere of secularism as the protagonist in his story of evangelical media practices.

Transimperial Negotiations and Cultural Anxieties from the Sensation Novel to the Adventure Story

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Robert McParland ◽  
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
Female Figure ◽  
Adventure Story ◽  
Cultural Measures ◽  
Cultural Anxieties ◽  
Sensation Novel ◽  
Sensation Novels ◽  
Woman In White ◽  
Lady Audley's Secret

The sensation novels of the 1860s expressed the anxieties of the age, challenged realism, and sought to revive wonder. Within the transformations of modernity, these novels were read and exchanged across the British Empire. Sensation fiction mixed romance and realism and its sensational elements reflected modern tensions and concerns. Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret probed the sources of violence, the cultural measures of sanity, and underscored the transgressions of an oppressed female figure in her search for freedom. Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White likewise challenged cultural certainties, as he observed the expanding popular reading audience. The rise of the adventure story within the imperial designs of colonization expressed a sense of mystery and an encounter with otherness that is interrogated here.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Kate Singer ◽  
Ashley Cross ◽  
Suzanne L. Barnett
Keyword(s):  
Print Culture ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Cultural Narratives ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Mobile Forms ◽  
Ontological Approach ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Perfect Storm

Building on Romantic scholarship that has opened the door to more capacious understandings of materiality that rethink the subject-object opposition of cultural materialism, the introduction makes the case that Romantic-era writers were, like us, material creatures living in an emphatically material world. In the perfect storm of historical and cultural changes in gender and sexuality, print culture, and science, Romantic writers sought alternative ways to explain materiality as fluid, unstable, and affective in order to challenge cultural narratives that insisted on notions of discrete sexed bodies, embodied subjectivities, isolated things, or stable texts. The introduction establishes a literary, critical, historical, and theoretical context for reading texts, bodies, things, and language as transgressive materialities that entangle with and alter the matters of the world, as they move across prescribed limits and braid together mobile forms of affect, embodiment, and discursivity. To help uncover this dynamic materiality in Romantic-era texts, the introduction provides a primer on new materialism and offers it as theoretical model and praxis. The collection, the editors conclude, not only reveals a new materialist imaginary for Romanticism but also unveils material transgressions that alter new materialism’s often strictly ontological approach.

scholarly journals Playing Cute: Sensation Villainy and the Aesthetics of Small Things in The Woman in White and Lady Audley’s Secret

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Eastlake
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
Literary Character ◽  
Woman In White ◽  
Lady Audley's Secret ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Small Things ◽  
Physical Sensation

Abstract In Our Aesthetic Categories (2012), Sianne Ngai defines ‘cute’ as an aesthetic ‘preoccupation with small, easy to handle things . . . an aesthetic that celebrates the diminutive and the vulnerable’. Although Ngai identifies the cute as a predominantly twentieth-century phenomenon, and one which is inextricably bound up with the mass-market commodification, even eroticization and fetishization of the cute object or person, it is difficult to imagine a literary character more enamoured with ‘small things’ – from tiny, sugary confections to his menagerie of pet mice – than Wilkie Collins’s Count Fosco, or a character who so perfectly conforms to the definition of the cute commodity itself as ‘appealing specifically . . . for protection and care’ than the ‘childish, helpless, babyfied’ Lucy Audley in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). This article reads Count Fosco and Lady Audley through the characteristics of cuteness to better understand the aesthetic and economic dynamics of their villainy, and to establish for the twentieth-century phenomenon of cuteness identified by Ngai a discernible genealogy in the specific conjunction of print culture, theatricality, commodification, and physical sensation that we now recognize as the sensation fiction of the 1860s.

Devoted Wife/Sensuous Bibi: Colonial Constructions of the Indian Woman, 1860-1900

2001 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Indrani Sen
Keyword(s):  
Print Culture ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Community Resident ◽  
Indian Woman ◽  
British India ◽  
Gender Ideologies ◽  
Indian Women ◽  
Gender Representations ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Anglo Indian

Current research has rather tended to neglect the print culture of 19th-century British India and its contribution towards the formation of gender ideologies. This article attempts to scrutinise the clamorous voices of the print culture: the newspapers, popular periodicals as well as copious published works, and to unravel the complex and sometimes contradictory web of constructions that ihese built around the gendered colonised. The second half of the century witnessed a definite cultural focus on the Indian woman. Among other things, this interest took the form of a constant engagement with the subject of the 'native' female in the print culture of the British community resident in India. The article explores the multifaceted and pluralistic representation of the Indian woman, ranging from prurient accounts of native female sensuality and discussion of social reform issues to laudatory inscriptions of wifely devotion and the sati. In other words, the image of the Indian woman was constantly being reconstituted and proscriptions of her sensuousness were interwoven with prescriptions of passive feminine behaviour. Admired models of perceived Eastern female docility were often selectively drawn upon, in a process constituting an 'Indianisation' of the Anglo-Indian female paradigm. While it is well recognised that representations of Indian women were strategically linked to the agenda of empire, what this article also tries to show is that, due to the complex interconnections between the ideologies of gender and empire, these gender representations also served to contain disturb ing issues raised by the contemporary women's movement in England.

Public and Print Cultures of Sex in the Long Nineteenth Century

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Cline Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Sexual Practices ◽  
Sexual Knowledge ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Female Authors ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Print Cultures ◽  
Heterosexual Marriage

The explosion of print culture and the advent of female authors and readers created the foundation for important changes in sexual practices and sexual mores across the long nineteenth century, influencing attitudes toward female pleasure, romantic love, courtship, marriage, and same-sex eroticism. This chapter focuses on female creators of sexual knowledge who worked to change legal practices and social customs by posing alternatives to indissoluble heterosexual marriage. It places women’s writings in their historical context of circulation—across state and national lines, and from pamphlets to newspapers to courtroom testimonies—revealing the ways that print offered possibilities for new authorities to emerge on the subject of women’s bodies and experiences.

Books

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Gillespie
Keyword(s):  
Print Culture ◽  
Book History ◽  
Canterbury Tales ◽  
Book Production ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Press ◽  
Human Labor ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Agent Of Change ◽  
Source Of Information

The book is a source of information about the past, a material result of inevitably imperfect human labor. Because they are further disordered by time, books are unstable witnesses to that past. Book history is of growing significance to the study of culture and literature. The importance of the press, and the nature of the “print culture” associated with it, has been the subject of debate between scholars who argue that the press was “an agent of change,” and Adrian Johns and others who insist that while the advent of print resulted in “fixity,” possessive authorship, the invention of copyright, a proliferation of titles, and capitalist investment in book production, they were not its inevitable result. This article focuses on “books,” particularly medieval “books.” It considers the poem “Chaucers Wordes unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn” and Linne R. Mooney’s identification of Adam Pinkhurst as the copyist of the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

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