Review: Better Left Unsaid: Victorian Novels, Hays Code Films, and the Benefits of Censorship

2014 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 563-567
Author(s):  
Paul Young
Keyword(s):  
Victorian Novels ◽  
Hays Code

Novel Relations

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alicia Mireles Christoff
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Object Relations ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Victorian Novels ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Gender And Sexuality Studies ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Impact

This book engages twentieth-century post-Freudian British psychoanalysis in an unprecedented way: as literary theory. Placing the writing of figures like D. W. Winnicott, W. R. Bion, Michael and Enid Balint, Joan Riviere, Paula Heimann, and Betty Joseph in conversation with canonical Victorian fiction, the book reveals just how much object relations can teach us about how and why we read. These thinkers illustrate the ever-shifting impact our relations with others have on the psyche, and help us see how literary figures—characters, narrators, authors, and other readers—shape and structure us too. In the book, novels are charged relational fields. Closely reading novels by George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, the book shows that traditional understandings of Victorian fiction change when we fully recognize the object relations of reading. It is not by chance that British psychoanalysis illuminates underappreciated aspects of Victorian fiction so vibrantly: Victorian novels shaped modern psychoanalytic theories of psyche and relationality—including the eclipsing of empire and race in the construction of subject. Relational reading opens up both Victorian fiction and psychoanalysis to wider political and postcolonial dimensions, while prompting a closer engagement with work in such areas as critical race theory and gender and sexuality studies. The book describes the impact of literary form on readers and on twentieth- and twenty-first-century theories of the subject.

Suffering Mothers in Mid-Victorian Novels by Natalie J. McKnight

1998 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-82
Author(s):  
Adrienne E. Gavin
Keyword(s):  
Victorian Novels

Utopian Socialism, Women’s Emancipation, and the Origins of Middlemarch

2021 ◽  
pp. 156-187
Author(s):  
Mark A. Allison
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Woman Question ◽  
Women's Suffrage ◽  
Victorian Novels ◽  
Communist Manifesto ◽  
Institutional Politics ◽  
Women's Emancipation ◽  
Utopian Socialism ◽  
Charles Fourier ◽  
Women’S Suffrage

This chapter demonstrates that George Eliot’s investigation of the early, “utopian” socialists catalyzed the writing of perhaps the most iconic of all Victorian novels, Middlemarch (1871–2). The utopian socialists (as Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, Henri de Saint-Simon, and their followers were increasingly known) frequently suggested that the transition to a new, nongovernmental social order hinged upon the emancipation of women. Their untimely calls for female liberation became newly salient with the coalescence, in the 1860s, of Britain’s first national campaign for women’s suffrage. This chapter’s reading of Middlemarch shows that socialist discourse provides Eliot a rich symbolic vocabulary with which to conduct her own novelistic investigation of the “Woman Question”—and to engage in a clandestine meditation on the claims of the suffragists. By incorporating socialist elements into her novel, Eliot could unobtrusively position herself in relation to the ideals and activities of this burgeoning movement—a movement in which a number of her closest friends were involved. Attending to Middlemarch’s socialist motif demystifies the novel’s shrouded origins and decodes a hitherto illegible record of Eliot’s proto-feminist aspirations which, like the early socialists’ own, were inextricably intertwined with skepticism about institutional politics. This chapter also provides a genealogy of “utopian socialism,” a category that has exerted a distorting influence on scholarship since Marx and Engels tarred their rivals with it in The Communist Manifesto.

scholarly journals “PERMANENTLY BLACKED”: JULIA FRANKAU’S JEWISH RACE

1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 171-183
Author(s):  
Michael Galchinsky
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Racism ◽  
Victorian Novels ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
History Of

IF THERE IS to be a challenge to the increasingly prevalent impulse to recover Anglo-Jewish texts from the silences of the archives, the challenge will undoubtedly arise in relation to the novels of Julia Frankau.1 Frankau’s late Victorian novels on Jewish subjects, Dr. Phillips: A Maida Vale Idyll (1887) and Pigs in Clover (1903), explore and authorize a particular set of attitudes known as “Jewish self-hatred,” and, I will argue, legitimate these attitudes by recourse to an idiosyncratic form of scientific racism. Moreover, as I will demonstrate, these texts have served as spurs to the production of racial anti-Semitism. In such a case, what does it mean to recover the text? For what purposes does one revive interest in a self-hating work that has a history of generating dangerous consequences?

Networks

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Jagoda
Keyword(s):  
Communication Systems ◽  
Postcolonial Literature ◽  
Media Analysis ◽  
Qualitative Sociology ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Network Structures ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Victorian Novels ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Early American

Networks influence practically every subfield of literary studies. Unlike hierarchies and centralized structures, networks connote decentralization and distribution. The abstraction of this form makes it applicable to a wide variety of phenomena. For example, the metaphor and form of the network informs the way we think about communication systems in early American writing, social networks in Victorian novels, transnational circulation in postcolonial literature, and computer networks in late 20th-century cyberpunk fiction. Beyond traditional literary genres, network form is also accessible through comparative media analysis. Films, television serials, video games, and transmedia narratives may represent or evoke network structures through medium-specific techniques. The juxtaposition of different literary and artistic forms, across media, helps to defamiliarize network forms and make these complex structures available to thought. Across subfields of literary studies, critics may be drawn to networks because of their resonance with histories of the present and contemporary technoscience. Scholars may also recognize the sense of complexity and interconnection inherent in networks, which resonates with experiences of intertextuality and close reading itself. In addition to studying representations of networks, literary critics employ a variety of network-related methods. These approaches include historicist scholarship that uses network structures to think about social organization and communication in different eras, quantitative digital humanities tools that map networks of literary circulation, qualitative sociology of literature and reader-response theory that analyze networks of readers and publishers, and formalist work that compares network and aesthetic forms.

Virtual Minds, Victorian Novels, and the Question of Modeling

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 471-483
Author(s):  
Elisha Cohn
Keyword(s):  
Object Oriented ◽  
Mental Images ◽  
Legal Process ◽  
Victorian Novels ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
Red Tape

Snagsby's paper shop in Bleak House (1853) deals in “all sorts of blank forms of legal process; in skins and rolls of parchment; in paper—foolscap, brief, draft, brown, white, whitey-brown, and blotting; in stamps; in office-quills, pens, India-rubber, pounce, pins, pencils, sealing-wax, and wafers; in red tape, and green ferret; in pocket-books, almanacks, diaries, and law lists; in string boxes, rulers, inkstands—glass and leaden, penknives, scissors, bodkins, and other small office cutlery; in short, in articles too numerous to mention.” While one might imagine this stifling bookish environment as especially inviting for an object-oriented reading, this passage has recently attracted what I might call a newly inflected kind of subject-oriented reading. This description from Bleak House makes an appearance in two recent critical monographs concerned with how the reader's cognitive capabilities meet words on the page to transform them into a felt reality. How does a passage like this act on our minds, creating mental images or offering a sense of embeddedness in an unreal “reality”? How does fiction become phenomenological?

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