Drama, Ecology, and the Ground of Empire The Play of Indigo

2018 ◽  
pp. 21-41
Author(s):  
Sukanya Banerjee
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Studies

By reading a mid–nineteenth-century Bengali play about indigo cultivation, Neel Darpan, this essay argues for the salience of drama—an overlooked form in Victorian studies—to ecocritical discussions. The essay also considers how the irreducibly ecological nature of colonialism recalibrates our analytical objects and impulses. In bringing ecology together with drama, the essay arrives at an idiom of “groundedness” as a critical imperative for ecologically minded scholarship, not least on empire.

scholarly journals From Reading to Rio: Oscar Wilde in Brazil

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-170
Author(s):  
Ross G. Forman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Victorian Studies

This essay examines the reverberations of the Oscar Wilde trials in Brazil, using it to probe how a “widening” of Victorian studies might work and arguing that looking beyond the use nodes of comparison enriches our understanding of the long nineteenth century.

THE NEW OTHER VICTORIANS: THE SUCCESS (AND FAILURE) OF QUEER THEORY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH STUDIES

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 755-771 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Kaye
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
History Of Sexuality ◽  
Sexuality Studies ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
Critical Writing ◽  
History Of

Much of the critical writingon Queer Theory and Sexuality Studies in a Victorian context over the last decade or so has been absorbing, exploring, complicating, and working under the burden of the influence of Michel Foucault's theoretical writings on erotic relations and identity. The first volume of Foucault'sThe History of Sexuality(1978), in fact, had begun with a gauntlet thrown down before Victorian Studies, a chapter-long critique of Steven Marcus'sThe Other Victorians(1966), a work that had offered an entirely new and at the time, quite bold avenue of exploring nineteenth-century culture – namely, through the pornographic imagination that Marcus taxonomized with precise, clinical flair as a “pornotopia” in which “all men . . . are always infinitely potent; all women fecundate with lust and flow inexhaustibly with sap or both. Everyone is always ready for everything” (276). In Foucault's telling, however, Marcus demonstrated a theoretically impoverished faith in Freudian models of “repression” in Marcus's examination of “underground” Victorian sexualities. It was Marcus's reliance on the “repressive fallacy,” his conviction that there existed a demarcated spatial and psychic Victorian counter-world thatThe History of Sexualityhad so forcefully undermined.

Beyond Two Cultures

2015 ◽  
pp. 400-415
Author(s):  
Alice Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Literature And Science ◽  
Methodological Issues ◽  
Nineteenth Century Literature ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
Two Cultures ◽  
Traffic Models ◽  
The One ◽  
Century Literature

As some of the key arguments of literature and science studies have become widely accepted and adopted by Victorian studies at large, it is necessary to reconsider a number of methodological issues underpinning the historicist study of literature and science in this period. This essay discusses some of the methodological challenges which face the field in a changing research landscape. The essay asks what, if anything, distinguishes nineteenth-century literature and science studies from other existing and potential interdisciplinary historicist approaches. It outlines and critiques some of the key models used in this field, especially the ‘one culture’ and ‘two-way traffic’ models, and explores two fundamental problems in the explanatory procedures of literature and science studies: problems of analogy and causation.

scholarly journals Victorian Murder and the Digital Humanities

Humanities ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 82
Author(s):  
Neil McCaw
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
User Experience ◽  
Digital Humanities ◽  
Online Resources ◽  
Specific Reference ◽  
Digital Resources ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
Empathic Understanding

The rapid extension of what has become known as the Digital Humanities has resulted in an array of online resources for researchers within the subdiscipline of Victorian Studies. But the increasingly acquisitive nature of these digital projects poses the question as to what happens once all the information and material we have related to the Victorians has been archived? This paper is an attempt to anticipate this question with specific reference to future digital resources for the study of ‘Victorian murder culture’, and in particular, the essentially textual nature of the nineteenth-century experience of crime. It will argue that there is potential for new forms of digital-humanities archive that offer a more participatory user experience, one that nurtures a cognitively empathic understanding of the complex intertextuality of Victorian crime culture.

NEO-VICTORIAN STUDIES

2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 339-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret D. Stetz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
Remarkable Effect

Long ago, Margery Williams'sThe Velveteen Rabbit(1922) taught us that toys become real when they are loved. Literary genres, however, become real when they are parodied. The neo-Victorian novel, therefore, must now be real, for its features have become so familiar and readily distinguishable that John Crace has been able to have naughty fun at their expense inBrideshead Abbreviated: The Digested Read of the Twentieth Century(2010), where John Fowles'sThe French Lieutenant's Woman(1969) stands as representative of the type. Crace's treatment of Fowles's first-person narrator results in a remarkable effect: the ironic commentary upon the nineteenth century from a twentieth-century vantage point that runs throughout the novel gets subjected, in turn, to ironic commentary from a twenty-first-century point-of-view:

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?

HISTORIES OF MASS CULTURE: FROM LITERARY TO VISUAL CULTURE

1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-499 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Cvetkovich
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Women Studies ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
English Departments ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
Eve Sedgwick

VICTORIAN STUDIES has always been, for me, a form of cultural studies. As early as my sophomore year in college, while reading Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society for a modern humanities course, I was fascinated to learn that a case could be made for the nineteenth century as the period during which notions of culture were constructed. Williams’s work was presented without much contextualization and it was only much later that I came to associate it with either British cultural studies or Marxism. My somewhat unconscious interest in forging connections between culture and politics, which I would argue is the founding mission of cultural studies, was matched by another unconscious interest in Victorian studies, and more specifically, studies of the novel, as a field in which to pursue feminism. By the time I reached graduate school in the 1980s, feminism had become a field and a methodology, and within English departments, Victorian studies produced a rich range of scholars, including Elaine Showalter, Ellen Moers, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and Nina Auerbach, who dominated the interdisciplinary field of women studies, which, like cultural studies, also sought to explain the relations between culture and politics. Their work on women authors and revising the canon was followed by that of an equally powerful group of feminist Victorianists, including Nancy Armstrong, Mary Poovey, Catherine Gallagher, and Eve Sedgwick, who explored not only how categories of gender and sexuality were integral to nineteenth-century social formations, but how they were invented in the modern period.

ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING: AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR 1996

1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 613-633
Author(s):  
Sandra M. Donaldson ◽  
Melissa Brotton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Annotated Bibliography ◽  
Elizabeth Barrett Browning ◽  
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 NotesDAI Dissertation Abstracts InternationalNCL Nineteenth Century LiteratureTLS Times Literary SupplementVLC Victorian Literature and CultureVP Victorian PoetryVR Victorian ReviewVS 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).

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