Introduction

The introductory chapter provides the historical and cultural contexts to situate the discussions on Victorian women’s travel writing on Meiji Japan in the wider academic debate on the British Empire, Victorian literature, and female travel writing. It provides an overview of Anglo–Japanese relations between 1854 and 1912 to trace shifts in the bilateral relationship and foreground its singularity in a multitude of East–West encounters. It then examines travel writings by both male and female travellers to Meiji Japan and fictional representations of the country in Victorian literature and theatre. It surveys travelogues by a group of female travellers alongside those by diplomats and journalists like Kipling, Japan-related writings by Wilde and Stevenson, and theatrical pieces such as The Mikado. The chapter considers the literary invention of Japan and analyses how women travellers negotiated discursive constraints due to gender and colonialism and challenged mainstream representations of Japan and Japanese people.

The Gothic Representations of the City through the Fl?neur in Victorian Literature

The Victorian Gothic moved away from old and conventional themes and spaces of early Gothic novels such as ruined castles and evil villains into more realistic spaces and characters that went hand in hand with the issues of the era. While the conventional Gothic space centered on the castle or other forms of old buildings, the city was an important component in Victorian Gothic imagery. In an era of growing mediation between the city and the urban dwellers, the gothic representations of the urban space in Victorian literature highly depended on the 'eye' of the its fl?neurs, or walkers who see, interpret, and produce the city. The fascination with modes of perceiving and seeing the mystery of the puzzling visual experience are evident in a wide variety of the nineteenth and twentieth-century theories and researches on the urban space. The focus of this paper is to graft some insights into debate on urban visuality and other related tropes that provide a range of perspectives on the field of the visual and perception of the city. Then, drawing from Victorian novels, this paper examines Dickens’s portrayals of urban subjects such as Gothic fl?neurs who produce the city as a Gothic place.

Ragged Fortunes and Swashbuckling Thrillers; Or, Recreating the Victorian in Young Adult Fiction 1985-2011

<p>The Victorian era has become a fashionable setting for contemporary young adult fiction. Studies of the contemporary pseudo-Victorian novel have focussed almost entirely upon fiction for adults. Scarcely any attention has been paid to their young adult equivalents — the subject of this thesis. Despite being marketed as “historical” fiction, these works do not adopt actual Victorian history as its basis but are influenced by the literature of the time instead. The chief inspirations are authors such as Dickens and Conan Doyle rather than Victorian children’s classics. After demonstrating the appropriation of Victorian literature in the young adult novels of Pullman, Bajoria, Updale, and Lee, I discuss the function of this Victorian dimension. The nineteenth-century “essential” categories under study here — London, prostitutes, opium dens, orphans, detectives — once embodied Victorian anxieties regarding class, social upheaval, gender politics, colonial guilt, and nationalism. But when contemporary writers evoke Victorian ghosts, they are putting forth their own world view. Consequently, these texts are doubly haunted. Heavy with Victorian ideologies, they simultaneously propagate new fears (for instance, terrorism) and appeal to contemporary sensitivities (particularly feminism). Where Victorian values do not align with the authors’ own, they are challenged and “updated”. Whenever they are made to agree, the reader is confronted with assumptions and prejudices that echo disturbingly through the centuries.</p>

Ragged Fortunes and Swashbuckling Thrillers; Or, Recreating the Victorian in Young Adult Fiction 1985-2011

<p>The Victorian era has become a fashionable setting for contemporary young adult fiction. Studies of the contemporary pseudo-Victorian novel have focussed almost entirely upon fiction for adults. Scarcely any attention has been paid to their young adult equivalents — the subject of this thesis. Despite being marketed as “historical” fiction, these works do not adopt actual Victorian history as its basis but are influenced by the literature of the time instead. The chief inspirations are authors such as Dickens and Conan Doyle rather than Victorian children’s classics. After demonstrating the appropriation of Victorian literature in the young adult novels of Pullman, Bajoria, Updale, and Lee, I discuss the function of this Victorian dimension. The nineteenth-century “essential” categories under study here — London, prostitutes, opium dens, orphans, detectives — once embodied Victorian anxieties regarding class, social upheaval, gender politics, colonial guilt, and nationalism. But when contemporary writers evoke Victorian ghosts, they are putting forth their own world view. Consequently, these texts are doubly haunted. Heavy with Victorian ideologies, they simultaneously propagate new fears (for instance, terrorism) and appeal to contemporary sensitivities (particularly feminism). Where Victorian values do not align with the authors’ own, they are challenged and “updated”. Whenever they are made to agree, the reader is confronted with assumptions and prejudices that echo disturbingly through the centuries.</p>

Music Physiology, Erotic Encounters, and Queer Reading Practices in Teleny

While music often appears as a “code” for sexual desire in Victorian literature, this article explores music's presence in a text for which no veiled language was needed: the anonymously published pornographic novella Teleny (1893). The authors of Teleny invoke emerging scientific discourses about music physiology to draw explicit parallels between musical and sexual encounters—as when the protagonist Camille orgasms in response to the vibrations of his lover's piano music. In such moments, Teleny offers an insistent defense of queer desire as a natural process rooted in the organic and often involuntary actions of the muscles and nerves—a particularly powerful intervention at a time when sexual “inversion” was most often denigrated as unnatural. In its use of biological science in the service of sexual representation—science that many twenty-first-century queer theorists might deem “essentialist”—Teleny presents a compelling challenge to scholars grappling with conversations about normativity, resistance, utopian desires, and idealized cultural objects.

Tom F. Wright's Transatlantic Rhetoric as an American Studies Teaching Resource

I first read Tom F. Wright's Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes in late summer 2020, while drafting the syllabus for a new undergraduate rhetoric course in my university's Writing major. I proposed “Writing across Cultural Differences” several years ago and had been waiting eagerly to teach it, only to find myself delivering the inaugural version over Zoom during the coronavirus pandemic. As I write this essay in December 2020, I am in the midst of syllabus-building email exchanges with a now-frequent teaching partner (Victorian literature specialist Linda Hughes), as we prepare to offer a graduate seminar in nineteenth-century transatlantic literature for the fourth time. (Our first foray into collaborative transatlanticism was in 2010.) While we plan for the upcoming class (also – sigh – being taught over Zoom), I am rereading Wright's book, this time focussed more on the “transatlantic” side of his title. A generative resource for my teaching in both these classes, Transatlantic Rhetoric enacts a global brand of American studies, modeling content and methodologies crucial to the field today. To illustrate, I will revisit some ways in which Wright's anthology is informing my pedagogy in this challenging COVID-shaped year.

Contagion

The study of contagion in Victorian literature may seem like a niche area of study, but understanding this focused topic depends upon deep foundational knowledge of many other concepts. Contagion was not a static concept over the course of the 19th century, as scientific innovations rapidly shifted epidemiological understandings. The result is that there is no overarching Victorian understanding of contagion, but rather, sets of disparate epidemiological concepts unique to different times, spaces, and social contexts, and even the predominant views at any given time were always actively debated. As debates about the nature of contagion itself shifted across the century—in a general movement from miasma theory, which posited toxic air as the source of disease, and toward germ theory, which posited individual microbes as the source of disease—concomitant debates about how to control and manage disease, the role of the government in so doing, and ideas of risk, community, and shared spaces also changed. Changing concepts of contagion also impacted thinking about societal roles, both individually and nationally. The role of the doctor in preserving health, and especially the doctor’s increasing professionalization and certification, was one of these considerations, as was Britain’s perceived role in colonial “improvement” projects abroad. Because of the role public health played in efforts to control or limit contagion, many scholarly considerations of Victorian contagion focus on surveillance and control of human bodies enacted by public health projects. Here, the debt to Michel Foucault will be obvious. Further, because protection and prevention against infectious disease necessitated locating the disease via surveillance and observational practices, many studies of Victorian disease focus on sight, seeing, optical technologies, and representation of sight in fiction and scientific texts. Finally, understanding contagion in this period also necessitates understanding the physical pathogens of most concern to Victorians because of their sheer prevalence. These include cholera, tuberculosis, syphilis, and, to a lesser extent, typhoid fever.

Ecology in Victorian Literature

Ecology, as a topic in studies of Victorian literature, is both longstanding and new. As recently as 2015, scholars were lamenting the field’s seemingly belated turn to ecocritical methods that had become commonplace in studies of romanticism and 19th-century US literature (Taylor 2015). Since then, as the scope of this article suggests, the prevalence of ecological approaches to Victorian literature has expanded greatly. Important forerunners tend to be premised on different assumptions than the newer studies, and, though the emerging field encompasses a variety of interests and approaches, it can be said to exhibit three overall defining characteristics that distinguish it from the ecocritical traditions of other fields: (1) a focus on social and anthropogenic natures; (2) a global, imperial, and systematic framework; and 3) an ethical investment in revealing the connections between 19th-century environmental transformations and environmental crises today. This last quality, above all, separates recent work from essential precursors, such as Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City (1973) and Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots (1983), both of which remain dazzlingly insightful. Perhaps it is unsurprising that literature of the Victorian period, written in the immediate aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, would focus less on the disappearing pastoral of romantic literature and more on the nature-culture formations and anthropogenic assemblages of the modern world, making Victorian ecocriticism less immediately visible as a separate school of interpretation. The fog of Victorian London is one of the most iconic natural images of the era, for example, but only recently has ecocritical scholarship fully conveyed its roots in coal smoke pollution. Similarly, while we have long understood that the literature of the British Empire is formally as well as thematically attuned to interconnection, we have not always appreciated how this capacity also extends to its environmental understanding. The Victorian shockwave of Darwinian theory, which revealed the endless mutability and profound interrelation of species, together with new communication and transportation networks enabled by steam power, integrated the world into a continuous epistemological whole and simultaneously integrated humans into a natural world from which they had long held themselves apart. These new ecological understandings inspired thinkers like John Ruskin and William Morris to develop an environmentalist politics premised on averting the worst excesses of industrial capitalism, but such resistance could, arguably, only soften the blows. Taken together, Victorian literature bears witness, then, to the strange twin birth of “ecology,” a word coined in 1866, and global environmental crisis.

Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature: Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire

At the beginning of his 1873 Australasian travelogue, Anthony Trollope observed that the future prospects of Australia and New Zealand “involved the happiness of millions to come of English-speaking men and women” while noting that “it has been impossible to avoid speculations as to their future prospects”. Philip Steer’s carefully-argued study of colonial settler writing in and about the Antipodes considers the cultural exchange between the Australasian colonies and the mother country, noting the importance of colonial culture to English realist writing. Positioning his work as a “sustained reckoning with Edward Gibbon Wakefield”, for Steer “the evolving frenzy of exploitation and transformation in the settler colonies put pressure on metropolitan forms of the novel and political economy, and provided new conceptual vocabularies for understanding British society and subjectivity”. In order to examine some of this pressure, Steer considers a range of authors—Victorian celebrities like Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope, alongside lesser-known writers including Catherine Spence and Henry Crocker Marriott Watson. He also seeks to re-evaluate how settler colonialism sits within Victorian writing generally, making a very convincing case for reconsidering the sense of overseas settlements as simply convenient places to which problematic characters might be banished.