Published during a time of rapid colonial expansion, Richard Doddridge Blackmore’s The Maid of Sker (1872) constitutes a conglomerate of fictional autobiography, historical and sensation novel. It takes the reader on a number of voyages to witness the most important British sea battles at the end of the eighteenth century. Considering the…[Read more]

Analogy, the comparison of one set of relations to another, was essential to Humphry Davy’s understanding of chemistry. Throughout his career, Davy used analogical reasoning to direct and to interpret his experimental analyses of the chemical reactions between substances. In his writing, he deployed analogies to organise and to explain his t…[Read more]

As Prof. Dale Townsend has observed, the concept of the Gothic has had an association with fairies from its inception; even before Walpole’s 1764 Castle of Otranto (considered the first Gothic novel), eighteenth-century poetics talked of ‘the fairy kind of writing’ which, for Addison, ‘raise a pleasing kind of Horrour in the Mind of the Reader’…[Read more]

Oliver Twist does not find wealth and family and live happily ever after. Amy Dorrit and Arthur Clennam never escape the workhouse. And Eugene Wrayburn does not revive to marry Lizzie Hexam and start a new and productive life. This article takes as its starting point the idea that a story can have ‘false’ endings and uses it as a way of app…[Read more]

This report describes a collection of 210,305 volumes of fiction that researchers are encouraged to borrow for their own work. Alternately, readers can simply browse the report as a description of English-language fiction in HathiTrust Digital Library. For instance, how does the proportion of fiction written by British authors or by women change…[Read more]

The aim of this special issue of Gothic Studies (23/3, to be published Nov 2021) is to bring together research that does not simply consider Gothic short fiction and its artistic and cultural brethren as incidental, but integral to the design and effect and/or cultural significance of the piece because the short form in the Gothic tradition has,…[Read more]

In the valuation of works of art, the setting of a price is the last step, the result of a discursive attribution of quality; in this regard, aesthetic and commercial evaluations merge. The structure of this mediation is characterised by the concept of the “knowledge market;” knowledge that is ordered and able to spread is essential in order to…[Read more]

In the medical humanities, there has been a growing interest in diagnosing disease in fictional characters, particularly with the idea that characters in Charles Dickens’s novels may be suffering from diseases recognised today. However, an area that deserves greater attention is the representation of women’s ageing as disease in Victorian lit…[Read more]

The journal ‘English Literature: Theories, Interpretations, Contexts’, published at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, invites scholars to send article proposals on the topic of
‘Fictions, Facts and “Effects of Reality”: Questioning the Mimetic in the Nineteenth-Century Novel’.
We shall be happy to consider essays that address and probl…[Read more]

Before the publication of The Time Machine (1895), H. G. Wells’s early works provide insight into the challenges of the late Victorian educational system. Wells benefited from a unique set of educational reforms intended to provide education for the lower middle class. He did so in the capacities of a student taking examinations to earn grants f…[Read more]

O objetivo do trabalho é analisar o jornal Centro Academico, publicado entre 1872 e 1873 por alunos da Faculdade de Medicina e Cirurgia do Rio de Janeiro e por alunos da Escola Central de Engenharia do Exército, como centro difusor de ideias republicanas durante o século XIX. Esse periódico diagnosticava o Império Brasileiro e, a partir diss…[Read more]

This essay considers the connections between myth and sympathy in Keats’s poetic theory and practice. It argues that the ‘Ode to Psyche’ exemplifies the way in which Keats uses mythological narrative, and the related trope of apostrophe, to promote a restrained form of sympathy, which preserves an objectifying distance between the poet and the f…[Read more]

This essay examines the representation of science in Jane Austen’s unfinished novel Sanditon. It argues that this text, written in the months before Austen’s death in 1817, points to a development in her understanding of the novel, one that associates the form with the emerging scientific disciplines of the early nineteenth century through its emp…[Read more]

Victorian Poetry 52 (2014), 185-203

Tennyson Research Bulletin 9 (2011), 454-462

Victorian Poetry 47 (2009), 61-80