This special issue of Social Text takes as its starting point the generative tension between recovery as an imperative that is fundamental to historical writing and research, and the impossibility of recovery when engaged with archives whose very assembly and organization occlude certain historical subjects. Responding to recent debates among…[Read more]

Situates the composition of Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas—from manuscript notes, source material, and pilot essays to its publication as an 84-page pamphlet—within the intellectual tendencies of the Reconstruction-era American social science movement to reveal Whitman’s text as an important case study in the nascent discipline. In his pro…[Read more]

The artist, collector, and critic Charles Ricketts (1866–1931) has often been characterised as a reactionary voice in early-twentieth-century debates about modern art. Although he responded conservatively to modern-art developments such as those embodied by the term ‘Post-Impressionism’, his work in book design and illustration exemplifies p…[Read more]

In his 1843 novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens used the pastoral mode to deliver a strong message about labor. To communicate this message, he employed the mode’s many traits, including its retreat into and return from the rural landscape and its focus on the country worker, traditionally the shepherd. This essay follows the novel’s pastoral ret…[Read more]

In both her epic poem The Spanish Gypsy and her final novel Daniel Deronda, Eliot drew upon kabbalistic concepts of the heavens through the characters of Jewish mystics. In the later novel, Eliot moved the mystic, Mordecai, from the narrative’s periphery to its center. This change, symbolically equated within the novel to a shift from…[Read more]

Entry for the special Keywords issue of the Journal of Victorian Literature and Culture.

Focusing on the impulsive act, this essay analyzes the relationship between the temporality of decision making and the determination of social context in Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), The Woodlanders (1887), and Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891). While critics often note the entrapment of Hardy’s characters in contexts such as social class…[Read more]

This article argues that the language used to describe financial speculation in the nineteenth century overlapped with the moral charge of novelistic temporality: the repeated injunction against “getting rich quick” was countered by the way suspense encouraged racing or skipping through a novel to reach the end. Charles Dickens’s novel Littl…[Read more]

This article argues that George Eliot’s Romola (1862-63) theorizes large-scale sympathy as a way of ethically engaging large groups of individuals outside one’s immediate social ambit. Yet the failed attempts of characters like Savonarola and Tito to imagine the experiences of unknown others suggests that large-scale sympathy estranges the sym…[Read more]

This article argues that old men and aging raised a central problem for Charles Dickens’s literary project: the novel’s difficulty of representing temporal continuity over long spans of time. For the old man, the meaningful plots of the nineteenth century—such as the bildungsroman or the marriage plot—are behind him. By examining three of Dic…[Read more]

This article argues that Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853)—both the fictional place and the novel—cannibalizes the temporalities of other literary genres, such as the story and the newspaper, as a way of preserving a way of life under the double threat of patriarchy and modernization. I use the concatenation of temporalities in Cranford to bring…[Read more]

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh seeks to redress the divisive work of women’s democratic political representation by way of poetic form to ask whether women must always be regarded as partial citizens. Women are not counted as integral units—ones—politically or culturally. Barrett Browning connects women’s ability to produce writing a…[Read more]

I look to the ways material text studies might be prompted by, and improve upon, thinking in new materialism. The result is that paper could be read for how histories and narratives seep into the paper record and require accounts of agentic materiality lest they be lost or muted. In what follows, I use stories about rag paper as points of…[Read more]

Review of Daniel Hack, “Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature” (Princeton UP, 2017).

This article compares the historiographic methods of two 19th century, California historians.. Mariano Vallejo, former Mexican military commander of Alta California, wrote his Recuerdos at the request of San Francisco-based, Anglo-American historian Hubert H. Bancroft. In his own memoir, Literary Industries (1915), Bancroft describes his…[Read more]

The final two months of 2017 witnessed a renaissance of an always-popular meme on Metafilter, Twitter: parodies of William Carlos Williams’s 1934 poem, “This Is Just to Say.” Parodies typically replace nouns and adjectives in this twelve-line, three-stanza Imagist poem. A minimum of six replacements yields an entirely new poem, such that users…[Read more]

Charles Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition (1901) is overwhelmingly understood as an historical novel. Critics have again and again focused on its journalistic historicity; its ambivalent racial politics; its attitudes towards assimilation, separatism, vengeance, and resistance; and Chesnutt’s alleged biographical identification with various cha…[Read more]

An analysis of criticism of Charles Dickens by his contemporaries G. H. Lewes and Hippolyte Taine. Both assessments address Dickens’s popularity by relying on commonplace concepts from Victorian anthropology. However, Lewes argues for a new form of critical practice addressed to popular fiction and addresses the inadequacy of existing critical…[Read more]