Commentators often express disappointment that the music for the main characters in _Aida_ is not more distinctive, i.e., does not make much use of the exotic styles that mark the work’s ceremonial scenes and ballets. It has also been argued that exotic style-elements here are mostly confined to female, hence powerless, characters. Such…[Read more]

Preprint to appear in a special issue of Cultural Analytics on “Identity.” The article explores the paradox that the representation of gender in fiction became more flexible while the sheer balance of attention between fictional men and women was growing more unequal. We measure the rigidity of gendered roles by asking how easy it is to infer…[Read more]

Her Father’s Name (1876) is one of Marryat’s most radical and intriguing novels, featuring Leona Lacoste, a cross-dressing heroine, and Lucilla Evans, a textbook hysteric who falls in love with her. For centuries, the diagnosis of ‘hysteria’ was conveniently applied to any woman who exhibited transgressive behaviour, whether it be through sexual…[Read more]

Whereas many women writers were reticent on the issue of property, or vehemently opposed to improving the position of wives, Florence Marryat used her public platform to campaign for change. As such, her work forms an important contribution to our understanding of women and property in the nineteenth century. In this paper I discuss the ways in…[Read more]

South African novelist and essayist Olive Schreiner interpreted South African racial and class categories for British readers in an effort to prevent what she worried would be bloody conflict between Boers and indigenous Africans.

Folk sources and narratives underlie much of Wuthering Heights.

From 1798 to 1944 the display of coats of arms in Great Britain was taxed. Since there were major changes to the role of heraldry in society in the same period, it is surprising that the records of the tax have gone unstudied. This dissertation evaluates whether the records of the tax can say something useful about heraldry in this period. The…[Read more]

The death and resurrection of Sherlock Holmes, a contrarian reading in which Holmes helps the murderer, and the century-long tradition of the Holmesian Great Game with its pseudo-scholarly readings in light of an ironic conviction that Holmes is real and Arthur Conan Doyle merely John Watson’s literary agent. This paper relies on these events in t…[Read more]

7 page introduction to longer reconsideration of Hawthorne’s career in terms of his conflicted engagements with Patronage Discourse, emerging historiography, and the intersection of electro-magnetics, fashion, and artistic production.

As is usual in such things, argues that everyone else has read something wrong, the something here being…[Read more]

Abstract: El impacto del colonialismo y del recién descubierto Oriente provocó que el continente europeo proyectase en aquellas tierras lejanas, llenas de exotismo, leyendas y sensualidad, sus propias pasiones prohibidas y sus más oscuros deseos. El erotismo que las culturas indígenas despertaban en la sociedad victoriana llevó a la creación de so…[Read more]