This study focuses on the cultural history of illegitimacy and its representation in literature, with an emphasis on the gender of fictional bastards and foundlings.

Exploration of how “Silas Marner” is George Eliot’s means to distinguish herself from those who are truly guilty of abandoning parental mores… ancestors, parents, themselves. An argument is made that the reason for the text is as provision for the author to temporarily relieve herself of guilt.

Exploration of how Mary Shelley uses her textual creation “Frankenstein” to engage with crippling feelings of growth panic that arose out of her recent adult self-actualization.

This essay looks to the near history of copyright, commercially licensed resources, and fair use that shapes digital scholarship on nineteenth-century periodicals today. Using the digitization of British Library newspapers as a case study, I demonstrate how arguments about access to public domain materials do not fully account for the complex…[Read more]

Front matter for Literatures of Liberalization: Global Circulation and the Long Nineteenth Century

Review of Peter J. Capuano, Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body

Review of The Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature by Anna Henchman

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 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]

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]