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]

This article details the contributions of blind readers to the development, design, and marketing of the optophone, a text-to-tone transcription machine introduced in the early twentieth century. We combine archival research with prototyping to investigate the dimensions involved in past coding and decoding practices. If archives provide…[Read more]

This article argues that the humanities and medicine fields have paid insufficient attention to race, which is reflected in and enabled by the apolitical nature of their cornerstone principles, their practices of literary interpretation, and their paucity of scholarship on writers of color. I examine the fields’ interpretation of Audre Lorde’s ill…[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]

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press Blog, 28 March 2018. A Q&A about the essay “JavaScript Affogato: Programming a Culture of Improvised Expertise,” published in Configurations 26.1 (2018): 47–72, DOI: 10.1353/con.2018.0002.

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]

An analysis of ten studies in Victorian literature and medicine examines the changes in the interdisciplinary field since G. S. Rousseau published an influential article on the topic in 1981.