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]

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

Review of English Studies 67 (2016), 1011-12

Review of English Studies 66 (2015), 1001-3

Annals of Science 74 (2017), 335-6

Tennyson Research Bulletin 9 (2009), 233-47

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot ends in both acts with the two tramps not moving in spite of agreeing that they should leave. Even though Vladimir and Estragon realize the futility of their wait, they remain adamant in the hope that Godot may arrive. Likewise, the Unnamable who cannot go on chooses to go on. What essentially translates in b…[Read more]

Growing interest in the archive as an object of study for queer criticism justifies closer attention to the concept of provenance. For archivists, provenance imparts a fundamental measure of integrity to archival collections by certifying their origin and proper order. Record origin and order, however, rely on authorial identity to establish…[Read more]

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot ends in both acts with the two tramps not moving in spite of agreeing that they should leave. Even though Vladimir and Estragon realize the futility of their wait, they remain adamant in the hope that Godot may arrive. Likewise, the Unnamable who cannot go on chooses to go on. What essentially translates in b…[Read more]