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Jacob Jewusiak deposited Tennyson’s Wrinkled Feet: Ageing and the Poetics of Decay in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 2 months ago
This article argues that Tennyson’s ‘Tithonus’ (1860) draws together ageing and decay through the poem’s formal wrinkling: moments where metrical disruption, folding, slackness, or concealment correspond to the insights derived from the perspective of great age — chiming the poet’s keynotes of disappointment, mourning, and loss. I turn to ‘Ulysses…[Read more]
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Jacob Jewusiak deposited Grandpaternalism: Kipling’s Imperial Care Narrative in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 2 months ago
The significance of old age in Kipling’s work has gone largely unacknowledged by critics who attend to the many youthful protagonists who sail, hunt, and explore their way across the plots of his fiction. This essay argues that the relationship between grandparent and grandchild in Kipling’s Kim serves as a representational strategy—at the level…[Read more]
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Jacob Jewusiak deposited Aging, Duration, and the English Novel: Growing Old From Dickens to Woolf (Introduction) in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 2 months ago
The rapid onset of dementia after an illness, the development of gray hair after a traumatic loss, the sudden appearance of a wrinkle in the brow of a spurned lover. The realist novel uses these conventions to accelerate the process of aging into a descriptive moment, writing the passage of years on the body all at once. Aging, Duration, and the…[Read more]
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James Gifford deposited Durrell’s Delta and Dylan Thomas’ ‘Prologue to an Adventure’ in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 2 months, 1 week ago
In 1939, Keidrych Rhys charged that Dylan Thomas’ “Prologue to an Adventure” was reprinted “in Delta (Paris) without acknowledgement… without permission”; however, Ralph Maud contrarily argues “Durrell, as editor of Delta, asked Thomas for contributions and published something by him in all three issues” (123). Thomas’ letters support the latter…[Read more]
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Daniel Williams deposited Transatlantic Climate and Gulf Stream Aesthetics in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 3 months, 2 weeks ago
The Gulf Stream gained scientific prominence in the nineteenth century as a test case for theories about the dynamics of ocean currents and the equilibrium of transatlantic climate. Discourse about the current supplied descriptions, analogies, and myths that persist into the present. Triangulating oceanic, ecological, and transatlantic approaches…[Read more]
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Dustin Friedman deposited “Sinister Exile”: Dionysus and the Aesthetics of Race in Walter Pater and Vernon Lee in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 4 months ago
The aestheticism of Walter Pater and Vernon Lee participated in a late-nineteenth-century discourse devoted to exploring the aesthetic’s role in producing and sustaining, as well as undermining, notions of racial difference. Pater’s “A Study of Dionysus: The Spiritual Form of Fire and Dew” (1876) and Lee’s “Dionea” (1890) partake of Immanue…[Read more]
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Dustin Friedman deposited Teaching Queer Theory beyond the Western Classroom in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 4 months ago
This article develops a theory of postcolonial queer pedagogy through reflections on teaching nineteenth-century literature at the National University of Singapore. Students draw on their experiences living in a culture torn between liberal and illiberal tendencies and recognize that such contradictions exist in both the Western and non-Western world.
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Dustin Friedman deposited “The rarest, most complex & most lately developed form of aestheticism”: Olive Schreiner, decadence, and the aesthetic education of the senses in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 4 months ago
This essay focuses on Olive Schreiner’s personal correspondence and the allegories collected in Dreams (1890) to explore her complicated relationship to late-Victorian Decadence. I argue that Schreiner modified Decadent writers’ use of intersensoriality and synaesthesia to educate her readers into a new kind of common sense, one aligned with her…[Read more]
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Michael Hancher deposited Making magazines and newspapers in the nineteenth century: Twenty-one reports in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 4 months, 1 week ago
The reports listed here and then reproduced in facsimile were published in British and American journals during the nineteenth century. They describe contemporary aspects, both editorial and mechanical, of the production processes that made such publications possible. Leading topics include the relative efficiency of steam-powered printing, the…[Read more]
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Carla Sassi posted an update in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 7 months, 2 weeks ago
The Jack Medal is awarded annually for the best article on a subject related to Reception or Diaspora in Scottish Literatures (including Scots, English, Gaelic and Latin). The award is named in honour of Professor Ronald Dyce Sadler Jack (1941-2016), Professor of Scottish and Mediaeval Literature at the University of Edinburgh from…[Read more]
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Samuel Baker deposited “The Forsaken Merman,” “The Little Mermaid,” and early modernism: Undersea imagery for the dissociation and dissolution of culture in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 8 months, 3 weeks ago
This essay shows how marine imagery mediates thought about culture, by exploring a series of imagined submarine visions across an intertextual network that extends from Matthew Arnold’s poem “The Forsaken Merman” back to Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Little Mermaid,” across the Atlantic to William James’s writings, and thence to ess…[Read more]
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Regenia Gagnier deposited From barbarism to decadence without the intervening civilization: or, living in the aftermath of anticipated futures in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 9 months, 1 week ago
ABSTRACT
The styles, moods, performances, and practices of decadence have been simultaneous with modernization, not least in the process of nation-building. This article considers the dialectics of decadence and modernization with particular attention to the roles and responses of women in the twentieth to twenty-first centuries.…[Read more] -
Dustin Friedman deposited Weird Sex: Teleny and the History of Sexuality in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 10 months, 1 week ago
In this article, I argue that that a close examination of the most sexually explicit scenes in the anonymous gay pornographic novel Teleny (1893) reveals that they do not anticipate the bourgeois, individualistic liberal gay subject described by Michel Foucault, but are instead more closely related to the cosmic horrors found in the genre of weird…[Read more]
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Dustin Friedman deposited E.M. Forster, the Clapham Sect, and the Secular Public Sphere in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 10 months, 1 week ago
Critics have characterized E.M. Forster as an advocate of what Jürgen Habermas calls the “secular public sphere.” Yet Forster was critical of liberalism’s insistence that religious experiences should be translated into the language of secular rationality. The discussion of the Clapham Sect in “Henry Thornton” (1939) suggests that eighteenth…[Read more]
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Dustin Friedman deposited Negative Eroticism: Lyric Performativity and the Sexual Subject in Oscar Wilde’s “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 10 months, 1 week ago
This essay explores the radical subjectivism of Oscar Wilde’s novella “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” (1889/1921), which celebrates the creative potential of nonessentialist forms of identity and yet cautions against jettisoning humanist notions of selfhood entirely. I contend that Wilde turned to G. W. F. Hegel’s performative theory of lyric…[Read more]
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Dustin Friedman deposited Unsettling the Normative: Articulations of Masculinity in Victorian Literature and Culture in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 10 months, 1 week ago
This article provides an overview of the academic study of Victorian masculinity. It argues that the pioneering work of feminist and sexuality studies scholars in Victorian studies during the 1970s and 1980s made it possible to discuss manhood critically as a historical and cultural phenomenon. It then presents a reading of major works on…[Read more]
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Dustin Friedman deposited Paterian Cosmopolitanism: Euphuism, Negativity, and Genre in Marius the Epicurean in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 10 months, 1 week ago
In this essay, I argue that Walter Pater’s description of “Euphuism” in Marius the Epicurean (1885) relies upon the insights of idealist philosophy in order to articulate a theory of what Rebecca Walkowitz calls “cosmopolitan style.” Specifically, Pater draws upon a disparate number of cultural discourses in his articulation of Euphuism while…[Read more]
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Samuel Baker deposited The Gothic, Supernatural and Religious: Scott, Hogg, and Blackwood’s in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 11 months, 1 week ago
A distinctive style of “Scottish Gothic’”emerged, after 1815, in fiction by Walter Scott, James Hogg, and fellow members of the Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine circle. This chapter introduces this corpus of Scottish Gothic literature, specifies some ways in which the uncanny entailments of Scottish Gothic relate to religious discourse (very muc…[Read more]
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Andrew C. Parker deposited Derrida and Victorian Studies – slides for roundtable discussion in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 1 year, 4 months ago
This is the PowerPoint presentation to accompany my comments for the Theoretical Foundations of Victorian Studies roundtable on January 7, 2021.
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George Phillips deposited Are trees forms? On formalism, material feminism, and historical literature in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 1 year, 4 months ago
This essay draws on formalist cultural studies and material feminism to argue for a new approach in modernist studies, which I call formalist materialism, an approach that reads ecological forms alongside aesthetic forms. Such an approach may have distinct advantages. Formalist materialism illuminates a new direction for formalists by connecting…[Read more]
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