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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 week, 2 days 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 week, 2 days 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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Dennis Denisoff started the topic Election for the Victorian and Early-Twentieth Century Forum in the discussion
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 2 months ago
Dear colleagues,
Thank you for considering me for the position on the Executive Committee of the Victorian and Early Twentieth-Century English Forum. The MLA has supported and inspired me since I was a graduate student in the queer ’90s, and I would greatly appreciate this opportunity to serve the MLA and its members in return—especially in add…[Read more]
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Matthew Levay started the topic MLA Forum Executive Committee Elections in the discussion
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 2 months, 1 week ago
Dear colleagues,
I’m honored to stand for election to the Executive Committee of the MLA’s Victorian and Early Twentieth-Century English Forum. A role on that Committee demands real attention to a host of responsibilities, chief among them the responsibility to ensure that all of the Forum’s convention panels, roundtables, and workshops refle…[Read more]
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Lila Marz Harper deposited “Swimming among the Jellyfish”: travel guides, Elizabeth von Arnim, and Rügen in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 2 months, 4 weeks ago
In the opening of Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen (1904), the protagonist, Elizabeth, comes across Marianne North’s autobiography, Recollections of a Happy Life (1894) and her description of the bathing near Putbus, “a sandy cove where the water was always calm, and of how you floated about on its crystal surface, and be…[Read more]
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Lila Marz Harper deposited “These Things Are a Parable”: Natural History Metaphors and Audience in Felix Holt (1866) in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 2 months, 4 weeks ago
It is apparent that George Eliot’s novels were heavily engaged with development in natural history; her metaphors made use of and reflected on mid-1800s discussions of evolution and taxonomy. In this essay, research in science history and Eliot studies leads to evidence of how, in Felix Holt (1866), Eliot was influenced by evolutionary s…[Read more]
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Daniel Williams deposited Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel, by David Kurnick in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 6 months, 3 weeks ago
Review of Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel, by David Kurnick
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Daniel Williams deposited Victorian Ecocriticism for the Anthropocene in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 6 months, 3 weeks ago
How might literary and cultural spheres intersect with the Anthropocene, the epoch — however defined — of humanity’s detectable influence at geological scale? What forms, genres, objects, and methodological lenses might prove most fertile in mediating between the concept’s abstraction and its concrete entailments for literary and cultural hi…[Read more]
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Daniel Williams deposited Slow Fire: Serial Thinking and Hardy’s Genres of Induction in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 6 months, 3 weeks ago
This essay considers the use of “serial thinking”—an approach to representation and cognition that emphasizes repetition, enumeration, and aggregation—in the work of Thomas Hardy. Examining his first novel, Desperate Remedies (1871), it connects Hardy’s approaches to serial thinking with the discourse of Victorian logic (especially the work of J…[Read more]
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Daniel Williams deposited Down the Slant towards the Eye: Hopkins and Ecological Perception in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 6 months, 4 weeks ago
This essay reads Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry for its “ecological perception”: a perceptual modality involving the dynamic interaction between human bodies and environmental givens or potentialities. Linking Hopkins’s syncretic ideas about perception to the psychologist J. J. Gibson’s account of our sensitivity to environmental “affordan…[Read more]
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Daniel Williams deposited Atmospheres of Liberty: Ruskin in the Clouds in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 7 months ago
John Ruskin’s cloud aesthetics develop a coherent, if figurative, inquiry into the nature of human liberty. His changing accounts of cloud formations across Modern Painters gradually place more emphasis on liberty within a framework of restraint and self-government. Attending to the shifting and equivocal senses of liberty in Ruskin’s aes…[Read more]
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Daniel Williams deposited Rumor, Reputation, and Sensation in Tess of the d’Urbervilles in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 7 months ago
This essay considers the significance of rumor in the work of Thomas Hardy, anchoring its claims in a reading of Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891). I argue that rumor conditions the narrative movement of this novel through its linked operations in social space and bodily sensation. First, I examine the relationship between the movements of…[Read more]
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Daniel Williams deposited The Clouds and the Poor: Ruskin, Mayhew, and Ecology in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 7 months ago
Ruskin and Mayhew together disclose a Victorian ecological discourse attuned to the divergent spaces, varying rhythms, and dispersed networks that compose the urban environment.
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Elaine Auyoung deposited Narrative Theory in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 11 months, 1 week ago
This essay surveys literary criticism at the intersection of narrative theory and the Victorian novel, which often takes one of two major approaches. In the first approach, critics examine how the act of narration itself shapes and constrains Victorian narratives, whereas in the second approach, critics focus on the relationship between Victorian…[Read more]
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Michael Hancher deposited Dictionary vs. Encyclopedia, Then and Now in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 1 year, 2 months ago
The New English Dictionary was originally distinguished from an encyclopedia in reach and function by its proponent Richard Chenevix Trench and its principal editor James A. H. Murray as differing in responsibilities: a dictionary described the meanings of words, an encyclopedia described the nature of things. The distinction had philosophical and…[Read more]
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Michael Hancher deposited Table of contents, The Tenniel Illustrations to the ‘Alice’ Books, 2nd ed. in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 1 year, 2 months ago
Table of contents.
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Jacob Jewusiak deposited Retirement in Utopia: William Morris’s Senescent Socialism in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 1 year, 5 months ago
This essay argues that William Morris’s work displaces an implicit youthful bias in theories of utopia and socialism by making senescence a structuring principle of his ideal society. For Morris, capitalist age ideology stratifies the lifespan into zones of youth and old age, usefulness and excess, and he perceived the rising reformist…[Read more]
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Jacob Jewusiak deposited Retirement in Utopia: William Morris’s Senescent Socialism in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 1 year, 5 months ago
This essay argues that William Morris’s work displaces an implicit youthful bias in theories of utopia and socialism by making senescence a structuring principle of his ideal society. For Morris, capitalist age ideology stratifies the lifespan into zones of youth and old age, usefulness and excess, and he perceived the rising reformist…[Read more]
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Andrew G. Christensen deposited On Being One’s Own Heir: British Portraiture, Metaphysical Inheritance, and The Picture of Dorian Gray in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 1 year, 6 months ago
Much scholarship on The Picture of Dorian Gray has focused on its possible textual sources and its place in literary traditions. This article demonstrates that by contextualizing the novel in the history of art and the tradition of British portraiture, we are able to answer significant yet overlooked questions such as why Wilde chose “picture” rat…[Read more]
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Renata Kobetts Miller deposited Syllabus for Melodrama, with assignments, Spring 2019 in the group
LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English on MLA Commons 1 year, 9 months ago
This is a syllabus for Renata Kobetts Miller’s capstone research course on Melodrama at the City College of New York in Spring 2019. It is built on the Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama, edited by Carolyn Williams (2018). The syllabus includes the final assignment sequence for scaffolded research.
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