MLA Commons | LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English | Activity https://mla.hcommons.org/groups/victorian-and-early-20th-century-english/ Activity feed for the group, LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English. Sat, 04 Apr 2026 09:29:52 -0400 https://buddypress.org/?v=10.6.0 en-US 30 hourly 2 a3959e4e2a62c924d45493a4a0b4b306 Dennis Denisoff started the topic extended deadline for a Vic/Ealy-20th-C Forum panel in the forum LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/groups/victorian-and-early-20th-century-english/forum/topic/extended-deadline-for-a-vic-ealy-20th-c-forum-panel/ Tue, 25 Mar 2025 22:59:44 -0400 Dear all,

The “Victorian and Early-20th-C English” forum has extended the deadline to submit an abstract for Panel 30480 “Solidarity and Institutional (In)action ” to March 28! They have also tweaked the description to emphasize their openness to a range of approaches to the topic; here is the new description:

<span…[Read more]

]]> 0 4e690ac0215a5f7b0830ba601e63d931 Amy Wong started the topic Nominations for New Member for Forum Executive Committee in the forum LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/groups/victorian-and-early-20th-century-english/forum/topic/nominations-for-new-member-for-forum-executive-committee/ Fri, 03 Jan 2025 17:27:28 -0500 Hello LLC Victorian and Early 20thC English Members,

I’m writing on behalf of the Forum Executive Committee to solicit nominations (self-nominations welcome!) for appointing an additional member to the committee. Annual new appointments are completed in March. The committee typically meets during the convention to discuss and organize roundtables…[Read more]

]]> 0 d83a9ad157caec422913592927951e4f Ji Eun Lee deposited Wooshing London: Unsettling Acceleration in H. G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1889187/ Fri, 14 Jun 2024 03:24:47 -0400 This essay reads H. G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay (1909) in the context of “wooshing” London—I take the word from the story—to see how the unsettling effect of this rapid urban mobility translates into the generic form of the novel. At the turn of the twentieth century, London was wooshing—that is to say, people and things in the city were moving by b…[Read more]

]]> 0 7e466df197665225411a86d11c68e436 Ji Eun Lee deposited Prowling in London: Canines in Bram Stoker’s Dracula in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1889182/ Fri, 14 Jun 2024 03:14:46 -0400 Dracula first appears in front of the British public in England not as a gentleman but in the form of “an immense dog.” This article reads Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) in the context of human-animal encounters happening on the streets of London when the fear of rabid dogs swept the city. Victorian urban projects aimed at building an urban struc…[Read more]

]]> 0 70acda6b306b4d4012d51e830c63701b Ji Eun Lee deposited Victorian Humanity in Colonial Korea, Where Asians Did Not See Themselves as the Other in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1889178/ Fri, 14 Jun 2024 03:04:39 -0400 This article reconsiders the racial hierarchies rendering the nonwhite race as the Other in Anglo-American Victorian studies by examining the case of colonial Korea, where both the colonizer and the colonized were people of color. In colonial Korea, reading Victorian and Edwardian literature enabled Koreans to find an alternative humanity beyond…[Read more]

]]> 0 e0ba1ae94924cbf389ba86cb02b95746 Regenia Gagnier deposited Language and literature in the information economy: the state of English, English and the state in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1887291/ Mon, 27 May 2024 04:02:03 -0400 The impact of colonialism and empire and then of transport, logistics, advertising, media, cinema, radio, tourism, and the internet extended the global reach of English. With 1.13 billion speakers, one in seven in the world now has some English competence. Within this global circulation of English, we have the global teaching of English language…[Read more]

]]> 0 0a987c7927563a1fc0505ba073fff56d Dustin Friedman deposited Toward a Decolonial Queer Humanism: Thomas Hardy's The Well-Beloved and André Aciman's Call Me by Your Name in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1878056/ Thu, 29 Feb 2024 04:01:26 -0500 This essay situates queer negativity within the modernist tradition. In The Well-Beloved (1897), Thomas Hardy satirizes the then-popular notion of racial memory for its racist, colonialist implications, inaugurating the modernist critique of romantic love as complicit with the self-delusions of the liberal-humanist subject. Despite the view shared…[Read more]

]]> 0 fe5cd44c0d2bb8934fe53383d5fe0a29 Regenia Gagnier deposited The Geopolitics of Beauty in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1870900/ Sat, 13 Jan 2024 04:01:52 -0500 Building on eighteenth-century philosophical traditions, Victorian aesthetics were often posed as an antidote to the vicissitudes of the Industrial Revolution and the political and economic demands of the marketplace, and in most cultures undergoing modernization the Beautiful has often functioned in opposition to the forces of power and…[Read more]

]]> 0 176906164fcfcf1156f6dd3104617392 Regenia Gagnier deposited The Futures of English: Introduction from the UK in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1870889/ Sat, 13 Jan 2024 03:04:06 -0500 Will students raised on social media still read English literature?
• What is the role of English/American literature in the PRC, India,
Australasia, the USA?
• What is the role of English language in relation to other global
and local languages?
• What is the role of decolonising efforts?
• How do our respective state apparatuses affect…[Read more]

]]> 0 fb802fe28b0c606a2447c7f882a728f6 Sharon Smulders deposited "Medicated Music": Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1864376/ Mon, 13 Nov 2023 03:03:10 -0500 Although Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s experience of love undoubtedly informs the female speaker’s curative restoration in Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), the series also shows the conscious deliberation of a Victorian poet engaged in the task of renovating generic imperatives to release feminine subjectivity — which had been invalidated by t…[Read more]

]]> 0 93b2eec1c8f268b8e2c34d42d2898937 Sophie Christman deposited * Bustin’ Bonaparte: A Post-Apartheid Adaptation of Olive Schreiner’sThe Story of an African Farm in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1861775/ Sun, 15 Oct 2023 04:11:59 -0400 This article examines how the South African film Bustin’ Bonaparte (2004) presents a
post-apartheid adaptation of Victorian colonialism in Olive Schreiner’s 1883 English novel The Story
of an African Farm. While both narratives utilize the surprising mode of play to unfold competing
racial and gender hierarchies in colonial Africa, Lis…[Read more]

]]> 0 f696afa71955448884debd8081615db3 Sophie Christman deposited * The Rise of Proto-Environmentalism in George Eliot in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1861769/ Sun, 15 Oct 2023 04:03:17 -0400 The “Ilfracombe” journals, “Ex Oriente Lux,” and “A Minor Prophet” register the ways
in which George Eliot’s nineteenth-century nonfiction prose and poetry evidence
ecotheological concerns that are proto-environmental, concerns that are also
reflected in some of her novels. Employing an ecocritical methodology, this article
traces the…[Read more]

]]> 0 58a53c9c57c188b24d73ae1806224bd6 Andrea Zemgulys deposited Bullied Young Women, Virginia Woolf's Sex Japes, and Modernist Sociability in the Time of #MeToo in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1843717/ Fri, 05 May 2023 03:48:45 -0400 Salacious rumors about Alfred Tennyson’s conduct with young women inspired Virginia Woolf’s satirical depiction of Tennyson and Ellen Terry in her draft and produced play -Freshwater.- In considering whether Woolf’s satire silences the whispers of Victorian women and/or corrects salacious rumor-mongering, this essay decides that the play more…[Read more]

]]> 0 956527711cba4aac5dc809d7df8fd42c Dustin Friedman deposited Do Queer Theory and Victorian Studies Still Have Anything to Learn from Each Other? in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1838061/ Tue, 21 Mar 2023 03:50:11 -0400 This essay argues that an antiracist, anticolonialist Victorian studies must remain open to universalizing claims of the kind found in early works of queer theory, particularly Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1990). Although recent work in queer studies (as well as literary studies generally) finds inspiration in Sedgwick’s…[Read more]

]]> 0 09fd991fc3e1c4fed88c73705d5921e8 Shawna Ross deposited Virginia Woolf and the Intellectual Life: A Graduate Syllabus in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1825764/ Fri, 09 Dec 2022 02:26:36 -0500 Virginia Woolf is already recognized today as a major player in the Bloomsbury Group, an intellectual powerhouse that influenced modern philosophy, politics, economics, aesthetics, biography, and literary criticism. Yet Woolf’s reputation as a fiction writer first and foremost has distracted critical attention from her thorough interrogation of w…[Read more]

]]> 0 9e65efd28040c56ed7693e35230fa5e2 Sophie Christman deposited The Rise of Proto-Environmentalism in George Eliot in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1823102/ Sun, 20 Nov 2022 02:30:38 -0500 The “Ilfracombe” journals, “Ex Oriente Lux,” and “A Minor Prophet” register the ways in which George Eliot’s nineteenth-century nonfiction prose and poetry evidence ecotheological concerns that are proto-environmental, concerns that are also reflected in some of her novels. Employing an ecocritical methodology, this article traces the developme…[Read more]

]]> 0 830822c11c335527a640adf20dea7d95 Sophie Christman deposited Bustin’ Bonaparte: A Post-Apartheid Adaptation of Olive Schreiner’sThe Story of an African Farm in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1823100/ Sun, 20 Nov 2022 02:27:16 -0500 This article examines how the South African film Bustin’ Bonaparte (2004) presents a
post-apartheid adaptation of Victorian colonialism in Olive Schreiner’s 1883 English novel The Story
of an African Farm. While both narratives utilize the surprising mode of play to unfold competing
racial and gender hierarchies in colonial Africa, Lis…[Read more]

]]> 0 6219d9790a092ab7125941026b69a330 Michael Hancher deposited Virtual Displacement of Victorian Periodicals in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1792487/ Fri, 02 Sep 2022 02:23:41 -0400 The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals should work to protect multiple runs of actual Victorian periodicals, which are potentially at risk in “collective collections” organized by academic libraries.

]]> 0 4f0e6551251bc28c9bf357ff9c7df061 Mirosław Miernik started the topic CFP: Volume on Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo), "Hadrian the Seventh" in the discussion LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/groups/victorian-and-early-20th-century-english/forum/topic/cfp-volume-on-frederick-rolfe-baron-corvo-hadrian-the-seventh/ Mon, 11 Jul 2022 13:23:23 -0400 We are seeking submissions for an upcoming volume on the work of Frederick Rolfe, also known as Baron Corvo, with particular emphasis placed on his novel Hadrian the Seventh. The book will be published by Lexington Books in 2024. The chapters should be around 7,500 words. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • The politics…

[Read more]

]]> 0 c9264fcf8c0fbb7a372e876f2704a23e Jacob Jewusiak deposited Tennyson’s Wrinkled Feet: Ageing and the Poetics of Decay in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1775703/ Thu, 24 Mar 2022 02:29:11 -0400 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]

]]> 0 770f85e53348ff5aa0e0a64d10b5cd4f Jacob Jewusiak deposited Grandpaternalism: Kipling's Imperial Care Narrative in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1775701/ Thu, 24 Mar 2022 02:26:39 -0400 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]

]]> 0 e86485143e540a371d458f6cd7ff79c6 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 https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1775699/ Thu, 24 Mar 2022 02:23:38 -0400 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]

]]> 0 5229d4372a37532f4301d31dd89d1338 James Gifford deposited Durrell’s Delta and Dylan Thomas’ ‘Prologue to an Adventure’ in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1774918/ Thu, 17 Mar 2022 03:51:48 -0400 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]

]]> 0 787dbd1f4b7442ec92aa71880144f221 Daniel Williams deposited Transatlantic Climate and Gulf Stream Aesthetics in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1771062/ Wed, 09 Feb 2022 02:26:22 -0500 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]

]]> 0 1058de33ff13d01b530963761f83a915 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 https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1769035/ Tue, 25 Jan 2022 04:09:12 -0500 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]

]]> 0 2d8124036aab918ae4b0edf276d248df Dustin Friedman deposited Teaching Queer Theory beyond the Western Classroom in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1769032/ Tue, 25 Jan 2022 04:03:36 -0500 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.

]]> 0 2282d1f5a5d1d5b2949bfb090ed27c56 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 https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1769028/ Tue, 25 Jan 2022 03:50:21 -0500 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]

]]> 0 f04dd31ff832b96a9a4b5b9e9446e180 Michael Hancher deposited Making magazines and newspapers in the nineteenth century: Twenty-one reports in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1768601/ Fri, 21 Jan 2022 02:23:39 -0500 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]

]]> 0 b5ef16deb5c321ec355a3b9e79490645 Carla Sassi posted an update in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English: The Jack Medal is awarded annually for the best article on a […] https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1754857/ Mon, 11 Oct 2021 12:57:37 -0400 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]

]]> 0 90532fb87250020efa90fff41b8d5441 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 https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1750926/ Tue, 07 Sep 2021 02:29:32 -0400 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]

]]> 0 c7f2023b2530dae56be6546c2302d960 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 https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1749991/ Wed, 25 Aug 2021 03:50:48 -0400 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]

]]> 0 f632dee4a9b5fa08980538503161e969 Dustin Friedman deposited Weird Sex: Teleny and the History of Sexuality in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1746904/ Wed, 21 Jul 2021 04:17:42 -0400 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]

]]> 0 24a16081493bb7dfd69218461d61e8c8 Dustin Friedman deposited E.M. Forster, the Clapham Sect, and the Secular Public Sphere in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1746901/ Wed, 21 Jul 2021 04:08:48 -0400 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]

]]> 0 904730b67ce798829872b642736a11e4 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 https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1746896/ Wed, 21 Jul 2021 03:57:46 -0400 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]

]]> 0 f86888ae3c15566928b2e1c3fc3d9dc6 Dustin Friedman deposited Unsettling the Normative: Articulations of Masculinity in Victorian Literature and Culture in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1746893/ Wed, 21 Jul 2021 03:50:34 -0400 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]

]]> 0 19cbab6611002c675cebae5beb550a39 Dustin Friedman deposited Paterian Cosmopolitanism: Euphuism, Negativity, and Genre in Marius the Epicurean in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1746413/ Tue, 20 Jul 2021 04:10:28 -0400 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]

]]> 0 06cfe589aeeefa703bd832c6db4b163c Samuel Baker deposited The Gothic, Supernatural and Religious: Scott, Hogg, and Blackwood’s in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1743682/ Sat, 26 Jun 2021 02:30:40 -0400 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]

]]> 0 9907d4a6550555ef3a8173d47283e99d Andrew C. Parker deposited Derrida and Victorian Studies - slides for roundtable discussion in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1721974/ Thu, 07 Jan 2021 03:53:35 -0500 This is the PowerPoint presentation to accompany my comments for the Theoretical Foundations of Victorian Studies roundtable on January 7, 2021.

]]> 0 6bc5f7deca6b200a541a001ad60b0b35 George Phillips deposited Are trees forms? On formalism, material feminism, and historical literature in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1721973/ Thu, 07 Jan 2021 03:50:59 -0500 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]

]]> 0 135767276c8571c56556850913fe7a0f Dennis Denisoff started the topic Election for the Victorian and Early-Twentieth Century Forum in the discussion LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/groups/victorian-and-early-20th-century-english/forum/topic/election-for-the-victorian-and-early-twentieth-century-forum/ Sat, 14 Nov 2020 19:37:48 -0500 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]

]]> 0 e3ae3b3f0d3d6b732dea2f80e5c24883 Matthew Levay started the topic MLA Forum Executive Committee Elections in the discussion LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/groups/victorian-and-early-20th-century-english/forum/topic/mla-forum-executive-committee-elections/ Tue, 10 Nov 2020 23:19:05 -0500 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]

]]> 0 6595444009199a99b6c1f6f1e45e5110 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 https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1713765/ Tue, 20 Oct 2020 03:50:44 -0400 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]

]]> 0 67555bfbecb76e21fae2419448f51c3e 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 https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1713621/ Mon, 19 Oct 2020 03:54:35 -0400 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]

]]> 0 52327066e1be8872ce5606690765e40a Daniel Williams deposited Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel, by David Kurnick in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1693075/ Wed, 24 Jun 2020 03:52:19 -0400 Review of Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel, by David Kurnick

]]> 0 9a34342df0a9db506dc3f755beab29b7 Daniel Williams deposited Victorian Ecocriticism for the Anthropocene in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1692813/ Tue, 23 Jun 2020 03:59:04 -0400 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]

]]> 0 027ad9e088e6a6f7a6cc27306e8690f0 Daniel Williams deposited Slow Fire: Serial Thinking and Hardy's Genres of Induction in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1692811/ Tue, 23 Jun 2020 03:48:44 -0400 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]

]]> 0 9ee28a387b9449bdddb1bddc595a98fd Daniel Williams deposited Down the Slant towards the Eye: Hopkins and Ecological Perception in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1692545/ Sun, 21 Jun 2020 03:48:43 -0400 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]

]]> 0 f7bb56357f6cabe1a3af01d8ade8ee0a Daniel Williams deposited Atmospheres of Liberty: Ruskin in the Clouds in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1692373/ Fri, 19 Jun 2020 16:25:21 -0400 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]

]]> 0 11a9ce417b1f8fa1cb1e58acfe7256b3 Daniel Williams deposited Rumor, Reputation, and Sensation in Tess of the d'Urbervilles in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1691936/ Wed, 17 Jun 2020 16:29:17 -0400 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]

]]> 0 06e8b26d18c08ca4e6277555adda7626 Daniel Williams deposited The Clouds and the Poor: Ruskin, Mayhew, and Ecology in the group LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1691935/ Wed, 17 Jun 2020 16:26:17 -0400 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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