This essay explores a theory of panoramas put forward by the experimental postwar German novelist and translator Arno Schmidt. Schmidt claims that panoramas were so pervasive in the visual culture of the nineteenth century that they unconsciously influenced writers of the period, so that when they wanted to describe vast landscapes they unthinkingly framed their descriptions by drawing on experience with specific panoramas. He primarily expounds the theory in his longest work of fiction, Zettel’s Traum (1970), translated (...) as Bottom’s Dream (2016), where he supports it with evidence from Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne. He also promoted the theory in later interviews, and regarded it not just as part of his fiction but as a significant discovery in its own right. This essay extracts Schmidt’s theory from its fictional context and illustrates how he thought it could be used hermeneutically to uncover submerged panoramas in the works of nineteenth century authors. We conclude by locating the theory as part of the contemporary reception history of panoramas. (shrink)

This book investigates the relationship between the fascinating and misunderstood penny blood, early Victorian popular fiction for the working class, and Victorian anatomy. In 1832, the controversial Anatomy Act sanctioned the use of the body of the pauper for teaching dissection to medical students, deeply affecting the Victorian poor. The ensuing decade, such famous penny bloods as Manuscripts from the Diary of a Physician, Varney the Vampyre, Sweeney Todd, and The Mysteries of London addressed issues of medical ethics, social (...) power, and bodily agency. Challenging traditional views of penny bloods as a lowlier, un-readable genre, this book rereads these four narratives in the light of the 1832 Anatomy Act, putting them in dialogue with different popular artistic forms and literary genres, as well as with the spaces of death and dissection in Victorian London, exploring their role as channels for circulating discourses about anatomy and ethics among the Victorian poor. (shrink)

This book includes essays on writers from the 1840s to the 1890s, well known writers such as Anne Bronte, Wilkie Collins and Bram Stoker, lesser known writers such as Geraldine Jewsbury, Charles Reade, Margaret Oliphant, George Moore, Sarah Grand and Mary Ward. The contributors explore important thematic concerns: the relation between private and public realms; gender and social class; sexuality and the marketplace; and male and female cultural identity.

The autocratic rule of both tsar and church in imperial Russia gave rise not only to a revolutionary movement in the nineteenth century but also to a crisis of meaning among members of the intelligentsia. Personal faith became the subject of intense scrutiny as individuals debated the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, debates reflected in the best-known novels of the day. Friendships were formed and broken in exchanges over the status of the eternal. The (...) salvation of the entire country, not just of each individual, seemed to depend on the answers to questions about belief. Victoria Frede looks at how and why atheism took on such importance among several generations of Russian intellectuals from the 1820s to the 1860s, drawing on meticulous and extensive research of both published and archival documents, including letters, poetry, philosophical tracts, police files, fiction, and literary criticism. She argues that young Russians were less concerned about theology and the Bible than they were about the moral, political, and social status of the individual person. They sought to maintain their integrity against the pressures exerted by an autocratic state and rigidly hierarchical society. As individuals sought to shape their own destinies and searched for truths that would give meaning to their lives, they came to question the legitimacy both of the tsar and of Russia’s highest authority, God. (shrink)

By the late nineteenth century, there were large numbers of women physicians in the United States. Three Realist novels of the time,Dr. Breen's Practice, by William Dean Howells,Dr. Zay, by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps andA Country Doctor, by Sarah Orne Jewett, feature women doctors as protagonists. The issues in these novels mirrored current issues in medicine and society. By contrasting the lives of these fictional women doctors to their historical counterparts, it is seen that, while the novels are good (...) attempts to he truthful treatments of women physicians' struggles, in certain areas they do not accurately address the concerns of women physicians. (shrink)

The novels,Dr. Breen's Practice andDr. Zay provide the twentieth century reader with some interesting and intimate insights into nineteenth century homeopathy as practiced by two women physicians. It becomes apparent after reading these two books that the existing knowledge about women in homeopathic medicine is inadequate to answer the questions that the novels raise. More investigation in this area would help illuminate the motivations women had to enter medicine, as well as their reasons for choosing homeopathy over (...) regular medicine. It would also help us understand the conflicting images we have of women physicians between strident reformer and scientific physician, and what led women like Clemence Lozier and Elizabeth Blackwell to choose one path over (or in addition to) the other.The novels show us that nineteenth century women did have the power to choose difficult paths, that these paths were often very lonely, and that unqualified support for a woman's career was rare, indeed. Until we learn more about particular physicians and the ways they lived their lives, we will not know if these novels were only fiction, or actually did represent reality. (shrink)

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 3, Page 426, June 2012.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Human Nature in Nineteenth-Century British Novels:Doing the MathJoseph Carroll, Jonathan Gottschall, John A. Johnson, and Daniel J. KrugerIThree broad ambitions animate this study. Building on research in evolutionary social science, we aimed (1) to construct a model of human nature—of motives, emotions, features of personality, and preferences in marital partners; (2) use that model to analyze some specific body of literary texts and the responses of readers (...) to those texts, and (3) produce data—information that could be quantified and could serve to test specific hypotheses about those texts.Evolutionary social science is still in the process of constructing a full and adequate model of human nature. Evolutionary social scientists know much already about how human reproductive behavior and human sociality fit into the larger pattern of human evolution. They still have much to learn, though, about the ways literature and the other arts enter into human nature. Our model of human nature draws on our knowledge of imaginative culture, integrates that knowledge with evolutionary theories of culture, and produces data that enable us to draw conclusions on an issue of broad significance for both literary study and evolutionary social science: the adaptive function of literature and the other arts.1In order to make advances in knowledge, it is necessary to choose some particular subject. Genetics is a basic science that applies to all organisms, but geneticists first got an empirical fix on their subject by focusing minutely, with Mendel, on peas, and, with Morgan, on fruit flies. In place of peas and flies, we have taken as our subject British novels of [End Page 50] the longer nineteenth century (Austen to Forster). As a literary topic, the subject is fairly broad, but our theoretical and methodological aims ultimately extend well beyond the specialist fields of British novels, the nineteenth century, British literature, narrative fiction, or even literary scholarship generally. This study is designed to engage the attention of literary scholars in all fields and also to engage the attention of social scientists. If it achieves its aims, this study would help persuade literary scholars that empirical methods offer rich opportunities for the advancement of knowledge about literature, and it would help persuade social scientists that the quantitative study of literature can shed important light on fundamental questions of human psychology and human social interaction. Our own research team combines these two prospective audiences. Two of us (Carroll and Gottschall) have been trained primarily as literary scholars, and two of us (Johnson and Kruger) primarily as social scientists.The focal point for this study is "agonistic" structure: the organization of characters into protagonists, antagonists, and minor characters. The central question in the study is this: does agonistic structure reflect evolved dispositions for forming cooperative social groups? Suppressing or muting competition within a social group enhances group solidarity and organizes the group psychologically for cooperative endeavor. Our chief hypothesis was that protagonists and good minor characters would form communities of cooperative endeavor and that antagonists would exemplify dominance behavior. If this hypothesis proved correct, the ethos reflected in the agonistic structure of the novels would replicate the egalitarian ethos of hunter-gatherers, who stigmatize and suppress status-seeking in potentially dominant individuals. If suppressing dominance in hunter-gatherers fulfills an adaptive social function, and if agonistic structure in the novels engages the same social dispositions that animate hunter-gatherers, our study would lend support to the hypothesis that literature fulfills an adaptive social function.2One of our chief working hypotheses is that when readers respond to characters in novels, they respond in much the same way, emotionally, as they respond to people in everyday life. They like or dislike them, admire them or despise them, fear them, feel sorry for them, or are amused by them. In writing fabricated accounts of human behavior, novelists select and organize their material for the purpose of generating such responses, and readers willingly cooperate with this purpose. They participate vicariously in the experiences depicted and form personal opinions about the qualities of the characters. Authors and readers [End Page 51] thus collaborate in producing a simulated experience of emotionally responsive evaluative judgment. If agonistic structure is a... (shrink)

This article extends Georg Lukács’s theorization pertaining to historical fiction by considering a novel written in response to colonial conditions. It treats Abdulhalim Sharar’s Urdu Malik al-‘Aziz and Virginia (1888) as a case where a fictional version of the encounter between Muslims and Christians during the crusades in the twelfth century is used to counter the colonial Indian present in the nineteenth century. I suggest that novels such as Sharar’s exemplify a vein of global thought since (...) the nineteenth century that resisted historicism but without abandoning the notion that the past was real. Deploying a genre that came to the fore in colonial conditions, Sharar imagines an alternative future by narrating the past otherwise via fiction. (shrink)

From Italian physician Hieronymus Mercurialis’s contention that the stomach was ‘the king of the belly’, to its promotion by the end of the nineteenth century to the ‘monarch of humanity’ in patent medicine, to Byron Robinson’s discovery of the enteric nervous system in 1907 (a mesh of neural connectivity that led him to dub the gut ‘the second brain’), there has historically been a longstanding awareness of the expansive reach of the gut in the functions of the body. (...) In the nineteenth century, the authority of the gut and its allyship with the brain became a focus for writers thinking about the intersections of illness and ‘modern life’. In medical texts, domestic health manuals, patent medicine, and fiction, the electric telegraph in particular became a way of envisaging what we would now call the ‘gut-brain axis’. The telegraphic metaphor enabled a view of digestion as not simply a mechanical or chemical process, but one that was understood in terms of time, space, and communication. However, such a framework also suggested problems of connection that were common to both systems, emphasising not only the healthy body’s quasi-telegraphic networks but also its vulnerability to delay, disruption, and pathological incoherence. This article will explore the use of telegraphic technologies as proxies for theorising gastric connection and more broadly the concept of ‘gastric time’ as a key conceit for understanding digestion as a process that was and is subject to the idiosyncrasies of bodily rhythms. (shrink)

This essay examines the theory of maternal impressions, the belief that a woman’s experiences or emotions during pregnancy could explain congenital disability or emotional/ behavior differences in her child and asks why this theory circulated as an explanation for disability seen at birth by both medical doctors and in literature for far longer than it did across the Atlantic. By presenting examples from nineteenth-century medical literature, popular fiction, maternal handbooks, and two canonical works of literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s (...) The Scarlet Letter and Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave, I argue that maternal impressions worked to maintain anxiety for women, and particular white women, to ensure they felt responsible if anything was “wrong” with their child. Ultimately, I show how maternal impressions was both an ableist and racialized understanding of inheritance that wouldn’t be discarded until the emergence of eugenics in the early twentieth century. (shrink)

The music of Christoph Willibald von Gluck was a revolution for Paris operagoers when his work premiered there in 1774. In a setting known for its restive and often rowdy spectators, Alceste, Iphigénie en Aulide, and Orpheé et Eurydice seized audiences with unprecedented force. They shed silent tears or sobbed openly, and some cried out in sympathy with the sufferers onstage. “Oh Mama! This is too painful!” three girls called out as Charon led Alcestis to the underworld, and a boy (...) pleaded with his father to take him home. A woman who watched the same performance described falling on her knees in her opera-box as the march of the priests of Apollo began, staying in this position “suppliant and with my hands clasped until the end of the piece.”Gluck's streamlined musical language was one reason for these emotional responses. He and his librettist Ranieri de’ Calzabigi simplified the conventions by eliminating extraneous subplots, abandoning the repetitive da capo form, and replacing trills and runs with simpler melodies meant to convey passion. Another reason was the widespread culture of sentimentalism, which equated virtue with sincerity and judged tears to be the natural sign of an open heart. Painters depicted tender and tumultuous family scenes, and friends pledged trembling vows of fidelity. Listeners were also readers, and many described similar tearful responses when they read the century's bestseller, Rousseau's novel Julie; or, The New Heloise.Everist, a musicologist, takes up the story of Gluck in France in the nineteenth century, when the German composer remained a presence in repertoires. No longer prone to tears, the public was often indifferent and sometimes hostile to his works. Conductors and composers nevertheless persisted in promoting Gluck's music. Between 1828 and 1870, operatic excerpts appeared roughly twice a year in performances of the prestigious Société des Concerts, and the charismatic conductor Jules Pasdeloup regularly programmed his music. Many listeners remained unconvinced. A writer in 1861 described the “sepulchral boredom that reigned the length of all five acts” of Alceste. The periodical Monde dramatique used the same language to characterize Gluck's music: it was “profoundly boring.” After a high point of performances in the middle of Napoleon III's reign, Gluck disappeared from the Paris opera and concert stage for some thirty years.Everist's aim in this slim book is to isolate the “agents” involved in the French reception of Gluck. Traditional reception histories might begin with Gluck and his aims, identifying musical features, particular responses of audiences, critics’ accounts, and perhaps the more elusive temper of the times. Everist focuses instead on less conspicuous networks of impresarios, theater directors, and publishers. In his telling, such agents also include journalists and writers of fiction. The avowed effort is to decenter the artist and his art to emphasize the limited role that composers and librettists play in the performance of an opera. A quoted passage in the book reminds us that without parking attendants, stagehands, and ticket sellers the show could not go on. True enough. Genealogies of Music and Memory therefore provides tables listing Gluck arias in anthologies, particular singers’ performances, works by composers other than Gluck who also drew themes from classical antiquity, and works by other foreign-born composers. A section on “material culture” lists paintings and sculptures of Gluck in Paris theaters and museums.As a “genealogy,” the book is a salutary reminder of the web of amateurs and professionals who discuss, promote, and perform works that others have created. Writers such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, Mme de Staël, and Hippolyte Taine held up Gluck as the embodiment of German music. Hector Berlioz wrote frequently and enthusiastically about Gluck, although he was less keen to program his music. The singers François Delsarte and Pauline Viardot aroused temporary interest in Gluck by regularly including his arias in their recitals. Musical anthologies for the bourgeois household included piano arrangements of his best-known arias. Some nineteenth-century adaptations of his works were scored for the military band.Genealogies of Music and Memory is musicology with very little music. Everist's reliance on networks of actors, agents, publishers, pedagogical practices, and archival environments leads him to assert that “multiple agency is endemic in the story told here.” Unfortunately, it is often unclear just what the story is. Carelessness in writing and editing throughout—including a subject-verb clash in the book's final sentence—has rendered key passages obscure. Everist describes Delsarte's voice as feeble, broken, veiled, and ready to be extinguished twice in the same paragraph, first as a paraphrase and again in a quotation (with a misplaced comma).Decentering artists and their work to elevate others responsible for its reception brings attention to the unseen and often unsung. In the absence of particular performance histories, musical analyses and description, or sustained accounts of shared tastes or critical responses, however, conclusions remain piecemeal. Everist claims to have revealed a “Geertzian web of culture” in his study. A more modest account would describe it as an enumeration of references, revivals, editions, excerpts, and arrangements. (shrink)

"The Ironic Space" is a highly original study which explores how Kantian epistemology opens a critical window onto the inner form of nineteenth-century realist texts. By tracing the outlines of German idealism, the author describes a philosophical and literary paradigm, which reveals the many contours of irony in Stendhal's "Le Rouge et le noir," Goncharov's "A Common Story," and Meredith's "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel." The readings not only illuminate surprising aspects of the novels, but also demonstrate how (...) their philosophical grounding problematizes the reading process. (shrink)

Applying ideas drawn from contemporary critical theory, this book historicizes psychoanalysis through a new and significant theorization of the Gothic. The central premise is that the nineteenth-century Gothic produced a radical critique of accounts of sublimity and Freudian psychoanalysis. This book makes a major contribution to an understanding of both the nineteenth century and the Gothic discourse which challenged the dominant ideas of that period. Writers explored include Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, and (...) Bram Stoker. (shrink)

The late nineteenth century was not only a time in which religious faith was questioned in light of increasing claims of natural science. It is more accurate to see the familiar Victorian crisis of faith as but one aspect of a larger historical phenomenon, one in which the methods of both religion and science came under scrutiny. Among several examinations of the status of scientific knowledge in the waning decades of the century, the treatment of the subject (...) by the German theologian Wilhelm Herrmann and philosopher Hans Vaihinger rejected its objective nature and denied that either scientists or theologians had access to the truth of nature. Although this stance regarding the nature of science, religion, and their relationship was limited to intellectuals in German society at the time, it foreshadowed developments in our own day in which the traditional search for truth has been problematized. (shrink)

Les prémices du mouvement pour l’émancipation des femmes coïncident dans l’espace grec avec leur entrée sur la scène littéraire. Les écrivaines participent d’abord largement de la veine patriotique qui caractérise la littérature grecque au xixe siècle. Mais elles s’en éloignent progressivement à partir des années 1880, quand certaines se tournent vers la prose et la fiction, évolution propice à l’expression d’une critique du système de genre qui correspond en outre à un glissement du récit de l’histoire nationale vers celui (...) d’histoires de la sphère privée. Outre l’intérêt intrinsèque qu’elle présente, notamment à travers l’intrication de la question nationale et de la question des femmes, l’étude du rapport des écrivaines grecques à l’histoire au xixe siècle invite à une réflexion historiographique et épistémologique sur l’articulation entre genre, histoire et littérature. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe presence of emotional words and content in stories has been shown to enhance a story’s memorability, and its cultural success. Yet, recent cultural trends run in the opposite direction. Using the Google Books corpus, coupled with two metadata-rich corpora of Anglophone fiction books, we show a decrease in emotionality in English-speaking literature starting plausibly in the nineteenth century. We show that this decrease cannot be explained by changes unrelated to emotionality, and that, in our three corpora, (...) the decrease is driven almost entirely by a decline in the proportion of positive emotion-related words, while the frequency of negative emotion-related words shows little if any decline. Consistently with previous studies, we also find a link between ageing and negative emotionality at the individual level. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Found in Translation: “New People” in Twentieth-Century Chinese Science Fiction by Jing JiangYingying HuangJing Jiang. Found in Translation: “New People” in Twentieth-Century Chinese Science Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. 144 pp. Paperback, ISBN 9780924304941.One of the Association of Asian Studies’ Asia Shorts series, Jing Jiang’s monograph is a delightful 130-page read including notes and a bibliography. It contributes new and cross-cultural perspectives (...) to the Chinese SF scholarship that has recently been invigorated by a plethora of translations into English, animated discussions at conference panels and themed lectures, and book-length studies such as Nathaniel Isaacson’s Celestial Empire: The Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction (2017), which focuses on China’s early twentieth century, and Hua Li’s Chinese Science Fiction during the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw (2021), which deals with works published between 1978 and 1981, to name just a couple. Jiang’s book covers both periods and the time in between with a purpose to investigate “how Chinese science fiction participates and intervenes in Chinese conceptualizations of the modern at critical junctures over the last century” (1), which Jiang achieves through comparative readings of texts brought into dialogue via translation. A shared theme of the texts studied is, as the book title suggests, the creation of a “new people,” either through edification or high-tech means such as bioengineering. Therefore, the interventions by science fiction that this study is concerned with are chiefly in debates about modern citizenry, subjectivity, and humanity in China’s twentieth century, when science fiction enjoyed its first two “booms.”This book has an introduction, four chapters, and an epilogue. The introduction offers a brief history of Chinese science fiction and announces the author’s intention to “situate Chinese science fiction within a dynamic model of world literature” (2). Jiang makes two crucial points: first, Chinese science fiction is a product of translation and transculturation, which [End Page 591] requires an intertextual and comparative study; second, contrary to its designation as a popular genre in the West, science fiction in China has been a form of elite literature and even a part of statist thinking. While this introduction may seem a bit long for a short book with “conciseness” as one of its marketing guidelines—the account of Lu Xun’s early life and turn to literature, for example, may be a little too elaborate for its purpose (10–12)—it lays a solid foundation for discussions about science fiction’s translingual dimensions and role in China’s nation-building discourse to develop through the chapters.The expansive first chapter, “Medicine for the Mind, Panacea for the Nation: How Did the Stories of Science and Fiction Become One?” is yet another historical survey, occasionally repeating points from the introduction, but this time of the background, genesis, and early growth of science fiction in China from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century (i.e., the late Qing dynasty [1644–1911] and early Republican era [1912–49]). Jiang gives a detailed account of occurrences deemed important to the rise and confluence of fiction and science within China’s nation-building discourse, including literati intellectuals’ promotion of “new fiction” and the dissemination of scientific knowledge, highlighting the roles played by central figures like Liang Qichao, Lu Xun, and John Fryer. Jiang makes the illuminating observation that Fryer’s stipulation of a “new novel” for a fiction contest he organized in Shanghai in 1895 foreshadowed China’s literary realism and the vernacular movement (30), and her remarks about translation, Chinese science fiction’s inherent hybridity, and its mission to cure the nation well echo the book’s central argument about the genre’s interventions.A shorter chapter follows, entitled “Scientifically Formed or Reformed: Bioengineering and Other Fantasies about a New Species of National Subjects,” which examines early science fiction stories about manufacturing humanity and argues that these texts “gave rise to a literary vision that believed literally in the malleability or programmability of the soul” (39). During the first boom of Chinese science fiction in the 1900s, translations of and sequels to Western stories showcase the debate about science’s power of shaping the soul... (shrink)

I aim to explode a famous thesis about “the rise of fictionality,” argued in an essay of that title by Catherine Gallagher. I also have in mind related claims that the eighteenth or the nineteenth century first distinguished fiction from nonfiction or first differentiated literature from other modes of discourse. Gallagher places the rise of fictionality exactly where Ian Watt placed the rise of the novel—England, 1720 to 1740—and she connects it to the development of a credit (...) economy. This article argues that the relationship between fiction and credit goes deeper than this, insofar as fiction was classically theorized in relation to modal concepts like probability and as such had a direct relationship to what Aristotle called endoxa: what is believed by all or by most. Probability was understood in relation not to what happens but to what is thought to happen: that is, to a socially constituted sense of what and who is credible. The article takes account of the multiple disciplines in which fictionality was theorized in the premodern period, but it emphasizes the centrality of rhetoric and the dissemination of a model of fictionality through the early modern grammar schools. Finally, it reads Shakespeare’s Othello to show that probable fiction was not only an available concept but a crucial tool for the analysis of social life. In Othello, ideologies of race and gender define the unequal terms on which credibility is established. Probable fiction is directly tied to the work of making and unmaking social worlds. (shrink)

Humanitarianism has a narrative problem. Far too often, aid to Africa is envisioned through a tale of Western heroes saving African sufferers. While labeling white savior narratives has become a familiar gesture, it doesn't tell us much about the story as story. Humanitarian Fictions aims to understand the workings of humanitarian literature, as they engage with and critique narratives of Africa. Overlapping with but distinct from human rights, humanitarianism centers on a relationship of assistance, focusing less on rights than on (...) needs, less on legal frameworks than moral ones, less on the problem than on the nonstate solution. Tracing the white savior narrative back to religious missionaries of the nineteenth century, Humanitarian Fiction reveals the influence of religious thought on seemingly secular institutions and uncovers a spiritual, collectivist streak in the discourse of humanity. Because the humanitarian model of care transcends the boundaries of the state, and its networks touch much of the globe, Humanitarian Fictions redraws the boundaries of literary classification based on a shared problem space rather than a shared national space. The book maps a transnational vein of Anglophone literature about Africa that features missionaries, humanitarians, and their so-called beneficiaries. Putting humanitarian thought in conversation with postcolonial critique, this book brings together African, British, and U.S. writers typically read within separate traditions. Paustian shows how the novel--with its profound sensitivity to narrative--can enrich the critique of white saviorism while also imagining alternatives that give African agency its due. (shrink)

I would like to end this questioning of canonical origins by returning to my point of departure, [Lawrence] Lipking’s notion of a “poetics of abandonment.” Lipking’s article was included in an issue of Critical Inquiry entitled Canons, in which it seemingly was held to represent a feminist perspective on canon formation. Lipking centers his attention on literary theory, a domain that has been granted new prominence, sometimes even the status of literature, in the most recent reformulation of the canon. It (...) may be, as Viktor Shklovsky suggested in Zoo, or Letters Not about Love, that literary theory is the novel’s successor, in which case the resurrection of Ovid’s abandoned women would make generic sense. Furthermore, for the first time in the history of literary criticism, there are today numbers of influential female literary critics, many of whom have called for a major reorganization of literary canons. Given the strategies deployed during previous moments of canon formation, it is perhaps inevitable that some of today’s male literary critics would instigate a debasement of theoretical mothers. Contemporary literary critics are no longer attempting to consign women writers to abandonment. However, even as they promote the cause of women writers, some may also be responding in a manner that reveals their perception that feminist literary theory has provided the most forceful recent challenge not only to literary canons but to critical canons as well.In the final development in his attempt to prove that a mimetic investment in female pain is the basic theoretical strategy deployed by all female readers, Lipking provides an analysis of recent feminist theorists ending with this characterization of the authors of The Madwoman in the Attic: “Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar gaze at the mad and outcast heroines of the nineteenth century as if into a mirror” . Thus Gilbert and Gubar—Lipking also cites the examples of Kate Millett and Ellen Moers—become the most recent incarnations of the abandoned literary woman, the literary critic whose views originate in her fear of abandonment. If my analysis of strategies of canon formation deployed in earlier centuries is correct, then the pronouncement from Lipking’s article with which I opened this essay may be a red herring. “In the absence of mothers, a father must raise the right issues.” Lipking may be calling for “a poetics of abandonment” not in response to a perceived maternal deficiency, but in order to consign strong female critics to abandonment, out of a Phaeton complex, a fear that, unless female theorists are cast off, critical sons may have an increasingly difficult time proving their legitimacy. Joan DeJean is professor of French at Princeton University. Her most recent book is Literary Fortifications: Rousseau, Laclos, Sade, and she is currently at work on a study to be titled Fictions of Sappho: Sappho’s Presence in French Literature, 1546-1937. (shrink)

Contemporary scholarship on speculative fiction has increased in Europe and the United States substantially in recent years. An upsurge in the number of speculative literary works and cinematic adaptations has played an instrumental role in this growing interest. Turkish writers have also joined this trend since they are now writing more speculative fiction. The aim of this study is therefore to present an overview of speculative fiction studies in Turkey and to introduce speculative fiction in Turkish (...) literature from the second part of the nineteenth century until the present day. Such a projection will acquaint scholars with scholarship on speculative fiction and relevant literary production in Turkey. This critical survey hopes to pique international scholarly curiosity about the Turkish tradition of speculative fiction and to inspire a revitalization of relevant scholarship in Turkey. (shrink)

Nineteenth-century philosophers, including J.S. Mill, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche, criticized Jeremy Bentham for his supposed aesthetic insensibility to the arts, especially literature. Through analysis of Bentham’s manuscript comments on novelists, both negative and positive, this essay analyzes the pleasure Bentham took in fictional narratives in the context of his advocacy for sexual and gender minorities, disabled persons, colonized and enslaved persons, children, and animals. Drawing from a wide range of Bentham’s papers, the author then focuses on a (...) vivid manuscript proposing ‘a new and improved Drama,’ in which Bentham examines the desire to be immersed in an interactive dramatic experience of one’s favorite works of fiction. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) 216-223 [Access article in PDF] Notes and Fragments Genre Fiction and "The Origin of the Work of Art" Nancy J. Holland I FIRST, A CONFESSION. Like, I suspect, many of my readers, I am an unpublished fiction writer. Unlike most of the closet fiction writers in academia, however, I write genre fiction. The question that immediately follows is how that (...) writing is related to the intellectual work I do in philosophy.This question, of course, is open to a broad range of answers, from the possibility that the two aren't related at all, to potential Freudian answers it might take years of therapy to unearth. Teaching informs one's life, however, as much as the reverse, and in teaching Martin Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art" to my Metaphysics class last year, I began to understand at least one dimension of the appeal that writing genre fiction has for me as a philosopher.But first, let me explain what I mean by genre fiction. In what follows, I will be referring primarily to four forms of genre fiction that have clear roots in the nineteenth century in Western Europe and North America: two gender-segregated genres, the western and the romance, and two gender-marked genres, science fiction and detective novels. I will be comparing these to two other forms of "popular culture" that also developed in the nineteenth century and have, I would argue, similar relationships to the older, more "legitimate," more elite art forms which they closely resemble: photography 1 and popular music, [End Page 216] especially those forms of popular music such as ragtime, blues, jazz, and rock that are informed by the African-American experience in the United States. 2These "low brow" art forms all appear to have arisen out of the growth of the middle class in developing parts of the world during the nineteenth century and the correlative confluence of greater leisure, greater aggregate prosperity, and higher levels of education across a broader spectrum of society. Further, these art forms all combine the surface appearance of their respective "high brow" correlate arts with the reassurance of repetition that is the cornerstone of the folk arts with which they are also correlated. Each of these forms of popular culture balances itself, then, between a demand for more and more "works of art" (and/or class aspirations based on the appearance of such) and a demand for the familiar in a rapidly changing, materially challenging world.Thus, photography gives us a frozen and thereby purified visual reality, an icon of memory to which we can return at will. The truth it reveals is most often starker than that of folk painting and portraiture, but also gives the appearance of being free from the subjectivity of the artist. Great iconic photographs such as the kiss on V-E day, I have heard it said, become more real than the reality they encapsulated.Popular music similarly combines often amazing musical complexity (which is not unknown, although rarer, in western folk music) with the reassurance of a form that not only repeats itself within a song, but also between songs of the same genre. Thus, blues can be recognized by both the minor chords in its melodies and the characteristic rhyme pattern of its lyrics. Moreover, most western popular music, even to some extent free-form jazz, has a familiar and reassuring beginning-middle-end structure, both melodically and dynamically, that locates a listener immediately within the song's "story-arc." 3This same beginning-middle-end structure is one clear hallmark of genre fiction. Another is repetition. We all immediately know the plot of a detective novel or science fiction adventure: where it will begin, what the key stages of the story will be, and how it will end—not just happily, but with a specific form of reassuring outcome, be it the victory of well-intentioned intelligence over cunning evil or humanity's ability to survive even the most alien (and so most familiar) of threats. At... (shrink)

In the nineteenth century, astronomers thought that a planet between Mercury and the Sun was causing perturbations in the orbit of Mercury, and they introduced ‘Vulcan’ as a name for such a planet. But they were wrong: there was, and is, no intra-Mercurial planet. Still, these astronomers went around saying things like (2) Vulcan is a planet between Mercury and the Sun. Some philosophers think that, when nineteenth-century astronomers were theorizing about an intra-Mercurial planet, they created (...) a hypothetical planet. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:META-ONTOLOGY AND META-FICTION by Denis E. B. Pollard Peter van inwagen's attempt to explain the nature of fiction makes use of Quine's program in meta-ontology.1 This program comprises four basic theses: (i) that being is the same as existence, (ii) that being is univocal, (iii) that this univocal sense is best captured, for the purposes of formalization, by die existential quantifier, and (iv) that deciding what to (...) believe about what there is comes to a decision about what theories we should accept. As the aim of formalization is explicitness, then theories should be rendered into canonicalese and their commitments identified through those sentences which are prefaced with the existential quantifier. For Inwagen, as for his mentor Quine, acceptance of theory expressed in this canonical form entails acceptance of the ontology expressed in those quantified sentences. Bringing these considerations to bear on fiction, Inwagen asks, "What are theories about fiction?" and replies that they are "theories that treat stories as having an internal structure" (p. 72). The upshot of this is that such theories contain sentences which, when formally rendered, revead commitments to fictional objects. It is further claimed that such sentences can be vehicles of objective truth. Thus Inwagen finds he cannot wholeheartedly dismiss Sarah Gamp as a nonentity. In this respect, his view contrasts with two contemporary accounts, the "reductivist" one which denies Sarah Gamp's existence and her possession of any properties whatever, and the more recent "Meinongian" view which would agree that Sarah Gamp does not exist, but would nonetheless strenuously maintain that she is a nurse, fat, old, and decidedly the worse for drink. Inwagen's Sarah is neither ofthese: pace both these positions, she exists all right, but with properties such as being a theoretical entity of criticism, being a satiric villainess, not being a woman, and not being fond of gin. Inwagen's attempt to steer what seems to be a middle course has yielded, if anything, a more counterintuitive result than either ofthe other views. What is die explanation for this? 244 Denis E. B. Pollard245 To begin with, it is important to note a distinction, which Inwagen himself accepts, between two kinds of sentences. Let us take the following elementary examples: (1) "Sarah Gamp is a nurse," and (2) "Sarah Gamp is a character in a nineteenth-century novel." With specimens like (1), Inwagen sides with the reductivist: such sentences asefalse, and are not about anything. But it is with examples like (2) that ontology becomes a real issue, since sentences of this kind belong to literary theory. Neither authors nor critics who make use of sentences of the first kind are committed to the existence of fictional entities. So far, so good. But what is it that compels such commitment in the second case? Inwagen is sceptical about reductivist analyses which seek to paraphrase such sentences in order to remove any "misleading" implications. Such paraphrases he would regard as at best "messy," and more seriously, unlikely to preserve intuitive meaning without appearing to say that there are fictional characters. Unfortunately, he brushes this aside as a "narrow technical issue" at the very point where rather more argument is needed. However, on the issue of preservation of intuitive meaning, it might well be argued that his contention is somewhat question-begging, suggesting a rather literal reading of (2) above as a straightforward predication superficially akin to (3) "McEnroe is a seeded player in this year's Wimbledon tournament." So by a strange alchemy, the expression "Sarah Gamp" in (2) is accorded a referential status denied to it in (1). It is at this point that the notion of"theoretical entity" is introduced to supply the need for a referent dictated by the Quinean program. Inwagen's Sarah Gamp, in this theoretical disguise, can now literally satisfy predicates like "... is a character in a nineteenth-century novel," but not predicates like "... is a nurse." The parallel being exploited here is that with scientific theory. An ideal gas can satisfy Boyle's Law, but cannot literally be ignited, put into containers, or have an offensive smell. But there is more than a suspicion of equivocation over the term... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Teaching Musical FictionMarcin Stawiarski (bio)IntroductionGiven the increasing interest in musico-literary studies, I wish to examine some ways in which music can be used for pedagogical purposes in teaching literature. It has been widely recognized that music and poetry sprang from the common origin of chant or incantation.1 Throughout the ages, the sister arts sometimes went hand in hand and sometimes parted company, but since the end of the (...) class='Hi'>nineteenth century musical aspects have been used quite extensively in literature, either as a subject matter or as a wellhead of structures. The number of musically inspired twentieth-century novels bears evidence to this strengthening of musico-literary relationships.2 Contemporary interactive, interdisciplinary, and multimedial works of art or artistic events also testify to a close sisterhood between the arts. This phenomenon has come to be called intermediality, which is defined as using more than one artistic medium in the creation of a work of art. But then, examining musical aspects in literature demands specific knowledge of the musical field itself, thus raising questions about the limits and the difficulties of using musico-literary materials in class. Suppose the student is not knowledgeable at all about music. What, then, can be the input the teacher can offer the student without necessarily inundating the latter with too much information? Is it possible to avoid generalizations in drawing comparisons or distinctions between music and literature? And, is it relevant to deal with music in teaching fiction?I wish to suggest that there are pragmatic elements of music that may be used in teaching music-related texts without previous skills in the musical field. In this respect, music may serve as an enriching and fascinating teaching tool. The point I would like to make is that quite often music leads the text to raise questions about literariness itself, so that it becomes possible not only to discuss musico-literary interrelations but to tackle the specificity of literature through the prism of intermediality. [End Page 78]This article will deal with two kinds of musico-literary phenomena appearing in fiction. On the one hand, I wish to examine the implications of the historical and cultural background in musicalized texts as an inherent aspect of many novels. On the other hand, I wish to broach the question of the musicalization of fiction, that is to say, the transposition or imitation of musical forms in literature.Literature Speaking about MusicThe Need of a ContextIn dealing with musical contexts of literary texts, the teacher may bring the student's attention to bear on the variety of ways a text may be related to music. A typology of different musico-literary interrelations has been established by such critics as Calvin S. Brown3 or Steven P. Scher. In Scher one will find a useful chart dividing musico-literary studies into two categories: literary presence within the musical field (explored by musicology) and musical presence within the literary field (explored by literary studies). The latter may be subdivided into word music, musical structures, and verbal music. This typology has been furthered by Werner Wolf in his critical work on the musicalization of fiction. Yet too detailed a categorization may seem difficult to put into practice in a classroom setting. Its principle drawback lies in the difficulty to sever one musical phenomenon in literature from the other. In numerous cases it seems impossible to drive an unequivocal wedge between (a) prosodic phenomena, appertaining to word music or musicality; (b) exclusively thematic or topical elements; and (c) specifically structural transpositions. Such an accurate classification, therefore, preferably would be used with more advanced students.The thematic or topical relationship I want to focus on in this section is by far the easiest to get across to students since it does not require musical skills. This approach is roughly tantamount to Scher's verbal music or Wolf's thematization,4 and it appears in texts dealing with music explicitly. Many texts resort to an extramusical (or paramusical) rather than a purely musical content. In other words, it is the critical or mythical context surrounding a given musical work that is often used in fiction. In reading Rose Tremain... (shrink)

The genre of fable tends to be overlooked in the study of Korean literary history on the ground that the genre seems too archaic to reflect the aesthetic standards established in the modern European novel, in which the focus lies in the realistic representation of the individual or contemporary society. However, the genre was not completely abandoned by modern Korean writers. Few critics have noted the continuing role played by the rich Korean fable tradition, which eventually made the reinvention of (...) the genre in the mass media possible. In particular, it is worth noting that there was the emergence of a new subgenre of fable in the late nineteenth century: that is, fabulous court case fiction, which is quite distinct from the Chinese literary tradition that had underprivileged imaginative narrative texts under the absolute domination of Confucian historiography. The genre of fabulous court case fiction makes us reconsider the plurality of narrative forms and various narrative functions. In this study, I examine how imaginative narrative texts such as fables simultaneously pursue the pleasure of storytelling and the purposes of both moral and specialized education. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sanford Freedman CHARACTER IN A COHERENT FICTION: ON PUTTING KING LEAR BACK TOGETHER AGAIN Criticism has never been able to talk about fictionality very long without talking about an "inside" and an "outside," a fictional world's relation to a non-fictional world. And always there lies an immediate tension in this relation posed by the concept of coherence. That is, does a fictional world cohere because it corresponds to (...) meanings "outside" die text or does a fictional world cohere because its "inside" parts stand in meaningful relation to each other? Northrop Frye, in explicating his dieory of symbols, distinguishes between "inside" and "outside" critical directions: Whenever we read anything, we find our attention moving in two directions at once. One direction is outward or centrifugal, in which we keep going outside our reading, from the individual words to the things they mean, or, in practice, to our memory of the conventional association between them. The other direction is inward or centripetal, in which we try to develop from the words a sense of the larger verbal pattern they make.1 That Frye suggests that critics see in both directions at once separates him from most twentieth-century Shakespearean critics who exaggerate one direction at the expense of the other. In this essay I will examine criticism of King Lear, specifically criticism about the play's characters from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, as a way of assessing this distinction, focusing on two related problems: first, how the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries' legacy of"inside"/"outside" talk affects twentieth-century critical debate, and second, how twentieth-century controversy polarizes "insides" and "outsides" without acknowledging the implications of doing so. If such an exaimination serves to undermine dominant twentieth-century concepts of coherence within Shakespearean criticism by pointing to unwritten rules-of-thumb, it does so, ultimately, to alter perspective on the supposed rites of passage from theories which give us cleair, alternative versions of a fictional world (traditional theories) to theories which seem to leave us floundering in a pluralist acceptance of all possible versions of a fictional world (deconstructive theories). 196 Sanford Freedman197 Eighteenth-century critics do not scrutinize King Lear from the point of view of character but rather through the mental images or ideas which the characters' words evoke. When Johnson faults Shakespeare's description of Dover Cliff in IV.vi, he argues diat the passage "does not impress die mind at once with the horrible idea of an immense height. The impression is divided; you pass on, by computation, from one stage of the tremendous space to another."2 Lifting Edgar's words out of die context of character, Johnson assumes the role of the purveyor of literature, akin to the role Pope assumed when he starred the "beauties" in his Shakespearean texts. What concernsJohnson is the "true" effect of looking down from a precipice, and he implies that the description should produce in different minds the same idea, an idea which is for him a singular idea, unmediated by composite ideas because the idea of looking down from a precipice necessitates that the immediacy of effect be synonymous with that of the idea. Edgar's purpose in leading his father to the cliffis overshadowed by the idea of looking down from a cliff, and we would do well to investigate an "outside" source, Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, rather than the Shakespearean text, as a means of discovering the purposefulness of Johnson's comment. Critical significance lies notjust inJohnson's airing ofneoclassical concern, but, more importantly, in his failure to find what he expects to be "there" in the play's "inside." Ideas, not characters, matter to the eighteenth-century's coherence, and the scope or comprehensiveness of that coherence has relatively local application; that is, editors range over several lines looking for relevant ideas but not between scenes or acts. In fact, one explanation of why they do not see a double plot is that their critical attention, like that of Swift's Lilliputians, lacks scope; dierefore, they fail to anticipate, to see patterns. Again, Johnson, for example, does not observe Gloucester's, Edgar's, and the fool's repetition of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:(P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship. by Stephanie Peebles TaveraEtta M. MaddenStephanie Peebles Tavera. (P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022. Hardback, xii + 220 pp. ISBN 978-1-4744-9319-2.Utopian Studies readers first saw Stephanie Peebles Tavera’s work in print in her 2018 essay on reproductive health in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland. More recently, (...) in (P)rescription Narratives, she gives readers a view of the much broader historical scope of her scholarship in literary and cultural studies. Tavera’s analysis of what she labels “feminist medical fiction” considers not only novels and short stories but also literary reviews, dramas, and documentary films, many of which will be unfamiliar to readers of utopian and dystopian literature. Yet the book contextualizes the ways in which these works capture the “utopian possibilities” of women writers who pushed for breaking the boundaries of the dystopian strictures of embodied life. The literary works “rescript” what had been prescribed by others as “normalized behavior,” from the latter-nineteenth century through the Progressive Era (5, 37). As Tavera illustrates through her detailed analysis, these women’s narratives provide “interventions that... interrupt the dissemination of false [End Page 612] narratives of the female body” and “alter the course of cultural development toward greater inclusivity” (5).To establish the temporal boundaries for the project, Tavera emphasizes the Comstock Law, established in 1873, and the death of its author Anthony Comstock in 1915. While Comstock’s work often has been understood as restricting pornography, she explains the Comstock Law as more than merely that. Comstock sought to control what he and others saw as sexual deviation, which included birth control in any form. Tavera also bookends the project with lawsuits associated with Victoria Woodhull and Margaret Sanger, both women who advocated for abortion and birth control as means of allowing women to avoid the strictures over their bodies. Additionally, she explains, Comstock’s racism caused him to completely overlook Black women, ironically allowing a space in which Black women’s feminist medical fiction especially rescripts “normalized behavior” (37)—a topic she pursues in two parts of the book.The book follows a roughly chronological path as it examines four topics related to women’s health, brilliantly organized into “(p)rescriptions,” indicated by Rx, rather than chapters with numbers. Rx1, “Crip Medicine,” illustrates how authors such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman pointed to the socially constructed status of “hysteria” in a patriarchal culture that saw women as deviant by nature. Instead, these authors advocated for a more holistic examination of women’s health, impacted by the environments in which they lived. Drawing from Lyman Tower Sargent’s widely accepted view of utopianism as dreaming of a place “considerably better than the society in which the author lived,” she underscores “the utopian impulse underlies much of the work of feminist medical fiction” (39). In particular, writers of feminist medical fiction were “driven by failure.”Perhaps most familiar to illustrate this point is Gilman’s work, such as “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which illustrated how the culture failed certain characters. The narrator of that story suffers postpartum depression and is made worse by Dr. S. Weir Mitchell’s rest cure. Consequently, Gilman proceeded to write other works, such as Moving the Mountain (1911) and then Herland (1915), which push readers to envision “alternative societies” without such destructive patriarchal medical practices (39). But Tavera also explains how Louisa May Alcott’s Eight Cousins, or the Aunt-Hill (1875) critiques contemporary culture by providing a “domestic utopia” in the female domain of Aunt-Hill, wherein the male Dr. Alec Campbell demonstrates “a better way... of caring for the female body” (55). And another key example is Rebecca Harding [End Page 613] Davis’s Kitty’s Choice: A Story of Berrytown (1875). Berrytown is described as “the Utopia in actual laths, orchards, and bushel-measures of the advance guard of the reform party in the United States” (qtd. in Tavera 55). Through its two physicians, Dr. Muller and Dr. McCall, who represent homeopathic and allopathic practitioners, readers see that the society... (shrink)