Series Editor’s Preface

Editor's Note Christopher Keep We welcome Abigail Boucher and Daniel Jenkin-Smith as guest editors of this issue's forum, which is dedicated to different bodily fluids, such as tears and breast milk. Far from reticent in their treatment of literally fluid aspects of human experience, the essays they have brought together demonstrate the extent to which the substances that bodies generate and emanate, whether linked with health or disease, are central to the Victorian history of the body. In its concluding essay, by L. Anne Delgado, the forum extends its reach to consider ectoplasm, the history of which signals the centrality of fluids to psychic as well as physical experience. The winning essay of the 2018 Hamilton Prize competition is "'The Limits of the Imaginable'": Women Writers' Networks during the Long Nineteenth Century" by Andrea Stewart (University of St. Thomas). We are pleased to publish this exceptional contribution to the field of Victorian studies in the current issue. The Hamilton Prize is awarded to the best essay submitted to our annual competition by a graduate student. Our grateful thanks go to the advisory board members who generously served as judges: Stephen Arata (University of Virginia), Holly Furneaux (University of Leicester), and Catherine Delyfer (Université Toulouse–Jean Jaurès). This issue features, too, the first of two clusters of articles on animal studies. As Matthew Calarco puts it citing the work of Jacques Derrida, the question of the animal is "a question deriving from an animal who faces me, an interruption deriving from an animal, an animal whom I face and by whom I am faced and who calls my mode of existence into question" (5). For the Victorians, too, the encounter with the animal was a kind of interruption, breaking up the epistemic grounds by which the human might claim its evolutionary right to consume the natural world, and calling attention to the ethical implications of our conflicted relations with non-human agents. Drawing on the burgeoning scholarship on animal studies in the study of nineteenth-century literature and culture, the essays gathered here explore topics ranging from Darwin's research on worms and the 1875 Royal Commission on Vivisection to the challenge posed by vegetarianism to proponents of natural selection and the animality of the non-human species in Kipling's The Jungle Books. A second cluster of essays on animal studies will appear in our Fall 2020 issue. Work Cited Calarco, Matthew. Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. Columbia UP, 2008. Google Scholar Copyright © 2019 Victorian Studies of Western Canada

This volume of sixteen scholarly essays seeks to bring the hitherto almost exclusively twentieth-century-focused discipline of ‘memory studies’ to bear on the long nineteenth century (1789–1914). By combining research by leading academics and emerging scholars, this project, which began at a meeting of the UK Society of Dix-Neuviémistes, testifies to the vibrant multidisciplinarity and international reach of current work in nineteenth-century literary, cultural, and historical French studies. In their Introduction, Susan Harrow and Andrew Watts are perhaps overly defensive about the absence of ‘theory’ from the book. According to them, the volume rejects a resolutely theoretical approach and prefers instead to emulate Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project ‘through its embrace of the popular and the official, the literary and the political, the visual and the ethnographic, the cultural and the social, the national and the international, the religious and the secular’ (p. 17). But it is precisely this eclectic approach to nineteenth-century France that constitutes the volume's interest. Several essays engage with previously neglected manifestations of cultural memory such as street names and signage (Colette Wilson), student festivals (Elizabeth Emery), national festivals (Rémi Dalisson), military memoirs (Brian Martin), history painting (Melanie Vandenbrouck-Przybylski), zutiste poetry (Denis Saint-Amand), and government reports (Ben Fisher†) in order to show not only how the nineteenth century remembered and rewrote itself and its relationship with previous centuries, but also how France remembers (or chooses to forget) aspects of nineteenth-century history. Other contributions, such as Luc Nemeth's discussion of twentieth-century French accounts of the Dreyfus Affair, show how and why the nineteenth century was remembered differently at various times. It is precisely the volume's dual focus not only on the nineteenth-century's own acts of remembrance, but also on the ways in which that century has been rewritten and re-remembered in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, that makes this volume an important contribution to French cultural history. This investigation of actual acts of remembering, which takes up the first half of the volume, is complemented by analyses of how the themes of memory and remembering function within a range of literary texts, both canonical and lesser known. Here again, the dual focus of the volume is apparent: on the one hand in the discussion of the function and themes of memory and history in realists such as Zola (Émilie Piton-Foucault), Flaubert (Carmen Mayer-Robin, Mary Orr), Balzac (Owen Heathcote), Barbey d'Aurevilly (Francesco Manzini), and Stendhal (Lucy Garnier and Cécile Meynard), and on the other hand in Tim Farrant's and Richard Saint-Gelais's respective explorations of the way in which remembering can become an act of transformative homage from one age to another.

176 Reviews Irene (p. 26) and Rasselas (p. 35) are as brief as they are speculative. Jonathan Clark's painstaking essay on Johnson as a non-juror sifts the evidence (necessarily largely negative) that Johnson did not take the oaths of allegiance and abjuration, but has to play down explicit evidence that poverty drove him prematurely out of Oxford, in order to promote the view that Johnson was avoiding the oaths. Even Clark's conclu? sion to the volume, a sensibly tentative summary which stresses the developmental and shifting nature of historical definitions, in the end simply declares Johnson a non-juror and pokes fun at those who might remain unconverted. Erskine-Hill warns 'The eighteenth century of Jonathan Clark and that of Paul Langford still confront one another. The broad-bottom interpretation of the long eighteenth century is yet to come' (p. 6); it remains to be seen whether anyone can provide it. University of Liverpool Paul Baines Physiognomy and the Meaning ofExpression in Nineteenth Century Culture. By Lucy Hartley. (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, 29) Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 2001. xii + 242pp. ?35; $54-95- ISBN 0-521-79272-x. This is an impressively erudite and carefully written work on a subject that has attracted much attention across the humanities and social sciences in recent years. Lucy Hartley's book is concerned with the emergence of physiognomy as a popular science in the nineteenth century, and traces its cultural impact. She writes about the cultural import of theories of human nature, based on anatomy and the shape of the cranium. To simplify enormously, she seeks in essence a cultural explanation (where did these ideas come from?) for a cultural process?in particular the creation of art, where it deals with the meaning of emotion and its expression. The ideas were scientific or medical in origin, sometimes mediated through the 'big names' such as Charles Bell, Darwin, and Frances Galton, and sometimes coming direct from earlier pre-scientific 'authorities' such as Lavater or Le Brun. A recent exhibition at the Hayward Gallery ('Spectacular Bodies', 2001) made it possible to 'see' the cultural role of such ideas in a much more vivid form than in a text. The curators (who included Martin Kemp, another author to have made a contribution to the literature on this topic) displayed a number of works which visually express the connections between scientific and medical theories about phy? siognomy and the representations of differenttypes and characters within nineteenthcentury art. Much of nineteenth-century thinking about character and human types was influ? enced by phrenology (a topic hardly considered by Hartley) and by a variety oftheories which suggested that 'degenerates', the mad, criminals, and 'primitive' peoples shared certain cranial characteristics. The Hayward exhibition dealt with how science and art intermingled, and suggested ways in which the physiognomic theories of human nature that Hartley analyses came to be embodied within systems of social order?the mental asylum, the prison, even the family.Where culture 'ends' and society 'begins' in all this is, of course, a moot point. It may seem unfair to compare an exhibition with a book, but the wider social di? mension is lacking in Hartley's study, and it is the poorer as a result. Some key earlier literature on the subject?e.g. Daniel Pick's Faces ofDe generation (Cambridge: Cam? bridge University Press, 1989)?is present in the bibliography but hardly considered in the text, which devotes instead perhaps too much attention to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the novels of Collins. Hartley's discussion of Galton's theories, for instance, certainly refersto their social dimensions, but fails to situate this important MLRy 99.1, 2004 177 work on the relation between physiognomy and social behaviour in its wider context, one which provided support for social Darwinism and that leads, ultimately, to the extermination camps. Crime, poverty, disease, and racial discrimination are all cen? tral to the nineteenth century's fascination with physiognomy, but they are curiously absent from Hartley's account, which, to compound the problem, is also bereft of the conclusion which might have joined the threads of her discourse more satisfactorily. The...

In order to consider the future of Victorian literary studies within the long nineteenth century, we must go back to that earlier “period” of the nineteenth century, and the French Revolution of 1789. Drawing on the aesthetic and political innovations of 1790s women's writings, this essay argues that we need to reconceive of nineteenth-century literary studies beyond the period boundaries of Romantic and Victorian. The sexualization of revolutionary Terror, and particularly of Robespierre, in Romantic-era writings by women like Helen Maria Williams, Mary Robinson and Fanny Burney, offers surprising precedents for the feminization of Terror associated with the retrospectives of Victorian writers like Carlyle and Dickens. In this respect, and given many other aesthetic continuities (for example, the crossgender and cross-period appeal of the “poetess” figure), the “Victorian period” appears increasingly unsatisfactory when compared to the merits of a long nineteenth-century model for literary studies.

Reviewed by: The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature ed. by Dennis Denisoff and Talia Schaffer Kaylee N. Henderson (bio) Dennis Denisoff and Talia Schaffer, eds., The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature (New York: Routledge, 2020), pp. xii + 540, $224 hardcover. This extensive collection, carefully compiled by Dennis Denisoff and Talia Schaffer, provides an ample overview of the theoretical frameworks and topics pertaining to the study of Victorian literature. The companion's forty-five chapters are organized into six themed sections: "Genres and Movements," "Media Histories," "Victorian Discourses," "Formulations of Identity," "Science and Spirit," and "Spatiality and Environment." Each section contains chapters written by top scholars from around the globe, often the very scholars who wrote the foundational texts for their subjects. Each chapter provides a thorough overview of the topic, discussing both [End Page 462] pioneering texts and the most recent scholarship. Additionally, each chapter details the current challenges facing scholars and outlines directions for future research, often in relation to other topics and disciplines. Denisoff explains in the introduction, "We asked our authors not to write encyclopedic summaries of their subject but instead to use their own voices and styles to consider what somebody new to a field should know about the history of scholarship on the particular subject" (7). The authors represented in this collection clearly were mindful of this request, and despite the many voices, it never feels disjointed. Rather, the companion is an accessible and invaluable tool for scholars of Victorian literature. Denisoff notes the driving questions behind this collection: "What does Victorian studies engage with today, and how is it doing so?" (7). While he admits there are myriad responses to these compelling queries, the editors have worked to ensure that "in addition to addressing nineteenth-century values and concerns, it is a collection of twenty-first-century issues, critically positioning Victorian studies within the current social and political climate" (8). For example, in "Victorian Digital Humanities," Karen Bourrier explains that "new technologies were often first developed as aids to the disabled, only afterward finding broader use among the general population" (129). She notes that "the exchange also worked in reverse, with technologies for the able-bodied being adapted by the disabled," highlighting the influence of disability studies on the digital humanities through a shared goal of accessibility (129). Lynn Voskuil, in "Why Victorian Ecocriticism Matters," draws on the Victorian garden to introduce prevalent issues in Victorian ecocriticism, including "the role of empire in prompting both ecological innovation and environmental degradation; the acceleration of anthropogenic climate change during the nineteenth century; and the emergence of global perspectives to grasp the planetary scale of the ecological legacy we inherited from our Victorian forebears and the challenges we continue to share with them" (506). Linda K. Hughes's chapter on "Periodical Studies," the only one to focus solely on Victorian periodicals, details three major phases of periodical studies and the ongoing evolution of research methods and challenges within the subject. However, nearly every chapter in the collection touches on periodical studies and print culture in some way. For example, in "Short Forms: Serialization and Short Fiction," Susan David Bernstein proposes that "studying excerpts and abridged editions of long Victorian novels, to evaluate the experience of reading and design of writing short formats, even if one form—the serial installment or a chapter—is part of a larger text," can help us to avoid fetishizing wholeness and lead to "a theory and practice of Victorian short forms" (43). In "Feminism and the Canon," Talia Schaffer details the decades-long dominance of the canon wars and feminist criticism and their subsequent absence in work on Victorian [End Page 463] literary studies. She posits that "the feminist/noncanonical victory meant that its precepts could be taken for granted, its core assumptions remaining stubbornly unarticulated" (278). Arguing that critics must move beyond recovery work focused on biological females to instead "aim for feminist goals that benefit everyone regardless of their relation to female identity," Schaffer asserts, "'Feminism' ought to name our method, not our objects" (281). She explicitly points to the ways we can apply this "feminist strategy for reading" to areas like digital humanities and periodical studies. Andrew M. Stauffer...

Dreams and Modernity: A Cultural History explores the dream as a distinctively modern object of inquiry and as a fundamental aspect of identity and culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. While dreams have been a sustained object of fascination from the ancient world to the present, what sets this period apart is the unprecedented interest in dream writing and interpretation in the psychological sciences, and the migration of these ideas into a wide range of cultural disciplines and practices. Authors Helen Groth and Natalya Lusty examine how the intensification and cross-fertilization of ideas about dreams in this period became a catalyst for new kinds of networks of knowledge across aesthetic, psychological, philosophical and vernacular domains. In uncovering a complex and diverse archive, Dreams and Modernity reveals how the explosion of interest in dreams informed the psychic, imaginative and intimate life of the modern subject. Individual chapters in the book explore popular traditions of dream interpretation in the 19th century; the archival impetus of dream research in this period, including the Society for Psychical Research and the Mass Observation movement; and the reception and extension of Freud’s dream book in Britain in the early decades of the twentieth century. This engaging interdisciplinary book will appeal to both scholars and upper level students of cultural studies, cultural history, Victorian studies, literary studies, gender studies and modernist studies.

Keeping Faith with Literature

This essay examines recent scholarship on imperialism and citizenship in nineteenth-century British literature. Against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic and the Black Lives Matter Movement of 2020, events that prompted worldwide discussions on citizenship rights and racial (in)justice, this essay interrogates the relative scarcity of scholarship on citizenship in the subfield of nineteenth-century British literature. Drawing on the postcolonial insight of the North American journal Victorian Studies’s widely-discussed special issue for Spring 2020 titled “Undisciplining Victorian Studies,” this essay argues that studies on nineteenth-century citizenship requires an interdisciplinary approach connecting the achievements of diverse disciplines encompassing history, political science, sociology, and more. In the nineteenth century, the British people understood themselves as “British subjects” rather than citizens, which was not yet a concept fully legally embraced though the definition of citizenship was being actively developed in other contexts. Historically, discussions of British national citizenship focused on suffrage, which inevitably emphasized class as the central question. This essay proposes that gender and race deserve more scholarly attention, especially through an expanded understanding of a British imperial citizenship that can encompass more kinds of social belonging beyond the right to vote. The essay concludes by raising the the question of academic citizenship in order to highlight the importance of the inclusion and participation of scholars from both formerly colonized parts of the world and outside the British Empire.

Reviewed by: Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 1780–1870 Sean X. Goudie (bio) Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 1780–1870, by Tim Watson; pp. xv + 263. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008, £55.00, £21.99 paper, $95.00, $36.99 paper. Entitled "Family Worship in a Plantation in South Carolina," the cover illustration for Tim Watson's impressive study was reproduced in the Illustrated London News in late 1863 as a way of casting a nostalgic glance at American plantation society before the "bloody Civil War" on the one hand and Caribbean slavery pre-emancipation on the other (1). Especially relevant for Watson's purposes is how the illustration's "real" dimensions compete with the romantic gloss the editors seek to impose on it. For it turns out that the black man preaching to his fellow slaves and the ostensibly benevolent white master at the center of the congregation (and the image) depicts not a pre-Civil War scene but Port Royal in 1861 during its occupation by the Union Army when Northern missionaries—including the one depicted in the illustration, a master of a markedly different kind—were introduced for purposes of converting and instructing the soon-to-be former slaves. [End Page 323] Watson's incisive treatment of the illustration serves as a compelling entrée into the book's central focuses. In the nineteenth century, writers from distinct locations across the British Empire gauged their relationship to a deeply embedded set of social and cultural dynamics between Britain and its Caribbean colonies by drawing alternately on the conventions of romance and realism in their texts—fiction, but also plantation logs and diaries, court testimonies, print media, travel writings, and uncertain objects such as rebellion-laced placards—for authority and support. Watson urges us to take seriously the Caribbean's important if little appreciated influence on British society and culture writ large in the nineteenth century. Across the study's chapters Watson argues compellingly for the importance—both in a romantic and a real sense—of peripatetic Black politico-religious figures like the Port Royal preacher depicted in the book's cover illustration. Drawing on scholarship on slavery and genre by Ian Baucom and others, the study's chief analytic is most sharply defined and developed in the first two chapters, which take up writings shaped by and responsive to the debates leading to emancipation in the 1830s. Leaders of the plantocracy such as the notorious Jamaican Simon Taylor wrote in the mode of "creole realism," presenting themselves as possessive of "qualities of reasonableness and enterprise" to defend against attacks drawn in the language of "gothic melodrama and tropical romance" by abolitionists bent on exposing the violence and excess of plantation society (11). Conversely, when novels such as Maria Edgeworth's Belinda (1801) deployed a "metropolitan" realism that rendered illegitimate efforts of Creole realists like Taylor (11), his cultural inheritors—including Charles White Williams for whom Watson makes a compelling case as the author of the anonymously published gothic novel Hamel, the Obeah Man (1827)—adopted an "imperial" version of romance in order "to memorialize the impending loss of the world of the plantocracy" (12). Within such imperial romances, ironically, we begin to glimpse "the enslaved Jamaicans themselves, the real creoles … and the world to come after emancipation in the 1830s" (12). If the real/romance paradigm allows Watson to manage an otherwise unwieldy array of genres and texts, some readers might yearn for greater precision and consistency in the use of that paradigm across the book's second half, which examines works authored during the post-emancipation period and focused especially on events surrounding the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion and its aftermath. Given, moreover, the extensive critical genealogies of the study's key terms, readers might wonder whether Watson understands the influence of Caribbean culture on British romance and realism to be like or unlike the shaping influence of gender and sexuality concerns, of developments in technology and visual culture, or of related colonial cultural sites like India—topics about which scholars in Victorian studies have had much to say. Perhaps we might properly regard such...

Reviewed by: Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire ed. by Nathan K. Hensley and Philip Steer Ursula Kluwick (bio) Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire, edited by Nathan K. Hensley and Philip Steer; pp. 261. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018, $110.00, $35.00 paper, $34.99 ebook. Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire is an exciting collection that does more than fill several important gaps in the field of ecocriticism. Certainly, the collection offers a welcome intervention within the fields of ecocriticism and Victorian studies by turning the spotlight on the nineteenth century, which has hitherto received somewhat less attention in environmental criticism than, for instance, the early modern period or the present. The broad range of authors, texts, and concerns analyzed by the contributors impressively showcases the relevance of ecocriticism to Victorian studies. But the collection goes much further than marking out Victorian ecocriticism as a promising subfield. Instead, it performs the leap signaled by the transition from ecocriticism to the environmental humanities: it shows the extent to which ecological issues are entangled with other concerns—not simply because environmental questions can fruitfully be posed alongside other questions, but because they intersect with other lines of inquiry, methodologically and practically. This is exemplified by the editors' own essay, "Signatures of the Carboniferous: The literary Forms of Coal," which devises a "hermeneutics of coal." Probing the "structuring role" played by coal across a range of texts (67), Nathan K. Hensley and Philip Steer highlight conjunctions between narrative infrastructure and energy regime to show how the logic of coal shapes literary form and, beyond that, "the form of thought itself" (78). Their carboniferous rereading of texts by Elizabeth Gaskell and Joseph Conrad challenges critical categories such as the transition between Victorianism and modernism. But Ecological Form also offers other interventions. The focus on empire brings together nineteenth-century ecological and postcolonial criticism, productively extending their intersection beyond the contemporary questions to which it has hitherto largely been confined. As Sukanya Banerjee writes in a superb essay on indigo and drama, the collection shows us that, "if over the last two decades we have reached a stage in which it is difficult to absent the history of empire from that of Victorian Britain, then we are now also at the stage where we cannot speak of 'empire' in terms of its human constituency alone" (24). Banerjee's essay highlights the interaction of human and more-than-human forces within colonialism by foregrounding the socioecological character of empire. Reading Nil Darpan (1860), Dinabandhu Mitra's play about the late 1850s Bengali indigo rebellion, in conjunction with the colonial history of indigo cultivation and its social consequences, Banerjee proposes groundedness as a critical concept that [End Page 331] makes visible the confluence of the agencies of colonizer, colonized, playwright, and the material environment—including, literally, the ground—within which their interactions and theatrical performance take place. Most programmatically, the collection engages with form and the role of the aesthetic for the production and representation of ecological knowledge. Specifically, it explores how Victorian forms frame ecological knowledge through aesthetic structures and how the representational challenges of environmental change and crisis in turn shape cultural form. In addition, it also examines how the Anthropocene shapes our perception of nineteenth-century literature. As this suggests, Ecological Form approaches form as a two-pronged effect: one of production (ecological knowledge is modelled by but also affects forms of representation) and one of reception (awareness of the Anthropocene transforms, or needs to transform, our perception of nineteenth-century texts). The resulting fluidity of the concept of form itself as sketched by the individual chapters is one of the greatest assets of the collection. Ecological Form embraces a wide range of genres, from canonical realist novels by Charles Dickens (Adam Grener), George Eliot (Elizabeth Carolyn Miller), and Gaskell (Hensley and Steer) to utopian fiction (Benjamin Morgan), Thomas Hardy's romances (Aaron Rosenberg), the elegy (Jesse Oak Taylor), science fiction (Karen Pinkus), satire (Teresa Shewry), drama (Banerjee), botanical writing (Lynn Voskuil), lectures by John Ruskin (Deanna K. Kreisel), and the writings of Martin Delany (Monique Allewaert). Yet...

Historia general de Panamá

18 Interdisciplinarity and Cultural Studies N icholas Da ly • Does the interdisciplinary turn inVictorian studies mean that the latter has become a historical branch of cultural studies? Now that some of the dust has settled around cultural studies, can we see it as interdisciplinary work by a different name?The answers depend on how you define the terms. I will assume that interdisciplinarity is a more transparent term than cultural studies (a purely heuristic assumption, needless to say). How then to define cultural studies? In a recent special edition of the European Journal of Cultural Studies, for example, editors Joke Hermes and Peter Dahlgren describe cultural studies as “a strong interdisciplinary academic practice which is invested deeply in empirical research in everyday meaning-formation” (Hermes and Dahlgren 261). Cultural studies has also, though, been seen as an “anti-discipline,” a bracing formulation that, if nothing else, implies that cultural studies means to stand for no nonsense. As Karl Maton and Handel Wright put it,“anti-disciplinarity ” suggests that cultural studies can somehow wriggle free from “the suffocating grip of procedures specialized to a delimited object of study” (Maton 386).1 But interdisciplinary or anti-disciplinary, many, if not most, cultural studies practitioners have tended to assume that since their object of study is culture—perceived as a whole way of life rather than as a narrow band of high cultural activity—they must draw on a wide range of approaches, from art history to anthropology, to understand that object. Does this mean that cultural studies and interdisciplinarity are allotropes of the same substance? I think not.We might see cultural studies as comprising an orientation towards the popular, towards audiences’ creating their own meanings out of the cultural material that comes their way, towards the “materiality” of cultural texts. None of these orientations is inconsistent with interdisciplinarity. But these aspects of cultural studies are political symptoms rather than ends in themselves. Cultural studies, at least in its earlier versions, was not interested in the popular as a rich but neglected realm of cultural endeavour. Rather, it saw the popular as a field of political conflict—a proxy war, you might say—where the dominant and dominated fractions of society struggle over meanings, identities, and values. This is also to say, of course, that the realm of culture is the realm of ideology, the place where selves are shaped and where individuals are interpellated as subjects; or the realm of competition for symbolic capital; or the realm where oppositional groups create their own meanings out of the cultural flotsam and jetsam that comes their way.Whichever one of these formulations you follow, it means assuming that culture is political, and thus teaching culture is also political. It is not clear to me that interdisciplinary work shares this politics, though I look forward to reading what others have to say about this. 19 Special Forum: Victorian Studies and Interdisciplinarity Perhaps none of the above is news to anyone. I am beginning to sound a little shrill even to my own ears. It might be better to descend from the soapbox and stick to some analysis of my own academic practice. However tentatively, I see what I do as fitting within the big tent of cultural studies, though I am not sure that I am“in the true” of that enterprise; and I have done some interdisciplinary work (for my current project on British culture in the 1860s, for example, I have been looking at art and music as well as literary and dramatic texts). Generally, I am interested in cultural history and in tracking the way in which particular cultural forms worked to reshape consciousness at particular historical moments. I am particularly interested in forms that were enormously popular for a period before fading into obscurity, sometimes to be revived again at a later date for a different audience. For example,Wilkie Collins’s sensation novel The Woman in White (1859–60) has enjoyed an academic vogue long after its original moment, where, say, Robert Coote’s A Sensation Polka (1863) has not. In these sudden flare-ups of popularity we can most clearly see how cultural forms interact with their historical...

OF THE MOST FASHIONABLE LITERARY TERMS these days is persona which is the Latin word for the mask that actors used to wear in the Greek and Roman theater. The currency of the term suggests that the identity of the author and his characters, and the distinction between them, has become a problem. When critics call characters in poems and plays and novels personae, they may mean one of two different things. They may mean that the characters are masks through which the author speaks, or they may mean that the characters have nothing to do with the author but are the masks or types necessary in order that the action may be played out. With both meanings of the word persona, the critics are saying that literature is or ought to be impersonal. Like most technical terminology the word persona is a weapon in a campaign in this case a campaign against the autobiographical or confessional style of much nineteenth-century literature. It is in nineteenth-century literature that the issue first arises between a personal and an impersonal literature, that it becomes a problem to distinguish between the author and his characters. To understand the twentieth-century reaction, we have therefore to understand why nineteenth-century literature became so personal. A good working explanation is provided, I think, by the Chicago philosopher George Herbert Mead, in his Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century. According to Mead, the ro© Regularly at the University of Virginia, ROBERT LANGBAUM is visiting professor of English this year at Columbia University. His latest book is The Gayety of Vision: A Study of Isak Dinesen's Art. The present article derives from a paper he read at the Conference in the Study of Twentieth-Century Literature at Michigan State University in May, 1964.

Nineteenth-century American literature has always been part of the conversations that now comprise contemporary approaches to the field of western literary studies, specifically “critical regionalism” and the “New Western Criticism.” The very issues at the heart of critical regionalist approaches—such as hybrid identities, third-spaces, contact zones, and the relationship between the local and the global—were anticipated in and by the literature of the nineteenth century. This claim comes into better view when nineteenth-century American literature is conceptualized through the US-Mexican War rather than the US Civil War. Defining the literary history of the United States through its hemispheric and international, rather than its internal and domestic, boundaries encourages the comparative practices and transnational methodologies called for by critical regionalist approaches. This conceptual remapping can lead scholars in the field today to ask further questions about indigenous literacies and cultural production in the nineteenth century, which will move nineteenth-century study and western literary studies forward in new and needed directions. Placing an emphasis on pedagogy and classroom strategies, this essay offers several approaches, texts, and authors that meld critical regionalism and a revitalized exploration of nineteenth-century American literature through the US-Mexican War.

Reviewed by: Women's Poetry and Religion in Victorian England Virginia H. Blain Women's Poetry and Religion in Victorian England, by Cynthia Scheinberg. Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, gen. ed. Gillian Beer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 275 pp. $55.00. This is a very timely publication. There has been a huge revival of interest in Victorian women's poetry in the last ten years, and it has led to a major reconfiguration of the English poetic landscape of the nineteenth century. Many of those feminist critics engaged in the recovery work of lost female voices from this period have had agendas far removed from the religious sphere. Yet religion and religious devotion were one of the major motivations driving many women poets towards publication of their work at a time when self-display of this kind was severely frowned on for women. Cynthia Scheinberg's excellent volume clearly demonstrates the importance of the religious element in the work of some of the most well-known of female poets, Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, where these elements have not been so much overlooked by earlier critics as perhaps, too homogeneously interpreted. For the angle introduced by Scheinberg is that of Jewish identity within Christian cultural formations in the Victorian period. She has chosen two poets from the mainstream Christian [End Page 152] (Protestant) culture to compare with each other, and with two Anglo-Jewish poets, Amy Levy and Grace Aguilar. Her readings bring to light some unexpected and highly illuminating insights, and cast a different interpretation on some aspects that have previously been too quickly assimilated into a "normative" Christian reading. Scheinberg's research has taken her beyond the more obvious figures in the new canon of women poets; her chapter on the remarkable Jewish poet Amy Levy, and one on the less well-known Grace Aguilar, show an impressive breadth of research. Her work on Aguilar is particularly valuable as she is so little known—and less understood, as an openly Jewish writer occupying space within a Christian tradition—and I found the discussion of Aguilar's poetic project judicious and illuminating, having only known her previously through her best-selling Home Influence: A Tale for Mothers and Daughters (1847). Amy Levy's remarkably fine poetry has been taken up with avidity by critics anxious both to pay tribute to its understated intelligence, depth of feeling, and musicality and to decode the evidence of same-sex desires in pre-twentieth-century verse. Scheinberg accepts this evidence, but her extensive and finely tuned readings help to inflect the poetry towards another of its deeper interests, that of Jewish identity and its meaning for a young woman with a more problematic relation to her own Jewishness than Aguilar's, a relation which has often been traced in her novels—especially the remarkable Reuben Sachs (1888)—but seldom in her poetry—until now. Both Aguilar and Levy, of course, were grappling not only with issues of Jewish identity in a Christian culture, but also with an often openly expressed and virulent antisemitism which pervaded mid-Victorian British culture. "Run to Earth" is an early Levy poem (not noted by Scheinberg) that might well repay a reading of this kind, dealing as it does with the horrific hunting down and destruction of a gypsy woman and her baby by a pack of stag-hunting aristocrats, starved for their usual prey on a day out in the forest. Of its kind, it is a chilling study of the roots of racism. Scheinberg's tracing of the multiple explorations by non-Jewish women poets of the archetypal Jewish figure of Miriam, prophetic singer of womanhood, is especially interesting. She shows the different inflections given to this figure by the Christian poets, arguing that there was a tendency to project upon the Jewish woman an erotic and public power of performance denied to "the angel in the house." Here I wish Scheinberg had been able to include a discussion of the extraordinary Adah Isaacs Menken, Jewish convert, actress and poet, whose one volume of poems Infelicia (1867) makes some unusually powerful indictments of Christian women's culture, seen as complicit with...