Late Victorian Into Modern

The original essays in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature mean to provoke rather than reassure, to challenge rather than codify. Instead of summarizing existing knowledge scholars working in the field aim at opening fresh discussion; instead of emphasizing settled consensusthey direct their readers to areas of enlivened and unresolved debate.This volume opens up, in new and innovative ways, a range of dimensions, some familiar and some more obscure, of late Victorian and modern literature and culture, primarily in British contexts. Late Victorian into Modern emphasises the in-between: the gradual changeover from one period to the next.The volume examines shared developments, points out continuities rather than ruptures, and explores and exploits an understanding of the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries as a cultural moment in which new knowledges were forming with particular speed and intensity. The organisingprinciple of this book is to retain a key focus on literary texts, broadly understood to include familiar categories of genre as well as extra-textual elements such as press and publishing history, performance events and visual culture, while remaining keenly attentive to the inter-relations betweentext and context in the period. Individual chapters explore such topics as Celticism, the New Woman, popular fictions, literatures of empire, aestheticism, periodical culture, political formations, avant-garde poetics, and theatricality.

In Becoming Modern in Toronto, Keith Walden shows how the Toronto Industrial Exhibition, from its founding, in 1879, to 1903 (when it was renamed the Canadian National Exhibition), influenced the shaping and ordering of the emerging urban culture.

This global environmental and political history “will redefine the way we think about the European colonial project” (Observer). “ . . . sets the triumph of the late 19th-century Western imperialism in the context of catastrophic El Niño weather patterns at that time . . . groundbreaking, mind-stretching.” —The Independent Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But the effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites. Davis argues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the Third World were sown in this era of High Imperialism, as the price for capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions of peasants’ lives.

From tabloid exposes of child prostitution to the grisly tales of Jack the Ripper, narratives of sexual danger pulsated through Victorian London. Expertly blending social history and cultural criticism, Judith Walkowitz shows how these narratives reveal the complex dramas of power, politics, and sexuality that were being played out in late nineteenth-century Britain, and how they influenced the language of politics, journalism, and fiction. Victorian London was a world where long-standing traditions of class and gender were challenged by a range of public spectacles, mass media scandals, new commercial spaces, and a proliferation of new sexual categories and identities. In the midst of this changing culture, women of many classes challenged the traditional privileges of elite males and asserted their presence in the public domain. An important catalyst in this conflict, argues Walkowitz, was W. T. Stead's widely read 1885 article about child prostitution. Capitalizing on the uproar caused by the piece and the volatile political climate of the time, women spoke of sexual danger, articulating their own grievances against men, inserting themselves into the public discussion of sex to an unprecedented extent, and gaining new entree to public spaces and journalistic practices. The ultimate manifestation of class anxiety and gender antagonism came in 1888 with the tabloid tales of Jack the Ripper. In between, there were quotidien stories of sexual possibility and urban adventure, and Walkowitz examines them all, showing how women were not simply figures in the imaginary landscape of male spectators, but also central actors in the stories of metropolotin life that reverberated in courtrooms, learned journals, drawing rooms, street corners, and in the letters columns of the daily press. A model of cultural history, this ambitious book will stimulate and enlighten readers across a broad range of interests.

Bringing together poststructuralist ethical theory with late Victorian debates about the morality of literature, this book reconsiders the ways in which novels engender an ethical orientation or response in their readers, explaining how the intersections of nation, family, and form in the late realist English novel produce a new ethics of hospitality. Hollander reads texts that both portray and enact a unique ethical orientation of welcoming the other, a narrative hospitality that combines the Victorians’ commitment to engaging with the real world with a more modern awareness of difference and the limits of knowledge. While classic nineteenth-century realism rests on a sympathy-based model of moral relations, novels by authors such as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner present instead an ethical recognition of the distance between self and other. Opening themselves to the other in their very structure and narrative form, the visited texts both represent and theorize the ethics of hospitality, anticipating twentieth-century philosophy’s recognition of the limits of sympathy. As colonial conflicts, nationalist anxiety, and the intensification of the "woman question" became dominant cultural concerns in the 1870s and 80s, the problem of self and other, known and unknown, began to saturate and define the representation of home in the English novel. This book argues that in the wake of an erosion of confidence in the ability to understand that which is unlike the self, a moral code founded on sympathy gave way to an ethics of hospitality, in which the concept of home shifts to acknowledge the permeability and vulnerability of not only domestic but also national spaces. Concluding with Virginia Woolf’s reexamination of the novel’s potential to educate the reader in negotiating relations of alterity in a more fully modernist moment, Hollanders suggest that the late Victorian novel embodies a unique and previously unrecognized ethical mode between Victorian realism and a post-World- War-I ethics of modernist form.

A Lacanian reading of fantasy fiction 1887-1914 showing the return of atavistic horrors in the wake of the dissolution of traditional authorities. The book shows the critical power of fantasy read in conjunction with psychoanalysis in exploring profound socio-political questions.

Reimagining Dinosaurs argues that transatlantic popular literature was critical for transforming the dinosaur into a cultural icon between 1880 and 1920