Michael Tondre, The Physics of Possibility: Victorian Fiction, Science, and Gender

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-211
Author(s):  
Tobias Wilson-Bates
Keyword(s):  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
And Gender

Novel Relations

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alicia Mireles Christoff
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Object Relations ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Victorian Novels ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Gender And Sexuality Studies ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Impact

This book engages twentieth-century post-Freudian British psychoanalysis in an unprecedented way: as literary theory. Placing the writing of figures like D. W. Winnicott, W. R. Bion, Michael and Enid Balint, Joan Riviere, Paula Heimann, and Betty Joseph in conversation with canonical Victorian fiction, the book reveals just how much object relations can teach us about how and why we read. These thinkers illustrate the ever-shifting impact our relations with others have on the psyche, and help us see how literary figures—characters, narrators, authors, and other readers—shape and structure us too. In the book, novels are charged relational fields. Closely reading novels by George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, the book shows that traditional understandings of Victorian fiction change when we fully recognize the object relations of reading. It is not by chance that British psychoanalysis illuminates underappreciated aspects of Victorian fiction so vibrantly: Victorian novels shaped modern psychoanalytic theories of psyche and relationality—including the eclipsing of empire and race in the construction of subject. Relational reading opens up both Victorian fiction and psychoanalysis to wider political and postcolonial dimensions, while prompting a closer engagement with work in such areas as critical race theory and gender and sexuality studies. The book describes the impact of literary form on readers and on twentieth- and twenty-first-century theories of the subject.

Charlotte Brontë

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Gender Identity ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
First Century ◽  
Narrative Style ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Literary Tourism ◽  
Sexuality And Gender ◽  
Literary Cultures ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Web

Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and afterlives examines the persistent fascination and creative engagement with Charlotte Brontë’s life and work in the context of the bicentenary of her birth. The essays in this volume cover the period from Brontë’s first publication to the twenty-first century, explaining why the author has been at the forefront of literary cultures. The contributors engage with topics including: the author cult which emerged shortly after her death; literary tourism in Haworth and Brussels; stage adaptations of her life and novels; her poetic legacy; the afterlives of her plots and characters in neo-Victorian fiction, cinema, television, the theatre and on the web. This book brings the story of Brontë’s legacy up-to-date, analysing texts such as obituaries, literary re-workings, adaptations for screen, vlogs, and erotic makeovers. The contributors take a fresh look at over 150 years of engagement with Brontë, considering genre, narrative style, the representation of national and regional identities, sexuality and gender identity, literary tourism, adaptation theories, cultural studies, postcolonial and transnational readings.

SOUND AND SCENTS

2006 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 385-387
Author(s):  
Barbara T. Gates
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
Class Consciousness ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Visual Imagination ◽  
To Come ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Do So

AFTER MORE THAN A DECADEscrutinizing the importance of sight in the nineteenth century, Victorian scholars are training their own sights on other senses. Books like Jonathan Crary'sTechniques of the Observer(MIT 1990), James Krasner'sEntangled Eye(Oxford 1992), and Kate Flint'sThe Victorians and the Visual Imagination(Cambridge 2000)–studies that revolutionized our understanding of why and how sight mattered in Victorian culture–have recently been complemented by books like the two under review here. Janice Carlisle'sCommon Scents: Comparative Encounters in High-Victorian Fictionand John M. Picker'sVictorian Soundscapeshave much in common. While focusing on a sense other than sight, each shifts gracefully between Victorian culture and literature, and each demonstrates concern with class and gender. Both books can certainly awaken a reader to a new recognition of what it meant to be alive during an era of rapid change and rampant class-consciousness. We sniff out others along with the characters in Carlisle's chosen novels and retreat to our own quiet studies with sighs of relief as we read about Picker's Victorian scholars' and illustrators' attempts to create soundproof studies in order to exclude the cries and clatter of London streets. As we do so, it is all but impossible to come away without a refreshed perception of what it meant to be a middle-class Victorian male, besieged by the smell of an alluring woman or the annoying sound of a persistent organ grinder.

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