Literature

From seduced maidens to adulterous wives, bigamists, courtesans, kept women, and streetwalkers, the so-called ‘fallen woman’ was a ubiquitous and enduring figure on the Victorian and Edwardian stage. Acts of Desire traces the theatrical representation of illicit female sexuality from early nineteenth-century melodramas, through sensation dramas, Ibsenite sex-problem plays, and suffrage dramas, to early social realism and the well-made plays of Pinero, Jones, Maugham, and Coward. This study reveals and analyses enduring plot lines and tropes that continue to influence contemporary theatre and film. Women’s illicit desires became a theatrical focus for anxieties and debates surrounding gender roles, women’s rights, sexual morality, class conflict, economics, eugenics, and female employment. The theatre played a central role in both establishing and challenging sexual norms, and many playwrights exploited the ambiguities and implications of performance to stage disruptive spectacles of female desire, agency, energy, and resourcefulness, using ingenuity and skill to evade the control of that ever watchful state censor, the Lord Chamberlain. Acts of Desire challenges the currency and validity of the long-established critical term ‘the fallen woman’. Encompassing a vast range of published and unpublished plays, archival material, censorship records, social and political texts, and contemporary reviews, it reveals the surprising continuities, covert meanings, and exuberant spectacles which marked the history of theatrical representations of female sexuality. Engaging with popular and ‘high art’ performances, this study also reveals the vital connections and exchange of influences between Victorian drama, narrative painting, and the novel, and shows theatre to be a crucial but neglected element in the cultural history of women’s sexuality.

America’s England examines the patterns of affiliation through which U.S. writers, public intellectuals, politicians, and aesthetes encoded the political turmoil of antebellum America in a transatlantic constellation. Demonstrating that English genealogies, geographies, and economics encoded the sectional crisis for antebellum Americans on both sides of the Mason-Dixon, it locates many of the crisis points of 1830s, 40s, 50s, and 60s America in a broader cisatlantic struggle over transatlantic connection. Through engagement with contemporaneous renditions of English race, history, landscape aesthetics, transatlantic telecommunications, and free trade discourses, northern and southern partisans—abolitionists, Unionists, and slaveholders alike—re-imagined the terms of the conflict, forming a transatlantic surround for the otherwise irreducibly cisatlantic political struggles that would dissolve the Union in 1861. This re-conceptualization of sectional issues in transatlantic terms undermined the notion that white citizens of the United States formed a unified biological or cultural community, effectively polarizing the imagined ethnic and cultural bases of the American polity. Moreover, a continued reference to English historical, cultural, and political formations allowed public intellectuals and authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Gilmore Simms, John Pendleton Kennedy, Charles Sumner, and Henry Herbert, to situate an era of developing national acrimony along longer historical and transnational curves, forming an account of national crisis that situated questions of a domestic political bearing at transatlantic remove from northern and southern combatants.

What is the relation between who a person is, and what he or she has? A number of Shakespeare’s plays engage with this question, elaborating a “poetics of property” centering on questions of authority and entitlement, of inheritance and prodigality, of the different opportunities afforded by access to land and to chattel property. Richard II and the Henry IV plays construe sovereignty as a form of property right, largely construing imperium, or the authority over persons in a polity, as a form of dominium, the authority of the propertyholder. Nonetheless, what property means changes considerably from Richard’s reign to Henry’s, as the imagined world of the plays is reconfigured to include an urban economy of chattel consumables. The Merchant of Venice, written between Richard II and 1 Henry IV, reimagines, in comic terms, some of the same issues broached in the history plays. It focuses in particular on the problem of the daughter’s inheritance and on the different property obligations among friends, business associates, and spouses. In the figure of the “vagabond king,” theoretically entitled but actually dispossessed, 2 Henry VI and King Lear both coordinate problems of entitlement with conundrums about distributive justice, raising fundamental questions about property relations and social organization.

Exemplifying a new methodology identified as “animality studies,” which focuses on constructions of animality at specific historical and cultural moments without the explicit emphasis on animal advocacy that is often found in animal studies, this book explores animality at the turn of the twentieth century in the United States. At that moment, shifts in what it meant to be both “human” and “animal” became crucial in terms of producing new ways of thinking about a wide range of human behaviors, including homosexuality, labor exploitation, and the lynching of black men. The discourse of “the jungle” was born at the confluence of Darwin and Freud; once human behavior could be explained, supposedly, by animal instincts that were naturally violent in the name of survival and heterosexual in the name of reproduction. Literary and cultural texts at the turn of the twentieth century addressed the “beast within,” shifting away from a Protestant Christian formulation of a devilish inner beast that was sinful and violent. This book’s central argument is that Darwinist-Freudian formulations of the human animal were often contested rather than reinforced by writers such as Jack London, Henry James and Frank Norris and cultural events such as a circus elephant publicly electrocuted at Coney Island and the Scopes “Monkey Trial.” This book reveals how the figure of the animal evolved in U.S. literature and culture at the turn of the century, particularly through the birth of the jungle: a discourse that continues to enable enduring justifications of homophobia, economic exploitation, and racism in the United States and beyond.

Common Precedents argues that precedent constitutes a sophisticated and powerful mechanism for managing social and cultural change and that this quality accounts for its unacknowledged centrality to Victorian culture. Precedential reasoning enables the recognition of the new and its assimilation as part of a continuous past. Through this act of recognition and assimilation, it constructs a sense of a common identity essential to the Victorians. By appearing to bring the past seamlessly into the present, legal precedent became vital to the preservation of a sense of commonality and continuity crucial to the common law and Victorian legal culture, as well as to the society in which it operated and the larger culture of which it was part. These qualities extended the impact of precedent beyond legal practices and institutions to the culture at large. This analysis of law and literature shows that precedential reasoning enjoyed widespread cultural significance in nineteenth-century culture as a means of preserving a sense of common history, values and interests in the face of a new heterogeneous commonality. Understanding the structure of precedent also explains how fictionality works, its epistemology, and how its commonalities are socially constructed, maintained, and reified. Common Precedents thus presents a cultural history of precedent and the ways in which it enables and facilitates a commonality through time.

Curious Subjects focuses on the relationship between women, curiosity, and the rise of the novel, using the lenses of scientific, legal, and “fictional” curiosity to examine the changing definitions of the subject within these various discourses. Texts range from eighteenth-century fiction to classic Victorian “heroine texts,” to contemporary revisions of realist forms, with an emphasis on the always-doubled and duplicitous nature of both female curiosity and the realist project. The book rethinks the question of female knowledge from within the form of the novel, using not just the metaphor but the history of curiosity after the Enlightenment. It begins with the wanderings of curiosity from medieval pilgrims’ relics to private collections to public museums, and interweaves this history with the origins of the modern legal subject, arguing that the most intriguing version of that subject is the curious heroine. So, from the beginning of the book, the rise of the novel, the evolution of curiosity, and the enfranchisement of women are deeply intertwined. Central literary figures include Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, and Henry James, with examples ranging from Paradise Lost and Clarissa to The Sadeian Woman and The Handmaid’s Tale, from Freud to Bluebeard’s wife.

Irish saga literature represents the largest collection of vernacular narrative in existence from the early Middle Ages, using the tools of Christian literacy to retell myths and legends about the pagan past. This unique corpus remains marginal to standard histories of Western literature: its tales are widely read, but their literary artistry remains a puzzle to many even within Celtic studies. This book, the first to offer a systematic literary analysis of any single native Irish tale, aims to show how one particularly celebrated saga ‘works’ as a story: the Middle Irish tale Togail Bruidne Da Derga (The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel), which James Carney called ‘the finest saga of the early period’. This epic tale tells how the legendary king Conaire was raised by a shadowy Otherworld to the kingship of Tara and, after a fatal error of judgement, was hounded by spectres to an untimely death at Da Derga’s Hostel at the hands of his own foster-brothers. By turns lyrical and laconic, and rich in native mythological imagery, the story is told with a dramatic intensity worthy of Greek tragedy, and the intricate symmetry of its narrative procedure recalls the visual patterning of illuminated manuscripts such as The Book of Kells. This book invites the reader to enjoy and understand this literary masterpiece, explaining its narrative artistry within its native, classical, and biblical literary contexts. Against a historical backdrop of shifting ideologies of Christian kingship, it interprets the saga’s possible significance for contemporary audiences as a questioning exploration of the challenges and paradoxes of kingship. The book does not require any previous knowledge of mediaeval Irish literature and contains a glossary of unfamiliar terms.

Faith in Shakespeare explains what it means to believe in Shakespeare’s plays, exploring how his plots can be both preposterous and gripping and his characters more substantial and enduring than the people surrounding us in the theater. Our experience can be partly explained by what Coleridge calls “the willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” The book explores poetic faith’s affinities and contrasts with religious faith, and it considers the recent return to religion in Shakespeare studies as well as speculation about Shakespeare’s own religious beliefs and their Reformation context. Nevertheless, Faith in Shakespeare concentrates on text over context, focusing on the afterlife of Shakespeare’s language more than theological controversies over the afterlife of spirits. The book confirms its convictions in literature’s intrinsic powers and explores the causes for our paradoxical belief in theater’s potent but manifest illusions. It shows how these illusions enlist our own imaginative cooperation by asking us to “piece out our imperfections with your thoughts” while responding with kindness and compassion towards the broader human imperfections of the actors, the playwright, and the characters they represent. Rather than faith in God or the supernatural, faith in Shakespeare is sustained and explained only by the complex, subtle and entirely human power of poetic eloquence and dramatic performance.

This book surveys and evaluates three centuries of criticism of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Volume one attends to questions of style and genre, while volume two traces six distinguishable debates (about Satan, God, innocence, the Fall, sex, and Milton’s universe). The first three chapters examine the longstanding debate about Milton’s grand style and the question of whether it forfeits the native resources of English. Early critics saw Milton as the pre-eminent poet of ’apt Numbers’ and ’fit quantity’, whose verse is ’apt’ in the specific sense of achieving harmony between sound and sense; twentieth-century anti-Miltonists faulted Milton for divorcing sound from sense; late twentieth-century theorists have denied the possibility that sound can ’enact’ sense. These changes of critical perception are extreme, yet the story of how they came about has never been told. This book explains how the changes came about and (in doing so) engages with the enduring theoretical question of whether it is possible for sound to enact sense. Subsequent chapters engage with such questions as whether Paradise Lost is an epic or an anti-epic, whether Satan runs away with the poem (and whether it is good that he does so), what it means to be innocent (or fallen), and whether Milton’s poetry is hostile to women. A final chapter on the universe of Paradise Lost makes the provocative argument that almost every commentator since the middle of the eighteenth century has led readers astray by presenting Milton’s universe as the medieval model of Ptolemaic spheres. This assumption, which has fostered the notion that Milton was backward-looking or anti-intellectual, rests upon a misreading of three satirical lines. Milton’s earliest critics recognized that he unequivocally embraces the new astronomy of Kepler and Bruno.

The idea of aesthetic autonomy—of art as a law unto itself—was a central preoccupation of modernism. Yet recent literary scholarship has tended to reject autonomy out of hand as a denial of literature’s social and historical contexts. This book argues instead that autonomy is modernism’s distinctive mode of social relations; it demonstrates the many forms of relative autonomy modernist novelists, poets, critics, and theorists imagined and strove for. Using a combination of formalist reading, Bourdieuean sociology of culture, and historical contextualization, the book uncovers the centrality of autonomy problems and aspirations in unexpected modernist topoi: the relations between domestic servants and aesthetes; visions of literary and musical late style; the Parisian expatriate lifestyle; and the figure of tautology. Through these topoi, this book analyzes four successively more expansive versions of autonomy for the artwork: from the world of labor, from the artist’s personality, from political community, and from referentiality. The book's analysis shows that autonomy is indispensable to a historical understanding of transnational modernism from late-nineteenth-century aesthetes (Wilde, Huysmans, Henry James), to high modernists (Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wallace Stevens), to late modernists (Djuna Barnes, Theodor Adorno, Paul de Man). Goldstone concludes that autonomy remains equally vital as a key concept for a renewed, sociologically rigorous literary study—of modernism and of other literary epochs—and an important but contentious doctrine in contemporary literature.