- Victorian Literature, Rossetti, Christina, Gaskell, Elizabeth, Amy Levy, Nineteenth Century British History and Culture, Literature and the Bible, and 19 moreNineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Victorian periodicals, The Works of the Brontë Sisters, Victorian poetry, Romantic poetry, English Literature, Poetry, Victorian Studies, Literature, Gender Studies, Gender, English, Feminist Theory, Nineteenth Century Studies, Women's writing, Fin de Siecle Literature & Culture, Charles Dickens, Victorian Women Writers, and George Eliotedit
- Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Anglia Ruskin University; research interests in nineteenth-century literatur... moreSenior Lecturer in English Literature at Anglia Ruskin University; research interests in nineteenth-century literature and theology; director of Nineteenth Century Studies at Anglia Ruskin.edit
Elizabeth Gaskell was the author of over forty short stories. Despite the resurgence in Gaskell criticism over the past three decades, these stories have only recently begun to receive the attention they deserve. Following an account of... more
Elizabeth Gaskell was the author of over forty short stories. Despite the resurgence in Gaskell criticism over the past three decades, these stories have only recently begun to receive the attention they deserve. Following an account of how the Victorian short story has been re-evaluated by literary critics, this introductory survey illuminates Gaskell’s key contributions to the development of the genre. Our discussion is structured around several areas of critical investigation that have been at the forefront of Gaskell studies over the past few years. These include: the position of Victorian short fiction in relation to predominant accounts of the form’s development; Gaskell’s engagement with the periodical press and the Victorian literary marketplace; her response to the connection between short stories and the Christmas season; and her deployment of supernatural and sensational tropes. The image that emerges is that of a professional woman of letters who used shorter fiction as ...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Ludlow argues that in Sylvia’s Lovers (1863) and A Dark Night’s Work (1863) Gaskell includes scenes of reconciliation that exemplify the wider theological and cultural move away from doctrines of vicarious and retributive punishment and... more
Ludlow argues that in Sylvia’s Lovers (1863) and A Dark Night’s Work (1863) Gaskell includes scenes of reconciliation that exemplify the wider theological and cultural move away from doctrines of vicarious and retributive punishment and towards a celebration of compassion and co-operation. In detailing how these scenes of reconciliation engage with the Incarnation-inflected teleology that was gaining momentum in the early 1860s, the chapter foregrounds Gaskell’s critique of the type of extraordinary heroism that is performed by the individual and considers her emphasis on the way in which the Christ-like compassion of a parent, spouse, child, or neighbour brings gradual renewal and transformation to the self and to society. Ludlow suggests that, like George Eliot, Gaskell recognises the power of public confession in restoring the interpersonal fictional community and in bringing an individual to a recognition of his or her own fragility and the consequent ongoing need for forgiveness.
Research Interests:
Abstract:Since she was commemorated as a saint in 387, Monica of Hippo has come to represent ideals of motherhood to successive generations. This article considers how three nineteenth-century women writers—Anna Jameson, Christina... more
Abstract:Since she was commemorated as a saint in 387, Monica of Hippo has come to represent ideals of motherhood to successive generations. This article considers how three nineteenth-century women writers—Anna Jameson, Christina Rossetti, and Harriet Beecher Stowe—engage with this legacy to offer new ways of imagining the empowering social potential of faith. In my analysis, I indicate how they contribute to the Incarnation-inflected discourse of the second half of the nineteenth century and provide a helpful backdrop to understanding recent feminist appraisals of Augustine.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
In this chapter the author explores the influence of the Oxford Movement on the early Pre-Raphaelite movement in English aesthetics and reveals how the gifted poet Christina Rossetti used the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s aesthetic in her... more
In this chapter the author explores the influence of the Oxford Movement on the early Pre-Raphaelite movement in English aesthetics and reveals how the gifted poet Christina Rossetti used the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s aesthetic in her poetry and devotional prose to inform and disseminate key elements of Oxford Movement theology during the later nineteenth century. The chapter provides a close analysis of the religious themes in Rossetti’s writings and shows how her poetry engages dialogically with the writings of the leaders of the Tractarian Movement in London, contributing to the maturation of their ideas, particularly in the Tractarian understanding of personhood.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
IN EXPLORING how Christina Rossetti and Amy Levy utilize the properties of the roundel that Algernon Charles Swinburne develops as a variation of the French medieval roundeux, this article situates their poetry of the late 1880s and early... more
IN EXPLORING how Christina Rossetti and Amy Levy utilize the properties of the roundel that Algernon Charles Swinburne develops as a variation of the French medieval roundeux, this article situates their poetry of the late 1880s and early 1890s alongside the spatial and temporal dynamics of the snapshot photograph. Their deployment of the poetic form resonates with the changing visual epistemology of lateVictorian Bloomsbury and participates in the formation of the “new nineteenth-century modernist consciousness” that Ivan Kreilkamp identifies.1 Combining Jonathan Crary’s insistence that the “photography effect” of the late nineteenth century is a component of various cultural shifts in the status of the observing subject with Isobel Armstrong’s recognition of the effect on literature of “those technologies of vision that introduced virtuality into Rossetti’s culture,” this discussion offers a reevaluation of late-Victorian lyric subjectivity.2 After detailing how Rossetti and Levy deploy the roundel’s affective potential and engage with the spatial dynamics of Bloomsbury, the argument explains how their lyric impressionism coincides with both Swinburne’s concern with French aestheticism and the emergence of European modernity. By investigating the dialogical properties of the roundel insights are gleaned from a comparative study of the two writers who were living in close proximity and moving in the same social and professional circles.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
The Short Story, Modernists, Victorians It is a commonplace in short story criticism that the short story in Britain reached its heyday through the literary movement of Modernism. It is only in recent years that literary critics have... more
The Short Story, Modernists, Victorians It is a commonplace in short story criticism that the short story in Britain reached its heyday through the literary movement of Modernism. It is only in recent years that literary critics have begun to give serious attention to Victorian short fiction, and Elizabeth Gaskell's writings have played a central role in this revisionary project. Roger Luckhurst records 1884 as the first time the term 'short story' is used as a noun phrase, while the OED gave it formal admittance into the vocabulary of English as late as 1933.1 Most surveys of the short story regard 1880-1920 as its heyday, when practitioners theorised it as a form particularly suited to a modern sensibility in reaction against verbose Victorian novels, 'loose baggy monsters' in Henry James's famous phrase.2 Modernists distrusted the kind of realism that the Victorian novel attempted, a panoramic representation of reality interpreted by an omniscient (or symp...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Review of: Forgiveness in Victorian Literature: Grammar, Narrative, and Community, by Richard Hughes Gibson, London: Bloomsbury Academic (New Directions in Religion and Literature), 2015, xiv + 169 pp. £50/ $90 (hardback) ISBN:... more
Review of: Forgiveness in Victorian Literature: Grammar, Narrative, and Community, by Richard Hughes Gibson, London: Bloomsbury Academic (New Directions in Religion and Literature), 2015, xiv + 169 pp. £50/ $90 (hardback) ISBN: 978-1-78093-711-3
Research Interests:
Review of Place and Progress in the Works of Elizabeth Gaskell, ed. by Lesa Scholl, Emily Morris and Sarina Gruver Moore. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2015, vii + 246 pp. £60/ $104.95. ISBN: 978-1-4724-2963-6.
Research Interests:
In this paper, I consider how Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Agnes of Sorrento (1861) and George Eliot’s Romola (1862-3) represent looking at sacred art and architecture as a religious experience that can be associated with the sacramental and... more
In this paper, I consider how Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Agnes of Sorrento (1861) and George Eliot’s Romola (1862-3) represent looking at sacred art and architecture as a religious experience that can be associated with the sacramental and with prayer. By contrasting the theological approach of the two novels that were both published in the Cornhill, set in the 1490s, and concerned with Savonorala’s leadership over Florence, I suggest how both authors offer very different reconfigurations of the sacramental.
After considering questions of influence and unpacking Eliot’s response to Stowe, I explore the tensions between the various experiences of the characters – in both novels- who see and enter spaces that have been set apart for worship and devotion. In highlighting these tensions, I stress how Eliot’s representation of the interruption of the religious aesthetic into the quotidian life of the characters illuminates her hermeneutical inquiry into the interrelation between the sacred and the profane.
After considering questions of influence and unpacking Eliot’s response to Stowe, I explore the tensions between the various experiences of the characters – in both novels- who see and enter spaces that have been set apart for worship and devotion. In highlighting these tensions, I stress how Eliot’s representation of the interruption of the religious aesthetic into the quotidian life of the characters illuminates her hermeneutical inquiry into the interrelation between the sacred and the profane.