Transatlantic Spectacles of Race: The Tragic Mulatta and the Tragic Muse

By Kimberly Snyder Manganelli 

 

The tragic mulatta was a stock figure in nineteenth-century American literature, an attractive mixed-race woman who became a casualty of the color line. The tragic muse was an equally familiar figure in Victorian British culture, an exotic and alluring Jewish actress whose profession placed her alongside the “fallen woman.”

In Transatlantic Spectacles of Race, Kimberly Manganelli argues that the tragic mulatta and tragic muse, who have heretofore been read separately, must be understood as two sides of the same phenomenon. In both cases, the eroticized and racialized female body is put on public display, as a highly enticing commodity in the nineteenth-century marketplace. Tracing these figures through American, British, and French literature and culture, Manganelli constructs a host of surprising literary genealogies, from Zelica to Daniel Deronda, from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Lady Audley’s Secret. Bringing together an impressive array of cultural texts that includes novels, melodramas, travel narratives, diaries, and illustrations, Transatlantic Spectacles of Race reveals the value of transcending literary, national, and racial boundaries.

"An engaging, rich, and provocative work that re-directs 'mixed-race' studies back to its complex archival and historical roots, Manganelli’s book challenges readers to consider the deeply imbricated, transnational production of 19th century racial and gender mythologies."

—Daphne Brooks, Princeton University

"Manganelli's clear, engaging writing will captivate readers of nineteenth and early twentieth-century British and American literature. This book provides a powerful and lucid model for scholars and students interested in transatlantic work."

—Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, author of Portraits of the New Negro Woman

KIMBERLY SNYDER MANGANELLI is an assistant professor of English at Clemson University.

19: Interdisciplinary Studies In The Long Nineteenth Century 16 (2013): W. T. Stead: Newspaper Revolutionary

Guest edited by  Laurel Brake and James Mussell

When W. T. Stead died on the Titanic he was the most famous Englishman on board. He was one of the inventors of the modern tabloid. His advocacy of ‘government by journalism’ helped launch military campaigns. His exposé of child prostitution raised the age of consent to sixteen, yet his investigative journalism got him thrown in jail. A mass of contradictions and a crucial figure in the history of the British press, Stead was a towering presence in the cultural life of late-Victorian and Edwardian society. This special issue of 19, guest edited by Laurel Brake and James Mussell, celebrates Stead’s life and legacy in all its diversity 101 years on. 

• Laurel Brake, James Mussell: ‘Introduction’
• Graham Law, Matthew Sterenberg: ‘Old v. New Journalism and the Public Sphere; or, Habermas Encounters Dallas and Stead’
• Lucy Delap, Maria DiCenzo: ‘“No one pretends he was faultless”: W. T. Stead and the Women’s Movement’
• Stéphanie Prévost: ‘W. T. Stead and the Eastern Question (1875-1911); or, How to Rouse England and Why?’
• Tom Lockwood: ‘W. T. Stead’s ‘Penny Poets’: Beyond Baylen’
• Paul Horn: ‘“Two Minds With but a Single Thought”: W. T. Stead, Henry James, and the Zancig Controversy’
• Sarah Crofton: ‘“Julia Says”: The Spirit-Writing and Editorial Mediumship of W. T. Stead’
• Marysa Demoor: ‘When the King Becomes your Personal Enemy: W. T. Stead, King Leopold II, and the Congo Free State’
• Tom Gretton: ‘From La Méduse to the Titanic: Géricault’s Raft in Journalistic Illustration up to 1912

The new issue of 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century is now available at http://19.bbk.ac.uk/index.php/19/issue/view/83.

A Feminist Reader: Feminist Thought from Sappho to Satrapi, 4 vol.

Edited by Sharon M. Harris and Linda K. Hughes

Deliberately global in scope, this 1900-page edited anthology places feminist writing by Anglo-American authors in dialogue with French, German, Italian, Mexican, Brazilian, African, Japanese, Egyptian, Indian, Australian, and Iranian feminist writings.  It also features multiple genres, such as letters and poems in addition to essays, dialogues, manifestas, and a concluding excerpt from a graphic novel, opening new possibilities for the study of genre and feminist discourse.  Each text features an editorial headnote and annotation, while the general introduction sets feminism in its historical and global contexts.

The Victorian writers represented in the collection include Caroline Norton, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Florence Nightingale, Mary Seacole, John Stuart Mill, Helen Taylor, Emily Davies, Frances Power Cobbe, Josephine Butler, Sophia Jex-Blake, Augusta Webster, Edith Simcox, Mona Caird, Amy Levy, Olive Schreiner, Dollie Radford, Sarah Grand, Nora Hopper, Alice Meynell, Vernon Lee, and Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy.

Purchase from Amazon or Cambridge UP.

Common Precedents: The Presentness of the Past in Victorian Law and Fiction

By Ayelet Ben-Yishai

Common Precedents maintains that precedent constitutes a sophisticated and powerful mechanism for managing social and cultural change. Reading major novels by George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and Wilkie Collins, this analysis of law and literature shows that precedential reasoning enjoyed widespread cultural significance in the nineteenth-century as a means of preserving a sense of common history, values, and interests in the face of a new heterogeneous society. An in-depth analysis of Victorian law reports argues that precedential reasoning enables the recognition of the new and its assimilation as part of a continuous past. The binding force of precedent, which ties judges to decisions made by their predecessors, also functions as the binding element of an always shifting commonality, pulling it together in the face of rupture and dispersion.

By appearing to bring the past seamlessly into the present, the form of legal precedent became material. It was vital to the preservation of a sense of commonality and continuity crucial to the common law and Victorian legal culture. But the impact of precedent extended beyond legal practices and institutions to the culture at large, and especially to its fiction. Ben-Yishai's monograph argues that understanding the structure of precedent also explains fictional form: how fictionality works, its epistemology, and the ways in which its commonalities are socially constructed, maintained, and reified. Common Precedents thus presents a cultural history of the forms of precedent and an intricate study of the formation of social convention.

Features

• Reveals how precedential reasoning as a strategy for managing change produced innovations in legal and fictional writing
• Identifies precedential reasoning as the fundamental epistemological paradigm employed by Victorians
• Brings together a rare combination of considerable legal and literary knowledge

"Common Precedents is a fascinating study of the form and substance of the formation of social convention. It's lucid, informative, and offers some truly brilliant readings." –Elaine Freedgood, author of The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel

Purchase from Amazon or Oxford UP. 

Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism

By Alison Byerly

Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism connects the Victorian fascination with "virtual travel" with the rise of realism in nineteenth-century fiction and twenty-first-century experiments in virtual reality. Even as the expansion of river and railway networks in the nineteenth century made travel easier than ever before, staying at home and fantasizing about travel turned into a favorite pastime. New ways of representing place—360-degree panoramas, foldout river maps, exhaustive railway guides—offered themselves as substitutes for actual travel. Thinking of these representations as a form of "virtual travel" reveals a surprising continuity between the Victorian fascination with imaginative dislocation and twenty-first -century efforts to use digital technology to expand the physical boundaries of the self.

Byerly’s work is unusual in approaching a Victorian phenomenon through the lens of contemporary conceptualizations of media and its effects. Other critics who have applied current theories about media to nineteenth century cultural forms have generally focused on the social or economic dimensions of these forms in order to examine topics like representations of empire, ideas about gender, or the development of consumer culture. This book places cultural studies into dialogue with an aesthetics that is re-energized by engagement with contemporary debates about virtual reality.  It is a foundational work in the emerging field of Victorian media studies.

"Byerly is chock-full of new materials brought into view through a fresh perspective straightforwardly grounded in the network-computer concerns of our present. It feels both intuitively right and brilliant."—Jonathan H. Grossman, University of California, Los Angeles, author of Charles Dickens’s Networks

Order from the University of Michigan Press or Amazon.

The Rise of the Modern Art Market, 1850-1939

Edited by Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich

Now available in paperback for the first time, this study of the modern London art market establishes the central importance of London for the development of the modern retail market in fine art. Leading experts track the emergence and development of the structures and practices that have come to characterize the commercial art system, including the commercial art gallery, the professional dealer, the exhibition cycle and its accompanying rhetoric of press coverage and publicity, and an international network for the circulation of goods.

This new commercial system involved a massive transformation of the experience of viewing art; of the relationships between artists, dealers, collectors, art objects and audiences; and of the very criteria of aesthetic value itself. Its history is thus a vital part of the history of modern art, and this anthology will be of interest to art historians as well as scholars of Victorian Studies, Museum Studies, and Social History.

Purchase from Manchester University Press. 

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism

By Steven J. Venturino

Alpha Books/Penguin USA, 2013 (distributed in the UK by DK)

While not exclusively related to Victorian studies, this book, written by a literary theorist who would be nowhere without George Eliot, provides an authoritative, humorous, and affordably priced introductory guide to literary theory and criticism, from Plato to the present. The book is organized into twenty-two chapters exploring fundamental questions of reading, notions of the text, and the importance of society in literature. Instructors and students alike will find accessible and conversational discussions of classical views of literature, formalist approaches, and critical perspectives ranging from Romanticism, Marxism, and Freudianism, to structuralism, deconstruction, and cultural criticism of various stripes.    

In his review, Haun Saussy, University Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago wryly asked, “Is this book serious? Or a parody? (A parody of literary theory, or a parody of Idiot's Guides?) Or just self-referential? Should we ask the author? Or is meaning in the eye of the beholder? Before getting past the cover, you're already in the world of literary theory and the questions it asks. Never more serious than when cracking a joke, Steven J. Venturino banishes dullness and gets to the point of literary theory, which has always been to spark the delight of understanding.” Narratologist Monika Fludernik of the University of Freiburg pronounced the book “A very readable and—would you believe it—extremely enjoyable introduction to literary theory. This book presents complex thoughts in easily graspable and quite memorable sentences. Guaranteed to appeal to anyone who loves to juggle with concepts and ideas.”

Purchase from Amazon (which offers a sneak peek) or an independent bookseller near you.