NAVSA Book Prize - Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem

The North American Victorian Studies Association is very pleased to announce Catherine Robson’s Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem as the winner of the first NAVSA Book Prize award.

About the book:

Many people in Great Britain and the United States can recall elderly relatives who remembered long stretches of verse learned at school decades earlier, yet most of us were never required to recite in class. Heart Beats is the first book to examine how poetry recitation came to assume a central place in past curricular programs, and to investigate when and why the once-mandatory exercise declined. Telling the story of a lost pedagogical practice and its wide-ranging effects on two sides of the Atlantic, Catherine Robson explores how recitation altered the ordinary people who committed poems to heart, and changed the worlds in which they lived.

Heart Beats begins by investigating recitation's progress within British and American public educational systems over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and weighs the factors that influenced which poems were most frequently assigned. Robson then scrutinizes the recitational fortunes of three short works that were once classroom classics: Felicia Hemans's "Casabianca," Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," and Charles Wolfe's "Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna." To conclude, the book considers W. E. Henley's "Invictus" and Rudyard Kipling's "If--," asking why the idea of the memorized poem arouses such different responses in the United States and Great Britain today.

Focusing on vital connections between poems, individuals, and their communities, Heart Beats is an important study of the history and power of memorized poetry.

"Heart Beats is a work of passionate intelligence—sensitive to issues of class and to the place of recitation in the disciplining of minds and bodies, but at the same time open to the idea that verse memorization can liberate and shape social practices for the better." —John O. Jordan, University of California, Santa Cruz

"Robson's history of memorized poetry is impressive in every way: imaginatively conceived and massively researched, it holds important implications for the way we teach and read." —Leah Price, Harvard University

"This innovative book gives an institutional history of memorizing poetry in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century schools, and provides an account of the psychological effects of this practice in the lives of students who memorized. A key scholarly book in the field, this book is a winner." —Linda Peterson, Yale University

Purchase from Princeton. 

BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History, 1775-1925

Editor: Dino Franco Felluga

BRANCH has just published the most recent set of essays, making the total word count of BRANCH now close to 500,000 words. The most recent additions are as follows: 

• Sean Grass (Iowa State U), “On the Death of the Duke of Wellington, 14 September 1852″
• Deborah Nord (Princeton), “On Augustus Egg’s Triptych, May 1858″
• Linda M. Shires (Stern C of Yeshiva U), “Color Theory—Charles Lock Eastlake’s 1840 Translation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colours)”
• Karen Weisman (U Toronto), “Anglo-Jewish Culture and the Condition of England: The Poetry of Marion and Celia Moss”
• Phyllis Weliver (Saint Louis U), “On Tonic Sol-fa, January 1842″
• Sharon Aronofsky Weltman (Louisiana SU), “1847: Sweeney Todd and Abolition”

Sean Grass offers up BRANCH's first entry on the death of an individual as event. Deborah Nord and Linda Shires offer up articles on art history while Phyllis Weliver provides us with a first BRANCH entry on music. Linda Shires' piece is a companion to her earlier BRANCH article on George Field's Chromatography of 1835. Karen Weisman examines the significance of the lesser known poets Marion and Celia Moss. And Sharon Aranofsky Weltman's piece joins a series of BRANCH articles on theater and theatricality, including previous articles by Ellen Malenas Ledoux, Renata Kobetts Miller, and Angela Esterhammer.

Visit website.

Postal Plots in British Fiction, 1840-1898: Readdressing Correspondence in Victorian Literature

By Laura Rotunno 

By 1840, the epistolary novel was dead. Letters in Victorian fiction, however, were unmistakably alive. By examining a variety of works from authors including Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle, Postal Plots addresses why. It explores how Victorian postal reforms encouraged the lower and middle classes to read and write, allowed them some social and political agency, and led many to literature. The writers born of postal reforms increased stratification between Victorian novelists, already struggling to define themselves as literary professionals. The reform-inspired readers threatened the novelists' development by flouting distinctions between high and low literature. Letters in Victorian novels thus become markers of the novelists' concerns about the hierarchies and mediocrities that threatened Victorian fiction's artistic progress and social contribution. Postal Plots explores Victorian literary professionals' conflict between their support for liberal ideals in the literary marketplace and their fear that they would be unable to bring those changes to pass.

Purchase through Amazon or Palgrave 

Reading Victorian Deafness

By Jennifer Esmail

Reading Victorian Deafness is the first book to address the crucial role that deaf people, and their unique language of signs, played in Victorian culture. Drawing on a range of works, from fiction by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, to poetry by deaf poets and life writing by deaf memoirists Harriet Martineau and John Kitto, to scientific treatises by Alexander Graham Bell and Francis Galton, Reading Victorian Deafness argues that deaf people’s language use was a public, influential, and contentious issue in Victorian Britain.

The Victorians understood signed languages in multiple, and often contradictory, ways: they were objects of fascination and revulsion, were of scientific import and literary interest, and were considered both a unique mode of human communication and a vestige of a bestial heritage. Over the course of the nineteenth century, deaf people were increasingly stripped of their linguistic and cultural rights by a widespread pedagogical and cultural movement known as “oralism,” comprising mainly hearing educators, physicians, and parents.

Engaging with a group of human beings who used signs instead of speech challenged the Victorian understanding of humans as “the speaking animal” and the widespread understanding of “language” as a product of the voice. It is here that Reading Victorian Deafness offers substantial contributions to the fields of Victorian studies and disability studies. This book expands current scholarly conversations around orality, textuality, and sound while demonstrating how understandings of disability contributed to Victorian constructions of normalcy. Reading Victorian Deafness argues that deaf people were used as material test subjects for the Victorian process of understanding human language and, by extension, the definition of the human.

“Jennifer Esmail has written the definitive work on deafness and language in Victorian England. But beyond that she has contributed immeasurably to our understanding of the way that language, spoken and written, was understood in that era culturally, politically, and socially. Since language was so central to the Victorians, this book opens a window not only on deafness but the larger Victorian culture as well.”

                Lennard Davis — Department of English, University of Illinois at Chicago

“An extensively and assiduously researched study of Victorian Deafness as a multi-layered cultural entity … Reading Victorian Deafness makes a groundbreaking contribution to Disability Studies at large and Victorianist Disability Studies specifically.”

                Martha Stoddard Holmes — Author of Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture 

“Jennifer Esmail’s superb study establishes her as a name to be reckoned with in the developing field of disability studies, and in Victorian cultural and literary scholarship more generally. Her exploration of deafness illuminates how Victorians  understood the senses, language, perception, and expressiveness. More than this, however, it is an important book about what it means to be human, and to possess the desire to communicate.”

                Kate Flint — Provost Professor of English and Art History at the University of Southern California, and author of The Victorians and the Visual Imagination

“As literary criticism has broadened to encompass aspects of sensory history, innovative scholarship continues to illuminate connections between overlooked texts and embodied experience. Jennifer Esmail’s wide-ranging examination of Victorian deaf communities not only joins but also extends this endeavor. Her important, compelling book works at the junction of disability studies, sound studies, and English studies to alter conventional understandings of what it meant to communicate in the nineteenth century.”

                John Picker — Comparative Media Studies and Literature, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and author of Victorian Soundscapes

Purchase from Ohio University Press  and Amazon 

Henry James, Impressionism, and the Public

By Daniel Hannah

 Proposing a new approach to Jamesian aesthetics, Daniel Hannah examines the complicated relationship between Henry James's impressionism and his handling of 'the public.' Hannah challenges solely phenomenological or pictorial accounts of literary impressionism, instead foregrounding James's treatment of the word 'impression' as a mediatory unit that both resists and accommodates invasive publicity. Thus even as he envisages a breakdown between public and private at the end of the nineteenth century, James registers that breakdown not only as a threat but also as an opportunity for aesthetic gain. Beginning with a reading of 'The Art of Fiction' as both a public-forming essay and an aesthetic manifesto, Hannah's study examines James's responses to painterly impressionism and to aestheticism, and offers original readings of What Maisie Knew, The Wings of the Dove, and The American Scene that treat James's articulation of impressionism in relation to the child, the future of the novel, and shifts in the American national imaginary. Hannah's study persuasively argues that throughout his career James returns to impressionability not only as a site of immense vulnerability in an age of rapid change but also as a crucible for reshaping, challenging, and adapting to the public sphere’s shifting forms.

'Focusing on the tendency in Impressionism to trouble distinctions between the public and the private, Daniel Hannah’s sophisticated and compelling book opens up broad new views of much that makes Henry James’s writing meaningful and much that has yet to be seen in the problem of Impressionism.'

--Jesse E. Matz, Kenyon College, USA

Purchase from Ashgate. 

Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain

By Melissa Edmundson Makala

Throughout nineteenth-century Britain, female writers excelled within the genre of supernatural literature. Much of their short fiction and poetry uses ghosts as figures to symbolize the problems of gender, class, economics, and imperialism, thus making their supernatural literature something more than just a good scare. Nineteenth-century ghost literature by women shows the Gothic becoming more experimental and subversive as its writers abandoned the stereotypical Gothic heroines of the past in order to create more realistic, middle-class characters (both living and dead, male and female) who rage against the limits imposed on them by the natural world. The ghosts of Female Gothic thereby become reflections of the social, sexual, economic, and racial troubles of the living. Expanding the parameters of Female Gothic and moving it into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries allows us to recognize women’s ghost literature as a specific strain of the Female Gothic that began not with Ann Radcliffe, but with the Romantic Gothic ballads of women in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain recovers and analyzes for a new audience this “social supernatural” ghost literature, as well as the lives and literary careers of the women who wrote it.

“This groundbreaking study makes a persuasive case that nineteenth-century women authors wrote ghosts into their fiction and poetry not just in order to entertain but also as a vehicle for social criticism. Through the figure of the ghost, they drew attention to religious, gender, and class-based inequality within British society, and to the human costs of empire and the industrial revolution.”

– Paula Feldman, University of South Carolina

University of Wales Press

Purchase from Amazon or Chicago UP .

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

Purchase at Amazon.