Francis O'Gorman

The Victorian novel

Acknowledgements. Textual Note. Introduction. . 1. Early Criticism of the Victorian Novel from James. Oliphant to David Cecil. The State of the Novel in 1900. University Study of Victorian Literature. Principles of Literary History. The Approach of George Saintsbury. Extract from Saintsburya s The English Novel (1913). E.M. Forster and Critiquing Literary History. The Modernist Construction of Victorian Fiction. David Cecila s View of Victorian Novels and Culture. Extract from Cecila s Early Victorian Novelists (1934). Further Reading. . 2. F.R. Leavis and The Great Tradition. Outline of the Chapter. Leavisa s Influence. The Principles of Leavisa Criticism. The Idea of Tradition. 1980sa Reactions to the Politics of Leavisa Criticism. The Principles of Leavisa The Great Tradition (1948). Its Treatment of Dickens and Leavisa Later Views on Him. Extract from The Great Tradition. . Further Reading. . 3. Feminism and the Victorian Novel in the 1970s. The Influence of 1970sa Feminism. Outline of the Chapter. Ellen Moersa Literary Women (1976). Elaine Showalter and the Female Tradition. Discussion of Showaltera s A Literature of Their Own (1977). 1980sa Response to Showalter. Extract from A Literature of Their Own. . Significance of Gilbert and Gubara s. . The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). The Madwoman Discussed. Gilbertand Gubara s Appraisal of The Madwoman. . Extract from The Madwoman. . Further Reading. . 4. Realism. Preliminary Questions. Outline of the Chapter. Histories of Realism. Ian Watta s The Rise of the Novel (1957) Discussed. The Cartesian Certainties of Realism. Watt Critiqued. Alternative Histories of Realism. Epistemology of Realism. Ioan Williams and Realisma s Certainties. George Levinea s View of Realism and Self--Consciousness. Extract from Levinea s The Realist Imagination (1981). Psychological Coherence in Realism: Bersani. A Future for Astyanax (1976). Politics of Classic Realism and Coherence Criticized in 1980s. Extract from Belseya s Critical Practice (1980). Belsey Critiqued. D.A. Millera s The Novel and the Police (1988) Discussed. The Turn Against Realism in the 1980s. Interest in Gothic. Interest in the not--Said of Realism. The Feminist Recuperation of Realism in 1980s. Extract from Boumehlaa s a Realism and the Ends of Feminisma (1988). New Historicism and Historicizing the Real. Rothfielda s Vital Signs (1992). Nancy Armstrong and Kate Flint. Conclusion. Further Reading. . 5. Social--Problem Fiction. Historicism and Feminism. What is Social--Problem Fiction?. Outline of the First Part of Chapter. Cazamiana s Reading in 1903. The Significance of Raymond Williams. Williamsa s a Structures of Feelinga . Williamsa s Criticisms of Social--Problem Fiction. The Knowable Community in Williamsa s. . The English Novel (1970). Extract from The English Novel. . Williamsa s Generalizations. Sheila Smitha s Particularization of Williams. More Problems Found in Social--Problem Fiction. Brantlingera s Historicization: a Context for Social--Problem. Fiction 1. New Historicism: Further Contexts. Context 2. Gallagher and the Discourse over Industrialism. Context 3. Mary Poovey and the Social Body. Extract from Mary Pooveya s Making a Social Body (1995). Criticisms of New Historicism. Guy and Individualism in the Victorian Mind. Extract from Guya s The Victorian Social--Problem. Novel (1996). Feminism and the Social--Problem Novel. Outline of Second Part of Chapter. Recent Work on Elizabeth Gaskell. Bergmanna s Views on Strong Female Characters. Kestnera s Canon Revision. Nord, Female Novelists, and Transgression. Harman, Female Novelists, and Transformation. The Future of Social--Problem Fiction Criticism. Further Reading. . 6. Language and Form. Outline of the Chapter. Language and The Victorian Novel. General Linguistic Studies of the Novel. Language of Individual Victorian Novelists. Chapmana s Forms of Speech (1994). Relation of Arguments to Thinking about Realism. Other Documentary Work on Victorian Language. Bakhtin and Language Studies. Inghama s Views on Gender and Class. Extract from Ingham The Language of Gender and Class (1996). Bakhtin and Literature Studies. Form and The Victorian Novel. Henry James on Monster Novels. Van Ghenta s Reaction and Emphasis on Unity. Extract from Van Ghent The English Novel. Form and Function (1953). Barbara Hardya s Reaction: the Advantages of Fluidity in Form. Hillis Miller and Form without God. Deconstruction and Incoherence. Garretta s Deconstructionist Views of Multiplot Fiction. Extract from Garretta s The Victorian Multiplot Novel (1980). Keen and Narrative Annexes. Approaches to Form in 1980s and 90s Summarized. Further Reading (Including Narratology). 7. Science and the Victorian Novel. Outline of the Chapter. Early Approaches to Field. Stevensona s Darwin Among the Poets (1932) Discussed. Henkina s Darwinism in the English Novel (1940) Discussed. Cossletta s Work on Overlaps of Science and Literature. Beer on Darwin and Fiction. Extract from Beera s Darwina s Plots (1983). Science and Literature Read Alongside Each Other. Levinea s Study of Novelists Who Did Not Read Science. Levinea s Influential Concept of the One Culture. Extract from Levinea s Darwin and the Novelists (1988). Dickens and Science. 1990sa Interest in Pathology and Mind Sciences. Helen Small and Lovea s Madness. Smalla s Critique of the One Culture Model. Sally Shuttleworth on Psychology. Logan on Hysteria, Wood on Neurology. Eugenics and the Novel. Further Reading. . 8. The History of the Book. Diversity of History of the Book Studies. Outline of the Chapter. Bibliographical Work of Relevance to Victorian Fiction. Butt and Tillotson and the Material Conditions of Authorship. Altick and the Reader. The Three--Volume Novel and Its Problems. Extract from Sutherlanda s Victorian Novelists and Publishers (1976). Feltes and Marxist Readings of Production and Authorship. Feminist Revision of Sutherland Publishing History. Working--Class Fiction Recovered. 1990a s Emphasis on the Reader. Flint and the Woman Reader. Gender and the Marketplace. Catherine Judda s a Male Pseudonyms and Female.a . Authority in Victorian Englanda (1995). Further Reading. . 9. Postcolonial Readings. Range and Diversity of Postcolonialism. Central Interests of Postcolonialism. Outline of the Chapter. Early Views of Victorian Fiction and Empire. Saida s Orientalism (1978) and Its Consequences for Fiction. Spivaka s Critique of Feminism. The Embeddedness of Fiction in Colonial Ideology. Extract from Spivak a Three Womena s Texts and Critique of Imperialisma . Brantlingera s Rule of Darkness (1988) and Explicit Engagements with Empire. Bivona and the Hidden Presence of Empire. Perera and Colonial Anxieties. Sharpe and Fictiona s Collusion with Ideology. Richards and the Imperial Archive. Azim and the Imperial Form of Fiction. Extract from Azima s The Colonial Rise of the Novel (1993). Deirdre David, Women, and the Empire. Meyer and Fictiona s Double Relationship with Colonial Ideology. Extract from Imperialism at Home (1996). Further Reading. Index.

Modernism, T.S. Eliot, and the ‘age of worry’

Worry as a state of mind is first labelled in the Victorian period, but it was firmly established as a category of mental experience by the third decade of the twentieth century. This article examines the entry of worry into discourse, the flourishing of self-help books, the definitions of worry as a peculiar ‘disease of the age’, and considers worrys challenges for representation in word art between the two World Wars, particularly in relation to High Modernism. It considers Joyces interest in ‘reading like a worrier’. The concentration of the second half of the essay is on T.S. Eliot who is claimed as, chronologically, worrys first poet. He absorbed as he helped propagate the terms and habits of worry, and, most importantly, he endeavoured to find significant meaning in this mental experience and to integrate it into acts of human moral choice and vision.

Swinburne and Tennyson's Peerage

Algernon Charles Swinburnes poetic relations with Alfred Tennyson were mostly respectful. Where Swinburne differed, he still acknowledged the abilities of the Poet Laureate. There is one major exception: Swinburnes violent reaction—never noticed before—to Tennysons acceptance of a barony in 1883. This article explores Swinburnes response and assesses the rich tangle of public and private reasons beyond the poets well-known republican hatred of the House of Lords. What emerges is a cultural moment when the question of Swinburnes identity as a political poet and English cultures understanding of how politics and poetry were related at the end of the nineteenth century became luminously visible. What also emerges are the striking, conflicted ways in which Swinburnes personal feelings about political verse were inextricable from his private regard for class.

MICHAEL FIELD AND SAPPHIC FAME: “MY DARK-LEAVED LAURELS WILL ENDURE”

Long Ago (1889), Michael Fields inaugural collection of verse, celebrated Sappho, the ancient poetess of Lesbos. The volume proclaimed the diversity of her sexuality; it saluted verse that was connected to the self; and it urged the authenticity of her creative force in ages beyond her death. Taking surviving fragments of Sapphic writing as embarkation points for new poems in her spirit, Michael Field, the joint pseudonym of the two poets Katherine Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913), hailed the continuing presence of the Greek in the modern age, drawing the reader back to an imagined version of Sapphos mind and experience, her desires and troubles, of which history held so slight a record. Developing ideas articulated by Robert Browning, particularly in the opening book of The Ring and the Book (1868–69), Long Ago discerned in poetry a way of regenerating the energy – or of creating the illusion of such regeneration – of an almost-lost, but indisputably authentic person from the ancient Mediterranean. The volume privileged a post-Romantic assumption about the signal importance of the self behind writing, the complexities and contradictions of which I explore here, and it understood modern poetrys dealings with a nearly vanished Greece as recuperative of a nearly disappeared artist. As such, Long Ago implicitly imagined the work of the contemporary poet as, to use Robert Brownings word, a matter of “galvanism” (Browning I.740): the calling back into the present of the lost forms of distant lives.

Tennyson's "In Memoriam" and tangle

The obvious contrast is between the village grave—Tennyson’s “kneeling hamlet” sounds like Somersby or Bag Enderby—and the sea, across which Hallam’s body was brought from Trieste. The image of Hallam’s body tossing beneath the ocean is distinctive, in the first instance, for its painful sense of alienation. It also gains some of its force at a deeper level from its relationship with Milton’s “Lycidas.” Tennyson’s lines provide a palimpsest of Milton’s happier reflection:

Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach,” and the Channel Railway

When did Matthew Arnold write his most celebrated lyric, “Dover Beach”? Kenneth Allott and Miriam Allott in their Longman edition of Arnold’s poems (1979) say it was composed “probably late June 1851” (253). And this has long been the assumption. It may well be correct. But it is worth exploring the possibility that it is not. Nicholas Shrimpton was prepared to do that in his review of Nicholas Murray’s A Life of Matthew Arnold (1996) and in his Everyman edition of selected Arnold poems (1998). It is not the case that there is empirical evidence (which the Allotts missed) that confirms a later date, only circumstantial evidence to allow for its possibility. That possibility is the starting point for my suggestion here. The relevant question in terms of dating is this: If Arnold wrote the poem in 1851, why did he not publish it in any of the five editions of his poems issued between 1851 and 1867? Nicholas Shrimpton concludes that “Dover Beach” was written “either in 1851 when Arnold twice briefly visited Dover during his honeymoons (for which there is some circumstantial manuscript evidence) or, alternatively, between 1857 and 1867” (Matthew Arnold 4–5). It is a sensible uncertainty. I cannot solve the problem of when Arnold wrote this poem. But I want to suggest how differently the poem reads if, like Nicholas Shrimpton, we take on board the possibility that it was completed between 1857 and 1867 and not in the middle of Arnold’s honeymoon. It has certainly never felt much like a honeymoon poem, with its confessions of the eternal note of sadness and a loveless world. More specifically, I think, “Dover Beach” reads differently if we allow that Arnold could have been aware of debates at the end of the 1850s and beginning of the 1860s about a crosschannel railway between the port of Dover and the French port of Calais. If we take these into account, the poem—in oblique though not direct contact with a matter of technological and military significance—acquires a distinctive national nuance. Projects for a submarine train-line had certainly been discussed before 1851 (the idea of the cross-channel tunnel started in France in 1802). Such debates could, theoretically, be in the substrata of “Dover Beach” had it been written at the earlier date. But my thought is this: that between the years 1857 and 1867 there was a renewed and high-profile concentration on the feasibility and the problems of a railway link between Dover and Calais that could not have been easy to miss. “Dover Beach” begins with an implied act of visual movement, a simple looking-across from England to France from a window. “The sea is calm to-night,” Arnold says:

Wordsworth and Touch

William Wordsworths poetry is strangely reluctant to record acts of touch between human beings, despite its commitment to sympathy. That reluctance is made more suggestive by the poets self-consciousness about it. This essay considers the oddly visible absence of sympathys gestures across Wordsworths career, and proposes that, in fact, the absence points to a deeper and more consequential engagement with touchs relationship to language. Considering the variety of ways in which language moves towards, or longs for, tangibility, the essay analyses the poets fascination with what it describes as a betweenness, a powerful and moving space in which words approach but do not actually become touchable. Related issues of the preciousness of words as words, and of the frailty of poetry envisaged as wholly solid are considered. But the central interest is Wordsworths fleeting fantasy of language that can persuade, and achieve, by becoming, in a mysterious, hard-to-describe manner, almost touchable.