Kate Flint

The Cambridge history of Victorian literature

This collaborative History aims to become the standard work on Victorian literature for the twenty-first century. Well-known scholars introduce readers to their particular fields, discuss influential critical debates, and offer illuminating contextual detail to situate authors and works in their wider cultural and historical contexts. Sections on publishing and readership, and a chronological survey of major literary developments between 1837 and 1901, are followed by essays on topics including sexuality, sensation, cityscapes, melodrama, epic, and economics. Victorian writing is placed in its complex relation to the Empire, Europe, and America, as well as to Britain’s component nations. The final chapters consider how Victorian literature, and the period as a whole, influenced twentieth-century writers. Original, lucid, and stimulating, each chapter is an important contribution to Victorian literary studies. Together, the contributors have created an engaging discussion of the ways in which the Victorians saw themselves, and of how their influence has persisted.

The fin de siècle

A Critical Essay (1868) and Yeatss eclectic edition of The Works of William Blake, Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical (1893) are landmarks of fin-de-siecle literary culture. The productive estrangement from usual modes of thought and perception is central to the aesthetics of fin-de-siecle Symbolism, which drew extensively on the work of Baudelaire and Pater. In Yeatss fin-de-siecle work, he tries to produce the illusion that the world evoked in his poems exists prior to or even apart from our experiences of the poems themselves. One of Paters great achievements in The Renaissance is to recast Kantian aesthetics in the twin vocabularies of Victorian physics and physiology. In History of Aesthetic(1892), Bernard Bosanquet notes the significance of aesthetics in the development of economic theory in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The spiritual and aesthetic aridity of middle-class life is a constant theme of fin de siecle literature.

“More rapid than the lightning's flash”: Photography, Suddenness, and the Afterlife of Romantic Illumination

This essay considers the actual and metaphorical power of the lightnings flash. As a natural phenomenon repeatedly described by Romantic writers, its startling, sudden illumination was repeatedly invoked by the pioneers of flash photography who looked to find suitable language in which to convey their new-found power to light up darkness. The sun already provided a vocabulary in which to describe daytime picture-taking; the associations with awe, danger, revelation and grandeur that lightning provided were readily adopted by such practitioners as Adolf Miethe and Johannes Gaedicke, inventors in 1887 of “Blitzlichtpulver,” or “lightning light powder.” But as I show through a close examination of nineteenth-century flash photographs, especially those of Jacob Riis, the characteristics of this medium are significantly dissimilar to the effects of lightning. This technology of visibility produced light that dazzled and lit up surfaces, rather than providing illumination in any deeper sense. Its literature looked to associations optimistically taken from lightnings status within European romanticism, but it could not sustain them. These photographers and inventors borrowed this vocabulary to promote their originality and inventiveness: ultimately, it allows us to identify what is distinctive, not contiguous, in flash photographys relationship to lightning.

The Aesthetics of Book Destruction

A book destroyed can be a beautiful thing. It can be dampened, moulded into a new shape, and photographed. It can be folded and pleated. It can be delicately cut into fantastical forms, or chiselled into a solid pistol-shape. In the case of these last three examples, it can then be re-presented in two-dimensional form, as a photographic image. Images of books that have been destroyed through negligence or catastrophe or as the result of acts of war or the nibbling teeth of mice can have, on occasion, their own shocking beauty.