Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 articles from September 2008

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 archives from September 2008

A note on this issue.(Editorial)
September 22, 2008... The collection of essays around the theme Victorian Hybridities in this issue of SEL marks only the second time in the forty-eight-year history of the journal that an entire number has been devoted to a single topic. As with our first special...

Editor's preface: hybrid forms and cultural anxiety.(Editorial)
September 22, 2008... Since the word "hybrid" so frequently appears in our most positive accounts of new automobiles, new mixed-media forms, and new technological and biological improvements, it seems well worth remembering that earlier cultures were likely to be...

Arnold's arrhythmia.(English poet Matthew Arnold)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2008... For the word, which tears the writer of prose away from himself and throws him out into the world, sends back to the poet his own image, like a mirror. --Jean-Paul Sartre (1) I shall tell a double tale. --Empedocles (2) ...

Browning's grafts.(English poet Robert Browning)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2008... In his famous 1831 essay "On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry, and on the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson," Arthur Henry Hallam claims Tennyson as the inventor of a "new species of poetry, a graft of the lyric on the dramatic." (1)...

Elizabeth Barrett's and Alfred Tennyson's authorial and formal links.
September 22, 2008... If they had only met earlier, Elizabeth Barrett might well have married Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Barrett first met Tennyson in the summer of 1851 when the new Poet Laureate and his wife Emily stayed with the Brownings in Paris. Even though...

The "prophet-poet's book".(Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2008... Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 1856 verse novel Aurora Leigh was her intended magnum opus, the "most mature of [her] works" and "the one into which [her] highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered." (1) Indeed, as she says so well...

Sketches by Boz, "so frail a machine".(Critical essay)
September 22, 2008... Charles Dickens's first major volume literary publication, Sketches by Boz (1836), presents readers with a startling assemblage of tales and vignettes that can best be described as a montage. When taken together, the fifty-six sketches...

Grafting A Christmas Carol.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2008... "Suffer any wrong that can be done you, rather than come here!" was the mock motto that Charles Dickens devised in Bleak House for the Court of Chancery. (1) Several years before he wrote these words, he had suffered humiliation in that court,...

Dialectics of social class in the Gilbert and Sullivan collaboration.(W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2008... Photographs of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan are numerous; but, so far as is known, there is no photograph of them together. In the decades following their deaths, when this situation was no longer remediable, A. H. Godwin felt the need to...

Anonymas's authors.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2008... Anonyma, or, Fair but Frail--a novel that came into the world with no fixed author, and remains, despite the best efforts of more than one bibliographer, without one--was first published by George Vickers in London late in 1863. (1) Anonyma was...

The "Spasmodic" hoaxes of W. E. Aytoun and A. C. Swinburne.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2008... Measured by its immediate impact, W. E. Aytoun's hoax review "Firmilian: A Tragedy" published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine surely must be one of the most successful pieces of literary criticism ever written. (1) Because it was a hoax, the...

Domestic hybrids: Ruskin, Victorian fiction, and Darwin's botany.(John Ruskin)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2008... Opening his 1880-81 series of essays for The Nineteenth Century, later given the collective title "Fiction, Fair and Foul," John Ruskin recollects the plants along the lane near his Herne Hill home, where as a boy and a young man he derived...

Robert Louis Stevenson's South Seas crossings.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2008... INTRODUCTION When Robert Louis Stevenson traveled through the Pacific islands and eventually became a resident of Samoa (1888-94), he was acutely aware of the inhabitants' loss of cultural memory through contamination from the various...

Florence Marryat's female vampire and the scientizing of hybridity.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2008... In the evil, bestial implications of her beauty, woman was not only tempted by the snake but was the snake herself. Among the terms to describe a woman's appearance none were more overused during the late nineteenth century than...

Assyrian monsters and domestic chimeras.(Essay)
September 22, 2008... "These extraordinary figures, which appeared to guard the inner recesses of the palace, were of colossal size, and united the head of a man with the body of a bull and the wings of a bird." (1) The words are those of pioneering Victorian...

A South Kensington Gateway from Gwalior to nowhere.(1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2008... Postcolonial histories of India have moved from straightforward narratives of domination or resistance to an emphasis upon dialogism. Dialogic histories assert some degree of subaltern agency and analyze the role ideological structures played...

Kipling's "mixy" creatures.(English writer Rudyard Kipling)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2008... A curious international encounter takes place in chapter 13 of Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim (1901), when the "smiling Bengali" Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, disguised as an itinerant physician and mixing "the best of English with the vilest of...

Recent studies in the nineteenth century.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2008... INTRODUCTION In a letter to Nellie Gosse, written in 1882, Robert Louis Stevenson included a tongue-in-cheek advertisement for his thirteen-year-old stepson's adventure story, the Black Canyon, or Wild Adventures in the Far West. He...

Books received.(Recent Studies)
September 22, 2008... Adams, Carol, Douglas Buchanan, and Kelly Gesch, eds. The Bedside, Bathtub, and Armchair Companion to "Frankenstein." New York and London: Continuum, 2007. Pp. 208. $60.00 cloth. ISBN 978-0-8264-1823-4. $14.95 paper. ISBN 978-0-8264-1824-1. ...

Abstracts.
September 22, 2008... Amy Billone, Elizabeth Barrett's and Alfred Tennyson's Authorial and Formal Links Elizabeth Barrett and Alfred Tennyson were intimately bound together biographically and artistically. The attitudes and experiences the poets shared covered...