Despotopoulou, Anna and Kimberly C. Reed, eds. Henry James and the Supernatural.

This book is a compilation of essays researching Henry James’s ghostly tales. As both editors state in their introduction to the volume, the book actually aims not only at dealing with the ghostly in terms of its supernatural element but also at scrutinizing it as a narrative technique, a strategy which endowed James’s oeuvre with a realistic, proto-modernist quality “giving it the elusiveness it is so much celebrated for” (1). Both editors also point out that James’s concern with the superna..

Investing in Realism: An Interview with Bruce Robbins

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Little lambs, linnets and babes in the snow: messages of kindness and caution in Christina Rossetti\u27s _Sing-Song_ and _Speaking Likenesses_

In this study of Christina Rossetti\u27s two books for children, Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872) and Speaking Likenesses (1875), I use a feminist theoretical lens to examine the implicit directions given to young girls about how to be an appropriate girl, woman, mother, and citizen of the British Empire in the 19th century. In many ways, the poems and stories in these two books contain a subtle set of rules regarding behavior for the implied audience, which is largely middle-class, white, and Christian. These works for children written by Christina Rossetti reflect an interesting middle place between a feminist viewpoint and an insistence on abiding by a patriarchal set of rules. She seems to find a place that is neither adversarial to the existing patriarchal structures nor entirely satisfied by living within it. Both books celebrate the safety and love found in the mother-child relationship and expand that to portray the extended community of female care-givers, sisters, aunts, grandmothers, as nearly utopian. Sing-Song and Speaking Likenesses contain pieces which portray a respite from the temptations and dangers of the larger world in the female sphere of the nursery. Of particular interest in these two texts is the inclusion of a cautionary note on the fallen woman and the dangers of sensuality and promiscuity

Despotopoulou, Anna and Kimberly C. Reed, eds. Henry James and the Supernatural.

This book is a compilation of essays researching Henry James’s ghostly tales. As both editors state in their introduction to the volume, the book actually aims not only at dealing with the ghostly in terms of its supernatural element but also at scrutinizing it as a narrative technique, a strategy which endowed James’s oeuvre with a realistic, proto-modernist quality “giving it the elusiveness it is so much celebrated for” (1). Both editors also point out that James’s concern with the superna..

Contrbutors

Notes on Contributor

William Dean Howells's Periodical Time

© 2019 by Arizona Board of Regents. This essay uses the example of William Dean Howells to redefine periodical time and suggest new ways in which extraliterary time manifests itself in literary form and content. Howells spent his early life typesetting for periodicals. Here he first encountered periodical time's key component parts: the human time of periodical labor and the paradoxical nature of periodical temporality. In A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889) he later wrote a novel in which a periodical is the major protagonist. The essay argues that Howells's experience of periodical time coincided with his formative experience of extraliterary time and that the two come together to shape the literary time of A Hazard of New Fortunes

‘”Coquetting amid incredible landscapes”: Women on the river and the railway’ 1862-1922

The opening of the first direct railway line from London to the Kent coast in 1862 challenged traditional dichotomies between town and country, and contributed to a growing nostalgia associated with the river. Fin de siècle writers used the apparent opposition between rail and river, city and country, to ask new questions about the place of women in a rapidly changing world; the transition to a new century further strained the traditional dichotomy between feminised pastoral and masculinised industrial, a tension reflected in the problematic portrayal of rail and water in the work of E. Nesbit