Introduction: boundaries in theory and history

Introduction to special issue on Victorian boundaries. Reproduced with permission of the publisher. © 2004 Cambridge University Press.WHEN ANGELIQUE RICHARDSON AND I began collecting the essays included here, we were interested to see how recent theorists of boundaries like Audre Lorde (hyphenated identities), Gloria Anzaldua (borderlands), Donna Haraway (cyborg), J-F Lyotard (the in-between), or Jacques Derrida (deconstruction) fared in relation to classic theorists of boundaries like Aristotle, Hegel, Marx, and Darwin. We found that while the field of Victorian Studies has absorbed the theory, current practitioners may refer little to past or present theoretical masters. Rather they describe which boundaries were salient to the Victorians and why; when they were permeable and how; and who enforced them and to what ends. The essays in this volume focus on specific boundaries and amass a wealth of detailed knowledge about them. They include the boundaries or boundlessness of London and her suburbs (Parrinder, Cunningham); transnational or deterritorialized boundaries of empire (Spear and Meduri); psychological boundaries (Rylance, Trotter); boundaries between body and soul (Moran) and living and dead (Robson); generic boundaries (Barzilai, Howsam, Small, Toker); boundaries of popular representation between art and politics (Ledger, Livesey); and boundaries between humans, animals, and machines (Joseph and Sussman). The essays here interrogate boundaries historically and pragmatically, with a high tolerance of the in-between or queer, to which I shall return below

A Symbiological Approach to Sex, Gender, and Desire in the Anthropocene

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Routledge via the link in this recor

Cultural philanthropy, gypsies, and interdisciplinary scholars: dream of a common language

Reproduced with permission of the publisher.Although he was a major force in fin-de-siecle cultural philanthropy in both North America and Britain, Charles Godfrey Leland is today known mainly through Occult websites on the Internet. This essay retrieves his research on the gypsies, revealing an unexplored source of Victorian philanthropy, and scrutinizes it from the perspectives of disciplines different from his own, philology: history, demography, ethnic studies, ethics, and politics. The essay is in four parts: I. Victorian Cultural Philanthropy: People Making People, and Some People Making Things II. Gypsy Lorists: The Non-Christian Roots of Philanthropy, III. Philanthropy's Other: The Persecution of the Gypsies, IV. Interdisciplinarity as Collectivity

“The disturbances overseas”: a comparative report on the future of English Studies

This is an adaptation of a talk first presented to the Council for College and University English (CCUE) conference on English for the Millennium, Sept. 1996. CCUE is the British professional body that represents the discipline and departments of English in England, Scotland, and Wales. The talk was meant to provide a transatlantic perspective on the future of the discipline. Originally it was published in CCUE News (June 1997) and later adapted to presentations throughout the U.K. The excerpts here focus on issues of multiculturalism, interdisciplinarity, and cultural studies

Literatures of Liberalization: Global Circulation and the Long Nineteenth Century

Front matter for Literatures of Liberalization: Global Circulation and the Long Nineteenth Centur

From barbarism to decadence without the intervening civilization: or, living in the aftermath of anticipated futures

ABSTRACT The styles, moods, performances, and practices of decadence have been simultaneous with modernization, not least in the process of nation-building. This article considers the dialectics of decadence and modernization with particular attention to the roles and responses of women in the twentieth to twenty-first centuries. World-historically, this was the emergence of self-governing dominions of Anglophone cultures, increasing US influence, and decolonization. Eighty-five states gained independence since 1922, with the African nation-states after 1956. While nationalist projects often deferred the Woman Question, liberal projects of New Womanism initiated debate between feminist individualism and more collectivist practices and ideologies. Movements like social Darwinism and eugenics impacted on women, and in terms of deformed relations of part to whole (a classic definition of decadence), modernization included the great unification movements of the “Pans” – Pan-Hellenism, -Islamism, -Asianism, -Africanism, and Zionism – but also the partitions of India/Pakistan, Palestine/Israel, the PRC/Taiwan, Ireland, Korea, Vietnam, and Cyprus, which often impacted women unequally. Under processes of globalization and nation-building, modernization and expressions of decadence have been in dialectical relations, though the meanings and targets shift as hegemons rise and fall

"A Sort of Rathmines Version of a Dior Design": Maeve Brennan, Self-Fashioning, and the Uses of Style

This article explores the politics of style in the writing of Maeve Brennan. Brennan's concern with style, subjectivity and power is strikingly visible in her short stories and ‘Talk of the Town’ essays for the New Yorker. While in some of her short stories published in the New Yorker in the 1950s, Brennan seems to offer an extended critique of dandyism, elsewhere in her writing self-fashioning takes on an altogether more positive value and is steeped in the political as well as literary commitments of her work. The article argues that Brennan's interest in the politics of style, both personally and in her writing, is informed by the different strategies she deployed as an Irish woman writer establishing her place amongst a New York literary elite in the mid twentieth century.This work began as a conversation with Neil Sammells about Irish women's writing and self-fashioning, and his encouragement and insightful responses to ideas in development were invaluable to the progress of the research. I am also very grateful to Maureen O'Connor and Caitríona Clear, whose work on the Irish woman writer and dandyism, and women and magazine culture, lays an all-important foundation for the arguments developed here. Archival research for the article was made possible by a Fulbright Scholarship in the Humanities (September 2012—January 2013), and I am most grateful to my host institution, Fordham University in New York. I would like to thank the literary estate of Maeve Brennan for kind permission to cite from Maeve Brennan's letters and unpublished material held in the Special Collections at the University of Delaware and the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library. The work was completed with the assistance of a Moore Institute Visiting Fellowship to the National University of Ireland, Galway in 2015, which provided a valuable opportunity to present work in progress as part of the seminar series hosted by the Centre for Irish Studies. Finally, I am grateful to the anonymous peer reviewers and editors at Women: A Cultural Review for their thorough and expert responses to the article

The Global Circulation of Victorian Actants and Ideas in the Niche of Nature, Culture, and Technology

Copyright © The English Language and Literature Association of KoreaOpen access journalThis article considers implications for Victorian Studies suggested by recent developments in the fields of world literatures and globalization. It considers the global scope of Victorian literature as an actant in world affairs, as in processes of liberalization, democratization, and trade, but also the specificity of each local environment and moment of transculturation. It makes a methodological intervention on behalf of interdisciplinary and intercultural studies by providing a framework to address two current problems. First, how may we, in language and literature studies, best study global processes of modernisation, democratization, and liberalization without losing the specificity of the local? Second, how may we best study the uniqueness of distinct locales where the forces of tradition and modernization meet? If the first problem requires translators and transculturalists who know literary history and history of genres, the second requires the disciplines relating to environment: nature (natural sciences), culture (the humanities), and technology (social sciences, engineering, and medicine). The actants include Victorian geopolitical ideologies such as individualism, collectivism, nationalism, internationalism, and cosmopolitanism; geopolitical institutions and state apparatuses such as modes of government, trade, legal systems, and armed services; and geopolitical commodities and technologies such as transport and sanitation systems, around which lives and literatures are built. Case studies come from modern Chinese, Indian, and Vietnamese literatures. (216/250