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"Stumping," or making political speeches in favor of a candidate, cause, or campaign has been around since before the 1800s, when speechmaking was frequently portrayed as delivered from the base of a tree. The practice, which has been strongly associated with the American frontier, British agitators, and colonial Australia, remains an effective component of contemporary democratic politics. 

In his engaging book On the Stump, Sean Scalmer provides the first comprehensive, transnational history of the "stump speech." He traces the development and transformation of campaign oratory, as well as how national elections and public life and culture have been shaped by debate over the past century. 

Scalmer presents an eloquent study of how "stumping" careers were made, sustained, remembered, and exploited, to capture the complex rhythms of political change over the years. On the Stump examines the distinctive dramatic and performative styles of celebrity orators including Davy Crockett, Henry Clay, and William Gladstone. Ultimately, Scalmer recovers the history of the stump speech and its historical significance in order to better understand how political change is forged.

From a historically grounded, feminist perspective, Bose offers four case studies, each of which illuminates a distinct individualizing rhetorical strategy. She looks at the parliamentary debates on the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, in which several hundred unarmed Indian protesters were killed; Margaret Cousins’s firsthand account of feminist organizing in Ireland and India; Kalpana Dutt’s memoir of the Bengali terrorist movement of the 1930s, which was modeled in part on Irish anticolonial activity; and the popular histories generated by ex-colonial officials and their wives. Bringing to the fore the constraints that colonial domination placed upon agency and activism, Organizing Empire highlights the complexity of the multiple narratives that constitute British colonial history.

Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend explores the meteoric rise, sudden fall, and legendary resurgence of an immensely influential writer’s reputation from his hectic 1881 American lecture tour to recent Hollywood adaptations of his dramas. Always renowned—if not notorious—for his fashionable persona, Wilde courted celebrity at an early age. Later, he came to prominence as one of the most talented essayists and fiction writers of his time.

In the years leading up to his two-year imprisonment, Wilde stood among the foremost dramatists in London. But after he was sent down for committing acts of “gross indecency” it seemed likely that social embarrassment would inflict irreparable damage to his legacy. As this volume shows, Wilde died in comparative obscurity. Little could he have realized that in five years his name would come back into popular circulation thanks to the success of Richard Strauss’s opera Salome and Robert Ross’s edition of De Profundi. With each succeeding decade, the twentieth century continued to honor Wilde’s name by keeping his plays in repertory, producing dramas about his life, adapting his works for film, and devising countless biographical and critical studies of his writings.

This volume reveals why, more than a hundred years after his demise, Wilde’s value in the academic world, the auction house, and the entertainment industry stands higher than that of any modern writer.

Outspoken, extravagant, and internationally celebrated in her lifetime, Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramée, 1839–1908) was one of the nineteenth century’s most successful and controversial writers. Her fiction, essays, and cultural criticism captivated readers across Europe and beyond, yet her polemical politics, cosmopolitan outlook, and opulent style left her at odds with the modernist critical traditions that shaped later literary scholarship. As a result, despite her considerable influence, Ouida has remained on the margins of Victorian literary history. Ouida: Cosmopolitan Ethics, Aesthetics, and Legacies offers the first sustained examination of the ethical and aesthetic commitments that underpin Ouida’s work and its effect on nineteenth-century culture. Bringing together an international group of established and emerging scholars, the collection explores her writing through frameworks including psychogeography, ecocriticism, decadence studies, celebrity studies, and adaptation studies. Contributors reveal how Ouida challenged conventional boundaries of nation, gender, class, and species while shaping contemporary debates about art, politics, and society. Opening with a conversation between Victorian literary scholars Pamela K. Gilbert and Talia Schaffer, the volume traces Ouida’s influence across literary networks, media forms, and historical periods, from her impact on fellow authors and feminist modernists to her afterlives in adaptation, fandom, and participatory culture. Positioning Ouida as a profoundly cosmopolitan thinker and writer, the collection reconsiders the boundaries of Victorian studies itself, demonstrating how nineteenth-century literature can be understood through dynamic exchanges across genres, borders, media, and time. In doing so, it restores Ouida to a central place in literary history while highlighting the enduring relevance of her global legacy. Contributors Katja Anderson Natasha Anderson Joseph Bristow Lorraine Dubuisson Frankie Dytor Jesse R. Erickson Helena Esser Pamela K. Gilbert Andrew King Jane Jordan Crescent Rainwater Talia Schaffer Margaret D. Stetz Joanna Turner

Our Lady of Victorian Feminism is about three nineteenth-century women, Protestants by background and feminists by conviction, who are curiously and crucially linked by their extensive use of the Madonna in arguments designed to empower women.

In the field of Victorian studies, few scholars have looked beyond the customary identification of the Christian Madonna with the Victorian feminine ideal—the domestic Madonna or the Angel in the House. Kimberly VanEsveld Adams shows, however, that these three Victorian writers made extensive use of the Madonna in feminist arguments. They were able to see this figure in new ways, freely appropriating the images of independent, powerful, and wise Virgin Mothers.

In addition to contributions in the fields of literary criticism, art history, and religious studies, Our Lady of Victorian Feminism places a needed emphasis on the connections between the intellectuals and the activists of the nineteenth-century women's movement. It also draws attention to an often neglected strain of feminist thought, essentialist feminism, which proclaimed sexual equality as well as difference, enabling the three writers to make one of their most radical arguments, that women and men are made in the image of the Virgin Mother and the Son, the two faces of the divine.