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The Appropriated Voice: Narrative Authority in Conrad, Forster, and Woolf reassesses questions of voice in three central modernist texts: Heart of Darkness, A Passage to India, and To the Lighthouse. Representing voice as the site of a struggle articulated on a number of fronts, Bette London challenges traditional assumptions about voice as a reliable marker of individuality, originality, self-identity, and aesthetic autonomy—assumptions reinforced in the recent reconstructions of modernism in postmodernism’s discourses.Drawing upon narrative theory, cultural criticism, and cultural ethnography, as well as feminist theory, London provides a sophisticated critique of the conventional categories at work in both traditional and revisionist criticism. Her method reveals the narrative and cultural appropriations through which modernism speaks, and produces what might be called modernism’s other ideology: its performance of its own political and aesthetic complicities; its display of its own second-handedness.The book is a contribution to contemporary theoretical debates as well as to the scholarship pertaining to Conrad, Forster, and Woolf.

In the early twentieth century, varied audiences took biology out of the hands of specialists and transformed it into mass culture, transforming our understanding of heredity in the process.
 
In the early twentieth century communities made creative use of the new theories of heredity in circulation at the time, including the now largely forgotten mutation theory of Hugo de Vries. Science fiction writers, socialists, feminists, and utopians are among those who seized on the amazing possibilities of rapid and potentially controllable evolution. De Vries’s highly respected scientific theory only briefly captured the attention of the scientific community, but its many fans appropriated it for their own wildly imaginative ends. Writers from H.G. Wells and Edith Wharton to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, J.B.S. Haldane, and Aldous Huxley created a new kind of imaginary future, which Jim Endersby calls the biotopia. It took the ambiguous possibilities of biology—utopian and dystopian—and reimagined them in ways that still influence the public’s understanding of the life sciences. The Arrival of the Fittest recovers the fascinating, long-forgotten origins of ideas that have informed works of fiction from Brave New World to the X-Men movies, all while reflecting on the lessons—positive and negative—that this period might offer us.

The dangerous lover has haunted our culture for over two hundred years; English, American, and European literature is permeated with his erotic presence. The Dangerous Lover takes seriously the ubiquity of the brooding romantic hero—his dark past, his remorseful and rebellious exile from comfortable everyday living. Deborah Lutz traces the recent history of this figure, through the melancholy iconoclasm of the Romantics, the lost soul redeemed by love of the Brontës, and the tormented individualism of twentieth-century love narratives. Arguing for this character’s central influence not only in literature but also in the history of ideas, this book places the dangerous lover firmly within the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, the Modernism of Georg Lukács, and Roland Barthes’s theories on love and longing. Working with canonical authors such as Ann Radcliffe, Charles Maturin, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Oscar Wilde, and also with non-canonical texts such as contemporary romance, The Dangerous Lover combines a lyrical, essayistic style with a depth of inquiry that raises questions about the mysteries of desire, death, and eroticism.

The Dangerous Lover is the first book-length study of this pervasive literary hero; it also challenges the tendency of sophisticated philosophical readings of popular narratives and culture to focus on male-coded genres. In its conjunction of high and low literary forms, this volume explores new historical and cultural framings for female-coded popular narratives.

The Daughter's Dilemma breaks new ground in literary studies through its application of family systems theory to the analysis of nineteenth-century domestic novels. Cohen argues for structural correspondences between families and novels: as systems seeking closure, they are governed by certain analogous laws. She argues further that the father-daughter dyad is the pivotal structure by which the nuclear family and the domestic novel were able to define themselves as closed systems. The study treats novels by Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen. Emily Bronte, George Eliot, and Henry James and places them in the context of the writers' individual family experiences. Drawing on recent work in literary and feminist criticism, anthropology, history, and psychoanalysis. as well as family systems theory, Cohen seeks to critique the limitations of these theoretical models even as she employs them lo illuminate the texts under discussion. The study's approach leads to insights about the contemporary family and about the present state of literature and literary criticism. Cohen concludes by suggesting that the modern period marked the demise of an ideology favoring closed systems. The result has been both a nostalgia for those systems and a redefinition of experience and relationship as open and subject to endless interpretation. Such an ideological reformulation helps explain the present insistence by literary theorists on the inescapability of the text and the "reality" of representation.

For centuries, women who aspired to write had to enter a largely male literary tradition that offered few, if any, literary forms in which to express their perspectives on lived experience. Since the nineteenth century, however, women writers and readers have been producing "disobedient" counter-narratives that, while clearly making reference to the original texts, overturn their basic assumptions.

This book looks at both canonical and non-canonical works, over a variety of fiction and nonfiction genres, that offer counter-readings of familiar Western narratives. Nancy Walker begins by probing women's revisions of two narrative traditions pervasive in Western culture: the biblical story of Adam and Eve, and the traditional fairy tales that have served as paradigms of women's behavior and expectations. She goes on to examine the works of a wide range of writers, from contemporaries Marilynne Robinson, Ursula Le Guin, Anne Sexton, Fay Weldon, Angela Carter, and Margaret Atwood to precursors Caroline Kirkland, Fanny Fern, Mary De Morgan, Mary Louisa Molesworth, Edith Nesbit, and Evelyn Sharp.

"The Empire Inside is unique in its tight focus on the objects from one geographical location, and their deployment in one genre of fiction. This combination results in a powerful study with a wealth of fine formal analyses of literary texts and a similar trove of marvelous historical data."
---Elaine Freedgood, New York University

"In The Empire Inside, Suzanne Daly does a wonderful job integrating an array of primary materials, especially novels and journal essays, to show the extent to which these ‘foreign’ colonial products of India represented absolutely central aspects of domestic life, at once part of the unremarkable everyday experience of Victorians and rich with meanings."
---Timothy Carens, College of Charleston

By the early nineteenth century, imperial commodities had become commonplace in middle-class English homes. Such Indian goods as tea, textiles, and gemstones led double lives, functioning at once as exotic foreign artifacts and as markers of proper Englishness. The Empire Inside: Indian Commodities in Victorian Domestic Novels reveals how Indian imports encapsulated new ideas about both the home and the world in Victorian literature and culture. In novels by Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and Anthony Trollope, the regularity with which Indian commodities appear bespeaks their burgeoning importance both ideologically and commercially. Such domestic details as the drinking of tea and the giving of shawls as gifts point us toward suppressed connections between the feminized realm of private life and the militarized realm of foreign commerce.

Tracing the history of Indian imports yields a record of the struggles for territory and political power that marked the coming-into-being of British India; reading the novels of the period for the ways in which they infuse meaning into these imports demonstrates how imperialism was written into the fabric of everyday life in nineteenth-century England. Situated at the intersection of Victorian studies, material cultural studies, gender studies, and British Empire studies, The Empire Inside is written for academics, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates in all of these fields.

Suzanne Daly is Associate Professor of English, University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The romance genre was a popular literary form among writers and readers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but since then it has often been dismissed as juvenile, unmodern, improper, or subversive. In this study, William J. Scheick seeks to recover the place of romance in fin-de-siècle England and America; to distinguish among its subgenres of eventuary, aesthetic, and ethical romance; and to reinstate ethical romance as a major mode of artistic expression.

Scheick argues that the narrative maneuvers of ethical romance dissolve the boundary between fiction and fact. In contrast to eventuary romances, which offer easily consumed entertainment, or aesthetic romances, which urge upon readers a passive appreciation of a wondrous work of art, ethical romances potentially disorient and reorient their readers concerning some metaphysical insight hidden within the commonplace. They prompt readers to question what is real and what is true, and to ponder the wonder of life and the text of the self, there to detect what the reader might do in the art of his or her own life

The authors whose works Scheick discusses are Nathaniel Hawthorne, H. Rider Haggard, Henry James, C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne, H. G. Wells, John Kendrick Bangs, Gilbert K. Chesterton, Richard Harding Davis, Stephen Crane, Mary Austin, Jack London, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary Cholmondeley, and Rudyard Kipling. This wide selection expands the canon to include writers and works that highly merit re-reading by a new generation.

The Measure of Manliness is among the first books to focus on representations of disability in Victorian literature, showing that far from being marginalized or pathologized, disability was central to the narrative form of the mid-century novel. Mid-Victorian novels evidenced a proliferation of male characters with disabilities, a phenomenon that author Karen Bourrier sees as a response to the rise of a new Victorian culture of industry and vitality, and its corollary emphasis on a hardy, active manhood. The figure of the voluble, weak man was a necessary narrative complement to the silent, strong man. The disabled male embodied traditionally feminine virtues, softening the taciturn strong man, and eliciting emotional depths from his seemingly coarse muscular frame. Yet, the weak man was able to follow the strong man where female characters could not, to all-male arenas such as the warehouse and the public school. The analysis yokes together historical and narrative concerns, showing how developments in nineteenth-century masculinity led to a formal innovation in literature: the focalization or narration of the novel through the perspective of a weak or disabled man. The Measure of Manliness charts new territory in showing how feeling and loquacious bodies were increasingly seen as sick bodies throughout the nineteenth century. The book will appeal to those interested in disability studies, gender and masculinity studies, the theorization of sympathy and affect, the recovery of women’s writing and popular fiction, the history of medicine and technology, and queer theory.

"The Novel as Event brilliantly does two things: presents a strikingly new theory of the way novels have effect in the social world, and also presents original readings of five major Victorian novels as demonstrations of the way that theory may be exemplified in practice. No other book that I know of does either of these two things in at all the same way."
---J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine

"I have no doubt that this book will become an important part of a renewed questioning of a certain unchallenged historicism prevalent in Victorian novel studies from the beginning."
---Kevin McLaughlin, Brown University

The Novel as Event is a timely reconsideration of the historical role of the Victorian novel from the perspective of its performativity. In a highly original application of the work of Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, and other readers of J. L. Austin, Mario Ortiz Robles argues that the language of the novel is paramount and that the current emphasis on the representational and physical aspects of the novel tends to obscure this fact. He provides brilliant original readings of five major Victorian novels: Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, Brontë's Jane Eyre, George Eliot's Middlemarch, Thackeray's Vanity Fair, and Collins's The Woman in White, illustrating that it is impossible to fully grasp the cultural power of the novel, from its role in the cultivation of manners and the conduct of courtship to the consolidation of bourgeois ideology and the construction of the subject, without an adequate account of the performativity of its language. By considering the novel as a linguistic event, Ortiz Robles offers a new explanatory model for understanding how novels intervene materially in the reality they describe, and, in doing so, he seeks to reinvigorate critical debate on the historicity of the realist novel and current methods of cultural criticism. The Novel as Event serves as a well-timed corrective to the narrow historicist approach to the materiality of the novel that currently holds sway.

Mario Ortiz Robles is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Cover art: "Untitled page from Constance Sackville West Album." Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film.

Enriching and complicating the history of fiction between Richardson and Fielding at mid-century and Austen at the turn of the century, this collection focuses on it-narratives, a once popular form largely forgotten by readers and critics alike, and advances important work on consumer culture and the theory of things. The contributors bring new texts—and new ways of thinking about familiar ones—to our notice. Topics range from period debates about copyright to the complex relationships with object-riddled sentimental fictions, from anti-Semitism in Chrysal to jingoistic imperialism in The Adventures of a Rupee. Essays situate it-narratives in a variety of contexts: changing attitudes toward occult powers, the development of still-life painting, the ethical challenges of pet ownership, the cult of Sterne and the appearance of genre fiction, the emergence of moral-didactic children’s literature, and a better-known tradition of Victorian thing-narratives. Stylistically and thematically consistent, the essays in this collection approach it-narratives from various theoretical and historical vantage points, sketching the cultural biography of a neglected literary form.

Published by Bucknell University Press.
Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Like other poststructuralist theories, Lacanian theory has long been accused of being ahistorical. In The Subject of Modernism, Tony E. Jackson combines a uniquely graspable explanation of the Lacanian theory of the self with a series of detailed psychoanalytic interpretations of actual texts to offer a new kind of literary history.After exposing the seldom-discussed history of the self found in the work of Lacan, Jackson shows that the basic plot structure of realistic novels reveals an unconscious desire to preserve a certain kind of historically institutionalized self, but that the desire of realism to write the most real representation of reality steadily makes the self-preservation more difficult to sustain. Thus in following through on its own desire to prove the certainty of its being, realism eventually discovers its own impossibility. Jackson charts the resistances to and misrecognitions of this discovery as they are revealed in the changes of narrative form from Eliot's last, most ambitious novel, Daniel Deronda, through Conrad’s most modernist novels, Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, to Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves. He ends with an appended consideration of the ‘‘Cyclops’’ and ‘‘Nausicaa’’ chapters from Joyces’s Ulysses.While other critics have argued that realism structures a certain self and modernism undoes that self, they have not attempted a historical explanation of why this change should have occurred. Jackson reads the emergence of modernism as a kind of generic self-analysis of realism, analogous to the self-analysis performed by Freud: when realism discovers the significance of its own desire to write the most real representation of reality, it has, in that moment, become modernism. It has grasped its own nature and so fully becomes itself, for the first time, as modernism.

How did Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein give rise to the iconic green monster everyone knows today? In 1823, only five years after publication, Shelley herself saw the Creature come to life on stage, and this performance shaped the story’s future. Suddenly, thousands of people who had never read Shelley’s novel were participating in its cultural animation. Similarly, early adaptations magnified the reception and renown of all manner of nineteenth-century literary creations, from Byron and Keats to Dickens and Tennyson and beyond. Yet, until now, adaptation has been seen as a largely modern phenomenon.
 
In Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century, Lissette Lopez Szwydky convincingly historicizes the practice of adaptation, drawing on multiple disciplines to illustrate narrative mobility across time, culture, and geography. Case studies from stage plays, literature, painting, illustration, chapbooks, and toy theaters position adaptation as a central force in literary history that ensures continued cultural relevance, accessibility, and survival. The history of these forms helps to inform and put into context our contemporary obsessions with popular media. Finally, in upending a traditional understanding of canon by arguing that adaptation creates canon and not the other way around, Szwydky provides crucial bridges between nineteenth-century literary scholarship, adaptation studies, and media studies, thus identifying new stakes for all.