Italian Refractions of the Victorian Gothic: Matilde Serao’s Fragmented Human Subject

In a compelling exploration of interdisciplinarity, the Victorianist Kelly Hurley examines the influence of nineteenth-century science on contemporaneous literary developments. Hurley argues that radical developments in a range of fields dislodged a comfortable anthropocentrism, which in turn asked uneasy questions of humans’ self-assigned transcendency within the natural order: The new discoveries in the geological and biological sciences required a radical rethinking of humanity’s position relative to its environment: its intimate relation to lower species; the role of the mere individual

Read more

Ashley Cook, Germany and the British fin de siècle

As well as researching and teaching the fin de siècle, I have been finding time to wander around the German university town I am currently living in. Looking at all the beautiful historic architecture – which includes many nineteenth-century buildings and statues – has made me aware of how relatively alien it all is. As a scholar born and raised in the UK, I am used to looking up at the Victoria and Albert Museum to see the fin de

Read more

Ashley Cook, The Curious Case of the New Woman Chutney

Ashley Cook completed her PhD at the University of Otago, New Zealand on late-Victorian fairy tales. She is now guest lecturer and post-doctoral researcher in English at the University of Tuebingen, Germany. Her research interests include women’s writing, experiences and understandings of time and temporality, gender and genre fiction. In her increasingly elusive spare time, she enjoys extolling the virtues of children’s fiction, running, and attempting to reproduce (with varying amounts of success) cakes from the Great British Bake Off.

Read more

Sarah Parker, ‘Dressed to Impress: Fashioning the Woman Poet’

By Sarah Parker The idea for my recent article ‘Fashioning Michael Field: Michael Field and Late-Victorian Dress Culture’ originated with a trip to ‘The Cult of Beauty’ exhibition at the V&A in Spring 2011.  Among the walls crowded with Pre-Raphaelite paintings and cabinets filled with intricate, hand-bound volumes, visitors were also able to view numerous examples of male and female aesthetic dress, including a sunflower-print robe and puffed-sleeve artistic tea gowns, many of which originated from Liberty & Co. Viewing

Read more

Encountering the Fin-de-Siècle: Utilising Archives for Undergraduate Teaching

Dr Sarah Parker (University of Birmingham) Never judge a book by its cover. Clearly the late-Victorians didn’t hold much by this adage, or we would not have inherited so many stunning examples of book design from the fin-de-siècle period. As critics such as Nicholas Frankel and Joseph Bristow have emphasised, one of the central goals of the aesthetic and decadent movements was to produce the ‘beautiful book’ as an objet d’art in its own right. John Gray’s Silverpoints (1893), for

Read more