Helen Brookman on Gail Marshall’s Shakespeare and Victorian Women (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2009) and Clare Broome Saunders’sWomen Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). To read the full review, visit http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=3&spage=402. Gavin Budge on Mary Poovey’s Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, IL: Chicago UP, 2008). To read the full review, visit http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=3&spage=406. Grace Moore on Radhika Mohanram’s Imperial White: Race, Diaspora and the British Empire (Minneapolis, MN: University
Read moreTag: JVC Issue 15.3
Kathryn Hughes, ‘Dickens World and Dickens’s World’
Dickens World opened at Chatham Maritime Docks in May 2007 and it almost immediately met with widespread criticism. Dickens World, emphasize its owners, is an ‘attraction’ and not a theme park. Given that once-aloof museums are increasingly employing the interactive strategies of the theme park, it seems entirely reasonable that a commercial ‘attraction’ such as Dickens World might in turn wish to annex some of the curatorial rigour of the museum. For what strikes you as you walk through Dickens
Read moreSarah Wah, ”The Most Churlish of Celebrities’: George Eliot, John Cross and the Question of High Status’
Published in 1885, John Cross’s biography of his late wife, George Eliot’s Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals, was written with the intention to ‘make known the woman as well as the author’. Yet, ironically, the biography is renowned precisely for the lack of insight it affords readers into the private life of George Eliot. Why did Cross make a promise that he could not keep? In JVC 15.3, Sarah Wah seeks to answer this question by examining
Read moreKatherine Inglis, ‘Ophthalmoscopy in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette’
In JVC 15.3, Katherine Inglis re-examines the representation of scopic conflict and discipline in Charlotte Brontë’s novel, Villette (1853), within the context of the reconfiguration of the eye during the 1850s. Villette is pioneering in its representation of an ophthalmoscopic conception of the eye, as an organ which could be looked into by medical practitioners as well as looked at. This notion of the eye was only possible after Hermann von Helmholtz’s invention of the ophthalmoscope in 1850. Villette is
Read morePhyllis Weliver, ‘Oscar Wilde, Music, and the “Opium-Tainted Cigarette”: Disinterested Dandies and Critical Play’
In her recent article in JVC 15.3, Phyllis Weliver reveals how the dandy’s languorous posture, aesthetic writing style, opium smoking, and musical repertoire interact in Oscar Wilde’s literature and criticism. Examining The Picture of Dorian Gray as well as ‘The Critic as Artist’ and The Importance of Being Earnest draws into focus how each of Wilde’s works is organized to create complicated relationships among this grouping, all of which belong to dandyish characters. The essay begins with a discussion of
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