George Eliot’s novels are amongst the first that come to mind when Henry James’s description of Victorian novels as ‘large loose baggy monsters’ is invoked. For many critics, the length of Eliot’s fiction, compounded by their months-long publication, raises questions about narrative poetics—how duration, tone, and the relation of narrative to description shape the rhythm of a reader’s experience. This chapter considers how the changeable rhythms of Eliot’s prose reflect her grasp of lived experience as a sequential unpacking of events one after another—and also as part of an overarching pattern that sardonic fate, or a meticulous author, holds in her hand. Rhythmic regularity—its iterability, repetition, and predictability—is both a mainstay of Eliot’s aesthetic and a counterpoint to the messy staccato of onrushing actuality that requires representation. Roland Barthes’s concept of idiorrhythmy may offer a new way into Eliot’s narrative poetics.

Abstract What makes readers fall in love? You might want to start your answer by explaining Ursula Le Guin. She sets readers adrift among worlds: peripatetic but somehow at home. Somehow, she sublimely mixes comfort with revelatory, emancipatory unsettlement. Small wonder that she has inspired later speculative writers, among them Neil Gaiman, Kim Stanley Robinson, N. K. Jemisin. Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea aims to do justice to both Le Guin’s passionate simplicity and her revenant complexity. It also makes the case for the boldness and coldness of the often-overlooked later three books of Earthsea. In Tehanu, Tales from Earthsea, The Other Wind (written decades after A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore were published between 1968 and 1972) she turned a cold eye, a dragon’s searching eye, back on the comfortable green world she herself had made decades earlier. They unfold a distinctive vision of the writer’s task: world-building as responsibility, plus openness. Call it invitational realism. She builds a world that leaves the real task of building, of creating, of imagining, and of reimagining, with her readers. Drawing on my own crooked path—from a DC childhood to teaching in Prague to San Francisco journalism to graduate school and then parenthood—Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea maps the ways that readers young and old find in Earthsea a kind of scholar’s stone, a delightfully mutable surface that rewards recurrent contemplation.

Book Review| September 01 2023 Review: Notework: Victorian Literature and Nonlinear Style, by Simon Reader Simon Reader, Notework: Victorian Literature and Nonlinear Style. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021. Pp. ix + 230. $70. John Plotz John Plotz Brandeis University John Plotz is a Professor of English at Brandeis University. He is the author of several books on Victorian and contemporary literature and culture, including The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics (University of California Press, 2000); Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton University Press, 2008); Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience Since Dickens (Princeton University Press, 2017); and Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea: My Reading (Oxford University Press, 2023). plotz@brandeis.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar plotz@brandeis.edu Nineteenth-Century Literature (2023) 78 (2): 164–168. https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2023.78.2.164 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation John Plotz; Review: Notework: Victorian Literature and Nonlinear Style, by Simon Reader. Nineteenth-Century Literature 1 September 2023; 78 (2): 164–168. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2023.78.2.164 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search Once a writer is proclaimed an author, Foucault famously argued, we (especially we scholars) start asking what exactly among their writings counts as a “work.” A diary? A letter? How about a shopping list? Our grounds for classification are not always clear, even to ourselves. Squarely in the gray zone, writer’s notes and notebooks—cached in diaries or in journals, typed like Samuel Butler’s, or scrawled like Darwin’s—are the subject of Simon Reader’s deep and thought-provoking first book. Although Reader does not explore what readers might make of similar notes and notebooks without a canonized author attached, that may make for a revealing complementary test-case. Because “the mainstream of the discipline is not equipped with intricate ways of describing notes and notebooks as literary art,” Reader proposes to fill the void with “a simple argument: the writer’s notebook encloses a genre equal in importance to the novel, poem, drama, or... You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviewed by: The Masses are Revolting: Victorian Culture and the Political Aesthetics of Disgust by Zachary Samalin John Plotz (bio) The Masses are Revolting: Victorian Culture and the Political Aesthetics of Disgust, by Zachary Samalin; pp. xi + 325. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2021, $42.95, $27.99 ebook. The Masses are Revolting: Victorian Culture and the Political Aesthetics of Disgust pinpoints crucial moments when public sentiment and governmental action were shaped not by Enlightenment reason but by “the Victorian structure of unwanted feeling” (12). From its opening pages, Zachary Samalin makes sure that readers feel what they perhaps already knew from the pages of Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew: the streets that pulse with people like mud, the street refuse that takes on a putrefying loathsome liquidity, and even the turbid Thames itself, which during the Great Stink of 1858 no longer flowed but reeked, so clogged and fecal had it become. Crucial to his study is the sort of disgust such sights and smells engendered. The city that should have epitomized the greatest contrast to the peripheral and primitive world that Great Britain meant to rule instead incarnates all that is disgusting about the human body and its aftereffects: the empire’s heart is rotten. The book’s five complex and wide-ranging chapters cover aesthetic theory from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing to Jacques Rancière, biology, social sciences of the Durkheimian and Freudian variety, and the legal [End Page 724] history of obscenity; these chapters are accompanied by a wittily titled introduction, “Of Origins and Orifices,” and conclusion, “Horizons of Expectorations.” This stimulating and thought-provoking anatomy of nineteenth-century British thinking about disgust navigates the historical pathway that Samalin sees leading “from the Aesthetics of Disgust to the Psychoanalysis of Repulsion” (21). At its heart is a four-year period that Samalin sees as home to a crucial volta: 1857 to 1860. It was then that, “rather than seeing their disgust as an individuating and subjective experience, Victorians understood it to articulate something public and shared, a reflexive sense that a cultural or a civilizational threshold had been transgressed” (20). The Masses Are Revolting concludes with a far-ranging yet acute account of its aims: “This discourse of disgust was not merely a characteristic feature of Victorian society’s sense of its own civilization, but a productive force motivating social transformation; not merely an idiom for demanding or decrying change, but a medium of such changes in its own right.” Samalin notes that “describing this productivity has entailed tracking down the minute, counterintuitive ways that the regulation of an appeal to unwanted emotion were installed at the heart of the historical processes that have been more insistently described in terms of rationality and rationalization” (241). Samalin’s crucial question can be paraphrased: is disgust a marker of distinction (my revulsion proves my civility) or is it itself a contaminating stain (to be disgusted means to be immersed in a life that is innately disgusting)? Samalin’s discussion of the way notions of disgust were batted about and transformed in the Victorian era is expansive, ambitious, and delightfully erudite: I took masses of notes, underlined many wonderful phrases, and left feeling deeply informed about its chosen topics. Worth singling out for special praise is a chapter about disgust in Charles Darwin’s writings, delightfully unexpected in its revelations. Samalin acutely and persuasively analyzes the significance of Darwin’s insisting that involuntary vomiting in humans developed from an earlier capacity among other primates to vomit voluntarily. Samalin perceives in this Darwin’s commitment to an idea of biosemiosis (sign systems other than language) that confirms disgust as part of a communicative system among other animals even though it has now become an involuntary response to disgusting food among humans. Samalin makes two historical arguments about his anatomy of evolving theories of disgust. One is that the period between 1857 and 1860 is a signal turning-point in this history of the changed ideology of disgust—for reasons relating to the 1858 Great Stink, as well as to Darwin, Karl Marx, and other luminaries whose thoughts rapidly changed in just that short period. The other claim is more implicit...

This chapter explores some of the ways that the tangibility, resonance, and the nonhuman aspects of William Morris's invented worlds became part of the DNA of fantasy's current worldwide ascendancy. Ideas about the nonhuman that persist in modern-day fantasy and speculative fiction are more shaped by William Morris's response to the Darwinian climate than is immediately apparent—albeit in some indirect and often counterintuitive ways. Faced with the challenge of how to think about a nonhuman world that undermines, or at least surrounds, the realm of seemingly autonomous human purposiveness, Morris's prose romances imagine a world in which the activity of characters accommodates and responds to its nonhuman surroundings. The infinitude of hope available in Morris's romances stems from his depiction of a world that refuses the idea of gaps between one character's conception of the world and another's.

Abstract:Robert Browning's "Beatrice Signorini" (1889) is a verse story about a love affair between two Baroque painters: Francesco Romanelli and Artemisia Gentileschi. The poem's drama comes from an art historian's falsehood that Romanelli and Gentileschi had been lovers and artistic collaborators and that Romanelli's wife Beatrice had taken revenge on his portrait of Artemisia. What makes this poem different from Browning's other dramatic monologues is that two women are important speakers: the title character and Gentileschi, who is famous for the graphic violence in the painting Judith Beheading Holofernes (c. 1620) located in the Uffizi Gallery. I argue that Browning's poem engages in a critique of art history's misogyny toward talented women. Equally important, Browning and his eighteenth-century source wrongly attribute sexual promiscuity to Gentileschi, who never had an affair with Romanelli. Thus, while Beatrice's anger raises the specter of Judith as she destroys her husband's portrait, the title character also anticipates #MeToo feminism's protest over the misinformation and sexual peril that women artists continue to face.

Reviewed by: The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel: John Williams by Charles J. Shields John Plotz Charles J. Shields, The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel: John Williams, Stoner, and the Writing Life. Austin: U of Texas P, 2018. 320 pp. Cloth, $29.95. I find it touching how many forms the love for John Williams takes. For a reclusive Texan who spent most of his career toiling in obscurity at the University of Denver, he cut a wide swath in his work and tickled many different fancies. I'd walk all day across arid desert or downtown Manhattan for his 1960 anti-Western, Butcher's Crossing, and I even admire his hermetic, cautious poetry. There were enough passionate devotees of the puckered stoicism of his 1972 Augustus that it shared a National Book Award with John Barth's Chimera. Still, in recent years it is certainly John Williams's 1965 Stoner that has garnered the most admirers—as well as a condemnatory jeremiad from Elaine Showalter, who worries about its take on gender, sexuality, and disability. There have been at least two reissues, not to mention Mark Asquith's 2017 Reading the Novels of John Williams and Steve Almond's William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life (2019). It is unquestionably a tribute to Williams's ability that Stoner, about the quiet and miserable life of a farm boy who falls in love with poetry and "rises" into a miserable life as an overlooked English professor at the University of Missouri, has in recent decades become the sort of book that people adore, give to their friends, fiercely identify with, and dub "the perfect novel." And full credit to Charles Shields for going behind the scenes to fill in the picture of Williams's own—somewhat similarly miserable—life. Shields is astute on the relationship between Stoner's difficulties and Williams's own misery, his fear of obscurity, his drinking and smoking, and, as one might predict of a man four times married, his cheating. I loved the etched account of Williams's Texas childhood: born John Edward Jewell in 1921, he was renamed Williams through his mother's second marriage, after his father disappeared into the West: family stories claimed his father was murdered in romantic circumstances, but Shields unearthed a newspaper article suggesting he remarried fifty miles away in 1942. Similarly valuable are [End Page 331] the vivid details Shields gleans from Williams's wartime service in India, even while debunking some of the later whoppers Williams himself told. There is also a welcome acuity to Shields's chronicle of the various thoroughly unromantic academic battles Williams fought as he tried to navigate between his wish to gain renown for his writing and the duties of teaching, scholarship, and editing that demanded precious time. There are some details about the corners Williams cut in his lecturing, but the crucial early story is of Williams's one foray into editing, a 1962 anthology, English Renaissance Poetry, which infuriated one of Williams's heroes, Yvor Winters. (To Williams, the anthology was a tribute to the canon and taste of Winters; to Winters it was simple plagiarism.) He seems to have been unhappy and not well-liked at Denver, given to litanies and rants, often drunken ones; Shields also reports his antipathy to "Thoreau, Whitman, Emerson, transcendentalism, Brook Farm, arts and crafts and communes" (206). Perhaps the crucial note about Williams's personal inflexibility is Shields's revealing interview with the feminist scholar Peggy Mcintosh. Briefly his Denver colleague in 1969, she "was afraid of him" because "he was so dour and resentful of women coming into men's territory" (204). Such unhappy aspects of Williams's character notwithstanding, Shields sheds useful light on his distrust of the "chaos of experience" (160) that struck him as the essence of novels by Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. By contrast, Williams admired the novels of Willa Cather, and especially her campus novel, The Professor's House (1925). Shields discovered in the Williams papers a 1966 note to a student that may explain that admiration: success in writing, he discloses, involves a novel's "moving primarily upon that level on...

Historians of social science from Anthony Giddens forward have ably chronicled Erving Goffman's legacy. Goffman's resonant book titles alone hint at the Dickensian acuity of his social close-reading: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956), Behavior in Public Places (1963), Interaction Ritual (1967), Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (1974), and Forms of Talk (1981). I envy newcomers the opportunity to read pieces like “On Cooling the Mark Out” (1952) and “Where the Action Is” (1967) with fresh eyes. Goffman, born in 1922 in Alberta, Canada, to Ukrainian parents, attended the University of Manitoba and the University of Toronto before receiving a PhD in sociology from Chicago. His fieldwork was in the Shetlands, and Asylums: Essays on the Condition of the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (1961) and Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963) were both written after a period of ethnographic immersion at St. Elizabeth's mental hospital in Washington, DC. It may help first-time readers to know that as an adolescent he had a “special aptitude for noticing details of people's interpersonal conduct”; also that “his Chicago classmates nicknamed him ‘the little dagger’ because of his talent for the pointed personal comment. Sometimes, they felt, he never knew when to stop.”

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