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Nature, Nostalgia, and the Countryside (Goldsmith, Gilpin, and Cobbett)

Author(s): Przemysław Uściński / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

In "The Song of the Earth", an ecocritical reading of numerous English writers of the countryside (Gilpin, Wordsworth, Austen and Hardy, among others), Jonathan Bate draws attention to the ambiguity of nostalgia, a feeling the implications of which entail both the idealization of the past and, Bates argues, the potentially valuable critique of the present. While focusing on Oliver Goldsmith’s influential poem “The Deserted Village” (1770) and its later resonance and reception, I refer also to such writers and thinkers as Crabbe and Cobbett, for whom the poetical meditation on the countryside compels an often wide-ranging political reflection on change and progress, on (human) nature as well as on politics and economy. I consider the ambivalence of nostalgia together with the notion of the picturesque as discussed by Gilpin. The fashionable “aesthetization” of the countryside in picturesque representations risks obliterating its historical transformations as discussed by Goldsmith. If nostalgic longing risks cancelling history by returning to the idealized past, the picturesque risks, in turn, erasing human labour by “naturalizing” itself as a mere framing of nature, or a mere adjustment of our perception of what is presumed to be already naturally present, but which may, in fact, be constructed through our nostalgic longing for such presence.

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Multiplying Unintelligibility: Joyce, Schizophrenia, Cities and Crime

Author(s): Jeremy Tambling / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

The attempt to ‘read’ the city and so to master it has been the subject of so much writing: Wordsworth, Blake, De Quincey, Dickens, Gissing, and Joyce being some examples from the ‘English’ tradition. But the modern city, unlike the village, or the country-setting, cannot be read, because it knows no inside or outside; its exterior harbours secrets as much as its interiors; put another way, the city allows no separation between the person who tries to understand it, and what is beheld: it allows no single-subject position to exist as the observer. This increasing failure, despite the attention given to conceptualising cities in such figures as Engels, or Georg Simmel, or Walter Benjamin, produces writing which may be considered as marked by a schizoid tendency, defining schizophrenia in terms of a loss of ego-boundaries, an inability to distinguish inside from outside, which may in turn be paranoiainducing. This article will move through several Romantic and nineteenth-century examples of such writing, focusing at last on James Joyce and Ulysses as texts which were in their own time thought of as schizophrenic, tending to the destruction of language as that which can distinguish inside and outside. What then is the relation of the city to schizophrenia? It is a question this article wishes to provoke.

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City and Irony: London’s Contradictions in Samuel Johnson’s London

Author(s): Przemysław Uściński / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

The article discusses Samuel Johnson’s early poem, London (1738), written in imitation of Juvenal’s Third Satire. It considers the trope of irony as employed in the poem within its imitative mode, examines the construction of the speaker in the poem and, in particular, Johnson’s satiric depiction of the eighteenth-century London as the place that intensifies contrasts and contradictions and hence defies attempts at clear definition. The poem is also placed in the broader tradition of eighteenth-century urban satire. More specifically, the article looks at Dr Johnson’s treatment of the disjunction between the moral and the economic that seems to define Britain’s capital for him. Consequently, his construction of Englishness in this piece appears to be outlined in direct contrast with his satiric representation of London’s cosmopolitan urban milieu, which Johnson tends to link with foreign influences as well as with chaos and corruption.

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Arnold Bennett’s Romance of the Suburbs

Author(s): Małgorzata Nitka / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

"A Man from the North" (1898), Arnold Bennett’s first novel, reflects, to a certain degree, the end-of-the-century shift in which, as Lynne Hapgood contends, suburbs rather than city constitute the narrative location and become a literary subject in its own right. The novel tells the story of Richard Larch who comes to London to attempt a literary career, for which he believes himself destined. He fails to accomplish the dream as he lacks both talent and commitment, while the dream itself turns out to be a piece of self-delusion. He turns out to be more suited to the regular and unimaginative life of a clerk and husband commuting to work from the suburbs. Even though this conclusion suggests that the suburban pattern of life may annihilate literary creativity, Bennett considers possibilities of their reconciliation. This paper seeks to examine the relationship between writing and suburbs as shown in the novel as well as to discuss larger, social and cultural, implications of the suburbs.

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City as a Nightmare: The Treatment of Urban Space in "The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" and Its Selected Visual Interpretations

Author(s): Anna Krawczyk-Łaskarzewska / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the 1886 novella by Robert Louis Stevenson, has inspired numerous interpretations and adaptations in visual and audio-visual media. While its popularity and cultural resonance should be ascribed first and foremost to the captivating portrayal of doctor Henry Jekyll and his evil alter ego, the setting of the controversial story merits attention as well, especially because it happens to be “integral to the situations played out within it” (Ridenhour 12). Presented as “a labyrinth of uncertain topography and confusing repetitions” (Dury 63), constantly transformed and distorted due to the intricate narratorial pattern, Stevenson’s London in Jekyll and Hyde remains an enigmatic, underwritten space and, therefore, a considerable challenge in terms of visual reimagining. From the point of view of the present article, of particular interest will be the work done by several artists who either provided illustrations for the novella or condensed its content into graphic novels. The common denominator for the examples selected is the representation of the city as a nightmare. Furthermore, as rendered by artists such as Charles Raymond Macauley, S. G. Hulme Beaman, Nestor Redondo, Thomas Van Der Linde, and Angela Barrett, the visualized “urbanscapes” function also as an extension of the narrators’ inner turmoil and a marker of the symbiotic, if toxic, relationship between the fictional characters and their (artificial) environment.

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From Britain’s Most Unloved Queen to the Favourite?

Author(s): Dorota Babilas / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

Compared with her eminent compatriots, Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria, Queen Anne appears to enjoy a very limited presence in popular culture. The recent Oscar-nominated film "The Favourite" (2018) directed by Yorgos Lanthimos may be perceived as an attempt to redress this situation. However, the director, known for his highly experimental earlier works, seems to be interested more in the symbolic and ironic cultural uses of the Queen, than in her real biography. The article attempts to explore the apparently sudden vindication and re-appreciation of Britain’s most unloved female monarch in the light of modern cultural issues, such as feminism and LGBT rights.

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The Possible Worlds of Oliphant and Eliot in "Miss Marjoribanks" and "Middlemarch"

Author(s): Ana Clara Birrento / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

In the introduction to "Miss Marjoribanks" [1866] 1969, Q. D. Leavis stated that Margaret Oliphant was the missing link between Jane Austen and George Eliot. Lucilla Marjoribanks was, in the critic’s words, the Victorian anti-heroine, insubordinate as far as her relationship to men is concerned, with a voracious appetite, and in opposition to the feminine ideal of a fragile submissive angel. Leavis argued that the novel carries an Oliphant tone in the honesty and realism, in the acknowledgement of the lack of idealism in life, constrained by conventions and prejudices. This is an opinion, I counterargue, that is underpinned by the theory of possible worlds. It was against these conventions and prejudices that George Eliot, wrote "Middlemarch" (1871) a few years later, representing Dorothea Brooke as a young woman both rational and ardent. This article analyses the modes in which the two novelists constructed respectively in "Miss Marjoribanks" and in "Middlemarch", possible worlds for women characters, discussing the relationship between the private and the public issues of culture and society, where Lucilla and Dorothea, living in those possible worlds, try to free themselves from Blake’s “mind-forged” social manacles.

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Saving Face

Author(s): Rebecca W. Boylan / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

In Thomas Hardy’s "A Pair of Blue Eyes", nature precipitates a drama in which female ingenuity and chivalry save the life of the cliff-clutching Henry Knight. Hardy narrates this in photographic impressions of disrupted realism: while Nature’s inversion both protects and threatens to destroy, a woman’s rescue of a man momentarily promises a new regard for the woman but eventually releases a torrent of destructive secrets and lies. This article contemplates Hardy’s regard for such inversions in nature – both human and atmospheric – to reflect on the novel’s preoccupation with gender identity. Borrowing from such scholars as Jonathan Crary, J. Hillis Miller, Mary Rimmer, and Timothy Hands, it observes the nineteenth-century transformation of human and natural forces as “inversions” that bring romantic confusions. Hardy’s sympathies suggest that inversion can actually preserve the fraught truths of both natural and human experiences.

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“In religion all roads have their obstacles”

Author(s): Grażyna Bystydzieńska / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

Newman’s first novel "Loss and Gain. The Story of a Convert" (1848) possesses some autobiographical elements. In this article the specific character of both conversions – of Newman and of Charles Reding, the protagonist of his novel – are discussed. Both conversions were the result of a rational, intellectual endeavour, although the emotional and irrational issues were frequently decisive. Oxford as the centre of the Oxford Movement was the setting of both conversions, which in both cases meant that the converts had to leave Oxford. "Loss and Gain" is also a response to the popular and numerous anti-Catholic arguments of the time, concerning, for instance, the Real Presence, the veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the saints and their relics, celibacy of the clergy, but also to the revival of Gothic architecture and Gregorian music in the liturgy of the Church of England. The article also discusses the poetics this spiritual Bildungsroman and its dialogical structure.

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“I saw the Man, that saw the Man, that said he saw this wondrous Sight”

Author(s): Paul Goring / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

The idea of the newspaper as a substitute eye working in the service of the reader, reflected in 18th-century titles, was predominant for most of the first two centuries of print-newspaper history. Newspapers were there to observe, and what they observed was primarily conveyed by the power of the printed word. Word-based forms of news reporting could also be ‘visual’, and this essay aims to expose the visual aspirations apparent in the work of early news writers. It does this by considering the newspaper reporting of the 1761 coronation of George III, which was a visually lavish public occasion that formed part of the ‘spectacular politics’ of the era. Although a mass public desire to see something unmediated can still be demonstrated, the newspapers also provided a critique of traditional spectatorship, pointing to the emerging power of the press.

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Dickens the Vagabond and the Tradition of Nightwalking

Author(s): Michael Hollington / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

In the context of the history of city streets by night, this essay explores the importance of Dickens’s night walking, when he sought inspiration for his writing in the London streets and their denizens, preferably in foul and dark weather, with sordid sights on display. Passages of Dickens’s novels which reflect this fascination are subjected to in-depth analysis which in particular draws attention to the centrality of the idea of the vagabond, and demonstrates the importance for Dickens of senses other than the visual – of hearing, odour, touch and even taste.

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“We must marry ’em”

Author(s): Sophia C. Jochem / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

Charles Dickens’s "Dombey and Son" (1846-8) represents a key reference point for Victorian gender studies, with critics focusing on the contrast between the ‘gender offender’ Edith and what Juliet John terms normative passivity on the part of the heroine Florence. This article addresses the question of whether marriage was really a happy ending for the women in Dickens’s novels, demonstrating that despite numerous weddings and marriages, "Dombey and Son" by no means presents matrimony as a solid foundation for happy unions and success in personal relations. Along with a vivisection of the marriage plot, there is speculation on what readers are expecting from the ending of a Dickens novel and concludes that weddings in "Dombey and Son" are not even “incisive beginnings”. As exemplified by the unions of Bunsby with Mrs. MacStinger, Florence with Walter, Cornelia Blimber with Mr. Feeder, B.A., and Susan Nipper with Toots, marriage is presented as a rather dusty tradition, and often a farce, not introducing the desired or expected change for the protagonists.

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The “(Un)fair Play” Method in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes Tales

Author(s): Joanna Kokot / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

It is already a commonplace that the style of reading assumed by classic detective fiction assumes the reader’s involvement in solving the puzzle, as the literary detective’s rival. This implies “the modern ‘fair play’ method”, as Dorothy Sayers calls it, consisting in supplying the reader with all the clues necessary to solve the riddle, concealing them at the same time so that their significance is not revealed too soon. However, one would seek the “fair play” method in Conan Doyle’s stories in vain. Watson, adopting the perspective of a participant of the events, reconstructs and reiterates in the process of telling his misinterpretations, omissions and blunders which he committed as a character of his stories. Hence Watson proves to be not only a naive narrator, but an unreliable one as well, making it impossible for the reader to act as a rightful rival to the detective. The article deals with the functions of this “unfair play” method.

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Progress and/as Utopia in James Hume Nisbet’s "The Great Secret: A Tale of To-morrow"

Author(s): Marta Komsta / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

Dedicated to “all those who, not quite satisfied with to-day, may be seeking after a happier to-morrow”, James Hume Nisbet’s "The Great Secret: A Tale of Tomorrow" (1895) stands out from the author’s predominantly adventure-oriented oeuvre as a work with a distinctly consolatory and didactic inclination, represented in the novel by the depiction of the afterlife as a utopian land of plenitude and comfort. This essay seeks thus to examine the relationship between the generic paradigm of utopia and the notion of progress, the latter contextualized in Nisbet’s novel with regard to the issues of scientific advancement and spiritual evolution. The author argues that by juxtaposing the dynamic spatio-temporal model of the post-mortem utopia with the implicitly dystopian depiction of late Victorian society, "The Great Secret" foregrounds the ideals of moral restoration and spiritual development as the foundations of a better future.

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Cultivating the Imagination

Author(s): Catherine Maxwell / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

The article examines a late Victorian concern about the accurate representation of flora in poetry of the period, demonstrating that poems which regard flowers and plants with studied attention are in a minority, and that poets usually use plants to serve their own interests, invoking flowers impressionistically for incidental atmospheric contribution or for symbolic or personal associations. It then goes on to explore poems by both male and female poets (principally Constance Naden, Laurence Binyon, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Katherine Bradley) that look attentively at plants and flowers, considering their interest is in the plant for the plant’s sake, and exposing ways in which the poetic self is represented in relation to the flower or plant.

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Dickens Writes Trauma

Author(s): Magdalena Pypeć / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

This article examines Dickens’s depiction of PTSD symptoms in connection with his country’s aggressive imperial actions. With a colonial other suffering from a pathological mental and emotional condition, the novel portrays colonialism as an inveterately traumatising phenomenon, the young Ceylonese’s trauma narrative being indicative of the collective race trauma afflicted on a larger community by colonial violence. Apart from portraying the traumatic inner landscape of his character, the novelist is equally engaged in offering ways of healing and recovery.

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1827: Real, Fictional, and Mythic Time in "The Pickwick Papers"

Author(s): Dominic Rainsford / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

The action of "The Pickwick Papers" begins in 1827, ten years before the novel was published. Quite how seriously we should take this date is debateable. In Chapter 2, Mr Jingle claims to have been present at the deposition of the Bourbons, which leads Dickens to issue a correction (of sorts) in a footnote to the 1847 edition: “A remarkable instance of the prophetic force of Mr Jingle’s imagination; this dialogue occurring in the year 1827, and the Revolution in 1830”. So, Dickens was not exactly scrupulous in setting up the novel’s original chronology, and may have thought that being so would have been slightly absurd (a kind of Pickwickian pedantry). Nevertheless, he does eventually spot the mistake with the Bourbons, and draws attention to it. And there are reasons for thinking that, in some ways, he may have been deeply invested in 1827 as the opening year. To be precise, "Pickwick" begins in May of that year, a month that Dickens will have vividly recalled, as it was then, as a 15-year-old office boy in Gray’s Inn, that he began his white-collar career. In fact, it is by no means impossible that May 12th, 1827, the day on which Mr Pickwick delivers his epoch-making paper on ponds and ‘tittlebats’, may have been the very day (in the real world) on which young Charles began work. Taking its starting point from a range of internal and external hints, forms of evidence, and loose ends, such as these, this article anatomises the dating of "Pickwick" in terms of Dickens’s personal history; his sense of the social and political specifics of the 1820s; the amateur antiquarianism that is satirised within the novel; and its fictional placement in a literary no-man’s-land between Romanticism and the Victorian.

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Political Plotters or Puppets?

Author(s): Katarzyna Strzyżowska / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

Indisputably, 18th century English society was male-dominated and male-oriented. The fundamental justification for the subjection of women was found in the Bible, and allowing women to make individual decisions or hold public offices was considered irrational. However, the situation had to be re-examined when Queen Anne came to the throne and often sought other women’s advice on issues which were to change the fate of the country. Examining a number of texts by contemporary men of letters who commented extensively on current political questions, helps to formulate conclusions on whether the women closest to the throne were personally and consciously interested in shaping the political arena, or were simply manipulated by politicians who chose to exploit their female naivety and folly.

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The Semiotics of the Gothic Country House in Jane Austen’s "Northanger Abbey"

Author(s): Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

The article discusses the semiotics of the gothic setting in Jane Austen’s "Northanger Abbey". It argues that the novel’s dialogic form juxtaposes contrasting genres and codes constructing a multi-layered and vibrant dialogue between the realistic and the fantastic modes of the novel.

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Figures of Hypocrisy

Author(s): Przemysław Uściński / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

In Charles Dickens’s "Hard Times" (1854), the discourse of facts and figures is exposed as a mask of narrow-minded utilitarianism that promotes a morality blind to anything but statistical data. Parody and multi-layered irony allow Dickens to expose such reductive logic as hypocritical, demonstrating how the novel’s villains discredit charity and pity as unsound only to replace them with a pseudo-scientific reverence for practicality. This article examines the textual devices through which Dickens exposes such hypocrisy, also by looking at the intertextual references in the novel and some earlier satirical writings about hypocrisy, which often link this vice with pity (as William Blake so frequently does), and with the response to poverty (as in the case of, for instance, Henry Fielding and Percy Bysshe Shelley). It also discusses the aesthetics of the novel in terms of its use of metonymy and allegory, which help Dickens to build a grim, fable-like narrative that challenges the reductive worship of utility and appreciates the value of kindness and compassion.

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