Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

259 Pages·2012·4.891 MB·English

by  Katharina Boehm (eds.)

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture
General Editor:Joseph Bristow, Professor of English, UCLA
Editorial Advisory Board:Hilary Fraser, Birkbeck College, University of London; Josephine
McDonagh, King’s College, London; Yopie Prins, University of Michigan;Lindsay Smith,
University of Sussex; Margaret D. Stetz, University of Delaware; Jenny Bourne Taylor,
University of Sussex
Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a new monograph series that
aims to represent the most innovative research on literary works that were produced in the
English-speaking world from the time of the Napoleonic Wars to the fin-de-siècle. Attentive
to the historical continuities between ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’, the series will feature stud-
ies that help scholarship to reassess the meaning of these terms during a century marked
by diverse cultural, literary, and political movements. The main aim of the series is to look
at the increasing influence of types of historicism on our understanding of literary forms
and genres. It reflects the shift from critical theory to cultural history that has affected not
only the period 1800–1900 but also every field within the discipline of English literature. All
titles in the series seek to offer fresh critical perspectives and challenging readings of both
canonical and non-canonical writings of this era.
Titles include:
Eitan Bar-Yosef and Nadia Valman (editors)
‘THE JEW’ IN LATE-VICTORIAN AND EDWARDIAN CULTURE
Between the East End and East Africa
Heike Bauer
ENGLISH LITERARY SEXOLOGY
Translations of Inversions, 1860–1930
Katharina Boehm (editorr)
BODIES AND THINGS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Luisa Calè and Patrizia Di Bello (editors)
ILLUSTRATIONS, OPTICS AND OBJECTS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY
LITERARY AND VISUAL CULTURES
Deirdre Coleman and Hilary Fester (editors)
MINDS, BODIES, MACHINES, 1770–1930
Colette Colligan
THE TRAFFIC IN OBSCENITY FROM BYRON TO BEARDSLEY
Sexuality and Exoticism in Nineteenth-Century Print Culture
Eleanor Courtemanche
THE ‘INVISIBLE HAND’ AND BRITISH FICTION, 1818–1860
Adam Smith, Political Economy, and the Genre of Realism
Stefano Evangelista
BRITISH AESTHETICISM AND ANCIENT GREECE
Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile
Margot Finn, Michael Lobban and Jenny Bourne Taylor (editors)
LEGITIMACY AND ILLEGITIMACY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LAW,
LITERATURE AND HISTORY
John Gardner
POETRY AND POPULAR PROTEST
Peterloo, Cato Street and the Queen Caroline Controversy
F. Gray (editorr)
WOMEN IN JOURNALISM AT THE FIN DE SIÈCLE
‘Making a Name for Herself’
Yvonne Ivory
THE HOMOSEXUAL REVIVAL OF RENAISSANCE STYLE, 1850–1930
Colin Jones, Josephine McDonagh and Jon Mee (editors)
CHARLES DICKENS, A TALE OF TWO CITIES AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
Kirsten MacLeod
FICTIONS OF BRITISH DECADENCE
High Art, Popular Writing and theFin de Siècle
Diana Maltz
BRITISH AESTHETICISM AND THE URBAN WORKING CLASSES, 1870–1900
Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (editors)
VERNON LEE
Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics
Muireann O’Cinneide
ARISTOCRATIC WOMEN AND THE LITERARY NATION, 1832–1867
David Payne
THE REENCHANTMENT OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot and Serialization
Julia Reid
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, SCIENCE, AND THEFIN DE SIÈCLE
Virginia Richter
LITERATURE AFTER DARWIN
Human Beasts in Western Fiction 1859–1939
Deborah Shapple Spillman
BRITISH COLONIAL REALISM IN AFRICA
Inalienable Objects, Contested Domains
Anne Stiles (editorr)
NEUROLOGY AND LITERATURE, 1860–1920
Caroline Sumpter
THE VICTORIAN PRESS AND THE FAIRY TALE
Sara Thornton
ADVERTISING, SUBJECTIVITY AND THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL
Dickens, Balzac and the Language of the Walls
Ana Parejo Vadillo
WOMEN POETS AND URBAN AESTHETICISM
Passengers of Modernity
Phyllis Weliver
THE MUSICAL CROWD IN ENGLISH FICTION, 1840–1910
Class, Culture and Nation
Paul Young
GLOBALIZATION AND THE GREAT EXHIBITION
The Victorian New World Order
Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture
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Bodies and Things in
Nineteenth-Century
Literature and Culture
Edited by
Katharina Boehm
University of Regensburg, Germany
Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Katharina Boehm 2012
Individual chapters © contributors 2012
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-36938-2
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Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Acknowledgements viii
Notes on Contributors ix
1 Introduction: Bodies and Things 1
Katharina Boehm
2 Bodily Things and Thingly Bodies: Circumventing
the Subject–Object Binary 17
Isobel Armstrong
Part I Spaces
3 ‘The end of all the privacy and propriety’:
Fanny’s Dressing Room inMansfield Park 45
Kirstyn Leuner
4 Modes of Wearing the Towel: Masculinity, Insanity,
and Clothing in Trollope’s ‘The Turkish Bath’ 66
Catherine Spooner
5 Travellers’ Bodies and Pregnant Things:
Victorian Women in Imperial Conflict Zones 84
Muireann O’Cinneide
Part II Practices
6 Albums, Belongings, and Embodying the Feminine 107
Samantha Matthews
7 ‘Books in my Hands – Books in my Heart –
Books in my Brain’: Bibliomania, the Male Body,
and Sensory Erotics in Late-Victorian Literature 130
Victoria Mills
8 Collecting and the Body in Late-Victorian and
Edwardian Museums 153
Kate Hill
v
vi Contents
Part III Performances
9 Aesthetic Woman: The ‘Fearful Consequence’
of ‘Living Up’ to One’s Antiques 177
Anne Anderson
10 The Difference an Object Makes: Conscious Automaton
Theory and the Decadent Cult of Artifice 197
Stefania Forlini
Part IV Epilogue
11 The Bodies of Things 221
Bill Brown
Bibliography 229
Index 249
List of Illustrations
2.1 Ice pail, Great Exhibition 1851, illustrated in
theOfficial Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of
the Great Exhibition. 29
2.2 Bowl, Great Exhibition 1851, illustrated in the
Art JournalIllustrated Cataloguefrom George Palmer
Blake (ed.),The Great Exhibition: A Facsimile of the
Illustrated Catalogue of London’s Crystal Palace
Exposition (permission pending). 30
4.1 George Du Maurier, ‘At the Turkish Bath’, Punch,
26 May 1866. Courtesy of Malcolm Shifrin. 67
6.1 Lock of hair, Edith May Southey Album,
Bristol Central Library, SR91, fol. 68. 108
8.1 ‘The Franklin Relics’, Illustrated London News,
4 November 1854. 161
8.2 A melia B. Edwards, ‘Digging for Mummies’,
from Amelia B. Edwards, A Thousand Miles up
the Nile (1890). Image from Travellers in the
Middle East Archive (TIMEA). 162
9.1 ‘ The Two Ideals’, Punch, 13 September 1879. 179
9.2 G eorge Du Maurier, ‘Acute Chinamania’,
Punch’s Almanack for 1875. 186
10.1 Gustave Vichy, Lune fin-de-siècle. Musée de
Louvain-la-Neuve. Donation M. Boyadjian.
Photography J.-P. Bougnet © UCL-Musée de
Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium). Courtesy of
Jean-Pierre Bougnet and François Degouys from
the Musée de Louvain-la-Neuve. 198
vii
Acknowledgements
The idea for this volume, and some of the essays in it, evolved out of the
conference ‘Bodies and Things: Victorian Literature and the Matter of
Culture’ which I co-organized at the University of Oxford in September
2008. I would like to thank my co-organizer, Rosemary Tate, who was
also involved in the early stages of assembling this collection, and eve-
rybody who participated in the conference.
Joe Bristow has been an exceptionally helpful, perceptive, and scru-
pulous editor. I am very grateful to Paula Kennedy and Ben Doyle for
their advice and assistance in putting together the collection, and to Jo
North for her copy-editing expertise.
Thanks are also due to Alina Nagel and Anna Hench for their help in
preparing the manuscript for publication.
The editor and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission gran-
ted to reproduce the copyright material in this book. Every effort has
been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission
for the use of copyright material. Many thanks to Malcolm Shifrin for
granting permission to use his image of George Du Maurier’s ‘At the
Turkish Bath’ and to Jean-Pierre Bougnet and François Degouys from
the Musée de Louvain-la-Neuve for granting permission to use their
image of Gustave de Vichy’s Lune fin-de-siècle. Any omissions or correc-
tions in terms of copyright will gladly be incorporated in future reprints
of this volume.
viii
Notes on Contributors
Anne Anderson was Senior Lecturer in the History of Art and Design
at Southampton Solent University from 1993 to 2007. Her academic
papers have appeared in the Journal of Design History,Victorian Literature
and Culture, History of Education, Popular Narrative Media, and Women’s
History Review. She contributed papers to Material Cultures, 1740–1920:
The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting (2009), Rethinking the Interior
c.1867–1896: Aestheticism and the Arts and Crafts (2010), and Fashion,
Interior Design and the Contours of Modern Identityy(2010).
Isobel Armstrongg is a fellow of the British Academy and Emeritus
Professor of English (Geoffrey Tillotson Chair) at Birkbeck College,
University of London. She has published widely on nineteenth-century
literature and culture and feminist thought. She has lectured and taught
in many contexts, including Harvard and Johns Hopkins University.
Among her works are a critical history of Victorian poetry (1993) and
a co-edited anthology of nineteenth-century women’s poetry (1996).
Her most recent book, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the
Imagination 1830–1880, won the Modern Language Association’s James
Russell Lowell Prize for the best book of 2008. Poems by her appeared
in Shearsman’s anthology of poetry by women, edited by Carrie Etter,
Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by U.K. Women Poets (2010).
Katharina Boehm is Assistant Professor in English Literature at the
University of Regensburg, Germany, and a visiting research fellow at
the English Department of Rutgers University. She is co-editor of the
essay collection Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Ageing in N ineteenth-
Century Culture (forthcoming). Her work has been published in
Victorian Review, Studies in the Novel, and Journal of Victorian Culture.
She is a founding editor of the online journalVictorian Network.She is
currently completing a monograph on Dickens, popular science, and
childhood.
Bill Brown is Karla Scherer Distinguished Service Professor in American
Culture at the University of Chicago. He has published widely on thing
theory, American literature, and popular literary genres. He is the author
of A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (2003), of a
special issue of Critical Inquiry, entitled ‘Things’ (2001), of The Material
ix