Project MUSE®: English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/361
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920.daily12024-03-28T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (1957) - vol. 63 (2020)Latest Articles: English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920TWOProject MUSE®English Literature in Transition, 1880-19201559-27150013-8339Latest articles in English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Stanley Weintraub, 1929–2019
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/751269
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HE WAS "STAN" to his friends and colleagues all over the world, and both came to understand directly his broad and deep knowledge of not only nineteenth-century British literature and history but the twentieth as well. He was an acute literary critic, a superb biographer, and an engaging historian. I once joked with him that he could craft a narrative from The Yellow Pages. He replied: "Not now. The Yellow Pages are gone."Stan supported Hal Gerber's hopes for English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 from the late 1970s forward. When I became editor in 1983, he continued that support with thoughtful counsel, always willing to read an essay submitted and offer detailed analysis. I depended on him for thirty-six
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-28T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/361/image/coversmallStanley Weintraub, 1929–20192020-03-16text/htmlen-USStanley Weintraub, 1929–20192020-03-162020TWOProject MUSE®42162024-03-28T00:00:00-05:002020-03-16Reggie Turner, Forgotten Edwardian Novelist
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/751270
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"Reggie Turner, Forgotten Edwardian Novelist" was published in ELT, 48.1 (2005), 3–37, much expanded from Chapter 6 in Reggie. A Portrait of Reginald Turner (New York: George Braziller, 1965). My last communication with Stanley Weintraub was about reprinting this article. I print this revised version in fond remembrance of Stan.It is one of my favorites because he tells a winning story about Turner's life and writing, spiced with Stan's irony and wit. Reggie's novels are mined in the spirit of ELT's founding: reconsidering and appreciating a "minor" writer's strengths and acknowledging the flaws.THE TWELVE NOVELS Reginald Turner (1869–1938) published between 1901 and 1911 are among the least known of the Edwardian
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-28T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/361/image/coversmallReggie Turner, Forgotten Edwardian Novelist2020-03-16text/htmlen-USReggie Turner, Forgotten Edwardian Novelist2020-03-162020TWOProject MUSE®1043632024-03-28T00:00:00-05:002020-03-16Joseph Conrad and the Knitting Machine
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/751271
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WHILE JOSEPH CONRAD was writing a letter to his friend R. B. Cunninghame Graham on 20 December 1897, the image of a knitting machine came to his mind. The object of this article is to ask: why a knitting machine?Cunninghame Graham was a politician, author, and adventurer. Like Conrad, he was a man of global experience, but unlike him he was a political idealist who laboured to put his revolutionary ideals into action. In the letter, Conrad teased Graham for his romantic optimism and socialist utopianism, telling him that human beings exist in a cosmos sublimely indifferent to their fate, set up for some inscrutable purpose that has nothing in the least to do with them. But in the depths of this bleak vision, comedy
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-28T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/361/image/coversmallJoseph Conrad and the Knitting Machine2020-03-16text/htmlen-USJoseph Conrad and the Knitting Machine2020-03-162020TWOProject MUSE®564382024-03-28T00:00:00-05:002020-03-16Vera; or, The Nihilists: Oscar Wilde's "Wretched Play" and the Challenges of Reassessing "Minor" Works
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/751272
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JUST OVER TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO ELT Press brought out Ian Small's Oscar Wilde Revalued (1993). Following on from Richard Ellmann's recuperative 1987 biography, Small's volume set out both to mark, and to help further the development of, a new era of research into a writer who had finally been established as part of the canon. An element of Small's ambition in Oscar Wilde Revalued (and his 2000 supplement, Oscar Wilde Recent Research, also published by ELT Press) was to draw scholars' attention to a wealth of archival documents, many hitherto unstudied, dispersed among British and American libraries, as well as to the ways in which the theoretical turn of academic criticism in the 1970s and 1980s was changing the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-28T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/361/image/coversmallVera; or, The Nihilists: Oscar Wilde's "Wretched Play" and the Challenges of Reassessing "Minor" Works2020-03-16text/htmlen-USVera; or, The Nihilists: Oscar Wilde's "Wretched Play" and the Challenges of Reassessing "Minor" Works2020-03-162020TWOProject MUSE®1318852024-03-28T00:00:00-05:002020-03-16Narrative, Epistemology and Thought Experiment in H. G. Wells's The Time Machine
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/751273
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RECENTLY, scholarship on H. G. Wells's first and breakthrough scientific romance has seen a marked change in emphasis. Critics have begun to depart from the traditional perspective on The Time Machine (1895) as a utopian satire or a class parable. Instead, authors such as Simon James and Caroline Hovanec, without ignoring these issues, tend to emphasise the more formally self-conscious aspects of the text, whether this is its enacting of anxieties about the purpose and permanence of literature, or its presenting of a scepticism of empiricism and science and embrace of a kind of idiosyncratic aestheticism. This article will follow this tendency in interpretation of The Time Machine, but will also rethink its
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-28T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/361/image/coversmallNarrative, Epistemology and Thought Experiment in H. G. Wells's The Time Machine2020-03-16text/htmlen-USNarrative, Epistemology and Thought Experiment in H. G. Wells's The Time Machine2020-03-162020TWOProject MUSE®941682024-03-28T00:00:00-05:002020-03-16The Politics of Naughtiness in L. T. Meade's School Fiction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/751274
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"IT HAS BEEN my privilege for years to write books which I think girls appreciate, and I may say, honestly, that I find no work pleasanter to do," popular girls' author L. T. Meade (1844–1914) declared in an essay published in the Academy and Literature in 1903.1 Indeed, the work (Elizabeth "Lillie" Thomasina) Meade found so pleasant brought her a good income and considerable fame. Described as the "Queen of Girls' Book Makers" by the Saturday Review in 1906,2 Meade's name appeared regularly on lists of preferred girls' authors published in a range of British magazines including the Leisure Hour, the Nineteenth Century, and the upscale Girl's Realm, where in 1899, readers voted her first in a list of "the most
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-28T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/361/image/coversmallThe Politics of Naughtiness in L. T. Meade's School Fiction2020-03-16text/htmlen-USThe Politics of Naughtiness in L. T. Meade's School Fiction2020-03-162020TWOProject MUSE®1253432024-03-28T00:00:00-05:002020-03-16Evolution, Idealism, and Individualism in May Kendall's Comic Verse
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/751275
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MAY KENDALL'S "Lay of the Trilobite" stages a dialogue between the poem's human speaker and a reanimated fossil. In the course of demolishing the human's self-satisfied belief in the evolutionary superiority of his "mighty mind," the trilobite pokes fun at his reading habits:
"You've Kant to make your brains go round,
    Hegel you have to clear them,
You've Mr. Browning to confound,
    And Mr. Punch to cheer them!"1
The "Lay of the Trilobite" is Kendall's most frequently discussed poem, and readings of it typically focus on its critique of the human's complacently anthropocentric interpretation of Darwinian evolution.2 The argument in this essay, however, is that the tendency to focus on Darwinism in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-28T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/361/image/coversmallEvolution, Idealism, and Individualism in May Kendall's Comic Verse2020-03-16text/htmlen-USEvolution, Idealism, and Individualism in May Kendall's Comic Verse2020-03-162020TWOProject MUSE®952952024-03-28T00:00:00-05:002020-03-16H. G. Wells as a Modernist
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/751276
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IN INVENTING TOMORROW, Sarah Cole aims "to place Wells within and among known modernists, as one of the period's great literary innovators, and … to show how his writing also clashes with modernist values as they have been enshrined by literary critics over the last seventy years." She pursues this goal with considerable conviction, aided and abetted by a host of acclamatory adjectives: powerful, surging, exceptional, prodigious, unflinching, formidable, forceful, inspired, exuberant, inexhaustible, unique, irrepressible, bold, among others gaveling the verdict for "Wells [as] one of the greatest and most innovative writers of the century."Her case opens with a dicey gambit: several pages touting Wells's literary
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-28T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/361/image/coversmallH. G. Wells as a Modernist2020-03-16text/htmlen-USH. G. Wells as a Modernist2020-03-162020TWOProject MUSE®70852024-03-28T00:00:00-05:002020-03-16A Distinctive Alternative to Ideological Critique
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/751277
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BASED ON FOUR LECTURES at Oxford University in 2015, Amanda Anderson's brief but trenchant book concerning her distinctive alternative to ideological critique in literary studies deserves the attention of anyone who has been following the debates about literature and the hermeneutics of suspicion. For those who have not been attending to the discussions closely, the book can serve as an accessible primer that characterizes and comments on influential work by Rita Felski, Caroline Levine, Franco Moretti, Lisa Zunshine, Jane Bennett, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, Lee Edelman, Ray Brassier, and others (in Chapter 3 but also intermittently throughout). Anderson provides essential references regarding the new
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-28T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/361/image/coversmallA Distinctive Alternative to Ideological Critique2020-03-16text/htmlen-USA Distinctive Alternative to Ideological Critique2020-03-162020TWOProject MUSE®165222024-03-28T00:00:00-05:002020-03-16Rethinking the Suburbs
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/751278
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HAVING LONG SHAKEN OFF their earlier reputation as places of criminal resort, over the nineteenth century the suburbs became the epitome of middle-class respectability, for whom they offered the prospect of rus in urbe on a budget. In their literary incarnations they are often seen to be deadly dull, and readers of ELT may be surprised at the idea of the suburbs as a place of promise. Familiar with the bleak visions of red-rust suburbia that unfold in the novels of E. M. Forster and H. G. Wells, or the Pooter-filled world evoked by George and Weedon Grossmith, we usually travel to the Victorian and Edwardian suburbs with low expectations. The city is a place of melodramatic contrasts, and the country may be a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-28T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/361/image/coversmallRethinking the Suburbs2020-03-16text/htmlen-USRethinking the Suburbs2020-03-162020TWOProject MUSE®96572024-03-28T00:00:00-05:002020-03-16Ecofeminism: Late-Victorian Women's Poetry
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/751279
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PATRICIA MURPHY'S NEW BOOK fulfills a twofold aim; first it confirms late Victorian women poets' ecological awareness and second it establishes strong connections between their stances on nature and their overt or latent feminist views. Informed by contemporary debates on ecological criticism and ecofeminism, this book successfully reveals the ecofeminist insights offered by Augusta Webster, Mathilde Blind, Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper), Alice Meynell, Constance Naden, and L. S. Bevington, all of whom challenged socio-cultural assumptions about the inferiority of woman and nature. Seemingly adopting a proto-constructivist approach, these generally understudied poets contested their society's
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-28T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/361/image/coversmallEcofeminism: Late-Victorian Women's Poetry2020-03-16text/htmlen-USEcofeminism: Late-Victorian Women's Poetry2020-03-162020TWOProject MUSE®122432024-03-28T00:00:00-05:002020-03-16Radical Trespassing
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/751280
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IN THRESHOLD MODERNISM, Elizabeth F. Evans makes a commendable contribution to the vibrant academic discourse on late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century London as a literary space, remarkably without limiting the study to modernist literature. Evans's focus is threefold on gender, class, and race within the context of three threshold spaces between private and public: first, shops and department stores; secondly, streets; and third, women's clubs. She investigates the literary figure of the new public woman (with all the facets of meaning this term implies) "at the intersection of space, identity studies, and narrative" and articulates the underlying social and historical meanings of London sights and places.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-28T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/361/image/coversmallRadical Trespassing2020-03-16text/htmlen-USRadical Trespassing2020-03-162020TWOProject MUSE®115522024-03-28T00:00:00-05:002020-03-16OUP Wilde Edition
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/751281
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JOSEPH DONOHUE has done an excellent job in teasing out the enormous textual problems surrounding what has come to us as Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest. Although this play does not appear to have quite the same textual problems surrounding Wilde's De Profundis, the textual problems accompanying The Importance of Being Earnest are, nevertheless, daunting indeed. Despite the challenges, Donohue has followed the various sources of textual evidence available and produced two volumes, one dedicated primarily to the four-act version of the play that Wilde originally envisioned, the other dedicated primarily to the three-act play with which we are most familiar. Given the significant amount of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-28T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/361/image/coversmallOUP Wilde Edition2020-03-16text/htmlen-USOUP Wilde Edition2020-03-162020TWOProject MUSE®65742024-03-28T00:00:00-05:002020-03-16Beyond Modernism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/751282
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THE ESSAYS COLLECTED in Decadence in the Age of Modernism, edited by Kate Hext and Alex Murray, emerged from a 2015 conference exploring the lingering influence of decadence and aestheticism in the twentieth century, and they ask readers to consider a number of compelling questions. The largest, perhaps, concerns influence itself: how do we identify literary influence and, more pointedly, to what end? With all due respect to the much-influenced and much-influencing T. S. Eliot, what purpose does tracking, tracing, delimiting the "dead poets" who continue to "assert their immortality" in the work of later writers serve? That one author was reading another, that he or she employed tropes or visited topics traversed
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-28T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/361/image/coversmallBeyond Modernism2020-03-16text/htmlen-USBeyond Modernism2020-03-162020TWOProject MUSE®114322024-03-28T00:00:00-05:002020-03-16Shaw & Chinese Culture
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/751283
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IN 1937, BERNARD SHAW wrote to Chinese stage director Wang Tjo-ling: "Up, China.… Go ahead with your plays—only don't do mine." A good many Chinese directors have disregarded this injunction on stage and screen, as Kay Li shows in Bernard Shaw's Bridges to Chinese Culture. Yet, as Li also shows, the staging of his plays is only one of many ways in which Shaw and Chinese culture have left their marks on one another—and continue to do so. Li describes Shaw's 1933 visit to China, Chinese productions of his plays both during his lifetime and after, Chinese figures who may have served as prototypes for Bill Buoyant and other dramatic characters, shared traits between Shaw's writing and that of recent Chinese Nobel
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-28T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/361/image/coversmallShaw & Chinese Culture2020-03-16text/htmlen-USShaw & Chinese Culture2020-03-162020TWOProject MUSE®90602024-03-28T00:00:00-05:002020-03-16Juliana Ewing & "the Law of Reticence"
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/751284
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IT'S "SELLING AT THE RATE OF 500 a day, 19,000 have been ordered already, and the printers can't get them out fast enough," Juliana Ewing wrote in an 1883 Christmas letter. With less than two years left to live, Ewing (1841–1885) had lucked out. Her Jackanapes, first serialized in 1879, had now suddenly become a late-Victorian bestseller.This good fortune might have seemed all the more surprising to the author given that her religious convictions about human dignity seemed to be falling out of fashion. The current vogue, at least according to her friends' book recommendations, highlighted animal-like representations of humanity—depraved Darwinian creatures driven only by biological urges. That was Ewing's aggrieved
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-28T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/361/image/coversmallJuliana Ewing & "the Law of Reticence"2020-03-16text/htmlen-USJuliana Ewing & "the Law of Reticence"2020-03-162020TWOProject MUSE®60452024-03-28T00:00:00-05:002020-03-16