Project MUSE®: Victorian Studies - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/203
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Victorian Studies.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 42, no. 2 (1999/00) through current issueLatest Articles: Victorian StudiesTWOProject MUSE®Victorian Studies1527-20520042-5222Latest articles in Victorian Studies. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Gatekeeping: Publishers’ Readers, Gender, and the Literature of the 1890s
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984649
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The recent institutional turn in post-1945 literary studies has expanded our understanding of the infrastructural logics of the literary marketplace and “the mechanisms that produce aesthetic phenomena” (Konstantinou and Sinykin 230). Such work has drawn particular attention to the prominence of gatekeeper figures, such as the editor and the literary agent, with the latter becoming increasingly influential in what has been dubbed the “conglomerate era” (Sinykin passim). However, such gatekeeper figures existed well before large-scale changes to the publishing industry in the 1960s. This essay focuses on a key but underexamined figure of the British fin de siècle: the publisher’s reader. In the post-1960 publishing
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/203/image/coversmallGatekeeping: Publishers’ Readers, Gender, and the Literature of the 1890s2026-03-05text/htmlen-USGatekeeping: Publishers’ Readers, Gender, and the Literature of the 1890s2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®903502026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05The Idea of the Majority
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984650
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In an 1860 lecture on the philosophy of history, Charles Kingsley said, “Where a nation is corrupt, that is, where the majority of individuals in it are bad” (Limits 55): he loosely identified the nation with the majority. Kingsley was giving his inaugural lecture at the University of Cambridge as Professor of Modern History, teaching as part of the Moral Sciences Tripos. Earlier in 1860, the Board had approved a short list of Tripos examination texts that included Aristotle’s Ethics, Politics, De Anima, Categories, and Analytics.1 Kingsley’s listeners, a large audience of faculty and students, would have heard in his remark a potential conflict with Aristotle. As nineteenth-century commentators and translators
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/203/image/coversmallThe Idea of the Majority2026-03-05text/htmlen-USThe Idea of the Majority2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®1140682026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05“The Beauty of Life”: Reciprocity, Aesthetics, and Ecological Ethics in Vernon Lee and William Morris
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984651
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In the introduction to an 1887 collection of essays, the versatile writer, critic, and polemicist Vernon Lee (born Violet Paget) paints a vivid picture of the River Tyne at Newcastle: a “vast mass of leaden water, polluted with every foulness, flowing heavily, or scarce seeming to flow at all, between lines of docks and factories, their innumerable masts and innumerable chimneys faint upon the thick brown sky” (“Juvenilia” 13). Her account of the effects of industry on the river follows her assertion that in order for “the great mass of mankind, which has neither peace nor dignity, nor beauty of life,” to “obtain a small allowance of any such qualities,” those who have them must “deprive [them] selves of a portion
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/203/image/coversmall“The Beauty of Life”: Reciprocity, Aesthetics, and Ecological Ethics in Vernon Lee and William Morris2026-03-05text/htmlen-US“The Beauty of Life”: Reciprocity, Aesthetics, and Ecological Ethics in Vernon Lee and William Morris2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®1019132026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05The Feeling of Letting Die: Necroeconomics and Victorian Fiction by Jennifer MacLure (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984652
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It’s no secret that many Victorian novels squeezed dramatic tension out of the contradiction between the iron laws of early nineteenth-century political economy and the compassionate Christian mandate to care for the poor. Industrial novels like Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854–55) and Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) staged this conflict as a clash between cold-hearted factory owners, usually male, and middle-class characters, usually female, who learn to advocate for the workers as individuals. But as Jennifer MacLure traces in her lucid and compelling book, the structure of political economy itself undermines this simple opposition between care and cruelty through the Malthusian argument that caring
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/203/image/coversmallThe Feeling of Letting Die: Necroeconomics and Victorian Fiction by Jennifer MacLure (review)2026-03-05text/htmlen-USThe Feeling of Letting Die: Necroeconomics and Victorian Fiction by Jennifer MacLure (review)2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®117122026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05Imagining Women’s Property in Victorian Fiction by Jill Rappoport (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984653
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In her incisive study Imagining Women’s Property in Victorian Fiction, Jill Rappoport prompts us to reconsider the diverse, and at times self-consciously alternative, paths that the representation of women’s economic rights and activities took in nineteenth-century fiction. How the Victorians imagined the potential impact that legal reforms regulating women’s property could have on the entire family crucially shaped the genre of the novel. What Rappoport expertly traces is, in fact, specifically the “literary stakes of marital property reform” (3). While much has already been written on the social and political contexts of nineteenth-century law, including how legal reform became addressed and debated in a variety
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/203/image/coversmallImagining Women’s Property in Victorian Fiction by Jill Rappoport (review)2026-03-05text/htmlen-USImagining Women’s Property in Victorian Fiction by Jill Rappoport (review)2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®95492026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05Faking It: Victorian Documentary Novels by Ellen Stockstill (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984654
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The subject of Ellen Stockstill’s Faking it: Victorian Documentary Novels is Victorian fiction that purports—through use of interpolated letters, diaries, and news clippings, among other devices—to be real. If the realist novel trades in verisimilitude, the documentary novel, in Stockstill’s account, claims authenticity: readers of Middlemarch (1871–72) are asked to marvel at the believability of Eliot’s admittedly fictional world, while readers of Agnes Grey (1847) or The Woman in White (1859–60) are encouraged to accept the testimonies they encounter as evidence of these texts’ non-fictional status.In traditional literary genealogies, Stockstill contends, the documentary novel— especially the epistolary novel
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/203/image/coversmallFaking It: Victorian Documentary Novels by Ellen Stockstill (review)2026-03-05text/htmlen-USFaking It: Victorian Documentary Novels by Ellen Stockstill (review)2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®79652026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05G. W. M. Reynolds Reimagined: Studies in Authorship, Radicalism, and Genre, 1830–1870 ed. by Jennifer Conary and Mary L. Shannon (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984655
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G. W. M. Reynolds—journalist, editor, newspaper proprietor, and hugely successful writer of popular fiction—seems an almost unavoidable figure in the world of London print in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Despite that ubiquitous presence, his significance has not generally been recognized in the scholarship about his times. If not forgotten, he was certainly disparaged after his death in 1879, and his critical rehabilitation did not begin until the 1950s, when serious attention began to be paid to nineteenth-century working-class writing and radicalism. His critical return has been gradual, to say the least, and G. W. M. Reynolds Reimagined: Studies in Authorship, Radicalism, and Genre, 1830–1870 is
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/203/image/coversmallG. W. M. Reynolds Reimagined: Studies in Authorship, Radicalism, and Genre, 1830–1870 ed. by Jennifer Conary and Mary L. Shannon (review)2026-03-05text/htmlen-USG. W. M. Reynolds Reimagined: Studies in Authorship, Radicalism, and Genre, 1830–1870 ed. by Jennifer Conary and Mary L. Shannon (review)2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®101122026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05The Victorian Idyll in Art and Literature: Subject, Ecology, Form ed. by Thomas Hughes and Emma Merkling (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984656
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The idyll has long been recognized as a prominent and highly popular genre in nineteenth-century art and letters, and yet, as editors Thomas Hughes and Emma Merkling point out in their introduction to this collection, it has generally been avoided as an object for sustained scholarly study. Its associations with naïve idealizations of the countryside as an unchanging, quintessentially English pastoral paradise have made the idyll appear a slight and unpromising subject for substantive critical engagement. In the face of this scholarly wariness, and inspired by the Midsummer Symposium at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art in 2018, the contributors to The Victorian Idyll in Art and Literature: Subject, Ecology, Form
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/203/image/coversmallThe Victorian Idyll in Art and Literature: Subject, Ecology, Form ed. by Thomas Hughes and Emma Merkling (review)2026-03-05text/htmlen-USThe Victorian Idyll in Art and Literature: Subject, Ecology, Form ed. by Thomas Hughes and Emma Merkling (review)2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®114282026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05British Writers, Popular Literature and New Media Innovation, 1820–45 ed. by Alexis Easley (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984657
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This engaging volume does not strictly align with familiar literary periods, but chooses a timeframe to distinguish in another context: 1820 to 1845 as a transitional phase for popular literature and print media. The strategy works: by not leaning on Romantic or Victorian frameworks, the volume instead clears space to examine intermediary forms and publishing formats, and the reconfiguration of authors’ and editors’ roles within a dynamic early nineteenth-century marketplace. As the introduction suggests, this transitional era looks different “when viewed from a media history perspective” (1). While emphases of individual chapters vary, they all provide such perspectives on how the book’s three eponymous concepts
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/203/image/coversmallBritish Writers, Popular Literature and New Media Innovation, 1820–45 ed. by Alexis Easley (review)2026-03-05text/htmlen-USBritish Writers, Popular Literature and New Media Innovation, 1820–45 ed. by Alexis Easley (review)2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®112932026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05Science, Medicine, and Aristocratic Lineage in Victorian Popular Fiction by Abigail Boucher (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984658
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Abigail Boucher’s debut monograph is an incisive, erudite, and pointed intervention in Victorian studies as well as the health/medical humanities—even though, rather puzzlingly, she avers that she is not “borrowing from [the latter field’s] methodologies” but is “analysing science and medicine in literature” (10). Since the emergence of the critical medical humanities, a field that strives to go beyond instrumentalizing literary studies as a mere handmaiden to the medical profession, it has taken up exactly the kinds of questions that Boucher does in this book. Hence, we health humanities scholars would wholeheartedly welcome this innovative monograph into our field formation, notwithstanding the author’s
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/203/image/coversmallScience, Medicine, and Aristocratic Lineage in Victorian Popular Fiction by Abigail Boucher (review)2026-03-05text/htmlen-USScience, Medicine, and Aristocratic Lineage in Victorian Popular Fiction by Abigail Boucher (review)2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®93572026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05Scientific Advice to the Nineteenth-Century British State by Roland Jackson (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984659
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Unlike the messy nineteenth-century world of scientific advice to the British state, Jackson’s monograph on the subject is a paragon of careful organization, evenhandedness, and crisp, clean prose. It presents for the first time a systematic overview of all dimensions of the central government’s formal use (and occasional blatant misuse) of scientific advice, broadly understood. Over three hundred and fifty parliamentary papers make up the empirical core of the book, supplemented by other records of government. This resolute focus on official state archives may come at a cost, but it has made possible a remarkable account of the (always slowly) changing place, roles, and scope of scientific advice in British state
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/203/image/coversmallScientific Advice to the Nineteenth-Century British State by Roland Jackson (review)2026-03-05text/htmlen-USScientific Advice to the Nineteenth-Century British State by Roland Jackson (review)2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®97212026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume IV: Building Identity, 1830–1913 ed. by Carmen M. Mangion and Susan O’Brien (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984660
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This is the fourth volume in a five-volume groundbreaking series that offers a comprehensive account of Catholicism in the British Isles from the (English) Reformation to the present day. In many ways the period covered in The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume IV: Building Identity, 1830–1913 was characterised by unprecedented change for Catholics following the repeal of the final barriers that prevented access to public institutions. Alongside this was the establishment of a Catholic hierarchy in 1850 in England and Wales and in Scotland in 1878. Along with the well-established hierarchy of Ireland, they eventually gained independence from the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/203/image/coversmallThe Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume IV: Building Identity, 1830–1913 ed. by Carmen M. Mangion and Susan O’Brien (review)2026-03-05text/htmlen-USThe Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume IV: Building Identity, 1830–1913 ed. by Carmen M. Mangion and Susan O’Brien (review)2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®109992026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05Mothers, Criminal Insanity and the Asylum in Victorian England: Cure, Redemption and Rehabilitation by Alison C. Pedley, and: Material Setting and Reform Experience in English Institutions for Fallen Women, 1838– 1910: Inside the ‘Homes of Mercy’ by Susan Woodall (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984661
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In her poignant 2019 study of Ireland’s mother-and-baby homes and Magdalen laundries, journalist Caelainn Hogan called out Ireland’s “shame-industrial complex” (Republic of Shame: How Ireland Punished ‘Fallen Women’ and Their Children [Penguin], 29), where Church and state colluded to institutionalize women “who were viewed as stained by sexual sin.” This culture of shame was so powerful that “illegitimacy and sexual transgression needed to be hidden even in death” (234), the mass burials of children born to “fallen women.” This extreme example of stigmatizing women who acted outside of moral boundaries captures a historiographical tradition that emphasizes the wide variety of actors— religious, political, legal
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/203/image/coversmallMothers, Criminal Insanity and the Asylum in Victorian England: Cure, Redemption and Rehabilitation by Alison C. Pedley, and: Material Setting and Reform Experience in English Institutions for Fallen Women, 1838– 1910: Inside the ‘Homes of Mercy’ by Susan Woodall (review)2026-03-05text/htmlen-USMothers, Criminal Insanity and the Asylum in Victorian England: Cure, Redemption and Rehabilitation by Alison C. Pedley, and: Material Setting and Reform Experience in English Institutions for Fallen Women, 1838– 1910: Inside the ‘Homes of Mercy’ by Susan Woodall (review)2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®141532026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05Gone Girls, 1684–1901: Flights of Feminist Resistance in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Novel by Nora Gilbert (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984662
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Nora Gilbert’s Gone Girls, 1684–1901: Flights of Feminist Resistance in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Novel identifies a frequent and under-recognized current in British novels spanning two centuries: women running away, fleeing domesticity in pursuit of uncertain, speculative, autonomous futures. Gilbert asserts that intervals of feminine flight are often treated sympathetically by authors, and that they presented readers with tempting models of how to “rebel, resist, and get out” (3). Even when novels end by chastening runaway heroines, their middles detail the social pressures that propel women’s flight, evincing a strong countercurrent to the domestic ideals that, at least since Nancy
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/203/image/coversmallGone Girls, 1684–1901: Flights of Feminist Resistance in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Novel by Nora Gilbert (review)2026-03-05text/htmlen-USGone Girls, 1684–1901: Flights of Feminist Resistance in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Novel by Nora Gilbert (review)2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®99692026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05Music, Morality and Social Reform in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Paul Watt (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984663
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Music, Morality and Social Reform in Nineteenth-Century Britain, by Paul Watt, is an enjoyable and much-needed book in the discipline of Victorian music studies. It focuses on a series of snapshot-studies exploring music-related writings by anonymous or lesser-known Victorians, and Watt’s self-stated goal is “to show how music-making—for example, singing, playing a musical instrument and dancing—was utilised to promote morality and social reform in the long nineteenth century” (1). Part 1, “Morality,” gives three case studies of when morality was disseminated through music and other daily activities: “Elementary Instruction” (chapter 1), “Manners and Etiquette” (chapter 2), and “Mechanics’ Institutes” (chapter 3).
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/203/image/coversmallMusic, Morality and Social Reform in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Paul Watt (review)2026-03-05text/htmlen-USMusic, Morality and Social Reform in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Paul Watt (review)2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®108272026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05Opera and British Print Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century ed. by Christina Fuhrmann and Alison Mero (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984664
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The corpus of literature on opera in Britain during the nineteenth century is not especially large. Eric Walter White’s pioneering study The Rise of English Opera (1951) was probably the first major study to raise awareness of the key operatic issues in Britain aside from the phenomenon of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s Savoy operas, and this book continues to be a useful reference tool alongside other broader studies by Nicholas Temperley, Paul Rodmell, and others. This new collection of essays has essentially concentrated its focus, as its title proposes, on British print culture, for which there was never a shortage, and has coalesced as the result of a workshop at King’s College, London, in 2017.The
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/203/image/coversmallOpera and British Print Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century ed. by Christina Fuhrmann and Alison Mero (review)2026-03-05text/htmlen-USOpera and British Print Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century ed. by Christina Fuhrmann and Alison Mero (review)2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®110532026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05Decadent Women: Yellow Book Lives by Jad Adams, and: Decadent Conservatism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Past by Alex Murray (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984665
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Decadence studies over the past twenty years has seen a strong shift toward addressing the global and the ecological, as well as works from later in the twentieth century. This has resulted in a reconfiguration of what is meant by “decadence,” already a famously slippery literary and cultural term. I am grateful then for two recent works that have taken on the valuable task of revisiting the concept within the era of the British Decadent movement—Jad Adams’s Decadent Women: Yellow Book Lives and Alex Murray’s Decadent Conservatism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Past. These detail-attentive studies contribute to the current expansion of decadence studies in innovative ways, while also benefitting all scholars in the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/203/image/coversmallDecadent Women: Yellow Book Lives by Jad Adams, and: Decadent Conservatism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Past by Alex Murray (review)2026-03-05text/htmlen-USDecadent Women: Yellow Book Lives by Jad Adams, and: Decadent Conservatism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Past by Alex Murray (review)2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®122042026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05Olive Schreiner: Writing Networks and Global Contexts ed. by Jade Munslow Ong and Andrew van der Vlies (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984666
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Jade Munslow Ong and Andrew van der Vlies’s impressive collection grew out of the web-based project South African Modernism 1880–2020, which is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and led by United Kingdom-based Munslow Ong with Australia-based van der Vlies as coinvestigator. Where the latter “examines South African literary modernism and its international connections from 1880 to 2020” (South African Modernism 1880–2020 [University of Salford, 2021-]), the former investigates “Schreiner’s own personal and political networks, as well as the creation, production, circulation and consumption of Schreiner’s writings” across southern Africa, Western Europe, India, the United States, New Zealand, and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/203/image/coversmallOlive Schreiner: Writing Networks and Global Contexts ed. by Jade Munslow Ong and Andrew van der Vlies (review)2026-03-05text/htmlen-USOlive Schreiner: Writing Networks and Global Contexts ed. by Jade Munslow Ong and Andrew van der Vlies (review)2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®112122026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05The Edwin Fox: How an Ordinary Sailing Ship Connected the World in the Age of Globalization, 1850–1914 by Boyd Cothran and Adrian Shubert (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984667
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Consider the piano, that archetypal tool of settler colonialism. “In the Victorian world, the piano was special,” we are told: “It was the symbol of treasured canons of middle-class values, representing the puritan work ethic, the morality of music, and the cult of domesticity. It was also a symbol of civilization” (179–180). And so, in an 1881 expedition to Bluff Harbour in the Colony of New Zealand, a ship brought a consignment of pianos fashioned specifically for the colony’s climatic conditions. The “civilization” that British settlers sought to extend over the MƗori, in a typical moment of imperial irony, was directly at odds with the bloody and unfree business of extracting ivory from the African interior, in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/203/image/coversmallThe Edwin Fox: How an Ordinary Sailing Ship Connected the World in the Age of Globalization, 1850–1914 by Boyd Cothran and Adrian Shubert (review)2026-03-05text/htmlen-USThe Edwin Fox: How an Ordinary Sailing Ship Connected the World in the Age of Globalization, 1850–1914 by Boyd Cothran and Adrian Shubert (review)2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®97262026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05Negotiating Relief and Freedom: Responses to Disaster in the British Caribbean, 1812–1907 by Oscar Webber (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984668
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Oscar Webber’s Negotiating Relief and Freedom: Responses to Disaster in the British Caribbean, 1812–1907 is a welcome addition to a burgeoning field of global disaster history. It is, on one hand, an environmental history of the Caribbean. It is also, on the other, a history of labor and ideologies of power: a study that seeks to integrate the catastrophic effects of hurricanes, volcanos, and earthquakes on peoples and landscapes of the Caribbean with an understanding of how those cataclysms reshaped how the British colonial state sought to feed, house, or otherwise discipline a rapidly transforming colonial society emerging out of the era of slavery. As Webber notes in the introduction, the specter of disaster
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/203/image/coversmallNegotiating Relief and Freedom: Responses to Disaster in the British Caribbean, 1812–1907 by Oscar Webber (review)2026-03-05text/htmlen-USNegotiating Relief and Freedom: Responses to Disaster in the British Caribbean, 1812–1907 by Oscar Webber (review)2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®76322026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05The Eastern Question in 1870s Britain: Democracy and Diplomacy, Orientalism and Empire by Leslie Rogne Schumacher, and: Britain, the Albanian National Question and the Fall of the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1914 by Daut Dauti (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984669
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The kaleidoscopic Eastern Question espoused various configurations from its inception to its end. It is a moral stance that grew out of a sympathy towards Eastern Christians who were believed to be languishing under the Turkish yoke. It also presented a purportedly insoluble diplomatic riddle due to the irreconcilable interests of the European Great Powers, who professed a mission civilisatrice to enlighten an outdated Eastern tyranny. Yet, behind this facade of deeply entrenched values, the Great Powers engaged in a bitter struggle for strategic assets and economic resources. The protean character of the Eastern Question—encompassing shifting alliances, nationalist revolts, and competing civilizational
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/203/image/coversmallThe Eastern Question in 1870s Britain: Democracy and Diplomacy, Orientalism and Empire by Leslie Rogne Schumacher, and: Britain, the Albanian National Question and the Fall of the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1914 by Daut Dauti (review)2026-03-05text/htmlen-USThe Eastern Question in 1870s Britain: Democracy and Diplomacy, Orientalism and Empire by Leslie Rogne Schumacher, and: Britain, the Albanian National Question and the Fall of the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1914 by Daut Dauti (review)2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®155542026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05Comments & Queries
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984670
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Comments & Queries are welcome via email: victstu@iu.edu.We also welcome all submissions via our online portal: https://scholarworks.iu.edu/iupjournals/index.php/victorianstudies/index.You can find us on Bluesky @victstudies.bsky.social, on Instagram @victorian_studies, and on Facebook at Victorian Studies.On the Cover is “The Effects of Noxious Vapours on Vegetation” from The Graphic, 19 June 1875, p. 588.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/203/image/coversmallComments & Queries2026-03-05text/htmlen-USComments & Queries2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®18572026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05Reviewers
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984671
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Mark D. Chapman (mark.chapman@theology.ox.ac.uk) is Professor of the History of Modern Theology at the University of Oxford and Distinguished Fellow of Ripon College, Cuddesdon. He has written widely on the history and theology of Anglicanism and ecumenism. He is the author of The Fantasy of Reunion: Anglicans, Catholics and Ecumenism, 1833–1882 (2014).Alisa Clapp-Itnyre, Ph.D. (aclappit@iu.edu) is Professor of English at Indiana University East in Richmond, Indiana. She is the author of Hymn Books for Children, 1800– 1900: Re-Tuning the History of Childhood (2016), Angelic Airs, Subversive Songs: Music as Social Discourse in the Victorian Novel (2002), and coeditor, with Julie Melnyk, of “Perplext in Faith:”
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/203/image/coversmallReviewers2026-03-05text/htmlen-USReviewers2026-03-052026TWOProject MUSE®109862026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-05