Project MUSE®: Studies in the Literary Imagination - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/589
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Studies in the Literary Imagination.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 44 (2011) through current issueLatest Articles: Studies in the Literary ImaginationTWOProject MUSE®Studies in the Literary Imagination2165-26780039-3819Latest articles in Studies in the Literary Imagination. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Openings in Victorian Literature and Culture: Beginnings, Ruptures, and Possibilities
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984511
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Openings, whether textual, physical, or conceptual, function as crucial thresholds between worlds, marking spaces of transition, possibility, and transformation. For the Victorians, the concept of openings carried particular significance in an era characterized by unprecedented social, technological, and cultural change. This issue of Studies in the Literary Imagination explores the multifaceted nature of openings in Victorian literature and culture, examining how beginnings, ruptures, and possibilities were represented, negotiated, and reimagined throughout the period.The essays in this collection approach the concept of openings from diverse angles, investigating formal elements such as literary beginnings and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/589/image/coversmallOpenings in Victorian Literature and Culture: Beginnings, Ruptures, and Possibilities2026-03-07text/htmlen-USOpenings in Victorian Literature and Culture: Beginnings, Ruptures, and Possibilities2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®106832026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07"Flowers / As Flourish Best Untrained": Hardy's Openings
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984512
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In a survey of Thomas Hardy's body of work, where are the openings? In my contribution to this special issue, I define openings as ruptures and breaks in form, often ruptures analyzed overtly by Hardy's poetic speakers and prose narrators. Hardy was an architect, a poet, and a novelist, and in all three realms, form was very much on his mind. He wrote and revised, he alternated between imitating genre conventions and critiquing them, and he adhered to systems and railed against them. His hundreds of poems, together, are remarkably consistent but offer some interesting outliers, such as "Domicilium," his first extant poem and his only poem in free verse. His many stories and novels join his Napoleonic verse play
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/589/image/coversmall"Flowers / As Flourish Best Untrained": Hardy's Openings2026-03-07text/htmlen-US"Flowers / As Flourish Best Untrained": Hardy's Openings2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®764762026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07Laments for Little Nell: Serial Grieving and White Sentiment
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984513
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In an oft-repeated story about the popular reception for Charles Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop, American readers of the serial installments—who had been left waiting to discover whether the heroine Little Nell would recover from her decline into poor health—gathered at the docks in New York and even rowed out to meet the approaching ships that would deliver the next issue of Master Humphrey's Clock, where Dickens's novel had been appearing weekly. Brought together by a collective sense of anticipation, the tale goes, the enthralled public shouted up from their boats for news of whether Nell would live or die.There is reason to suspect that this anecdote is, in fact, apocryphal: an invention, Nathan Murray
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/589/image/coversmallLaments for Little Nell: Serial Grieving and White Sentiment2026-03-07text/htmlen-USLaments for Little Nell: Serial Grieving and White Sentiment2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®1171322026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07Out of the London Streets: Mayhew's Performance of Poverty on the Provincial Stage
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984514
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Working as a correspondent for The Morning Chronicle in 1849 and 1850, investigative journalist Henry Mayhew brought readers' attention to the plight of the poor in London, drawing on interviews he conducted with a wide array of itinerant and low-wage workers. After breaking with his editors over political and creative differences, Mayhew founded his own two-penny periodical to continue his inquiries into this topic. Mayhew only composed a portion of the ambitious multi-volume publication he had planned, ultimately selling the rights to his publishers, who completed the project using ghostwriters.1 Aiming to recuperate his losses, Mayhew launched a series of live performances of his "odd characters of the London
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/589/image/coversmallOut of the London Streets: Mayhew's Performance of Poverty on the Provincial Stage2026-03-07text/htmlen-USOut of the London Streets: Mayhew's Performance of Poverty on the Provincial Stage2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®890482026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07The Opening of Great Expectations
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984515
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This essay focuses on the first three paragraphs of Great Expectations—hardly more than a single page in any modern edition and barely more than one column in its original serialization in All the Year Round (AYR). In the opening sentences of the novel, Dickens provides readers with everything they need to know about Pip at the beginning of his journey, and I argue that without Dickens's careful crafting of these first three paragraphs, the convict's disrupting and disturbing "Hold your noise!" would not have nearly as much power as it does. The convict's interruption of Pip's melancholic meditation certainly jolts the novel's plot forward, but the curtain raiser of Great Expectations, brief as it may be, deserves
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/589/image/coversmallThe Opening of Great Expectations2026-03-07text/htmlen-USThe Opening of Great Expectations2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®337902026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07Editing with Scissors: Jane Shelley's Editorial Cuts in Shelley and Mary (1882)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984516
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"When the public handle my Mary's name as though they have a right to it, it will be my death warrant."–Jane, Lady ShelleyIn literary criticism, scholars have long attended to the contributions of editors—how they frame, contextualize, and augment the lives they seek to preserve. In the case of Shelley and Mary (1882) and its editor Jane, Lady Shelley, however, it is not what she adds that demands scrutiny but the strategic omissions that merit critical attention. Jane Shelley, the daughter-in-law of British Romantic writers Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein (1818) and The Last Man (1826), and Percy Bysshe Shelley, author of "Mont Blanc" (1817), "Ozymandias" (1818), and "Ode to the West Wind" (1820) among
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/589/image/coversmallEditing with Scissors: Jane Shelley's Editorial Cuts in Shelley and Mary (1882)2026-03-07text/htmlen-USEditing with Scissors: Jane Shelley's Editorial Cuts in Shelley and Mary (1882)2026-03-072026TWOProject MUSE®811982026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-07