Project MUSE®: CUSP: Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Cultures - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/839
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in CUSP: Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Cultures.daily12026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (2023) through current issueLatest Articles: CUSP: Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century CulturesTWOProject MUSE®CUSP: Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Cultures2768-637X2768-6361Latest articles in CUSP: Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Cultures. Feed provided by Project MUSE®The Twentieth Century: Victorian Studies in Person
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985474
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Last year, we sent out the call for papers for the 2025 Northeast Victorian Studies Association (NVSA) conference on the theme of "The Twentieth Century." I then received an email. The sender would love to submit an abstract, they said, but unfortunately had nothing to say about presentism. This delighted me, because it justified what I feared was a satanic theme for a Victorian studies conference.The twentieth century has not been "the present" for a generation, but it affects us with longing, resentment, envy, and aversion, just as the nineteenth century haunted people a century ago. Our fiftieth anniversary conference theme would encompass the more familiar topics of influence and aftermath, but also encourage
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/839/image/coversmallThe Twentieth Century: Victorian Studies in Person2026-03-18text/htmlen-USThe Twentieth Century: Victorian Studies in Person2026-03-182026TWOProject MUSE®133542026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-18Time Travel's Travels: Victorian Speculation in the Twentieth Century
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985475
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It is a truism that also happens to be true: twentieth-century science fiction was inescapably shaped by H. G. Wells's early scientific romances. George Orwell is not alone in believing "thinking people who were born about the beginning of this century are in some sense Wells's own creation. … The minds of all of us, and therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed."1 And yet scholars have remained unsure about the crucial contribution Wells made to the DNA of science fiction.The larger work in progress, from which this piece is drawn, Laughter is from Mars, argues that we can best understand Wells's work at the dawn of the Scientific Age as a key inflection point in a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/839/image/coversmallTime Travel's Travels: Victorian Speculation in the Twentieth Century2026-03-18text/htmlen-USTime Travel's Travels: Victorian Speculation in the Twentieth Century2026-03-182026TWOProject MUSE®418132026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-18Victorian Childhood, Interwar Retrospect
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985476
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This essay is about a particular kind of twentieth-century retrospect onto the late-nineteenth century. I will focus on two works, both memoirs of a sort, both written in the 1930s, both memorializing their authors' late nineteenth-century childhoods, both depicting upper-middle-class, metropolitan childhoods in particular. Significantly for what I want to consider, both works were written in the shadow of the coming cataclysm: the first begun as the Nazis rose to power in the early Thirties and then expanded over the course of that decade, the second in 1939–1940 as the war approached and then began. Yet both bear an oblique relation to that advancing calamity.The first is Walter Benjamin's Berlin Childhood around
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/839/image/coversmallVictorian Childhood, Interwar Retrospect2026-03-18text/htmlen-USVictorian Childhood, Interwar Retrospect2026-03-182026TWOProject MUSE®315642026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-18Victorians Unborn: Revisionist Futures in Turn-of-the-Century Spiritualism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985477
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What does it mean to be unborn? At our present moment, this question is contentious. For most of human history, however, it was not; and the Victorians were the ones who shaped the figure of the unborn child into the politically potent one it is today. This essay examines a striking personification of the "unborn" that appeared in parlors and drawing rooms across England and America in the late-nineteenth and the early-twentieth century. I am referring to an important turn in the spiritualist movement that radically reimagined the fate of what was called the "spirit-born" child—the infant that was stillborn, miscarried, or aborted. Spiritualism was notable for its insistence that even unbaptized children would go
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/839/image/coversmallVictorians Unborn: Revisionist Futures in Turn-of-the-Century Spiritualism2026-03-18text/htmlen-USVictorians Unborn: Revisionist Futures in Turn-of-the-Century Spiritualism2026-03-182026TWOProject MUSE®392512026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-18"No Parentage in Love": The Queer Victorian Roots of Modern Irish Nationalism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985478
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Perhaps no national tradition has suffered more than the Irish from a periodizing split between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In standard accounts, the first decades of the latter saw two developments emerge as if from nowhere, apparently untethered from what preceded them. In the sphere of politics, the deadening lethargy that James Joyce and others identified as following on the disgrace and death of the nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell was abruptly broken by the 1916 Easter Rising. Meanwhile, in cultural terms, the concomitant turbocharging of modernist writing in Ireland seemed similarly unpredicted by a weak Victorian literary culture. Both assessments are increasingly open to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/839/image/coversmall"No Parentage in Love": The Queer Victorian Roots of Modern Irish Nationalism2026-03-18text/htmlen-US"No Parentage in Love": The Queer Victorian Roots of Modern Irish Nationalism2026-03-182026TWOProject MUSE®346552026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-18Afterword
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985479
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This cluster of essays originated at the 2025 Northeast Victorian Studies Association Conference on "Twentieth-Century Victorians," held at Boston University. Many of the papers at this conference looked backwards at the nineteenth century through the prism of the twentieth. In this afterword, however, we want to temporarily reverse this direction and consider instead how nineteenth-century writers projected themselves forward in time. A number of works of Victorian speculative fiction trace out imaginative possibilities for the future, from the socialist utopia of William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890), to the dystopian system of mandatory euthanasia delineated in Anthony Trollope's The Fixed Period (1882), not
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/839/image/coversmallAfterword2026-03-18text/htmlen-USAfterword2026-03-182026TWOProject MUSE®404482026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-18Mechanical Hands: Skill and Surplus in Industrial Art Education
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985480
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There is a wonderful gimmick at the heart of turn-of-the-century art educator J. Liberty Tadd's system of industrial arts training. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Tadd had been expanding and modifying the system of manual training developed by Charles Godfrey Leland at the Public Industrial Art School (PIAS) of Philadelphia, which opened in 1880. Tadd was an instructor at the school from the start and became director in 1884, when Leland relocated to England. Leland and Tadd's ideas of art education center on freehand sketching, original design production, nature drawing, and practical handicrafts. Tadd's version of this system was premiered nationally at the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/839/image/coversmallMechanical Hands: Skill and Surplus in Industrial Art Education2026-03-18text/htmlen-USMechanical Hands: Skill and Surplus in Industrial Art Education2026-03-182026TWOProject MUSE®1128502026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-18In a Sapphic Time and Space: The Chronotope of Lesbos in Les Chansons de Bilitis
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985481
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In the second volume of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex, published in 1900, Havelock Ellis writes that "homosexuality has been observed in women from very early times, and in very wide-spread regions."1 He follows this indefinite assertion with case studies in lesbianism (distinguishing between same-sex encounters and female inversion) from contemporary society, history, and literature. Though he references instances of lesbianism in diverse contexts from Brazil to India, America, and France, he does little to differentiate the cultural mores and behavioral distinctions between these—though he notes that these distinctions indeed existed. Instead, he devotes significant attention to the particular spatial
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/839/image/coversmallIn a Sapphic Time and Space: The Chronotope of Lesbos in Les Chansons de Bilitis2026-03-18text/htmlen-USIn a Sapphic Time and Space: The Chronotope of Lesbos in Les Chansons de Bilitis2026-03-182026TWOProject MUSE®1185732026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-18Feminism and the Scapegoat: Mona Caird, the Anthropology of Sacrifice, and the New Woman Novel of Ideas
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985482
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"Woman is the scapegoat of society," declares Sibella Lincoln, a minor New Woman character in Mona Caird's 1889 novel The Wing of Azrael. She continues: "Upon her head are piled all the iniquities and the transgression and the sins of the children of Israel, for an atonement; and then 'by the hand of a fit man'—as the Scriptures have it—she is driven forth into the wilderness."1That women are the sacrificial victims of society is a fundamental premise of Caird's work. The allusion to Azazel in the novel's title—in Jewish legend, a demon or fallen angel who receives a sacrificial goat as part of the rite of Yom Kippur—is no idle literary flourish (though Caird is confounding Azazel with Azrael, who is an angel of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/839/image/coversmallFeminism and the Scapegoat: Mona Caird, the Anthropology of Sacrifice, and the New Woman Novel of Ideas2026-03-18text/htmlen-USFeminism and the Scapegoat: Mona Caird, the Anthropology of Sacrifice, and the New Woman Novel of Ideas2026-03-182026TWOProject MUSE®1281812026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-18"That Which Draweth"—A Lost Prose Sketch by George Egerton
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985483
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In 1932, when "George Egerton" (Mary Chavelita Dunne, 1859–1945) contributed "A Keynote to Keynotes," her short memoir, to Ten Contemporaries: Notes Toward Their Definitive Bibliography, she was very clear about what had happened forty years earlier. Focusing on the composition of her most famous work, Keynotes (1893), she told of a burst of creative brilliance that had turned her suddenly and rapidly into an author. Until that moment, as she recounted, she had always confined herself to making up stories and keeping them to herself; then, while living in a cottage one mile outside Millstreet, County Cork, Ireland, something shifted. "Inside ten days" during 1892, she "wrote six stories" and eventually sent them to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/839/image/coversmall"That Which Draweth"—A Lost Prose Sketch by George Egerton2026-03-18text/htmlen-US"That Which Draweth"—A Lost Prose Sketch by George Egerton2026-03-182026TWOProject MUSE®447232026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-18Signing Back: Deaf History and the 1880 Conference of Milan
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985484
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When an American Sign Language-user follows a sign or phrase with the sign "THAT," the effect is to highlight or amplify what has been said. "1880 THAT," therefore, is a statement title; 1880 is a big deal. The Second International Congress on Deaf Education, held in Milan in 1880, is often discussed as one of the most significant events in deaf history. This conference, organized and attended almost exclusively by hearing educators (there was a single deaf delegate), overwhelmingly endorsed "oralism" (teaching deaf children to speak and lipread) and shunned the use of sign language in deaf education. The consequences were far-reaching, particularly in Europe and North America, from where the delegates came. For
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/839/image/coversmallSigning Back: Deaf History and the 1880 Conference of Milan2026-03-18text/htmlen-USSigning Back: Deaf History and the 1880 Conference of Milan2026-03-182026TWOProject MUSE®145352026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-18