Victorian Psychology and the Novel
Anne Stiles
Originally published in Literature Compass

David Copperfield as Psychological Fiction
Mike Spilka
Originally published in Critical Quarterly

Gourmet Meals and Fast Food: a Vocal Approach to Dickens’s Literature and Journalism
Ian Wilkinson
Originally published in Literature Compass

Dickens, The Haunting Man
Steve Connor
Originally published in Literature Compass

Benjamin’s Paris, Freud’s Rome: whose London?
Adrian Rifkin
Originally published in Art History

Dickens the lawbreaker
Anthony Julius
Originally published in Critical Quarterly

Using Dickens to Market Morality: Popular Reading Materials in the Nickleby“Advertiser”
John J. Fenstermaker
Originally published in The Journal of Popular Culture

Recent Studies in Victorian English Literary Dialect and its Linguistic Connections
Sue Edney
Originally Published in Literature Compass 

The Victorian Middle Classes: Wealth, Occupation, and Geography
W. D. RUBINSTEIN
Originally published in Economic History Review

To read this article and the commissioned commentaries for free just click on the PDF link below.

 Victorian Print Culture, Journalism and the Novel PDF

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Abstract

A number of studies have challenged the divide between Victorian literature and journalism in recent years by rethinking the relationship between enduring literary genres such as the novel and ephemeral forms of print including newspapers and magazines. This essay identifies the key ways in which studies in print culture and book history have revised our understanding of the 19th-century literary marketplace by identifying a high degree of interaction between the era’s literature and journalism. The essay begins with an introduction to print culture as a field of research that has challenged the narrow literary focus of Victorian studies by expanding its borders to include the eclectic assortment of journalistic writing representative of the 19th century. It then considers how the development of digital archives has improved access to the full range of reading materials once available to audiences. The essay concludes with an assessment of how attention to the entire spectrum of print consumed by the reading public has inspired a critical revaluation of the relationship between journalism and the Victorian novel.
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This article originally appeared in Literature Compass

In this short snippet, Prof. Jon Mee from the University of Warwick talks about the Celebrating Dickens Project that he and his colleagues have been working on, which includes a mobile phone app, a series of podcasts and a 45 minute documentary.

To read this article and the commissioned commentaries for free just click on the PDF link below.

The Manly Mind? Revisiting the Victorian ‘Sex in Brain’ Debate PDF

In order to post your comment and response, please use the comments box at the bottom of this post. All comments are moderated and will appear shortly after they are submitted.

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Abstract

Historians in the 1970s and 1980s explored the ways in which Victorian science characterised and caricatured the female intellect. As a core element of debates on the extension of the franchise, and on women in higher education, the scientific literature on the mental differences between men and women has been thoroughly explored. A key part of this literature dealt with the relative weights of male and female brains, and the assertions of evolutionists and anatomists that fundamental physiological differences explained any observable differences in psychology by natural law. The paper revisits this material with a new set of questions. To what extent did scientific discourse not only subordinate women, but also serve to reinforce a social hierarchy of men? How was manliness, as a natural mental quality, defined, and who did it exclude? Exploring the ways in which scientific literature mirrored discourses of racial, political and citizenship exclusions, substantial revisions to the existing historiography are suggested. The paper concludes by proposing a turn towards the image of the ‘animal’ as a fundamental category of analysis in Victorian thought, upon which constructions of gender, race and social hierarchy were constructed.
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This article originally appeared in Gender & History

Literature Compass editor and author, Anne Stiles (St. Louis University) shares her thoughts on scholarship regarding Dickens, psychology, gender and the brain.

Papers discussed are:

The Manly Mind? Revisiting the Victorian ‘Sex in Brain’ Debate by Rob Boddice
Victorian Sexualities by Holly Furneaux
Unsettling the Normative: Articulations of Masculinity in Victorian Literature and Culture by Dustin Friedman
Dickens and Women by Kathryn Sutherland
In Such a State of Ink: Adolescents in the Novels of Charles Dickens by Elizabeth Welburn
Victorian Psychology and the Novel by Anne Stiles
David Copperfield as Psychological Fiction by Mark Spilka

To read this article and the commissioned commentaries for free just click on the PDF link below.

 Global Dickens PDF

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Abstract

Intended as a case study in the globalization of literary studies and as part of an effort to help launch the Global Circulation Project under the auspices of Literature Compass, the present essay takes the writings of Charles Dickens as its focus. The essay has three primary goals. First, it recounts the story of Professor Ada B. Nisbet’s attempt between the mid-1960s and 1984 to compile and publish an international bibliography of Dickens, one that would examine and analyze the circulation of Dickens’s writings not only within Anglo-American literary culture but also in the rest of the world. The essay traces the history of this ambitious project, analyzes the reasons it was never completed, and describes the archive that Professor Nisbet left behind. Second, the essay provides a report, necessarily incomplete, of work published since 1984 and work-in-progress that deals with the global circulation of Dickens’s writings. Finally, “Global Dickens” issues an invitation to scholars from around the world to contribute to an ongoing dialogue about the reception and significance of Dickens outside Britain, Europe, and North America.
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This article originally appeared in Literature Compass

PUTTING THE WORLD INTO A BOX: A GEOGRAPHY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY ‘TRAVELLING LANDSCAPES’
Veronica Della Dora
Originally published in Geografiska Annaler

New Histories of British Imperial Communication and the ‘Networked World’ of the 19th and Early 20th Centuries
Glen O’Hara
Originally published in History Compass

PEOPLING THE VICTORIAN GOLDFIELDS: FROM BOOM TO BUST, 1851–1901
Charles Fahey
Originally published in Australian Economic History Review

Victorian Sexualities
Holly Furneaux
Originally published in Literature Compass

Unsettling the Normative: Articulations of Masculinity in Victorian Literature and Culture
Dustin Friedman
Originally published in Literature Compass

Club Talk: Gossip, Masculinity and Oral Communities in Late Nineteenth-Century London
Amy Milne-Smith
Originally published in Gender & History

Dickens and Women
Kathryn Sutherland
Originally published in Critical Quarterly

A‘Pilgrim Reformer’at the Heart of the Empire: Behramji Malabari in Late-Victorian London
ANTOINETTE BURTON
Originally published in Gender & History