The V21 Collations: Book Forum welcomes Anna Maria Jones, Erica Kanesaka Kalnay and Kristin Mahoney in conversation about Grace E. Lavery’s Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics and the Idea of Japan (Princeton, 2019). Near the end of the book’s introduction, Lavery points to “the Japan this book is about” (30). The Japan that she has named …read more
The V21 Collations: Book Forum welcomes Jill Ehnenn, David Agruss, and Richard Kaye in conversation about Dustin Friedman’s exciting new work: Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self (Johns Hopkins, 2019). Friedman’s book stages a key intervention in queer theory by proposing that the queer aesthetes that constellated around Walter Pater should be situated …read more
The V21 Collations: Book Forum welcomes Matthew Reznicek, Dani Green, and John Plotz in conversation about Mary L. Mullen’s compelling new scholarly work: Novel Institutions: Anachronism, Irish Novels and Nineteenth-Century Realism (Edinburgh, 2019). As Mullen states with characteristic precision and clarity in the Introduction, “Novel Institutions offers a new understanding of the politics of institutions …read more
The V21 Collations: Book Forum welcomes Lindsay Wilhelm, Richard Menke, and Kimberly Hall in conversation about Susan Zieger’s The Mediated Mind: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century (Fordham, 2018). Zieger’s compelling new work explores ephemeral forms of “printed paper and imprinted objects,” as various kinds of new media that “touched every region of …read more
The V21 Collations: Book Forum welcomes Katarzyna Bartoszynska, Carolyn Dever and Milan Terlunen in conversation about Elaine Auyoung’s When Fiction Feels Real: Representation and the Reading Mind (Oxford, 2018). Auyoung’s provocative and compelling new work of scholarship begins with this question: “how can nineteenth-century novels bring readers into intimate relation with fictional personas and world that seem …read more
The V21 Collations: Book Forum welcomes Paul Fyfe, Kate Holterhoff and Sheila Liming in conversation about Sarah Allison’s Reductive Reading: A Syntax of Victorian Moralizing (Hopkins, 2018). A masterful integration of digital humanistic approaches and more traditional close-reading methods, Reductive Reading makes a compelling, persuasive case for the way that the style of Victorian literature …read more
The V21 Collations: Book Forum welcomes A.K. Huseby, John Schulz, and Annmarie Drury in conversation about Anne C. McCarthy’s Awful Parenthesis: Suspension and the Sublime in Romantic and Victorian Poetry (Toronto, 2018). McCarthy’s impressive new study “argues that suspension… [– as the] seemingly paradoxical concatenation of activity and passivity, of presence and absence — marks …read more
The V21 Collations: Book Forum welcomes Elspeth Green (Princeton University), David Coombs (Clemson University) and Anna Henchman (Boston University) in conversation about Michael Tondre’s The Physics of Possibility: Victorian Fiction, Science, and Gender (UVA Press, 2018). Tondre’s illuminating new work explores the wide range of intellectual projects, including the physical and mathematical sciences alongside fiction, …read more
V21 Collations: Book Forum welcomes Adam Fales, Heidi Smith, and Devin Griffiths in conversation about Megan Ward’s fascinating new book, Seeming Human: Artificial Intelligence and Victorian Realist Character (Ohio State Press, 2018). In this provocative work, Ward proposes “a new genealogy of realist character” (2) as a corrective to the historical preference for subjective interiority. …read more
The V21 Collations: Book Forum welcomes Kathleen Frederickson (UC Davis), Sara Lyons (U of Kent, Canterbury), and Scott Thompson (Temple) in conversation about Sebastian Lecourt’s inspired and inspiring—or perhaps reservedly “hope[ful]” (199)—new work Cultivating Belief: Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics, & the Secular Imagination (Oxford, 2018). Locating in Victorian anthropology an understanding of religion as “a …read more