V21’s Collations: Book Forum welcomes Dustin Friedman, Ellis Hanson and Tara Thomas in conversation about Daniel Wright’s lively, pleasurable (or perhaps pleasure-full) and discerning new work, Bad Logic (Hopkins, 2018), which begins, appropriately enough, with this incitement: “it can seem a kind of magic to put into language the vagaries of desire” (1). Wright’s book …read more
V21 Collations: Book Forum welcomes Anna E. Clark, Tara K. Menon and Daniel Wright in conversation about Jonathan Farina’s insightful new work, Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2017). Far from quotidian in its claims, Everyday Words explores what it regularly names as “rudimentary” and “common” words and phrases—“as if,” “but” and “that sort …read more
The V21 Collations: Book Forum welcomes Alex Bove, Racheal Fest and Nathan Hensley in conversation about Bruce Robbins’s most recent publication The Beneficiary (Duke, 2017). Robbins’s The Beneficiary offers a history of humanitarianism that encompasses a wide range of writers, artists and pundits from the nineteenth century forward, concluding that “whatever our political principles, we …read more
V21 Collations: Book Forum welcomes Daniel Kasper, Rithika Ramamurthy, and David Womble in conversation about Emily Steinlight’s splendid new book Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life (Cornell, 2018). Steinlight deftly surveys the literary forms wherein writers responded to exponential population growth by “radically rearticulat[ing] what it means to belong to …read more
V21 welcomes Will Glovinksy (Columbia), Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb (Williams College), and Bruce Robbins (Columbia) in conversation about Nasser Mufti’s Civilizing War: Imperial Politics and the Poetics of National Rupture (Northwestern, 2018). In exploring the modern understanding of “civil war,” Mufti’s boldly challenges dominant conceptions of civilization, civility, modernization, and nationalism. He offers a persuasive …read more
Collations: Book Forum welcomes Thomas Albrecht (Tulane), Daniel Pollack-Pelzner (Linfield College), and Katherine Voyles (U of Washington, Bothell) in discussing Jesse Rosenthal’s Good Form: The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel. In his insightful new work, Rosenthal masterfully weaves together philosophy and fiction to contemplate the “moral conceptualizations of narrative form” (5) for Victorian writers …read more
The V21 Collective’s Collations: Book Forum welcomes Elisha Cohn (Cornell University), Kate Flint (University of Southern California) and Travis Lau (UPenn) in discussing Benjamin Morgan’s The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature (Chicago, 2017). Morgan’s exciting, interdisciplinary new work explores Victorian aesthetic thought, situating it “at the intersection of multiple discourses and …read more
The V21 Collective is delighted to introduce our latest “Collations: Book Forum” with a discussion of Nathan K. Hensley’s book Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (Oxford UP, 2016). A masterful and beautifully written book of commanding scope, Hensley’s Forms of Empire posits a new method of reading the Victorian period’s, and more broadly …read more
The V21 Collective is delighted to introduce our latest “Collations: Book Forum” with a discussion of Devin Griffiths’s book The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature Between the Darwins (Johns Hopkins UP, 2016). Already the recipient of high praise, including a nomination for the British Society for Literature and Science book prize, Age of Analogy “explores …read more
Welcome to the second “Collations: Book Forum” on recent publications in Victorian Studies and related areas of research. We are delighted to discuss Elisha Cohn’s Still Life: Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel (Oxford UP, 2016). Cohn’s Still Life posits a “new theory of Victorian aesthetics” by utilizing what the V21 Manifesto identifies as “speculative and synthetic methods” that allow …read more