Papers by James Eli Adams
A History of Victorian Literature, 2009
Wilde’s Other Worlds, 2018
Victorian Studies, 2018
In the 1830s, Thomas Arnold, the Headmaster of Rugby School, was widely regarded as a dangerous m... more In the 1830s, Thomas Arnold, the Headmaster of Rugby School, was widely regarded as a dangerous man. He was a fierce controversialist—he likened Tractarians to foreign spies, who merited hanging—and many observers (including some of his own trustees) feared that he would turn Rugby into a breeding ground for Radical politics. Lytton Strachey’s portrait of Arnold in Eminent Victorians (1918) offers little hint of this, an omission which is one index of Strachey’s pervasive belittling of his subject. But this lacuna also registers the triumph of an earlier biographer of Arnold. The moral paragon who Strachey set out to debunk was largely the creation of a single literary work, A. P. Stanley’s Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D. D. (1844). Even in a Victorian culture so remarkably appreciative of clerical memoirs and lives, Stanley’s biography stood apart in its immense popularity and influence: by 1890 it had sold hundreds of thousands of copies in at least fifty editions and had enshrined “Dr. Arnold” as a beacon of moral earnestness, Christian piety, and energetic social reform. Ironically, the image of Arnold as, in Basil Willey’s words, “the great schoolmaster who changed the face of education all through the public schools of England” is largely a myth (52). The structural changes that Arnold brought about at Rugby were not dramatic; they were mostly confined to delegating greater disciplinary authority to the praepostors, the students of the Sixth Form, in the interests of encouraging a kind of moral self-government. That innovation derived from a system that Arnold had encountered as a student at Winchester, but it did not bring about notable changes elsewhere, in part
Choice Reviews Online, 2004
Adams/A History of Victorian Literature, 2009
The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture, 2014
Victorian sexual attitudes were closely bound up with the impact of Evangelical faith, particular... more Victorian sexual attitudes were closely bound up with the impact of Evangelical faith, particularly as it informed two subsequent developments in Victorian Christianity: Tractarianism, which was widely received as a form of Anglo-Catholicism, and ‘muscular Christianity’, which was centrally concerned to rescue the body from the moral rigour of both Evangelicals and Tractarians. In religious controversy, connections between sexuality and faith emerge not only in direct address of central concerns, such as marriage and prostitution, but more obliquely, through the labelling of deviance, particularly the insinuation of ‘unnatural’ desire. Such stigma gave unusual public notice to, or at least glimpses of, proscribed forms of sexuality, which came into increasing visibility in the latter decades of the century, partly through appeals to ancient Greece as the source of a more humane ethos than Christianity.
A New Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, 2014
Anderson/A Companion to George Eliot, 2013
Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, 1996
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ELH, 1992
... The divergent emphasesbroadly speaking, those of arete and thumosexist in un-easy conjuncti... more ... The divergent emphasesbroadly speaking, those of arete and thumosexist in un-easy conjunction ... a specific image, or to the drama of understanding, is also a gesture of seduction ... finds a different lesson: Wilde, he urges, exposes "the misleading common sense that finds ...
Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, 1997
Victorian Studies, 2012
summer 2012 as managed here, however, is clumsy and slow-moving. The success of a similar techniq... more summer 2012 as managed here, however, is clumsy and slow-moving. The success of a similar technique of reading in the following chapter indicates the greater ease of managing visual material as significant context. One clear and productive contrast recchio draws is between du maurier’s interpretive emphasis on narrative nodes of the text and Thomson’s prodigious proliferation of “visual stereotypes” that overwhelm the letterpress (76). One of the strengths of recchio’s study—its excess—is also a weakness. Arguments are typically extended beyond the Cranford remit; almost all of the supplementary material is interesting, if not strictly germane, but it does distend chapters more than once, and I craved a slightly tighter, more focused argument. examples include sections on aftertexts such as Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Fair Barbarian (1881), illustrated editions of other authors, and other books or series by illustrators of Cranford. The narrative is thorough, and it clearly informs recchio’s breadth of vision, which, for example in the chapters on twentieth-century school texts and dramatic productions, illuminates the successful penetration of Cranford into America’s culture of nostalgic englishness. These popularizing formats, recchio suggests, became a healthy antidote to fears of degeneration associated with mass immigration and to literary decadence. I have only a few cavils. Given the richness of access to Victorian journals that digitisation affords, it is incomprehensible why a scholar should resort to Elizabeth Gaskell: The Critical Heritage (1991) for identification of and quotation from contemporary reviews, or why a letter by John ruskin should be quoted from that source. One of the doubtful results of recchio’s reliance on this anthology is the assumption that only two reviews of Cranford appeared on its first appearance as a volume, whereas a simple digital search of British Periodicals identifies several others. The literary author maps by Lucien Leclaire reprinted here are unreadable; magnified sections would have been better than illegible wholes. While there are few typos (including of Leclaire’s name), the failure of anyone to spot Dilk for sir Charles W. Dilke is surprising. recchio’s publishing history, however, is interesting on several counts: as a material history of cultural publication, as an interpretation of the Cranford texts that benefits from a number of interrogative formats, and as an opportunity to see an inquiring mind at work. Laurel Brake Birkbeck, University of London
Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination, 1995
Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, 2016
to Courbet's painting. Women as objects of male desire are related to the incorporation of th... more to Courbet's painting. Women as objects of male desire are related to the incorporation of the body into a network of social relations. According to Patrick O'Donovan, the body, the Other, and a repudiation of the body politic can be rooted in ambivalence throughout the novels of the Goncourt brothers. The object of desire as reflected in the serpentine dance of the Oriental belly dancers of North Africa analyzed by Emily Apter, or the allure of the "bayaderes" for Rhonda Garelick, stand as a commentary on the French Empire, its colonialism, a site of mastery linked with science (as demonstrated by Dorothy Kelly on Zola's experimental novel), and the beginning of the society of consumption. In fact, Barbara Vinken chooses the department store in Zola's Le Bonheur des Dames as activator for the arousal of feminine desire. Revisiting Barthes' SIZ, Diana Knight draws the conclusion that the textual slant of realism is complicit with a value system which st...
Nineteenth Century Prose, Sep 22, 1997
Much recent analysis of Pater approaches his work as a legitimation of homoerotic desire. As this... more Much recent analysis of Pater approaches his work as a legitimation of homoerotic desire. As this emphasis counters the subtle homophobia informing much modernist reception of Pater, it also entails renewed attention to Pater's original audiences, and thus to a neglected social dimension of his writing. In the early reception of Pater, however, sexuality is of less moment than gendered constructions of literary labor, within which Pater's pursuit of "pulsations" was attacked as a form of effeminacy. Pater's subsequent preoccupation with the "manliness" of art can be seen in this light less as a defensive response to homophobia than as an effort to reconstruct a traditionally feminized ethical stance as an eminently masculine self-discipline. ********** Like much criticism of the last decade or so, a good deal of the most provocative recent writing on Pater might be thought of as a return to the repressed--as a concerted recovery or reassessment of attributes of his work that in various ways have been devalued, marginalized, or elided. The most striking development along these lines has been attention to Pater's sexuality. Homophobia, many critics have argued, has been a potent force in the reception not only of Pater but of aestheticism generally. The recent revisionary response to this tradition has thus implicitly worked along two lines: Preoccupation with homoerotic dynamics in Pater's writing contests not only the decorums of Pater's own era, but also the later, high modernist culture that concertedly marginalized Pater--or, in the case of T.S. Eliot, tried to relegate him to something approaching outer darkness. Yet that earlier unease with Pater persists--at least on the evidence of Denis Donoghue's recent study, Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls. (1) On the one hand, Donoghue's work is a striking reflection of Pater's new prominence in histories of modernism: Donoghue's Pater is not only a fount of modernist culture, but as such commands sufficient attention to warrant a book-length study published by one of America's most prestigious literary houses. Yet Donoghue also treats Pater with almost unremitting condescension, recycling the familiar image of the meek, "hothouse" aesthete of brittle talents, who was abashed by his dangerous disciple, Wilde, and overmastered by the world at large. This assessment, which has been widely echoed by reviewers, suggests an unexpected aptness in Donoghue's subtitle, "lover of strange souls." In Pater's "Leonardo da Vinci" that phrase describes both Leonardo's admirers and Pater's own readers, in whom he often arouses a deeply perplexed regard akin to the "fascination" that he attributes to Leonardo. (2) Pater, it seems, cannily anticipated the ambivalence not only of Donoghue but of Donoghue's modernist masters: Haunting as many of them found Pater's prose, it also seemed the work of a man withdrawn, furtive, evasive, a man with something to hide, or perhaps not enough of a man. As recent attention to Pater's homoerotic sensibility has revised such assessments, the withdrawn, wistful dreamer has been transformed into a more daring figure who is engaged in a concerted effort to legitimate a world of transgressive pleasures--a figure rather like Pater's own Leonardo, "a bold speculator, holding lightly by other men's beliefs," "the sorcerer or the magician, possessed of curious secrets and a hidden knowledge." (3) This emphasis pointedly acknowledges an important social dimension that was long attenuated or altogether absent in studies of Pater's work, inasmuch as it draws attention to the character of Pater's audience--more precisely, his multiple audiences. Earlier treatments of Pater's style--culminating, I think, in Carolyn Williams' masterful analysis of The Renaissance--tended to approach that style as a largely autonomous creation, either as the expression of a distinctive psyche or as the pursuit of a formal coherence, whether logical or aesthetic. …
A Concise Companion to the Victorian Novel
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Papers by James Eli Adams