English

Realism is not particularly realistic: we accept that it contains multiple ontologies and read 'reference' as normative and indeed constitutive of the genre, but if we read it literally and skeptically, this hetero-ontology performs all kinds of wonders and introduces the possibilities of new kinds of belief, new social formations and new ways of being in a world that breaks apart and then mends in a new configuration. Taking an obscure Indian Mutiny/boy's adventure novel -G. A. Henty's Rujub, the Juggler (1893) -as a case study, this article asks us to read realism against its grain and wonder about its routine, but rupturing gestures towards reality, history, as well as to the inexplicable, the supernatural and the other-worldly. How many worlds can a novel contain? What if we insist on suturing them together into one?

is one of those remarkable critics who insist, every so often, that we turn about and reexamine the path by which we have come into a particular field of inquiry so that we may understand exactly why it is we find ourselves here, and not there, or there. Her new book, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England, is such a prominence from which to surveil the landscape of female gender roles and sexualities, and to afford ourselves a glimpse of the terrain ahead. Marcus's book ambitiously seeks to extend Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's groundbreaking work on male homosocial desire, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985). Sedgwick's work, which identifies the erotic triangles and the "traffic in women" from Shakespeare to Walt Whitman, provides a launching point for Marcus's own exploration. As Marcus convincingly asserts: "Yes, homophobia was less powerful between women than between men, but was that because all forms of love between women were essentially interchangeable, as the continuum theory suggests? Yes, women's relations were less violently policed than men's, but are they therefore less interesting?. .. Yes, relationships between women were different, but don't we need at least an entire book to explore that.. . ?" (Between Women, p. 10). Like Sedgwick, Marcus uses feminist and queer theory to investigate samesex desire whilst broadening the perspective from the homosexual to the homosocial. Although there have been many studies of women's friendship, romantic friendship, love, and marriage by influential critics such as Lillian Faderman and Martha Vicinus, Marcus argues that these works have produced a "dominant paradigm" whereby women's relationships with other women all fall under the rubric of "a subset of lesbianism and as a subversion of gender norms" (p. 29). Rather than view women-centric relations from the perspective of marginalization or transgression, Marcus suggests that we need a more nuanced approach that reads the bonds between women without reducing them to the identical or the interchangeable. This is Marcus's challenge to the cultural map of Victorian England as we now understand it. Unlike Sedgwick, Marcus does not adopt a diachronic approach to the history of womens' relationships. While Sedgwick's book

Might we, Romanticists and Victorianists, be or become one people? This cluster of essays, by Ian Duncan, Mary Favret, Catherine Robson, and Herbert Tucker, addresses longstanding and emergent cruxes in our collective scholarship, including questions of periodization, mediality, trans/nationality, genre, and mode. “Romance” and “realism” provide two provoking terms for thought. An introduction, by Elaine Freedgood and N. Maureen McLane, lays out axes of categorization, questions for pedagogy and the profession as well as intellectual and disciplinary genealogies. Duncan notes the insufficiency of such terms as “long nineteenth century” and proposes Walter Scott as one figure who teaches us how to think period as well as realism and romance; Favret addresses the romantic lecture and its current resonance in the age of MOOCs; Robson explores the nature of Victorian reading, and directions for Victorianist readings; Tucker meditates on the status of desire and marriage plots—Romantic a...

ThErE arE m a n y Victorian novels that circulate in the academic and popu lar imaginations, and they have changed radically over the past 150 or so years. One is integrated, coherent, and conservative. It keeps people in place: in their countries, colonies, kitchens, and castles. Its time is empty and homogenous. It has been the fall guy and the straw man for the formal intricacies of the eighteenth-century, modernist, and postmodernist novels: it is before and after the nineteenth century that innovation happens, in which the uninterrupted diegesis formed by the Victorian omniscient narrator and the narrated world are examined, disrupted, and discussed in the novel itself, creating layers and layers of narrative and nuance. This state of affairs has also meant that other novels-Irish novels, Nigerian novels, lesbian novels, Dalit novels, and other aspirational fictions-are in the waiting room of literary history. Their formal ruptures are accidental and messy and the result of underdeveloped literary sensibilities, especially when it comes to "form." Realism is the ur-form of the novel: the point of arrival and departure, the apex of repre sen ta tion that is also an endpoint, and a dead end. It is anomalous and power ful; its aspiration to reference is unique in literary history, a magnificent achievement that quickly becomes an embarrassment, even, as George Levine puts it, what seems like "an historically inevitable mistake."1

ThErE arE m a n y Victorian novels that circulate in the academic and popu lar imaginations, and they have changed radically over the past 150 or so years. One is integrated, coherent, and conservative. It keeps people in place: in their countries, colonies, kitchens, and castles. Its time is empty and homogenous. It has been the fall guy and the straw man for the formal intricacies of the eighteenth-century, modernist, and postmodernist novels: it is before and after the nineteenth century that innovation happens, in which the uninterrupted diegesis formed by the Victorian omniscient narrator and the narrated world are examined, disrupted, and discussed in the novel itself, creating layers and layers of narrative and nuance. This state of affairs has also meant that other novels-Irish novels, Nigerian novels, lesbian novels, Dalit novels, and other aspirational fictions-are in the waiting room of literary history. Their formal ruptures are accidental and messy and the result of underdeveloped literary sensibilities, especially when it comes to "form." Realism is the ur-form of the novel: the point of arrival and departure, the apex of repre sen ta tion that is also an endpoint, and a dead end. It is anomalous and power ful; its aspiration to reference is unique in literary history, a magnificent achievement that quickly becomes an embarrassment, even, as George Levine puts it, what seems like "an historically inevitable mistake."1

for a long time, many Victorian novels were not all that great. From Victorian critics like G. H. Lewes and Monckton Milnes in the 1850s, '60s, and '70s, to novel scholars like Dorothy Van Ghent and Barbara Hardy in the 1950s and '60s, Victorian fiction often fails to find a suitable form: it is too long, too much engaged in telling and not enough in showing, and too avoidant of the tragic in its denouements. In short, Victorian fiction is too narrative (diegetic) and not dramatic (mimetic) enough. Then, in the twenty years between 1960 and 1980, forms seemingly "native" to Victorian "realistic" fiction are found with more and more success, and the very big novel as a form lifts off, making it a naturalized effort thereafter. A new genre is born, or "read" into being in the sense that Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins have suggested that lyric is read into being in the mid-nineteenth century and then projected backward as a long-standing poetic