bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Education
Authors: Gargano Elizabeth
Published: June 2017

The Victorian era saw major changes in the nation's educational landscape, as a patchwork of church‐affiliated schools, charitable institutions, factory schools, and dame schools was gradually reorganized into a national school system under state regulation. Such changes evolved out of the Victorian education debates, an intense national conversation on educational reform that took place in newspapers, educational treatises, government reports, and parliamentary debates, as well as popular and literary fiction. Novelists like Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and many others created vivid schoolroom depictions that documented educational abuses, questioned current pedagogical methodology, and contrasted good teaching with bad. The new genre of schoolboy fiction moved over time from suspicion of institutional education to an unproblematic celebration of it. Though often pessimistic about the current educational scene, novelists and educational theorists remained optimistic about the future of educational reform, seeing it as a means of shaping a just and vital society.
Elegy
Authors: Matthews Samantha
Published: June 2017

An elegy is a poem of loss or mourning written after a death in order to express grief, commemorate the dead, and seek consolation, and which often employs conventions from classical pastoral. The adjectival form “elegiac” loosely characterizes many forms of Victorian art and culture as nostalgic or melancholy. The canonical Victorian elegies include Alfred Tennyson,In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850); Matthew Arnold, “Thyrsis” (1866); Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Ave atque Vale” (1868). Mainstream criticism on major elegies has drawn principally on theories of the Freudian “work of mourning” and Bloomian “anxiety of influence.” Expansion of the Victorian poetry canon in the 1980s and 1990s exposed limitations to masculinist psychoanalytic interpretations, and these have been addressed productively in gender, genre, and ethical criticism.
Eugenics
Authors: Richardson Angelique
Published: June 2017

Eugenics, the idea of conscious intervention in evolution to bring about perceived biological improvement, developed in the second half of the nineteenth century in response to new levels of urban poverty, and in opposition to perceived indiscriminate almsgiving. Drawing on a combination of social purity and new biological discourses, and emerging in a climate of heightened anxiety over degeneration, national efficiency, and imperial decline, it also coincided with an emergent, gendered, and moral citizenship, as middle‐class women sought to gain public recognition for their national contribution as mothers. Eugenics formed the subject of numerous novels, notably New Woman fiction by Sarah Grand and George Egerton and works by H. G. Wells and Grant Allen, finding its most sustained expression not in legislation or public policy but in imaginative literature and the popular press.
Fantasy
Authors: McGillis Roderick
Published: June 2017

Victorian literature is often thought of as the age of realism in fiction; it is also an age noted for its high seriousness in nonfiction prose by sages such as John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Darwin, and others. Despite this reputation for a focus on the world we live in, Victorian writers also created other worlds. Indeed, the entire culture in the nineteenth century delighted in other worlds, so much so that they often folded other worlds into the reality they knew. In short, fantasy was everywhere in Victorian Britain. In literature, fantasy turns up in a variety of forms: the fairy tale, thekunstmärchen, the gothic, nonsense, medieval imitations, and the oriental tale. Famous practitioners of fantasy such as Lewis Carroll and George MacDonald are only the most visible of a great number of fantasy writers, many of whom are women.
Film
Authors: Elliott Kamilla
Published: June 2017

Victorian literature and film have a simultaneously divided and conjoined existence in history, interdisciplinary academic discourse, and the cultural practice of literary film adaptation. Adaptations and scholarship alike often manifest a Janus‐faced vision that looks back to Victorian literature as ancestor of film and forward to its diverse afterlives in film, as well as other media.
Food
Authors: Broomfield Andrea
Published: June 2017

Scholarly interest in the topic of food and literature in Victorian England has been keen in recent years and shows no signs of abating, in part because this era offers cultural historians and literary critics so much material to work with. The nineteenth century saw the birth of gastronomy and hence an emerging canon of gastronomic literature; the rise of domestic realism, which is replete with scenes of cooking, procuring food, and dining is likewise interesting to scholars; furthermore, the significant increase in the number of published cookbooks, among them the best‐sellingBook of Household Managementby Isabella Beeton, allows literary critics and food historians better insight into the needs of an expanding middle class.
Gore, Catherine
Authors: Wilson Cheryl A.
Published: June 2017

One of the most popular and prolific silver‐fork novelists, Catherine Gore published over fifty fashionable novels between 1830 and 1858. Her novels conform to the silver‐fork formula by depicting the glamour of high society, yet she also exposes and critiques that society, creating texts that are both complex and historically valuable.
Greenwell, Dora
Authors: Gray F. Elizabeth
Published: June 2017

Dora Greenwell was a genre‐crossing mid‐Victorian who reenvisioned gender and class roles in essays, poetry, and theological and biographical writings. She was also an unmarried gentlewoman of reduced means who refused to become a stereotype; a theologian of broad religious sympathies; and an activist whose incarnational Christian faith grounded compassionate intervention for the weak and oppressed. While best known in her own time for her religious poetry, her essays, in particular “Our Single Women” and “On the Education of the Imbecile,” are today more frequently discussed.
Howitt, Mary
Authors: d'Albertis Deirdre
Published: June 2017

Mary Botham Howitt (1799–1888), best known during her own lifetime as a poet or author of domestic fiction and children's tales, was also a prominent editor and translator who collaborated frequently with her husband and fellow Quaker, William Howitt (1792–1879), also a prolific author and publisher of the influential
Howitt's Journal
(1847–48). Both Howitts were committed to advancing radical causes of the day; Mary Howitt spoke out in support of property reform and suffrage for women in the 1850s and 1860s. Largely forgotten until feminist scholars directed attention to her navigation of the Victorian literary marketplace, Mary Howitt exemplifies the collaborative practices of many professional women of letters in the period.
Ireland
Authors: Murphy James H.
Published: June 2017

British Victorian literature was extensively read in Ireland, and characters in Irish novels are also reported as reading British literature. Literacy was growing in Ireland and the means of borrowing or buying books were numerous. Movements of cultural nationalism were themselves often dependent on British literary influences. Various forms of Irishness were depicted in British‐set fiction. Many Irish authors made their careers in Britain and some became highly successful. Irish Victorian literature is largely ignored both by Victorianists and Irish Studies scholars: by Victorianists because it is too Irish; by Irish Studies scholars because it is too British. The publishing industry gives access to the nuances of Victorian Ireland as does Irish Victorian drama, which operated within a multinational context. In fact, it is best to think not of one Victorian Ireland but of multiple Victorian Irelands. Literature remains a key way of exploring and understanding them.
Journalism
Authors: Brake Laurel
Published: June 2017

This entry probes the intimate relationship between journalism and literature when their borders were porous and they overlapped. One iteration of much Victorian literature is its first appearance in commercial, serial formats, often in the press and anonymously. Authors of literature frequently wrote articles and reviews and served as founders and editors. Poetry appeared in all serials, as did serialized fiction; but most ubiquitous were the prose article and literary criticism. Reviews and literary advertisements were important economically to authors, serials, and publishers. After 1860 fiction and the press, particularly the periodicals, coexisted in a productive symbiosis. The miscellany structure of periodicals and newspapers persisted, however, until 1880, accommodating literary copy amid diverse other types, including news and politics. Late in the century dedicated literary magazines proliferated.
Journalism, feminist
Authors: Hamilton Susan
Published: June 2017

Feminist journalism in nineteenth‐century Britain can be defined as women's press writing that advocated for the transformation of women's social, political, and legal position. Dispersed across the full network of Victorian print media, nineteenth‐century feminist journalism can be organized into two large and generally complementary fields: journalism published in established newspapers and periodicals and broadcast to a wide audience, and journalism produced by and circulated to feminist‐identified writers and readers in specialist titles that often served as the official organs of feminist organizations and sought to gain support for specific initiatives. Both fields of press writing circulated an array of political positions, analyses, and ideas for strategy. Together these fields of feminist journalism constitute the multifaceted networks of affiliation, competition, and debate that are Victorian feminism.
Kingsley, Henry
Authors: Scheuerle William H.
Published: June 2017

Henry Kingsley (1830–76) was a popular Victorian author who wrote seventeen novels, four collections of short stories and essays, and two separately printed novellas; he also prepared an edition of Daniel Defoe's
Robinson Crusoe
, with a biographical introduction of the author. Today he is best known for his two Australian‐based novels –
The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn
(1859) and
The Hillyars and the Burtons: A Story of Two Families
(1865) – and for his
Ravenshoe
(1862), a novel that set a pattern for his works that dealt with how the splendors of the past were fading in the industrial changes of mid‐nineteenth‐century England.
Kipling, Rudyard
Authors: Fernandez Jean
Published: June 2017

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), Nobel Prize‐winning writer of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, was largely regarded as an apologist for empire, with all its attendant sins of racism, warfare, and economic exploitation. However, Kipling's complex intellectual and aesthetic response to empire is evidenced in the generic range of his work, from imperial gothic short fiction to satirical poetry, to juvenile fiction, to experimental modernist fiction, to essays and speeches.
Plain Tales from the Hills
,
Barrack Room Ballads
,
The Jungle Book
anthologies, and
Kim
are some of his more famous titles. Empire studies and postcolonial studies have revived interest in his work.
Levy, Amy
Authors: Bernstein Susan David
Published: June 2017

Amy Levy (1861–89) was a Victorian poet and novelist who also wrote essays on literary topics – on poets Christina Rossetti and James Thomson, on American realism, on Jews in fiction – as well as on Anglo‐Jewish life and on women in modern London. She is credited with writing the first Anglo‐Jewish realist novel,
Reuben Sachs
, and a New Woman novel,
The Romance of a Shop
. She is the author of three collections of poetry, and her dramatic monologues “Xantippe,” “Magdalen,” and “A Modern Poet” are frequently anthologized, along with shorter lyrics like “A Ballad of Religion and Marriage.”
Linton, Eliza Lynn
Authors: Meem Deborah T.
Published: June 2017

Eliza Lynn Linton (1822–98) was a curious figure in Victorian letters. In her periodical journalism she was the most famous antifeminist of her day, but in her novels she created powerful independent women heroines. She was obsessively feminine in gender, but she wrote her autobiography under a male pseudonym. She married and took her husband's name, but her most powerful attachments – in life and in fiction – seem to have been with women. She embodied the tensions, conflicts, and contradictions faced by women in the Victorian age.
MacDonald
, George
Authors: Pennington John
Published: June 2017

Though he wrote poetry, sermons, literary criticism, and realistic novels, George MacDonald is most famous for his adult fantasies
Phantastes
(1858) and
Lilith
(1895) and for his fairy tales directed at children – the longer ones,
At the Back of the North Wind
(1871),
The Princess and the Goblin
(1872), and
The Princess and Curdie
(1883); and the shorter ones, which include “The Light Princess,” “The Shadows,” “The Giant's Heart,” “Little Daylight,” and “The Wise Woman” (published in various editions throughout his career). MacDonald's reputation significantly rests on C. S. Lewis's assessment of him; and Lewis labeled MacDonald a Christian writer who excelled at mythopoeic narratives.
Malet, Lucas (Mary St. Leger Kingsley)
Authors: Schaffer Talia
Published: June 2017

Although largely forgotten after her death in 1931, “Lucas Malet” (Mary St. Leger Kingsley Harrison), the daughter of Charles Kingsley, was one of the preeminent writers at the turn of the century. Her celebrated and controversial fiction, especially
The Wages of Sin
(1890) and
The History of Sir Richard Calmady
(1901), broke new ground in the depictions of nonnormative bodies and desires. Critics compared her to George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James. Malet's fiction is strongly experimental, with interests in aesthetic, economic, imperial, erotic, and psychological issues, but her personal unconventionality (including her conversion to Catholicism and her residence abroad) and her stylistic experimentation alienated readers in the twentieth century. Today queer theory and disability studies are helping scholars recover her work.
Martineau, Harriet
Authors: Logan Deborah A.
Published: June 2017

Harriet Martineau (1802–76) was one of the most prolific authors of the Victorian era, her career spanning a half‐century of writing. Her earliest literary success –
Illustrations of Political Economy
(1832–34), didactic tales examining the social impact of industrialization – was a key transitional genre bridging Romantic and Victorian novel aesthetics. Widely traveled, Martineau – termed “the first woman sociologist” – wrote analyses of antebellum America, Egypt and the Middle East, and postfamine Ireland; she wrote history, “popularized” Comtean Positive philosophy, and earned the title “first and greatest of women journalists.” Her lifewriting includes autobiography, self‐help literature, and many thousands of letters. Through an orientation predicated on Enlightenment humanism, Martineau's contributions to intellectual history are by definition interdisciplinary.
Melodrama
Authors: Williams Carolyn
Published: June 2017

Melodrama is a form of music drama that developed in the late eighteenth century, flourished on the Victorian stage, and is still a dominant mode today. Melodrama's focus is on ordinary people, who speak in prose, and the plays are intended for a popular audience. A theater of spectacle, scenic elaboration, and special effects, melodrama aims to engender an intense affective response in its audience. Gesture, declamation, music, and tableaux formally organize the audience's response, which alternates between absorption and shock. A more or less fixed set of stock characters engage in plots rife with action, suspense, and pathos. A mixed genre, potential tragedy alleviated by its signature happy ending, melodrama mediates new forms of social life in post‐Enlightenment, postrevolutionary modernity, encouraging the belief that crime will be punished and virtue recognized and rewarded. The histories of melodrama and realist fiction are deeply intertwined, and melodrama makes a definitive contribution to the rise of cinema.
Mill, John Stuart
Authors: Tucker Irene
Published: June 2017

This entry examines the life and work of Victorian England's most prolific and influential political philosopher, John Stuart Mill, through the analytical prism of his own
Autobiography
(posthumously published). Educated from early childhood according to the principles of utilitarianism by his father, philosopher James Mill, the young Mill eventually abandoned many utilitarian tenets; nonetheless he came to see the sort of self‐cultivation he both recorded and enacted in his lifewriting as a central practice of citizenship.
Modernism
Authors: March‐Russell Paul
Published: June 2017

Critics have often starkly contrasted modernism with Victorian literature. This contrast was largely an invention of the modernists themselves, for whom it served as a means of self‐identification – a process exacerbated by the institutionalization of English literary studies. In fact the relationship between modernism and Victorian literature was often more ambiguous than that, and many contemporary literary historians have been working to draw a clearer map of their overlapping tendencies.
Oliphant, Margaret
Authors: Langland Elizabeth
Published: June 2017

Margaret Oliphant was an extraordinarily prolific writer, even by Victorians’ standards. During her lifetime she produced nearly one hundred novels, over fifty short stories, more than one hundred nonfiction works, and over three hundred essays and articles. In her
Autobiography
, Oliphant herself commented that her productivity – necessitated by her role as breadwinner for her extended family – compromised the quality of her oeuvre. However, in her own time, she earned admiration and praise for her most memorable novels, among them
The Chronicles of Carlingford
,
The Ladies Lindores
, and
Kirsteen
– which are significant for their astute representations of major issues of her day, particularly those focusing on women, class mobility, and religion and dissent – and for her
Stories of the Seen and Unseen
, ghostly explorations of the borderland between the living and the dead. Recent republication of her substantial nonfiction oeuvre is now allowing readers to recover her reputation as a formidable literary journalist and major critical voice of the Victorian era.
Oxford Movement
Authors: King Joshua , Pond Kristen
Published: June 2017

The Oxford Movement emerged in the 1830s, among members of the Oxford clergy and academics who defended the Church of England's independent authority from the state and sought to reestablish its ties to pre‐Reformation Christianity. These priests and scholars soon sought ways to circulate their views in print, at a time when the activity of reading was spreading to an unprecedented degree. As a result, the Oxford Movement became one of the most influential literary and mass‐media phenomena in nineteenth‐century Britain. The Oxford Movement is a powerful example of the ways in which religious groups understand and project themselves through the media forms that structure society.
Patmore, Coventry
Authors: Gelpi Barbara Charlesworth
Published: June 2017

Coventry Patmore (1823–96) is best known for his long poem
The Angel in the House
. Published in four volumes between 1854 and 1862, it was not immediately popular but became a bestseller by the 1880s, as the culture wars over the rights of women grew more heated. Patmore intended the book both as a celebration of his wife, Emily Andrews Patmore, and as a statement to the effect that the subordination of women to men was a law of God and nature.
Pfeiffer, Emily
Authors: Olverson T. D.
Published: June 2017

Now noted by critics for her feminist views and her considerable talent for the sonnet form, Emily Jane Davis Pfeiffer was known in her day as a remarkably versatile writer of considerable ability, range and repute. More than a famed sonneteer, Pfeiffer was an artist, a critic, a dramatist, a travel writer, a philanthropist and a political campaigner. Due to a fire at her publishers in 1882, much of her original early work was destroyed and not reprinted. Pfeiffer is deserving of full critical reappraisal, not least because of her fine metrical skills and her compassionate social conscience.
Philanthropy
Authors: Maurer Sara L.
Published: June 2017

Because of the industrial revolution, the system of voluntary aid for the poor in the nineteenth century underwent enormous disruption. Victorian literature represents both this upheaval and the competing demands philanthropists felt in responding to it. On the one hand, the rules of political economy dictated that charity be given sparingly and only to those who fully deserved it. On the other hand, charitable workers felt a strong obligation to make their work be about knowing the poor and about genuinely feeling for their distress, an engagement that Victorians hoped would ease class tensions. Toward the end of the century, philanthropy and the literature that represented it took on more revolutionary ambitions, seeking not to make the status quo bearable, but to remake all of society. Throughout the century, literature itself constituted an important channel for charity. Creating and circulating something that might be read by those in distress constituted an important act of charity.
Poetess
Authors: Lootens Tricia
Published: June 2017

As a term of praise, as an insult, and as a relatively neutral synonym for “female poet,” the titlepoetessclearly predates Victorianism. In popular terms, however, the mythic “Poetess” tends to be an insistently Victorianized figure. A heritage rather than a heroine, the Poetess is a trope: through her Victorian writers, male and KEEP AS WRITTEN female, performed as if channeling the secret and often mournful heart of “woman.” “WOMAN” SHOULD BE CAPITALIZED. SORRY IT WASN'T With its appeal to the “pure” emotions of the national and/or imperial private sphere, Poetess performance offered rich, contested resources for developing Victorian, transatlantic, and transnational patriotic literary cultures.
Pornography
Authors: Colligan Colette
Published: June 2017

Although pornography is not a literary category one usually associates with the Victorians, it was in fact a Victorian invention. A bona fide trade in pornographic literature only truly began in the nineteenth century. Since the unearthing of this body of literature in the 1960s, scholars have worked to uncover the history of its secret trade and have debated its larger significance for British sexual culture both at home and abroad.
Pre‐Raphaelitism
Authors: Helsinger Elizabeth
Published: June 2017

The term “Pre‐Raphaelitism” applies most immediately to the joint projects of poets and artists who came together in two successive phases: as the Pre‐Raphaelite Brotherhood (1848 to c. 1854), which included Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and William Michael Rossetti and was joined by Christina Rossetti as contributing poet; and, a few years later (1856 to c. 1865), as a second grouping around Rossetti, which included William Morris, Edward Burne‐Jones, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. In both phases, young men early in their careers fired each other to strike out on new and distinctive paths; both groups sought to disrupt present conventions and to think poetry and visual arts freshly, drawing inspiration from work in other languages, cultures, and media and from an historical moment distant from their own: the period before Raphael (that is, before the high Renaissance). In both groups, the most intense periods of collaboration were brief, yet extraordinarily productive for poetry as well as for the visual arts, creating a form of modern medievalism that looked ahead to the modernisms of the next century.
Reform in literature
Authors: Berman Carolyn Vellenga
Published: June 2017

The Victorian period was launched by an age of reform, from 1832 to 1867. During these decades, which were framed by parliamentary reform, the British government, popular movements, and individuals made efforts to improve the nation by changing the forms of its institutions and the practices of its people. Although reformers were divided by religious and political beliefs, they were united in their reliance upon the technologies of print and the circulation of cheap literature. Women writers involved in transatlantic reform movements paved the way for “condition of England” or “social problem” novels. In turn, the social purpose of reform dignified the work of literature, particularly for women writers. Responding to parliamentary reports, imaginative writers made a case for the importance of literature to politics and for the importance of political issues in literature. Even writers uninterested in reform were affected by the formal innovations of reform literature.
Roget, Peter
Authors: Greiner Rae
Published: June 2017

Peter Mark Roget's
Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases
(1852) made the author's name a byword for synonyms. But Roget, a practicing physician and scientist, intended the work not as a tool to enhance vocabulary but as one that facilitated the expression of human thought. Organizing word entries into six primary classes of categories, Roget drew on his knowledge of the natural sciences to design a science of word use that could expand “the sphere of our mental vision.” This characterization points to Roget's lifelong interest in optical illusions and visual perception, among the many scientific and philosophical topics on which he published and lectured.
Science fiction
Authors: Miller Renata Kobetts
Published: June 2017

Science fiction first emerged as a subgenre of the novel in the Victorian period, manifesting a cluster of formal and thematic characteristics that would come to define a novelistic form that both differed significantly from and employed the techniques of Victorian realism. The critical mass of novels that shared these characteristics includes works by,Edward Bulwer‐Lytton, H. G. Wells,, and Arthur Conan Doyle Additionally, because science fiction was an international phenomenon, works by Jules Verne such as20,000 Leagues under the Sea(1870) andFrom the Earth to the Moon(1865) share characteristics with British science fiction, as does American Charlotte Perkins Gilman'sHerland(1915). While the common themes of Victorian science fiction reflect contemporaneous scientific and technological developments, science fiction novels manifested a pattern of generic features, because they performed a particular cultural role in a particular cultural moment. As science emerged as a discipline, science fiction played the role of mediating what would later be called “the two cultures” – the sciences and the humanities. The empiricism that underlies the formal techniques of Victorian science fiction novels overlaps with hallmarks of the realist novel, but also offers a masculinist reaction to what was perceived as an increasingly feminized world of Victorian realist fiction.
Sensation fiction
Authors: Surridge Lisa
Published: June 2017

Featuring crimes such as murder, bigamy, or adultery in seemingly proper middle‐class homes, the sensation novel of the 1860s and early 1870s tantalized readers with clues and leads of false identities, hidden pasts, and uncanny doubles. Appalled Victorian critics accused sensational writers such as Wilkie Collins, Ellen Wood, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Ellen Wood of catering to popular appetite, preaching to the nerves, undermining morality, and aligning the reading matter of the kitchen with that of the drawing room. Recent critics, however, have explored the sensation novel as a popular form that exploited contemporary fascination with a nervous, embodied reader, self‐conscious about the mass print marketplace; that contained a clash between realism and sensational effects; that mastered a combination of visual and verbal vocabulary; that disrupted Victorian boundaries of race, class, gender, and disability; that wielded influence on the novels of the fin de siècle; and that was redolent of emergent modernism.
Popular literature and culture
Authors: Creekmur Corey K. , Mangum Teresa
Published: June 2017

During the Victorian period, the category of “popular literature” itself underwent significant transformations; these dramatized broader changes in the production and consumption of the many other forms of popular culture, which simultaneously competed with literature for the attention, time, and funds of the British public. An explosion of new narrative genres as well as of diverse forms and formats of popular reading material that served the era's increasingly literate audiences also presented a problem for those who worried that the apparent addiction of a growing audience – including middle‐class women – to cheap and “sensational” fiction posed social and perhaps even physical dangers to the nation.
Shaw, George Bernard
Authors: Zorn Christa
Published: June 2017

George Bernard Shaw has been widely considered one of the most important playwrights in English. He wrote more than sixty plays, countless critical and political articles, theoretical treatises, and five novels. The Irish‐born Shaw helped liberate British drama from nineteenth‐century idealism and melodrama by employing dialectic structures and realist discussion, thus transforming the way people thought about theater. Shaw's early plays scandalized his audiences, but his use of paradox and humor facilitated the reception of his critical thoughts. His theater reflects a tension between individualism and larger sociopolitical issues, including feminism, socialism, evolution, war, and the Irish question. A prominent leader of the Fabian Society, Shaw became an outspoken public intellectual whose long productive life straddled the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Although overshadowed by some of his political misjudgments of the twentieth century, Shaw's late works are receiving more attention as critics are increasingly placing him in multiple intellectual contexts.
Symons, Arthur
Authors: Weiner Stephanie Kuduk
Published: June 2017

Poet, essayist, critic, and editor, Symons was the foremost British champion of avant‐garde literature and art at the turn of the twentieth century. He belonged to the Rhymers’ Club and was connected through friendship or editorial work onThe Savoymagazine and other projects to virtually every French and British artist of the day. As a critic, he introduced English‐speaking audiences to the European avant‐garde and wrote brilliantly about a wide array of figures from the past and his own time. His poetic experiments with impressionism, symbolism, and empirical realism contributed to the emergence of a spare, constrained lyric verse that prioritized imagery and explored how subjectivity and objectivity interact. Throughout his career, he explored the advent of self‐consciously modern art and the nature of aesthetic representation. He epitomized the new ways of producing and consuming culture that characterized his historical moment.
Temperance
Authors: McAllister Annemarie
Published: June 2017

The temperance movement, advocating either moderate use of alcohol or complete abstinence, was one of the most significant social and cultural influences for reform in the nineteenth century. It was ever present for many Victorian writers and readers. Various groups and movements in the United States and United Kingdom differed in their definitions of temperance and in their suggested solutions. Temperance literature was widely popular and its tropes influenced many more general narratives.
Vampires and vampirism
Authors: Alliata Michela Vanon
Published: June 2017

The ancient legend of the vampire, which mainly derives from Slavic folklore, came to dominate the gothic imagination of the Victorians for its emphasis on cruelty, barbarity, and a faraway world of dark superstitions and supernatural terrors. In the works of Polidori, Le Fanu, and Stoker the threatening figure of the Nosferatu, a lethal aristocratic seducer, was seen as an agent of disorder, degeneration, and transgression. A metaphor for uncontrolled individualism, excess, and disruption of established middle‐class values, vampirism was couched in ambivalent terms, becoming the instrument for the projective identification of aggressive drives. Far from being a pretext to weave terrifying tales, it provided instead a tool for the exploration of psychological, cultural, and political concerns, such as identity, sexuality, class anxieties, nationalism, and ethnicity, and especially object loss and fantasies of corporal preservation which the legend of the undead fully embodies.
War
Authors: Reed John R.
Published: June 2017

Victorian literature on war dealt with past wars, especially of the Napoleonic period, current wars, such as the Crimean War and conflicts in India and Africa, and fanciful or future wars, as with some fiction of H. Rider Haggard and H. G. Wells. It developed subgenres of the naval novel and the army novel. Various poets wrote on subjects associated with war, notably Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Rudyard Kipling.
Watson, Rosamund Marriott
Authors: O'Brien Lee
Published: June 2017

Poet, journalist, editor Rosamund Marriott Watson's poetry is a rich, culturally significant body of work marked by formal innovation and a subversive awareness of gender. Her witty, informed writing on interior design, gardens, art, and fashion contributed to an emergent, influential discourse aimed at producing an ideal middle‐class home marked by a new kind of femininity.
Women of letters
Authors: Peterson Linda H.
Published: June 2017

During the nineteenth century the “woman of letters” emerged as an author with both literary ability and professional ambition. Several material and cultural developments contributed to this professionalization: the founding of new periodicals, the policy of regular payment to contributors, and the practice of anonymous publication. Such developments encouraged women to write in multiple genres, including the review essay, biography, history, and travel writing, as well as fiction. Well‐known women authors, including Harriet Martineau, Margaret Oliphant, and George Eliot, took advantage of these developments to launch their careers and establish their professional reputations. Nonetheless, at the century's end the women authors lauded for their literary achievement tended to be fiction writers, the novel being the genre most readily identified with women's writing.
Worboise, Emma Jane
Authors: Lysack Krista
Published: June 2017

Emma Jane Worboise (1825–87) is best known as a Victorian evangelical writer whose popular domestic novels, nearly fifty in all, often responded to theological and denominational debates of the day, even rewriting existing novels such as
Jane Eyre
in an evangelical register. But, equally, they explored issues of women's religious authority and marriage. Matters such as these were ones that Worboise also addressed in varying degrees as editor of
The Christian World Magazine
. Although a complete edition of her novels was begun in her own lifetime, they remain largely out of print today. Critics who are now remembering Worboise's contributions do so with an increasingly nuanced sense of the ways in which her evangelicalism could be deployed simultaneously toward theological, commercial, literary, and political goals.
American Victorian poetry
Authors: Jackson Virginia
Published: June 2017

“American Victorian Poetry” sounds like a contradiction in terms. Actually, the phrase “Victorian Poetry” was coined by an American in New York, when E. C. Stedman published
Victorian Poets
in the United States in 1875. Further, since all of the poets we now call “Victorian” were read and reread on the American side of the Atlantic, we should say that the circulation of Victorian poetry was certainly American. But there is also much nineteenth‐century American poetry that is distinctly Victorian in source and influence, for example, the work of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. If Victorian poetry was obsessed with variations on verse genres (and it was), then Longfellow's version of American Victorian poetry did exactly what Stedman predicted it would do: it turned Victorian variation into dramatic American abstraction.
Political Anthropology
Authors: Greenhouse Carol J.
Published: June 2017

The subfield of political anthropology developed out of anthropology's long‐standing engagement with politics, power, interests, and forms of contestation around the world. Political anthropology is a vibrant area of the discipline today, if no longer bounded as a distinct area of inquiry. The pervasiveness of power relations and the stakes in actually existing politics in anthropologists' ethnographic locations make political anthropology central to anthropology's theories, methods, reflexivity, and relevance.
Achebe, Chinua
Authors: Ashuntantang Joyce
Published: June 2017

Chinua Achebe is a Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic. His more than 30 published works of fiction – including his groundbreaking novel
Things Fall Apart
– poetry, children's literature, nonfiction, and critical essays continue to shape the way African literature is read, written, and disseminated around the world.
Aidoo, Ama Ata
Authors: Pinto Samantha
Published: June 2017

Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo (née Christina Ata Aidoo, b. 1942) is perhaps one of the most well‐known African woman writers in the world. Her multi‐genre career has spanned half a century, and has included drama, poetry, novels, and short fiction, as well as numerous foundational essays on the topic of African literature and feminism. She is known for not shying away from taboo subjects in continental literature, including polygamy, African participation in chattel slavery, queer sexuality, birth control, marital rape, and childlessness.
Arab Anti‐Colonialism
Authors: Garrison Douglas H.
Published: June 2017

The history of anti‐colonial activism and thought among Arabic‐speaking peoples in the region known today as the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) extends to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Over the past 300 years it has appeared in numerous locales and found myriad articulations throughout the Arab world. As such, Arab anti‐colonialism defies simple definition or categorization. Insofar as a unifying theme exists in its multiple iterations, it is the demand for self‐rule and treatment as equals upon the international stage.
Art
Authors: Bohrer Frederick N.
Published: June 2017

The topics included in postcolonial studies have deeply affected the discourses of art and art history, as well as the very objects and displays of art museums around the world. Questions of globalization, identity, race, and power resonate throughout contemporary and historical art, but also illuminate the biases or limitations of the art world and the discipline of art history itself. In addition, they put on display the differences between media and historical periods in ways that fruitfully allow us both to look closer at art and at ourselves looking.
Asian American Literature, Criticism and Theory
Authors: Kim Sue
Published: June 2017

Asian American literature has its roots in the nineteenth century, and Asian American criticism and theory grew out of the Asian American movement of the 1960s and 70s. An extremely broad field, Asian American criticism examines literature by people of East Asian, Southeast Asian, South Asian, and Middle Eastern descent. Since its beginnings, Asian American literary criticism and theory have engaged with feminism, Marxism, poststructuralism, queer theory, postcolonialism, and cultural studies in heterogeneous and productive ways.
Beauvoir, Simone de
Authors: Houten Christina Van
Published: June 2017

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86) was a French writer, existentialist philosopher, and feminist, whose career spanned the twentieth century. She believed that literature could effect social change and she encouraged the concept of a
littérature engagée
(committed literature). Her literary works, like her theoretical texts, investigate philosophical, social, and political themes: the concept of situated freedom, the relationship of an individual conscience to “the other,” the principles of ethical relationships, and the existentialist concern with the possibility of changing the world. Throughout her career, she was committed to leftist politics. Following World War II, she traveled extensively, offering a critique of capitalism and global race, class, and gender relations. Best known for her book
The Second Sex
, a critique of patriarchy and its positioning of woman as “other,” de Beauvoir argues for an equality between men and women that allows for sexual difference.
Arab Spring 2011
Authors: Alessandrini Anthony C.
Published: June 2017

“Arab Spring” is a phrase coined to describe a series of popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Bahrain, Syria, and throughout the Middle East and North Africa, beginning in December 2010. These uprisings have led to the removal of dictatorial leaders in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen; in other cases, most notably Bahrain and Syria, peaceful popular protests were met with overwhelming violence, with continuing effects. The uprisings themselves have led to debates as to how to best analyze them, and have offered a challenge to traditional categories for understanding revolts and revolutions. As such, they provide an important project for postcolonial and anti‐colonial analysis and action.
Borders in Latin America
Authors: Zavala Oswaldo
Published: June 2017

The term “borders” is crucial to the understanding and current debates of Latin American postcolonial studies. It refers to at least three stages of the region's history: first, as the geopolitical notion that was activated in the Spanish colonies in the sixteenth century; second, as the teleological objective of the various projects of modernity of the independent nations in the nineteenth century; and third, as a cultural signifier that has produced the deconstruction and further dispersion of national discourses and nationalist identities.
Brand, Dionne
Authors: Wallace Belinda Deneen
Published: June 2017

Trinidad author Dionne Brand is a poet, novelist and essayist whose creative works focus on the varying ways in which people map their lives. Mapping involves both the intimate act of conjuring one's own path, as well as the courageous act of traversing existing routes. Thus, for Brand's characters, mapping involves engaging different spatial arenas, such as the political, geographical, emotional, spiritual, ephemeral, and sexual, all the while wrestling with issues of identity, home, and belonging in their quest to participate fully in the human experience.
Carey, Peter
Authors: Henningsgaard Per
Published: June 2017

Peter Carey is best known as a novelist and two‐time winner of the Booker Prize – one of only a handful of writers to have managed this feat. He is also a writer of short stories, memoirs, screenplays, and a children's book. Carey is widely thought of as the literary heir to Patrick White (the only Australian writer, to date, to have won a Nobel Prize in Literature) by virtue of the former's popularity with readers outside his native home of Australia, as well as his interest in national themes. Peter Carey was born on May 7, 1943, in the small Australian town of Bacchus Marsh, Victoria. His novels include
Bliss
,
Illywhacker
,
Oscar and Lucinda
,
The Tax Inspector
,
The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith
,
Jack Maggs
,
True History of the Kelly Gang
,
My Life as a Fake
,
Theft: A Love Story
,
His Illegal Self
,
Parrot and Olivier in America
,
The Chemistry of Tears
, and
Amnesia
.
Banditry
Authors: Dabove Juan Pablo
Published: June 2017

Banditry is usually associated with offenses (often involving violence) against property, such as highway robbery, plunder, cattle rustling, protection rackets and so forth. But its significance in Latin American postcolonial history and culture stems from the fact that “banditry” does not name a specific offense well codified in penal codes. As such, it belongs to a “metalanguage of crime.” It is a trope designed to criminalize any challenge to the state monopoly of legitimate violence. Banditry belongs to the vocabulary of politics; it is one of the primary discursive tools used to enact the “original” definition of what politics (as opposed to crime) is in a given arena of struggle and to define political subjects (and behaviors) as opposed to criminal ones.
Catholicism in Latin America
Authors: Hoyos Héctor
Published: June 2017

This entry presents a brief chronological survey of landmark events in the relationship of Catholicism and society in Latin America and in the Iberian peninsula, with an emphasis on the postcolonial period. Consideration is given to the Catholic Church as an organization, as a doctrine, and as it pertains to their combined, broader cultural imprint. In relation to the work of Koselleck and Weber, the entry examines the conceptual history of “Catholicism” and its role in structuring societal relations and informing cultural production. Subthemes include patronage, concordats, legitimacy, social doctrine, and the definition of the human.
Chandra, Vikram
Authors: Reddy Sheshalatha
Published: June 2017

The Indian‐born, American‐based writer, Vikram Chandra has published two novels,
Red Earth
,
Pouring Rain
(1995) and
Sacred Games
(2006), and a collection of short stories,
Love and Longing in Bombay
(1997). He is known for his interest in narrative structure, and his works often feature embedded narratives, parallel narratives, multiple narrators, and the clever manipulation of the narrative conventions of various genres, including detective fiction, fantasy, and oral traditions. In his latest works, Chandra has also been one of the foremost chroniclers of the impact of “new,” market‐liberalized India on its urban landscapes, especially Bombay.
Chatterjee, Partha
Authors: Bhattacharya Anindya
Published: June 2017

A central figure of the subaltern studies collective, Partha Chatterjee is celebrated for his groundbreaking intervention in the understanding of nationalism as well as his work on empire, modernity, historiography, and political society. His writing is remarkable for its capacity to undermine the discourse of post‐Enlightenment liberal rationalism and modernity which claim a universal status. His central concern is the conflict of the two forces of capital and community in the colonial world and the politics of the governed, and his achievement a historiography that counters the universalizing Western and nationalist narratives by favoring the local, the cultural, and the fragmentary.
Coetzee, J. M.
Authors: Macaskill Brian
Published: June 2017

J. M. Coetzee is a prize‐winning Anglophone novelist and internationally distinguished academic, Nobel laureate, translator, and advocate for animal justice. A citizen of South Africa and also more recently of Australia, Coetzee has earned wide recognition as possibly the most important living writer of the English language, and heir to Samuel Beckett, whose presence – along with many other literary precursors from Flaubert and Joyce to Kafka and Borges – domestically haunts Coetzee's novels, none of which has only one author‐parent or monolithic nationality, and all of which, despite their singularity, resist the monology of a single and authoritarian word.
Cortázar, Julio
Authors: Cameron John H.
Published: June 2017

Julio Cortázar (1914–84) was an Argentinian writer of novels, short stories, and essays who is generally regarded as one of the seminal figures of the Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s. Cortázar is also considered one of the seminal postmodern writers, and his short stories have been generally ranked alongside those of Borges by many of his contemporaries; one of them, “Las babas del diablo,” provided the inspiration for two films, Michelangelo Antonioni's
Blowup
(1966) and Brian de Palma's
Blow Out
(1981). At the same time, and although he always referred to it as a “counter‐novel,” his 1963 novel (
Rayuela
or
Hopscotch
) is considered to be one of the most important novels of the late twentieth century.