bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Acceptability of woman‐delivered HIV self‐testing to the male partner, and additional interventions: a qualitative study of antenatal care participants in Malawi
Authors: Choko Augustine Talumba , Kumwenda Moses Kelly , Johnson Cheryl Case , Sakala Doreen Wongera , Chikalipo Maria Chifuniro , Fielding Katherine , Chikovore Jeremiah , Desmond Nicola , Corbett Elizabeth Lucy
Published: June 2017

Introduction: In the era of ambitious HIV targets, novel HIV testing models are required for hard‐to‐reach groups such as men, who remain underserved by existing services. Pregnancy presents a unique opportunity for partners to test for HIV, as many pregnant women will attend antenatal care (ANC). We describe the views of pregnant women and their male partners on HIV self‐test kits that are woman‐delivered, alone or with an additional intervention.

Methods: A formative qualitative study to inform the design of a multi‐arm multi‐stage cluster‐randomized trial, comprised of six focus group discussions and 20 in‐depth interviews, was conducted. ANC attendees were purposively sampled on the day of initial clinic visit, while men were recruited after obtaining their contact information from their female partners. Data were analysed using content analysis, and our interpretation is hypothetical as participants were not offered self‐test kits.

Results: Providing HIV self‐test kits to pregnant women to deliver to their male partners was highly acceptable to both women and men. Men preferred this approach compared with standard facility‐based testing, as self‐testing fits into their lifestyles which were characterized by extreme day‐to‐day economic pressures, including the need to raise money for food for their household daily. Men and women emphasized the need for careful communication before and after collection of the self‐test kits in order to minimize the potential for intimate partner violence although physical violence was perceived as less likely to occur. Most men stated a preference to first self‐test alone, followed by testing as a couple. Regarding interventions for optimizing linkage following self‐testing, both men and women felt that a fixed financial incentive of approximately USD$2 would increase linkage. However, there were concerns that financial incentives of greater value may lead to multiple pregnancies and lack of child spacing. In this low‐income setting, a lottery incentive was considered overly disappointing for those who receive nothing. Phone call reminders were preferred to short messaging service.

Conclusions: Woman‐delivered HIV self‐testing through ANC was acceptable to pregnant women and their male partners. Feedback on additional linkage enablers will be used to alter pre‐planned trial arms.
Piwi1is essential for gametogenesis in molluskChlamys farreri
Authors: Ma Xiaoshi , Ji Aichang , Zhang Zhifeng , Yang Dandan , Liang Shaoshuai , Wang Yuhan , Qin Zhenkui
Published: June 2017

Piwi(P-element induced wimpy testis) is an important gene involved in stem cell maintenance and gametogenesis in vertebrates. However, in most invertebrates, especially mollusks, the function ofPiwiduring gametogenesis remains largely unclear. To further understand the function ofPiwiduring gametogenesis, full-length cDNA ofPiwi1from scallopChlamys farreri(Cf-Piwi1) was characterized, which consisted of a 2,637 bp open reading frame encoding an 878-amino acid protein.Cf-Piwi1mRNA was mainly localized in the spermatogonia, spermatocytes, oogonia, oocytes of early development and intra-gonadal somatic cells. Additionally, the knockdown ofCf-Piwi1by injection ofCf-Piwi1-dsRNA (double-stranded RNA) into scallop adductor led to a loss of germ cells inC. farrerigonads. Apoptosis was observed mainly in spermatocytes and oocytes of early development, as well as in a small number of spermatogonia and oogonia. Our findings indicate thatCf-Piwi1is essential for gametogenesis in the scallopC. farreri.
Associating ground magnetometer observations with current or voltage generators
Authors: Hartinger M. D. , Xu Z. , Clauer C. R. , Yu Y. , Weimer D. R. , Kim H. , Pilipenko V. , Welling D. T. , Behlke R. , Willer A. N.
Published: June 2017

A circuit analogy for magnetosphere‐ionosphere current systems has two extremes for drivers of ionospheric currents: ionospheric electric fields/voltages constant while current/conductivity vary—the “voltage generator”—and current constant while electric field/conductivity vary—the “current generator.” Statistical studies of ground magnetometer observations associated with dayside Transient High Latitude Current Systems (THLCS) driven by similar mechanisms find contradictory results using this paradigm: some studies associate THLCS with voltage generators, others with current generators. We argue that most of this contradiction arises from two assumptions used to interpret ground magnetometer observations: (1) measurements made at fixed position relative to the THLCS field‐aligned current and (2) negligible auroral precipitation contributions to ionospheric conductivity. We use observations and simulations to illustrate how these two assumptions substantially alter expectations for magnetic perturbations associated with either a current or a voltage generator. Our results demonstrate that before interpreting ground magnetometer observations of THLCS in the context of current/voltage generators, the location of a ground magnetometer station relative to the THLCS field‐aligned current and the location of any auroral zone conductivity enhancements need to be taken into account.
Aestheticism and women poets
Authors: Vadillo Ana Parejo
Published: June 2017

This entry looks at the vast aesthetic school of poetry by women. From Amy Levy, Alice Meynell, and Olive Custance, to Katharine Tynan, E. Nesbit, Graham R. Tomson (Rosamund Marriott Watson) and Michael Field, this entry examines how women poets created and engaged with the discourses, style, and politics of the intricate web of the cultures of aestheticism existing at fin de siècle.
Africa
Authors: Johns Timothy
Published: June 2017

Although missionary, adventure, and naturalist literature began to emerge from Africa in the early and mid‐Victorian periods, it took the so‐called “Scramble for Africa,” during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, for Victorian literature to become fully invested in the dramatic transformation of the continent. This entry maps the unique spatial dimensions of Victorian narratives set on the continent, tries to make sense of extreme projections of Victorian gender identity in Africa, and introduces the rise of black writers influenced by Victorian rule and missionary training. It also pays special attention to Olive Schreiner, the first major anglophone writer on the continent; to literary portraits of Cecil Rhodes, the most powerful British imperialist on the continent, and to Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
, a novella that still serves as the final word on the Scramble.
Allingham, William
Authors: Campbell Matthew
Published: June 2017

William Allingham (1824–89) was an Irish poet, journalist, anthologist, and diarist. Friend and collaborator with the Pre‐Raphaelites, author of
Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland,
and editor of
Fraser's Magazine
. His
A Diary, 1824–1889
, is an indispensable record of the table talk and opinions of numerous Victorian literary figures, most notably Thomas Carlyle and Alfred Tennyson.
Arnold, Edwin
Authors: Franklin J. Jeffrey
Published: June 2017

Though Edwin Arnold (1832–1904) published many collections of poetry that were popular in his day, he is remember now largely for a single poem. That poem,
The Light of Asia
(1879), is a book‐length narrative epic. The book made Arnold an international best‐selling author at a scale seen by very few other poets, earning him a knighthood and very nearly the Poet Laureateship. He also had a long career as a popular and influential writer and editor for the London
Daily Telegraph
. He and
The Light of Asia
are most significant as a primary catalyst for an international cultural paradigm shift that promoted East–West dialogue about Buddhism from the final quarter of the nineteenth century forward
Austin, Alfred
Authors: Scheuerle William H.
Published: June 2017

Alfred Austin (1835–1913) was a journalist, novelist, poet, dramatist, and the fifteenth poet‐laureate of England (1896). His poetry ranged from sonnets and love poems and verse tales to long dramatic poems, and patriotic ones after he was named poet‐laureate. Today, Austin's prose idylls, such as
The Garden that I Love
(1894, 1907 revised) and
In Veronica's Garden
(1895) are considered to be his best creative works. His major prose work was
The Poetry of the Period
(1870), a collection of eight critical essays about individual Victorian poets and poetic classifications.
Beerbohm, Max
Authors: Mahoney Kristin
Published: June 2017

Max Beerbohm is remembered primarily as a late‐Victorian Decadent and member of the
Yellow Book
circle. However, his humorous essays, fiction, and caricatures at once practice and satirize the Decadent aesthetic. His most well‐known works include “A Defence of Cosmetics,” which appeared in the first issue of the
Yellow Book
, the novel
Zuleika Dobson
, the short story “Enoch Soames,” and his caricatures of
Rossetti and His Circle
. Though he is so often associated with the fin de siècle, he spent the majority of his career in the twentieth century, channeling a camp or satirical vision of Victorian aestheticism for a modern public.
Bildungsroman
Authors: Green Laura M.
Published: June 2017

The classic Bildungsroman is a Victorian novel that focuses on the moral and emotional development of a protagonist, from youth to the brink of adulthood, as he or she encounters the demands of other characters and a particular social world. The Bildungsroman has a critical reputation as a normalizing genre that moves toward the goal of reintegrating an initially erring, rebellious, or simply inexperienced protagonist with his or her societal norms. However, the Victorian Bildungsroman frequently has an ambivalent relationship to the social norms with which its protagonists engage, with some examples of the genre ending in loneliness or death.
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth
Authors: Pykett Lyn
Published: June 2017

An extremely prolific and successful novelist, Mary Elizabeth Braddon wrote thrilling, often melodramatic, novels in magazines and newspapers aimed at both middle‐class and working‐class readers. Best known for her sensation novels, such as
Lady Audley's Secret
, Braddon also wrote novels of crime and detection, and historical fiction. Since the late twentieth century she has been rediscovered and reassessed by feminist scholars and students of popular culture as a highly readable and culturally fascinating author whose books reveal a great deal about nineteenth‐century attitudes to women as writers, readers, and fictional subjects; legal discourses on marriage and divorce; changing attitudes to marriage and the family; gendered social roles and class identities; nineteenth‐century medico‐legal discourses on insanity; the aesthetics and meanings of melodrama; the construction of the modern nervous subject in the mechanized, high‐speed culture of modernity; and the rise of consumer culture.
Brontë, Anne
Authors: Badowska Eva
Published: June 2017

Anne Brontë (1820–49), the youngest of the Brontë family, was long eclipsed by her sisters, Charlotte and Emily, but her writings have, over the years, steadily risen in the appreciation of literary critics. The extant body of Anne's work includes a significant number of poems, some of which were published in
Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
(1846); two novels,
Agnes Grey
(1847) and
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
(1848); and a few brief “diary papers,” some coauthored with Emily. Anne favored a markedly realist approach to social topics, particularly the position of women in society, and is now regarded as one of the most significant feminist novelists of the nineteenth century.
Brontë, Emily
Authors: Morse Deborah Denenholz
Published: June 2017

Emily Jane Brontë (1818–48) was a Victorian poet and novelist of Irish and Cornish lineage who was raised upon the Yorkshire moors, a place she imbued with sacred meaning. In her short life she published only one novel,
Wuthering Heights
, and twenty‐one poems, although many other poems have been published since her death. Her poetry is among the most admired in all of English literature, and
Wuthering Heights
is one of the most influential novels ever written. She wrote with her sisters Charlotte and Anne, whose work has also become famous; the three sisters are unique in the history of English literature.
Canadian Literature
Authors: Henderson Jennifer
Published: June 2017

Literary production in Victorian Canada was shaped by challenges related to the predicament of culture in a settler colony, including the use of imported language and forms and the difficulty of staking claims to literature's rootedness or cultural distinctiveness. It was also shaped by conditions that dictated the transnational context of publication and readership: the lack of copyright protection for locally published books and, towards the end of the century, the dominance of American mass‐market culture. Mid‐century prose documented the great wave of immigration from the British Isles in descriptive sketches, life writing, and advice to prospective emigrants. In fiction the favored genres were historical romance and local color given the urgency of the need to supply Canada with a heroic past and with evidence of cultural particularity. Allegories of courtship and marriage adjudicated questions of cultural identity following the political absorption of French into English Canada. French Canada was incorporated as the premodern, mythic past of the new English‐speaking Dominion in historical romances. Indigenous characters appeared in the literature as the representatives of civilization in a primitive stage, although elements of their cultures were occasionally borrowed in the conscious myth‐making of Euro‐Canadians. The realist animal story is a notable departure from the rule of romance in fiction. In poetry, the period sees a transition from abstract patriotism and the enthusiastic conquering of nature to lyrics seeking reconciliation with nature and displaying a new sharpness of imagery.
Carroll, Lewis
Authors: White Laura
Published: June 2017

The Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–98), better known to the world by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an extraordinary polymath. His literary fame resides primarily on his two brilliant children's fantasies,
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
(1865) and
Through the Looking‐Glass and What Alice Found There
(1871), and to a lesser degree on the nonsense quest poem,
The Hunting of the Snark
(1876). The
Alice
books have had an international and persistent influence since their publication; only the Bible and Shakespeare are quoted more frequently in Anglo‐American culture. These two tales have delighted generations of children while supplying a boundless array of sophisticated puzzlement for arm‐chair philosophers of all stripes. While Carroll did not singlehandedly divert children's literature away from the sentimental, harsh, and didactic fare that was common in the early nineteenth century (as has been often claimed), his
Alice
books nonetheless transformed the genre, partly by their free play of invention and fantastic adventure, partly by their depiction of the direct view of a child, and partly by their avoidance of sentiment and moral indoctrination. The books are equally if not more important to adult readers, because of their gnomic but playful depths, with their nonsensical treatment of language, reality, death, and other weighty subjects through absurd plot developments, verbal wit, black humor, and free satiric play.
Class
Authors: Childers Joseph W.
Published: June 2017

Victorian society was fundamentally divided into three large social groups, the aristocracy, the middle class, and the working class. Although this division had been inherited from earlier eras, industrialization and urbanization during the Victorian period tested the old patriarchal class system by creating new connections between the social orders that were based on money and labor more than on obligation and duty. Millions of working‐class people immigrated to the new industrial centers, transforming the working class from one of primarily rural agrarian workers to urban industrial poor. Although aristocratic power waned with the advance of democracy and the extension of the vote, the increase in middle‐class wealth and political influence established that group as dominant allowing it to propagate its values as the English norm.
Cobbe, Frances Power
Authors: Hamilton Susan
Published: June 2017

Frances Power Cobbe was a pioneering feminist journalist, founder of the largest English antivivisection society, and among the best known feminist writers of her day. Writing for the press and social movements, her work used the genres of the established newspaper and periodical press – the article, the leader, the letter to the editor – to situate feminist discourse within dailyness and recurrence, creating new audiences for feminist ideas, and establishing feminism as an accepted frame of reference.
Collins, Wilkie
Authors: Joshi Priti
Published: June 2017

Wilkie Collins's publishing career spanned most of the second half of the nineteenth‐century, his first novel published in 1850, his last a few months following his death in 1890. He wrote and collaborated with Dickens; Trollope, Gaskell, and Kingsley were contemporaries in the early days, with George Eliot emerging on the horizon. By the time of Collins's death, the literary landscape was dominated by Hardy, Gissing, H. Rider Haggard, and R. L. Stevenson. A popular novelist, Collins published both the first “sensation novel” and the first detective novel in English. His writings expose the conventions and laws that facilitated the maltreatment of Britain's disenfranchised: women, wives, mixed‐race peoples, servants, the working poor. The limited property rights of married women were a particular target, as were the critiques of Britain's empire and treatment of prostitutes.
Commonplace book
Authors: Throsby Corin
Published: June 2017

Commonplace books were blank albums that were used to transcribe favorite passages of literature by hand. In the Victorian era they began to include not only transcribed poems, homilies and prayers but also a wide range of media such as sketches, pressed flowers, autographs, and magazine cut‐outs. At this time they were particularly popular with middle‐class women, who used their carefully curated commonplace book to display their literary tastes, education, travels, and social circle. Commonplace books have often been dismissed as largely sentimental and contrived, but recent critics have argued that they represented a very “active” way of reading that potentially undermined copyright and challenged commercial publishing practices. By the mid‐eighteenth commonplace books had fallen out of fashion and were for the most part replaced by preprinted albums and scrapbooks.
Craik, Dinah Maria
Authors: Childers Joseph W.
Published: June 2017

A prominent literary figure during her own lifetime, Dinah Maria Craik (née Mulock; 1826–87) is today remembered primarily for her 1856 novel,John Halifax, Gentleman, a paean to the Victorian middle‐class ethos of self‐determination and self‐help. A prolific novelist, poet, and essayist, Craik was among the best known and most widely read writers of her era. Craik was a strong advocate of women's rights in novels likeA Brave Lady(1870) andHannah(1871), as well as a writer of children's literature, most notablyThe Little Lame Prince(1879). Her work today figures importantly in Victorianist disability studies, feminist criticism, and children's literature.
Ouida (Marie Louise Ramé)
Authors: King Andrew
Published: June 2017

Ouida (Marie Louise Ramé, 1839–1908) was one of the most widely read late Victorian authors, her novels, short stories and essays exploring the limits of conventional morality, animal rights, and financial prudence from the perspective of sympathy. Conscious of the constructed nature of writing and identity generally and of the importance of beauty for mental well‐being, she influenced aestheticism. Her early work is set among the British aristocracy, but from 1871 on Europe – and especially Italy – become dominant: many tales are set among the abjectly poor, mixed with celebrations of both natural and artistic beauty. The vexed nature of gender, sexuality, and class are key themes: she coined the term “the New Woman” and, although she is often seen as an antifeminist, independent powerful women play large parts in almost all her fiction.
Dowson, Ernest
Authors: Snodgrass Chris
Published: June 2017

Judged the greatest lyric poet of the late nineteenth century, Ernest Dowson was the most technically gifted poet of the famous 1890s Rhymers’ Club, one of the most distinguished of the nineties “Decadents,” and a devotee the idealistic fin‐de‐siècle “Religion of Art.” The notorious and misleading “Dowson Legend” made him the chief emblem of what W. B. Yeats called the Decadent “tragic generation.” It was believed that the many losses Dowson suffered during his “untidy” hyper‐bohemian life combined to dictate the central paradigm in his art: innocence sequestered from but unable to survive a vulgar reality constantly threatening to violate it. However, this consistent theme – based largely on the writings of Schopenhauer and Pater, among others – predated and was virtually unaltered by the “tragic” events of his life.
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan
Authors: Briefel Aviva
Published: June 2017

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was one of the most renowned authors and popular figures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is most remembered for his creation of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, whose adventures he recounted in fifty‐six short stories and four novels. In addition, he wrote prolifically in a number of other fictional genres – including the historical novel and the boy's adventure story – and produced several political and journalistic writings. Most notably, he was a strong advocate of England's role in the Boer War and an outspoken critic of King Leopold II's rule in the Congo. Toward the end of his life, he became a devoted participant in the spiritualist movement and wrote a number of books on the subject.
Epic
Authors: Tucker Herbert F.
Published: June 2017

Victorians wrote epic poems not just in spite of the genre's confessed incompatibility with modernity, but by way of it. Heroes in leadership position weathered crises of ethical or psychic integrity that mirrored the instability of the nineteenth‐century body politic. Traditionally epical plots of strife were deflected from the battlefield onto the social fields of debate and sport, gender and class conflict; the old quest and foundation plots wore, albeit displacedly, the new liveries of commercial venture and imperial administration. Global visions and myths of progress offered a vantage whence poets could repurpose such epic devices as the catalogue, the otherworldly visitation, and the extended simile as means of performing, and assaying, feats of monumental scope and encyclopedic omniscience to which the explosion of data in a shrinking world was foreclosing access.
Novel, factory
Authors: Zlotnick Susan
Published: June 2017

Many of the leading novelists of the period, including Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte Brontë, fictionalized the transformations brought about by the Industrial Revolution, thereby creating a short‐lived subgenre of the Victorian novel. Factory novels depict the unhealthy working and living conditions of industrial workers. They seek models of class relations that would reduce conflict and misery, but without fundamentally altering Victorian class hierarchies. They draw on documentary accounts, such as blue books, but they also deploy a variety of literary modes, from melodrama to domestic realism, to engage the reading public. Early factory novels focus on the horrors of child labor and advocate for the passage of the Ten Hours Act. Those written later in the 1840s reflect the widespread unrest and violent class conflicts of the decade known as the Hungry Forties
Gender
Authors: Green Laura M.
Published: June 2017

Victorian social and scientific discourses converged on a consensus that men and women formed two sexes distinct from one another in body, mind, and social role. Men were stronger, fitting them for physical and intellectual dominance, for action, and for participation in the public sphere. Women were weaker in body and mind, greater in emotional responsiveness, and physiologically defined by the capacity for reproduction. This paradigm of sexual difference and complementarity shaped Victorian literature. For early and mid‐Victorian novels, plots of romance across sexual difference serve as a metaphor for harmony across other social divides, such as class, but in the “sensation novel” of the 1860s, featuring adultery, bigamy, and uxoricide, marriage plots are less about the maintenance than about the disintegration of social bonds. By the century's end, the sexually ambiguous figures of the “New Woman” and the male “aesthete” posed significant challenges to Victorian conventions of gender representation.
Grand, Sarah
Authors: Mangum Teresa
Published: June 2017

Madame Sarah Grand (1854–1943) was a leading figure in the field of late Victorian novels, essays, drama, and poetry that came to be called New Woman literature. In her short stories, novels, and essays, as well as in her political activism, Grand fought for improved educational opportunities for girls and women, rational dress, marriage law reform, suffrage, and health reform. Her two best‐known novels,The Heavenly Twins(1893) andThe Beth Book(1897), are often taught in nineteenth‐century British literature and women's literature classes today.
Illustrated newspaper
Authors: Sinnema Peter W.
Published: June 2017

Illustrated journalism is as old as periodical literature itself. Crude woodcuts accompanied many of the tracts, ballads, and pamphlets that circulated in the early decades of the seventeenth century. These illustrated stories – typically of disaster, murder, rebellion, and plague – suggested that image and text were natural allies at the very inception of “the news.” But the idea of an illustrated newspaper proper remained embryonic, “a hitherto uncultivated germ,” as Mason Jackson called it, until the early Victorian period. It found its culmination only in 1842 with the inaugural number of Herbert Ingram's
Illustrated London News
, the world's first regularly illustrated weekly, mass‐produced on steam‐powered presses capable of printing woodblock engravings and letterpress together in a sixteen‐page format.
Industrialism and Literature
Authors: Ketabgian Tamara
Published: June 2017

During the Victorian period, the industrial revolution spurred a massive social, political, and economic process of change. Attracted and repelled by this transformation, writers produced an explosion of essays, novels, poems, plays, autobiographies, and journalism. Many attempted to address machine culture as an urgent social force and literary topic, especially during the height of realist industrial fiction and social criticism from the 1830s to the 1850s. In a shift of focus, later works either rejected or symbolically recast its influence on high literary art. Here, modern technology is often an unspoken presence, informing the texture of everyday life and commodity culture through industrialized bodies, emotions, and media systems. Yet, despite these differences, nearly all Victorian writers expressed ambivalence toward the emerging urban, capitalist, and industrial face of modern life, as it evolved from the early years of the factory system to the rise of mass culture at the end of the century.
Irish Poetry, 1880–1910
Authors: Steele Karen
Published: June 2017

Commonly described as the Celtic Twilight or the early Irish revival, Irish poetry from 1880 to 1910 spanned two linguistic traditions, Irish and English, and included a diverse range of poets, a significant proportion of whom were women. Over the course of these thirty years, the most characteristic Celtic Twilight poetry focused on an individual's relationship to history; the relationship between the past and present; the nature of poetic imagination; and observations of the natural (mostly rural) world. Early revival poetry was marked by a growing consciousness about Ireland's still‐forming national canon. As a result, poetry of this era expressed a core set of values centered on three recurrent interests: the nation, spirituality, and nature.
Italy
Authors: Fraser Hilary
Published: June 2017

Italy has a significant presence in Victorian literature: it provided the subject, the scene or occasion, and sometimes the aesthetic form for writing across a wide generic range, which included poetry, fiction, drama, history, journalism, art writing, and travel literature. The Victorians’ own variegated imaginative responses to and representations of Italy are grounded in earlier pastoral, gothic and Romantic modes of writing Italy; but they bring to those traditions a distinctively modern inflection, which intensifies and complicates the relationship between the two countries. The struggle for unification and independence at mid‐century meant that, for English writers such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, John Ruskin, John Addington Symonds, and Vernon Lee, Italy became associated with ideas of freedom and self‐determination in other spheres. Already a site of cross‐cultural encounter for British writers at the beginning of the century, Italy became increasingly identified as an imaginative arena for exploring questions of social, political, sexual, and aesthetic identity.
Johnson, Lionel
Authors: Bartlett Mackenzie
Published: June 2017

Lionel Pigot Johnson (1867–1902) was a poet and critic whose reputation as a “minor” author of the 1890s has been undergoing reconsideration in recent scholarship. During his short life, Johnson was a member of the Rhymers’ Club, a proponent of Irish Home Rule, a Roman Catholic convert, and an important decadent poet. He was known for being a scholar, a theologian, and a traditionalist, and his poetry often blends his interests in Celtic history, classicism, and medievalism with the contemporary concerns of late Victorian Britain and his personal struggles with alcoholism and a suppressed homosexuality. Although he published only one book of literary criticism and two volumes of poetry in his lifetime, many of his letters and essays were collected in the two decades following his death, and his writing had a significant influence on modernists like Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and W. B. Yeats.
Latin America
Authors: Aguirre Robert D.
Published: June 2017

The Victorian literary encounter with Latin America was complex and multifaceted, featuring various forms of travel writing and imaginative fiction. The region's great wealth and commercial possibilities dominated public discussion, but the legacy of Spanish colonialism as well as the undercurrent of pre‐Hispanic indigenous culture provided rich ground for writers from many corners of the Victorian literary world.
Marriage and courtship
Authors: Kaye Richard A.
Published: June 2017

Courtship and marriage are dominant concerns in Victorian fiction and poetry, as they are in nineteenth‐century British social, political, and intellectual life. These entwined subjects assumed different forms in the novel depending on the class setting, social parameters, and ideological affiliations of a given work and author. In addition to exploring the myriad means for intimate wooing, writers and thinkers such as Dickens, George Eliot, Darwin, Trollope, Gaskell, the Brownings, Hardy, Charlotte Brontë, Ruskin, and Thackeray were keenly invested in the intricacies of the marriage plot. Yet they also emphasized both the comic and the tragic implications that arose from the intense pressure to find an appropriate spouse. Tradition‐indebted writers stressed the value of “separate spheres,” according to which women held a preeminent place in Victorian domestic life, while advanced intellectuals accentuated the constrictions of the spousal bond. Toward the end of the century, the figure of the New Woman as well as men of dissident sexualities cast a shadow over the once idealized conjoined fundaments of Victorian life, courtship, and marriage.
Massey, Gerald
Authors: Sanders Mike
Published: June 2017

Gerald Massey (1828–1907) first came to prominence as a significant leader and poet of late Chartism. Following the collapse of Chartism, Massey became an important spiritualist; in the latter half of his public career he achieved a reputation as a controversial writer and lecturer on a variety of topics, most notably Shakespeare, Egyptology, and the origins and development of western religions. In the literary field he is still best known for his Chartist poems. In other areas his writings on Egyptology and the development of Judeo‐Christianity continue to attract attention beyond the academy.
Medicine
Authors: Bailin Miriam
Published: June 2017

The rise of modern medicine and the extension of its explanatory powers over so many areas of human experience coincided with the increasing cultural authority of imaginative literature as a record and exploration of everyday life. Both literature and medicine addressed central questions about moral, social, and physical distress and drew from the same cultural presuppositions that they in turn confirmed or helped to shape. Although the relations between doctors and patients were rarely a subject for fictional treatment, the discourse of medicine and the methodology of medical science entered into imaginative treatments of psychic distress and of the social problems arising from urbanization and an industrial economy. Literary scholarship on the relations between medicine and literature has flourished since the 1980s, as a result of the wide acceptance of interdisciplinary research and of the influence of Michel Foucault's work on the disciplinary force of medical discourse.
Meynell, Alice
Authors: Elizabeth Gray F.
Published: June 2017

In a career spanning five decades, Alice Meynell wrote poetry, journalism, essays, literary and art criticism; she also edited periodicals and literary collections. She enjoyed both popularity and critical acclaim for essays such as “The Rhythm of Life” and for poems such as “The Shepherdess,” achieving considerable renown and influence in fin‐de‐siècle Britain. A Roman Catholic and a staunch feminist, she espoused moral and aesthetic discipline. Nominated poet laureate in her own time, she has been discussed in recent years as a leading aesthete and woman of letters.
Norton, Caroline
Authors: Latané David E.
Published: June 2017

Because of travails endured after her unfortunate marriage of convenience to George Norton, Caroline (Sheridan) Norton (1808–77), a celebrated society beauty and granddaughter of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, became an influential advocate for the custody and property rights of married, divorced, and separated women. As a poet, novelist, and editor of magazines and giftbooks, she played a prominent role in the literary culture of the 1830s and 1840s, and her literary work is gradually being reexamined. Her legacy, however, remains in her campaigns for women's rights.
Pacific Islands
Authors: Hancock Stephen
Published: June 2017

The Pacific of the nineteenth century was a zone of contact between native peoples seeking cultural and physical survival and Europeans seeking to control the area for economic gain. British literature of the period, however, imagines the region as either an uninhabited and welcoming paradise or a savage land waiting for the European to tame it and to rescue its women. Such fantasies, which include images of cannibals, inhabit even the pages of authors like Robert Louis Stevenson, who lived on the islands and whose work was generally more sympathetic to the people who lived there. Authors wrote to assure readers that they have discovered the islands at a time when these places had become less dangerous but still contained elements of dying savage cultures.
Penny fiction
Authors: Rosenman Ellen
Published: June 2017

Penny fiction (books sometimes called “penny bloods” and “penny dreadfuls”) was a significant factor in the formation of a distinctive working‐class culture. Drawing on older forms such as melodrama, it was intimately tied to the emergence of working‐class periodicals. Featuring sensational and episodic plots, it functioned not only as re‐creation but also as an education in radical politics. Toward the end of the century these novels were replaced by juvenile literature, much of which was directed at a middle‐class audience and lost its political edge.
Poetry
Authors: Warwick Slinn E.
Published: June 2017

Once dismissed as moralistic and self‐indulgent, Victorian poetry is now read as a repository of contestation and linguistic dynamism. A symbolic–idealist mode follows the traditions of Romantic subjectivism until the circumscribed introspection of the nineties. A developing psychological focus relocates mental states on the borders between self and a social–political world where perception is a process of linguistic mediation. Dramatic and narrative emphases absorb contemporary issues – religion, science, gender roles, sexual morality, slavery, prostitution, both personal and institutional politics, both private and national identities. Some poetry expounds the virtues of domestic morality and spiritual value, but a great deal tests the boundaries of human understanding. This poetry enacts discursive conflict, self‐consciously engaging the materiality of language and finding innovative ways of dramatizing the continuing tensions wrought by personal demands (love, hatred, desire) in relation to external cultural forces (tradition, belief, bourgeois politics).
Political economy
Authors: Dalley Lana L.
Published: June 2017

Political economy is defined as the study of wealth and its distribution and trade – in and among individual nations. The emergence of political economy coincided with the rise of industrialization in Britain and, at least in part, the new field tried to explain the workings and possibilities of the new industrial economic system. By 1837, when Queen Victoria took the throne, political economy was a well‐established field of study, and one that would preoccupy many of the period's prominent writers and thinkers. While Harriet Martineau's series
Illustrations of Political Economy
(1832–34) is probably the best‐known example of a nineteenth‐century literary work that engages the themes of economic theory, numerous Victorian writers were exploring the implications of political economy in their literature. Recent scholarship demonstrates the extent to which nineteenth‐century literature both was shaped by and helped shape the cultural conversation about political economy.
Reade, Charles
Authors: Grass Sean
Published: June 2017

Charles Reade was one of the most popular sensation novelists of the 1860s, earning his fame by working extensively with documentary materials to produce gripping and meticulously detailed accounts of Victorian social abuses. Though less widely known now, his work remains relevant to ongoing critical discussions of sensation fiction, the Victorian literary market, and the debate over fictional realism that raged during the middle decades of the Victorian period.
Rossetti, Christina Georgina
Authors: Kooistra Lorraine Janzen
Published: June 2017

Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830–94) was a Victorian poet of English‐Italian lineage associated with the Pre‐Raphaelite movement in art and the Oxford Movement in the Anglican Church. She published five books of poetry, two collections of short fiction, and six works of devotional prose in addition to periodical essays and encyclopedia entries. Rossetti's publications had a transatlantic audience and her work was critically well received. Frequently anthologized and reprinted, her poetry has inspired writers, musicians, and visual artists from the nineteenth century to the present.
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel
Authors: Bentley D. M. R.
Published: June 2017

A core figure in the Pre‐Raphaelite movement and a major influence on aestheticism, symbolism, and the Arts and Crafts movement, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the Victorian period's most important poet‐painter. A devotee of female beauty, he peopled his poems and pictures with feminine types as diverse as the Virgin Mary, the “fallen women,” and the
femme fatale
, as well as with depictions of the women – Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth, Jane Morris – with whom he had passionate and fraught relationships. Drawing on Dante, Titian, Malory, and others, he developed a distinctive poetic and pictorial idiom in which to explore the relationship between the divine and the human in the realm of sexual love and to ponder the ultimate questions of human existence, themes that lie at the heart of his sonnet sequence
The House of Life
.
Politics
Authors: Cunningham Valentine
Published: June 2017

The political subject is considered as involving state power, governance, legislation, democratic struggles, elections, but also as involving what modern post‐Foucauldian critique gathers under the triumvirate of gender, race, and class. Victorian writing is steeped in politics because writers were: as, variously, deep insiders and greatly concerned outside observers – as members of Parliament and would‐be MPs, as travelers and fellow travelers, as anxious bourgeois, agitators, and victims of state oppression, as journalists, documentarists, satirists and critics of the left, the right, and the center. A writing that omnivorously scripts sufferings and oppressions at home and abroad, poverty, tyranny, war, unhappy marriages. A writing preoccupied metatextually with its own condition as would‐be political weapon; and not altogether happy about the verbal power it craves.
Scotland
Authors: McKechnie Claire Charlotte
Published: June 2017

Scotland contributed massively to the Victorian literary landscape. The material produced in this period proved itself to be diverse, wide‐ranging, and vibrant; writing in a variety of genres, Scottish authors, through the medium of both their fiction and nonfiction writing, left their mark on issues such as women's rights, the economy, and anthropology, among many others. Together, these writers give a certain impression of “Scottishness” and also show the way in which Victorian Scottish writers influenced and were influenced by their cultural milieu and made an impact far beyond Scotland's – and Britain's – shores.
Serialization
Authors: Law Graham
Published: June 2017

Following a pair of brief introductory sections that define relevant modes or forms of literary serialization and justify the use of the term “revolution” to describe the transformations taking place in both from the early Victorian decades, the entry is divided into two main sections, which respectively concern the aesthetics and the sociology of serial publication. The first principally covers questions of regularity, periodicity, illustration, and revision, while the second concerns how serialization patterns changed under political and economic pressures, with separate paragraphs devoted in turn to installment publication in newspapers, as fascicles, and in magazines. The entry concludes with a summary of the underlying trends over the course of Victoria's long reign.
Stoker, Bram
Authors: Senf Carol
Published: June 2017

Known primarily as the author of
Dracula
, perhaps the Victorian period's preeminent example of gothic fiction, Bram Stoker also wrote eighteen other books. Eclipsed during his lifetime by his employer, the actor Henry Irving, as well as by
Dracula
, Stoker has recently come into his own as a writer. Not only have scholars applied a number of critical approaches to
Dracula
– including psychoanalysis, feminist criticism, gender studies, Marxist criticism, queer studies, and postcolonial criticism – but they are also beginning to study his other fiction. This more comprehensive approach has led to seeing Stoker as a writer of Irish literature as well as a writer who experimented in numerous genres of Victorian popular literature, including gothic literature, the Western, historical fiction, and the romance.
Novel, Irish
Authors: Murphy James H.
Published: June 2017

In the nineteenth century “the Irish novel” designated works that dealt with humorous Irish imbecility or the struggle between landlords and tenants – or both. The Anglo‐Irish literary revival was dismissive of Irish Victorian fiction, and in the twentieth century interest in it was limited to seeing it merely as a prelude to later “big house” novels of declining Anglo‐Irish fortunes. Later critics pointed with satisfaction to the supposed failure of realism in Irish Victorian fiction as allowing Ireland to leap forward into modernity. Recent work of recovery and analysis has opened the field to considering the work of a multitude of authors – some of whose work is briefly described here – and to new possibilities for research.
Tonna, Charlotte
Authors: Rasmussen Bryan B.
Published: June 2017

Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna (1790–1846) was an English evangelical social critic who wrote fictions and religious tracts criticizing the industrial and spiritual conditions of England and Ireland. She was a formative figure in women's writing, supporting herself entirely by her professional writing and by the editing of popular women's magazines and journals, such as the
Christian Lady's Magazine
. Her industrial novel
Helen Fleetwood
(1841) detailed in almost journalistic fashion the effects of the English industrial system on women and children, influencing Elizabeth Gaskell's better‐known
Mary Barton
(1848). An arch‐evangelical, Tonna wrote in defense of radical Protestant resistance in Ireland. She wrote her spiritual conversion narrative
Personal Recollections: The Life of Charlotte Elizabeth
(1841) in part as reaction against the political and religious freedoms heralded by Catholic Emancipation (1829).
Trollope family
Authors: Michie Elsie B.
Published: June 2017

Beginning with the appearance of Frances Trollope's
Domestic Manners of the Americans
in 1832, various members of three generations of the Trollope family published steadily into the twentieth century. Family authors included Frances Trollope, her brother Henry Milton, her husband Thomas Anthony, her daughter Cecilia Tilley, her sons Thomas Adolphus and Anthony, and Anthony's son Henry Merivale. Besides writing numerous travel books and novels, the Trollopes and their spouses also published actively in the periodicals and maintained a literary salon in Florence, Italy. As a group the Trollopes represent an extraordinary example of a nineteenth‐century family devoted to writing and publishing at a prolific rate.
Wales
Authors: Bohata Kirsti
Published: June 2017

Wales was a Welsh‐speaking country with a significant English‐speaking minority, including an anglicized gentry. Historical novels, short tales or “sketches,” and romances were important forms throughout the Victorian period. Toward the end of the century, a nascent industrial fiction emerged depicting life in the coal and iron industries. Translations from medieval Welsh manuscripts of Celtic myths bred new life into contemporary literature in English, within and beyond Wales. An 1847 government report into the state of education, and the opportunities to learn English – itself a response to widespread social unrest in the 1830s and 1840s – caused uproar in Wales as it depicted the Welsh as unruly, drunken, and immoral, and the women as sexually licentious. These stereotypes of an unruly but backward people were often perpetuated in English literature. Riots were used by native writers to make anti‐colonial or unionist statements in their fiction. When the home rule movement emerged in the 1880s, the periodical press became an important outlet for fiction and other writing along nationalist themes.