collective social hour is back! we are pleased to partner with the Forum on Victorian and Early 20th C. English to welcome MLA-goers for mirth and gab. join us: Saturday 7 January 5:30-7:00pm The View Lounge Marriott Marquis roundup of Forum and affiliate panels (drop us a line if yours is somehow missing) 59 Locating Classed Subjectivities: Intersections of Class and Space in British Literature 70 Ecology, Empire, and the Victorian Geographical Imaginary 86 Caribbean Studies and Victorian Studies 239 Repurposing Romanticism 265 Reworking Race and Empire: Class, Labor, Decolonization 318 Marx ..read more

The V21 Collations Book Forum is pleased to welcome Elizabeth Oldfather, Jacob Henry Leveton, and Michael Gamer in conversation about Ian Newman’s The Romantic Tavern: Literature and Conviviality in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, 2019). Newman provocatively reexamines the transformations in the English social, political, and literary landscape through the locus of the tavern. While Romantic literature is strangely lacking in accounts of tavern life, Newman’s study shows how taverns make the “alternative arrangement” of literature, conviviality, and politics visible (8). This is in part ..read more

The V21 Collective & VCologies are pleased to convene an interdisciplinary summer reading group on the subject of “Radical Ecologies.” Focusing on critical theory in the Marxist tradition, we will be seeking to engage, historicize, and apprehend the place of Metabolic Rift analysis as developed in the venerable Monthly Review School and in relation to the study of nineteenth-century literary and visual cultures. Theoretical readings will include selections of Marx, organicism in G.W. Leibniz, and Brett Clark, John Bellamy Foster, and Richard York’s Ecological Rift, literary works by Percy ..read more

The V21 Collations: Book Forum welcomes Rachel Hollander, Beth Bevis Gallick, and Samantha Tett in conversation about Thomas Albrecht’s The Ethical Vision of George Eliot (Routledge, 2020). Albrecht’s exciting new study tracks a double conception of ethics as it develops over the course of Eliot’s career, a development consisting of both “an ethics of connecting and communing with other persons across differences and apartness” and “an ethics insisting on the ethical value of recognizing one’s own inherent separateness and that of others” (4). Albrecht’s intervention is to think about both thi ..read more

The V21 Collations: Book Forum welcomes Shannon Draucker, Julia Fuller, and Kate Thomas in conversation about Abigail Joseph’s Exquisite Materials: Episodes in the Queer History of Victorian Style (Delaware, 2019). As evocative and suggestive as the works she addresses in it, “the project of this book,” she says, “is to explore the histories and pathways of the ‘coded,’ complicated relationships between homosexuality and material culture, seeking to move beyond the language of stereotype in which it is often ensnared” (3). Joseph traces “complex strains of material, aesthetic, and relational i ..read more

The V21 Collations: Book Forum welcomes Elaine Auyoung, Nate Crocker, and Anna Gibson in conversation about David Sweeney Coombs’s Reading with the Senses in Victorian Literature and Science (Virginia, 2019). Coombs’s book is a fascinating intervention into our understanding of the physiology of reading. Provocatively juxtaposing nineteenth century physiological epistemologies of perception alongside Victorian literature, Coombs illuminates the conception, in scientific and literary writing, of reading as an embodied practice––a key to understanding “the continuities [and antinomies] between r ..read more

V21Collective special issue of Criticism  published May 2020! Theories of the Nineteenth Century Vol. 61, No. 4, Fall 2019 guest edited by Zach Samalin and Anna Kornbluh Introduction: A Map the Size of the Empire (Samalin) What Does It Mean to Periodize a Theory? Three Feminist Encounters with Theories of the Nineteenth Century (Kathy Psomiades) Beyond Urgency: Shadow Presentisms, Hinge Points, and Victorian Historicisms (Eleanor Courtemanche) Toward an Inessential Theory of Form: Ruskin, Warburg, Focillon (S. Pearl Brilmyer and Filippo Trentin) To Write Like a Dream: Nineteenth-Century L ..read more

The V21 Collations: Book Forum welcomes Anna Maria Jones, Erica Kanesaka Kalnay and Kristin Mahoney in conversation about Grace E. Lavery’s Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics and the Idea of Japan (Princeton, 2019). Near the end of the book’s introduction, Lavery points to “the Japan this book is about” (30). The Japan that she has named is an idea rather than an actual geopolitical entity. Despite the definite article, “the Japan” we learn about was no one thing to the Victorians, irreducible and yet also instrumental in the development of their broader aesthetics. It was “exquisite,” wh ..read more