Nineteenth Century Studies

Examines the ways in which religion was constructed as a category and region of experience in nineteenth-century literature and culture.

This magnificent survey of the most popular period in music history is an extended essay embracing music, aesthetics, social history, and politics, by one of the keenest minds writing on music in the world today. Dahlhaus organizes his book around "watershed" years--for example, 1830, the year of the July Revolution in France, and around which coalesce the "demise of the age of art" proclaimed by Heine, the musical consequences of the deaths of Beethoven and Schubert, the simultaneous and dramatic appearance of Chopin and Liszt, Berlioz and Meyerbeer, and Schumann and Mendelssohn. But he keeps us constantly on guard against generalization and clich . Cherished concepts like Romanticism, tradition, nationalism vs. universality, the musical culture of the bourgeoisie, are put to pointed reevaluation. Always demonstrating the interest in socio-historical influences that is the hallmark of his work, Dahlhaus reminds us of the contradictions, interrelationships, psychological nuances, and riches of musical character and musical life. Nineteenth-Century Music contains 90 illustrations, the collected captions of which come close to providing a summary of the work and the author's methods. Technical language is kept to a minimum, but while remaining accessible, Dahlhaus challenges, braces, and excites. This is a landmark study that no one seriously interested in music and nineteenth-century European culture will be able to ignore.

Both a historical recovery and a critical rethinking of the functions and practices of textbooks, Archives of Instruction: Nineteenth-Century Rhetorics, Readers, and Composition Books in the United States argues for an alternative understanding of our rhetorical traditions. The authors describe how the pervasive influence of nineteenth-century literacy textbooks demonstrate the early emergence of substantive instruction in reading and writing. Tracing the histories of widespread educational practices, the authors treat the textbooks as an important means of cultural formation that restores a sense of their distinguished and unique contributions. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, few people in the United States had access to significant school education or to the materials of instruction. By century’s end, education was a mass—though not universal—experience, and literacy textbooks were ubiquitous artifacts, used both in home and in school by a growing number of learners from diverse backgrounds. Many of the books have been forgotten, their contributions slighted or dismissed, or they are remembered through a haze of nostalgia as tokens of an idyllic form of schooling. Archives of Instruction suggests strategies for re-reading the texts and details the watersheds in the genre, providing a new perspective on the material conditions of schooling, book publication, and emerging practices of literacy instruction. The volume includes a substantial bibliography of primary and secondary works related to literacy instruction at all levels of education in the United States during the nineteenth century.

In Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel, Erika Wright argues that the emphasis in Victorian Studies on disease as the primary source of narrative conflict that must be resolved has obscured the complex reading practices that emerge around the concept of health. By shifting attention to the ways that prevention of illness and the preservation of well-being operate in fiction, both thematically and structurally, Wright offers a new approach to reading character and voice, order and temporality, setting and metaphor. As Wright reveals, while canonical works by Austen, Brontë, Dickens, Martineau, and Gaskell register the pervasiveness of a conventional “therapeutic” form of action and mode of reading, they demonstrate as well an equally powerful investment in the achievement and maintenance of “health”—what Wright refers to as a “hygienic” narrative—both in personal and domestic conduct and in social interaction of the individual within the community.

This important and influential inquiry into the history of religious and moral ideas in the nineteenth century has become (since its first appearance in 1949) a seminal study for all students of English literature and the history of ideas. In it, the author examines a shifting succession of beliefs.

This book confronts a significant paradox in the development of literary realism: the very novels that present themselves as purveyors and celebrants of direct, ordinary human experience also manifest an obsession with art that threatens to sabotage their Realist claims. Unlike previous studies of the role of visual art, or music, or theatre in Victorian literature, Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature examines the juxtaposition of all of these arts in the works of Charlotte Brontë, William Thackeray, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and others. Alison Byerly combines close textual analysis with discussion of relevant ancillary topics to illuminate the place of different arts within nineteenth-century British culture. Her book, which also contains sixteen illustrations, represents an effort to bridge the growing gap between aesthetics and cultural studies.

In Unsettled States, Dana Luciano and Ivy G. Wilson present some of the most exciting emergent scholarship in American literary and cultural studies of the “long” nineteenth century. Featuring eleven essays from senior scholars across the discipline, the book responds to recent critical challenges to the boundaries, both spatial and temporal, that have traditionally organized scholarship within the field. The volume considers these recent challenges to be aftershocks of earlier revolutions in content and method, and it seeks ways of inhabiting and amplifying the ongoing unsettledness of the field. Written by scholars primarily working in the “minor” fields of critical race and ethnic studies, feminist and gender studies, labor studies, and queer/sexuality studies, the essays share a minoritarian critical orientation. Minoritarian criticism, as an aesthetic, political, and ethical project, is dedicated to finding new connections and possibilities within extant frameworks. Unsettled States seeks to demonstrate how the goals of minoritarian critique may be actualized without automatic recourse to a predetermined “minor” location, subject, or critical approach. Its contributors work to develop practices of reading an “American literature” in motion, identifying nodes of inquiry attuned to the rhythms of a field that is always on the move.