The Winter 2012 issue of Victorian Network, entitled "Sex, Courtship, and Marriage" and guest edited by Dr. Charlotte Mathieson (University of Warwick), is now available (see below).
Please also read previous issues of Victorian Network, "The British Empire and Victorian Literature and Culture", "Victorian Literature and Science", "Crossing the Line: Affinities Before and After 1900", "Theatricality and Performance in Victorian Literature and Culture" and "Production and Consumption in Victorian Literature and Culture".
The next issue, themed "Victorians and the Law", is forthcoming in Summer 2013.
Volume 4, Number 2 (Winter 2012)
Introduction: Sex, Courtship and Marriage in Victorian Literature and Culture
Charlotte Mathieson(University of Warwick)
Hetty had never read a novel [...] how then could she find a shape for her expectations?
George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859)
This line from George Eliot's 1859 novel Adam Bede, reflecting on the thoughts of young, naïve country girl Hetty Sorrel as she falls in love with the older, wiser and wealthier gentleman Captain Arthur Donnithorne, provides an indicative point from which to begin a discussion of sex, courtship and marriage in Victorian literature and culture, opening up many of the ideological tensions and wider cultural resonances that these terms and their intersections produced. In the naïvety of Hetty's innocent unknowing and shapeless expectations, Eliot signals the problem of ignorance about sex prevalent among young women in the period; in the assertion that ‘a novel' would provide Hetty with a guide to understanding, we are reminded of the centrality of courtship and marriage in structuring many novels of the period, as well as the cultural work that literature played in ‘shaping' the ideas of its readers. ... Read the full text here.
Table of Contents
Articles
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Introduction: Sex, Courtship and Marriage in Victorian Literature and Culture | Abstract PDF |
| Charlotte Mathieson (University of Warwick) |
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‘I Think I Must Be an Improper Woman Without Knowing It’: Fallenness and Unitarianism in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth | Abstract PDF |
| Rachel Webster (University of Leeds) |
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‘So Pure and Rational an Attachment’: Isabella Glyn’s Performance of Social and Sexual Risk at Sadler’s Wells | Abstract PDF |
| Jem Bloomfield (University of Nottingham) |
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Madness in Marriage: Erotomania and Marital Rape in He Knew He Was Right and The Forsyte Saga | Abstract PDF |
| Helen Goodman (Royal Holloway, University of London) |
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Victorian Cougar: H. Rider Haggard’s She, Ageing and Sexual Selection in Marriage | Abstract PDF |
| Esther Godfrey (University of South Carolina Upstate) |
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Pederasty and Sexual Activity in Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince and Other Tales | Abstract PDF |
| Chris Bartle (University of Leeds) |
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Valences of Desire: The Suspended Eroticism of Middlemarch | Abstract PDF |
| Colleen M. Kropp (Temple University) |
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