SEL - Studies in English Literature

Abstract: An exploration of Lord Byron’s engagements with writing as a dimension placed between materiality and the immaterial, this article highlights and evaluates the relevance of this nexus in his output and poetics. After examining Countess Teresa Guiccioli’s traveling chest and her Byron-related souvenirs as a paradigmatic intersection of words and things, it turns to analyze Byron’s idea of writing as an im/material interface and his poetry, in The Bride of Abydos (1813), The Giaour (1813), The Corsair (1814), and canto 3 of Don Juan (1821), as a container of things and objects. As the article demonstrates, Byron’s experiments with materiality, its relations with human subjects, and the transcendental side of language, result in a decentered notion of subjectivity that is inextricable from his metaliterary reflections on the im/material implications of writing.

Diego Saglia

Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

Objects, Things, and Writing the Im/material in Byron

拜伦作品中的物体、事物与非物质书写

Abstract: This article explores how early Victorian social reformers deployed lists as sanitation devices to organize messy social and material realities into representative categories. Dickens’s own notable reliance on lists has been interpreted as dovetailing with a reformist politics of realist representation. But through a reading of Oliver Twist , I argue that Dickens transforms lists from a neutral technology of organization to a more anarchic form in which parts multiply without respect to a larger whole. Dickens’s lists mingle various and often mutually incompatible categorical systems and flashily attend to grammatical parts over the regulating whole of the sentence.

Beatrice Sanford Russell

Dickens’s Glazomania, Oliver Twist ’s Lists, and the Politics of Realism

狄更斯的玻璃狂热症、《雾都孤儿》的清单，以及现实主义的政治

Abstract: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is steeped in traditional modes of thinking about the “progress of civilizations” that she imbibed in her readings of David Hume, Voltaire, Constantin Volney, and others. Her characters anxiously track themselves and each other into normative accounts of knowledge and action that appear progressively civilized, but none of the characters, including the monster himself, can actually live up to the ideals they propose. Instead, the novel intermittently proposes modes of relation that are founded on the quest for mutual benefit—a logic that I connect to the author’s hesitant embrace of utilitarian thinking.

Mark Canuel

Frankenstein and the Progress of Civilizations

弗兰肯斯坦与文明的进步

Abstract: This article contends that Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848 novel Mary Barton confuses several kinds of categorization and thus challenges the viability of classification as a way to organize industrial society. The argument focuses on Gaskell’s polymorphic minor characters, who embody a dynamic superabundance of contradictory social roles and thereby resist categorization into prefabricated literary types. Attending to these polymorphic characters encourages a more capacious understanding of what minor figures in English realism are capable of doing. Ultimately, I suggest that Mary Barton even erodes the categorical distinction separating minor characters from major ones in the first place.

Brian Reinken

Characterization and Categorization in Mary Barton

《玛丽·巴顿》中的特征与分类

Abstract: This article presents three rediscovered letters written between 1849 and 1851 by the great Victorian man of letters Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881). In these letters, Carlyle sets out his views on the importance of a system of universal, non-sectarian, and national education, as well as declares his support for the Lancashire Public School Association and its successor the National Public School Association. Together, these letters shed new light on the sections regarding education in Carlyle’s famous published works “Chartism” (1839), “Past and Present” (1843), and “Latter-Day Pamphlets” (1850), while suggesting that he continued to show substantial affinities with advanced liberal and radical opinion on this particular issue, despite the common belief that he became an out-and-out reactionary in later life.

ISSN	0039-3657, 1522-9270
h-index	18

Publication Information	Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press，Publishing cycle: ，Journal Type: journal，Open Access Journals: No
Basic data	Year of publication: 2002，Proportion of original research papers: 0.00%，Self Citation Rate:N.A.， Gold OA Rate: 0.00%

SEL - Studies in English Literature

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Objects, Things, and Writing the Im/material in Byron

Dickens’s Glazomania, Oliver Twist ’s Lists, and the Politics of Realism

Frankenstein and the Progress of Civilizations

Characterization and Categorization in Mary Barton

Three Rediscovered Letters by Thomas Carlyle on National Education (1849–1851)

Objects, Things, and Writing the Im/material in Byron

Dickens’s Glazomania, Oliver Twist ’s Lists, and the Politics of Realism

Frankenstein and the Progress of Civilizations

Characterization and Categorization in Mary Barton

Three Rediscovered Letters by Thomas Carlyle on National Education (1849–1851)

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Journal Impact	0.26