1st Edition
Re-Reading the Age of Innovation Victorians, Moderns, and Literary Newness, 1830-1950
The period of 1830–1950 was an age of unprecedented innovation. From new inventions and scientific discoveries to reconsiderations of religion, gender, and the human mind, the innovations of this era are recorded in a wide range of literary texts. Rather than separating these texts into Victorian or modernist camps, this collection argues for a new framework that reveals how the concept of innovation generated forms of literary newness that drew novelists, poets, and other creative figures working across this period into dialogic networks of experiment. The 14 chapters in this volume explore how inventions like the rotary print press or hot air balloon and emergent debates about science, trade, and colonialism evolved new forms and genres. Through their examinations of a wide range of texts and writers—from well-known novelists like Conrad, Dickens, Hardy, and Woolf, to less canonical figures like Charlotte Mew, Elías Mar, and Walter Frances White—the chapters in this collection re-read these texts as part of an age of innovation characterized not by division and divide, but by collaboration and community.
Introduction
Louise Kane
Part I: Inventing and Innovating: Science, Technology, Formal Experiment
Chapter 1
The Sky as Heterotopia in Dickens, Gissing, and Woolf
Claes E. Lindskog
Chapter 2
The Rise and Fall of the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine (1881–1930)
Jayme Yahr
Chapter 3
Balloonomania: Flying Machines, Periodicals, and the Trajectory of World Literature
Louise Kane
Chapter 4
A Metaphysical Theatre: Abstract Painting, Color Music, and Futurist Experiments in
Avant-Garde Film
Christopher Townsend
Part II: Changing Landscapes: Empire, Trade, Ecology
Chapter 5
Histories Yet to Come: Adventure Fiction and the Ideologies of Free Trade
Keith Clavin
Chapter 6
Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and the Failure of Empire
Camelia Raghinaru
Chapter 7
Uncertainty, Doubt, and Belief in the Poetic Landscapes of T.S. Eliot and Thomas Hardy
Anna Bedsole
Part III: Navigating Feeling: the Self, Empathy, Human Character
Chapter 8
F. Mabel Robinson, Vernon Lee, and George Moore: the Aesthetics of Sympathy
and Texts of Transition
Kathryn Laing
Chapter 9
Racial Exposé and the Empathic Mind in Walter Francis White's The Fire in the Flint
Masami Sugimori
Chapter 10
A Writerly Communion: Browning, Balzac, and Catholicism in Edith Wharton’s
"The Duchess at Prayer"
Nancy Von Rosk
Part IV: Blurring Boundaries: Gender, Sexuality, Desire
Chapter 11
"Disposed to Daring Innovation": New Modernism, New Woman Fiction, and New Motherhood
Elizabeth Podnieks
Chapter 12
"Sometimes I Pose, but Sometimes I Pose as Posing": Stella Benson’s Early Fiction
Nicola Darwood
Chapter 13
Parsing Between-ness: Love, Looking Backward and Forward, in Charlotte Mew’s Short Fiction
Kristen Renzi
Chapter 14
The Spirit of Contemporary Life: Icelandic Queer Modernism
Ásta Kristín Benediktsdóttir
Afterword
Regenia Gagnier
Biography
Louise Kane is Assistant Professor of Global Modernisms at the University of Central Florida. She is a General Editor of the forthcoming Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Global Modernist Magazines series and Editor of the James Joyce Literary Supplement.
