The Incredible Nineteenth Century: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Fairy Tale
The Incredible Nineteenth Century: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Fairy Tale (I19) seeks to publish the best scholarship on the century that was, in many ways, the time period in which the modern genres of science fiction and fantasy began, and in which the academic study of fairy tale and folklore has its roots. ISSN 2995-2514
Young, Simon. The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends. UP of Mississippi, 2022
Simon Young is a British historian who has published several books and peer-reviewed articles on topics concerning the supernatural, history, and folklore. In 2022, he added The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends to his extensive publication repertoire. Young’s impressively exhaustive methodology for curating this collection of Victorian legends is unlike other books of its kind, which have generally focused on fairytales, ghostly and spectral stories, or, such as in the case of Karl Bell’s 2012 book, The Legend of Spring-Heeled Jack: Victorian Urban Folklore and Popular Cultures, many alterations of a singular legend or unifying motif. In this book, Young investigates a very particular type of story: “belief narratives . . . stories in which the readers or listeners are expected to believe or in which they are expected to consider belief” (xxi; emphasis added). In other words, Young limits his survey to the sort of extraordinary tale that allows the audience to ponder the probability of its validity rather than immediately dismiss the impossibility of it. The resulting collection is rather sensational without crossing over into the realms of science fiction, fantasy, or wholly unbelievable tall tales. The most noteworthy effect Young’s book has on our understanding of Victorian folklore is the way he reveals a network of literary culture via the history of transmutable storytelling as he carefully traces the variations of each legend from one version of the story to the next, across publication venues, social classes, British territories, and time periods of the nineteenth century.
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McCoppin, Rachel S. The Legacy of the Goddess: Heroines, Warriors and Witches from World Mythology to Folktales and Fairy Tales. McFarland, 2023
Rachel McCoppin’s study of female archetypes considers the role of the feminine in world mythology, folklore, and fairy tales. McCoppin’s argument unfolds over eight chapters, essentially split into two halves, bookended by a preface, introduction, and conclusion. Her purpose and desire for the book is perhaps most clearly stated in her conclusion. She writes, “This book has strived to portray how the female characters of folktales and fairy tales hold many important similarities with the most powerful imaginings of femininity that cultures around the world once envisioned—the goddesses of mythology” (244). The first half of the book examines how the female characters within myth, folktales, and fairy tales often serve as guides and teachers to the male protagonists they encounter. These chapters delve into different narratives that feature a female archetype aiding the masculine archetypal hero. The second half of the book focuses on the female archetypal hero in her own right as the author analyzes the role of formidable heroines found in many folktales and fairy tales from around the world. These chapters analyze the female heroes, protagonists, and villains as major actors within their own quests as opposed to characters acted upon by masculine heroes.
Powers, Heather, editor. Fairy Tales in the College Classroom: Essays to Spark Lesson Plan Ideas Across the Curriculum. McFarland, 2024
As a curation of finely crafted essays on “the closest thing we have to a universal antidote” (8), Heather Powers’s Fairy Tales in the College Classroom: Essays to Spark Lesson Plan Ideas Across the Curriculum provides important resources to locate the pedagogical impact of fairy tales. Revisiting narratives that most readers are fairly well acquainted with, the essays span across the discursive terrains of linguistics, critical race studies, gender studies, visual studies, and adaptation studies. Exploring the potential of fairy tales as educational tools across various disciplines, the collection offers important perspectives on how these narratives can resourcefully enrich college-level teaching. Along with its rigorous academic approach, a reader’s familiarity with the background makes it an insightful read. This combination of academic rigor and familiar reading experiences makes the work an intriguing exploration of the several approaches the study of fairy tales invites: social, historical, anthropological, philological, and literary.
Canepa, Nancy L., editor. The Enchanted Boot: Italian Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. Wayne State UP, 2022
The Enchanted Boot: Italian Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, edited, translated, and introduced by Nancy L. Canepa, is an important contribution to the library of fairy tale anthologies. The introduction establishes the history of fairy tales in Italy, arguing that “the three most significant moments in Italian fairy-tale history occur at pivotal moments of construction, deconstruction, or reconfiguration of national identity” (22). From Baroque and Renaissance Italy to post-war Italy, Canepa effectively elucidates the waxing and waning interest in fairy tales as part of Italy’s literary and national history. Readers more familiar with the French and German fairy tale traditions will be interested to learn that Giambattista Basile’s literary versions of familiar tales such as Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Rapunzel, and Hansel and Gretel precede Perrault’s and the Grimms’ versions. However, the initial flowering of literary fairy tales during the Italian Renaissance did not create the same sustained creative process that occurred elsewhere in Europe and they have fallen in and out of vogue in the literary tradition, which has contributed to the lack of Italian fairy tales in the canon. The lack of a comprehensive sampling in Italian fairy tales in English has also impacted this reduced presence in the European fairy tale canon. This anthology intends to expand the traditional European canon by reintroducing Italian fairy tales to English-speaking scholars. This accessible anthology features translations of key Italian fairy tales, ranging from the fourteenth to the twenty-first century. Although organized chronologically, Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index (ATU) tale types are identified in the preface to each fairy tale, as well as compiled in an appendix, which assists researchers in navigating this text.
Adapting The War of the Worlds for Television
In 2019, two TV adaptations of H. G. Wells’s classic The War of the Worlds (1898) were simultaneously released. The two shows make very different choices in the way they adapt the original novel, each trying in its own way to modernize the source material for contemporary tastes. One is a period drama set in Edwardian England while the other is a contemporary update set in both France and England. Both shows foreground female characters as their leads, although both fail to convincingly empower their protagonists and completely move beyond stereotypes. Similarly, the original anti-imperialist content from the novel is maintained by one but not by the other. Instead, it draws from Wells’s novel to reimagine it as a post-apocalyptic narrative about human cooperation and competition. Both productions exploit contemporary anxieties over societal collapse. They ultimately focus on the novel’s original interest in the limited first-person perspective of its protagonist and narrator, while concentrating on the family as the locus of their narratives and themes.
Lies of P: Envisioning Automata in the Belle Epoque
Lies of P is a 2023 Korean action role-playing game developed by Neowiz Games and Round8 Studio. It is a free adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883), envisioning the main character as an automaton rather than a puppet. It is also set in the fictitious city of Krat and uses the Belle Epoque for aesthetic inspiration. The architecture, for instance, reflects a variety of styles, lavish and rich with details, such as Neo-Gothic and Art Nouveau, which were predominant during that period.
Nosferatu (2024): A Truly Monstrous Monster
Since writer/director Robert Eggers chooses to follow the same narrative trajectory as previous Nosferatu films, people reading this review might well ask, “Why do I need to see this new version? What does it do that previous adaptations did not?” My answer is that the biggest changes are that Eggers focuses on Ellen’s motivation to sacrifice herself to a creature so obviously evil and that Eggers also establishes the full extent of Orlok’s evil. Not only is he a creature of consummate evil, he is also a moldering dead body to whom Ellen is nonetheless sexually responsive. As a result, Nosferatu provides its actors (Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter, Bill Skarsgard as Count Orlok, and Nicholas Hoult as Thomas Hutter) with rich and complex roles. In addition, masterful cinematography, a haunting musical score, and lavish period costumes make it a pleasure to watch. But don’t take my word for it. Though it did not win any of them, the film received Academy Award nominations for production design, best makeup and hairstyle, cinematography, and costume design, not to mention similar nominations by BAFTA.
Poor Things and Yorgos Lanthimos: A Film Review Intersecting Various Feminist Debates
Poor Things (2023), the ninth film by Greek auteur filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, continues to present the director’s off-kilter vision of humanity, allowing people to view themselves in defamiliarized ways. The works of Lanthimos exude an artistic contemplativeness and often convey an artificial realism where normalcy is presented as both benign and insidious. These cinematic traits are evident in his breakout film, Dogtooth (2009). This austere work deconstructs a bizarre suburban family as an autocratic state, showing how easily children can be manipulated to believe in a worldview, but also how people inevitably rebel. Intersecting with Dogtooth, Lanthimos’s other films, The Lobster (2015) and The Favourite (2018), explore social microcosms in cloistered, controlled environments, satirizing power dynamics within larger social structures.
A Totally Rad Mad Scientist: Lisa Frankenstein’s Queer Articulations of Victor Frankenstein and the Creature
Screenwriter Diablo Cody’s long-awaited return to the horror genre took up the highly influential science fiction novel Frankenstein (1818) with a synthy 80s soundtrack, a dynamic cast, and the comedic eye of director Zelda Williams. Lisa Frankenstein (2024) does not attempt to adapt Mary Shelley’s classic with exact detail. Rather, the film reinvents it through a horror-comedy-romance-monster-mashup and uses the source material to capture the queer essence of Victor Frankenstein’s monster. Lisa Frankenstein’s premise highlights the ways in which a high school social outcast can locate their confidence and sense of self through monstrosity. In turn, the film indicates that the monster’s standing as a figure for selfhood and transformation is stronger than ever in the 2020s.
Recreating Mary Shelley’s Canon: Creature as the Authentic Turkish Frankenstein
Released in October 2023 on Netflix, Cagan Irmak’s Creature is a miniseries that presents an unusual Turkish adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Set in late-nineteenth-century Istanbul, in the Ottoman Empire, the story follows Ziya, a young medical student driven to push the boundaries of science to revive the dead. After witnessing the death of his professor Ihsan, Ziya becomes obsessed with bringing him back to life. He ultimately succeeds, but not in the way he anticipates. The resurrection of Ihasan leads to the creation of a monster, marking a new and unexpected beginning.
Copyright (c) 2025 Cenk Tan https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
A Class Dishonored: The Dishonored Franchise as a Critique of Victorian Idealism
In “The Steampunk City in Crisis,” Catherine Siemann suggests that steampunk fiction is written as “a city in crisis, a place where the imagined, steam-powered technologies create or address social problems and environmental disasters that echo historical ones” (51). In the appropriation of Victorian culture for steampunk, however, one component of that culture is frequently ignored: religion. Unlike other steampunk works, Dishonored (2012-2021), a game series by Arkane Studios, develops its central thesis by paying careful attention to the religious culture of Victorian England, bringing their spiritual experimentation to its natural conclusion. By taking this approach, Dishonored presents a much darker “city in crisis,” one in which the technology and world events of this fictional universe —a regicide, a plague, and a coup—rather than spurring its citizens to action, leave them in a state of paralysis. In this portrayal, Dishonored presents a relevant critique of the Victorians in two ways. First, the Victorians are criticized for clinging to Christian virtues while also shedding that religious sentiment. Second, they are criticized for promoting empire, in the void left by the reduction of Christianity, as a bastion against the dangers of a changing global landscape. In this dual criticism, Dishonored, particularly through its gameplay, highlights how non-aristocratic Victorians may have coped with a disaster, exemplifying how the idealization of progress in both religious and imperial thought is steeped in privileged interests.
“A truly happy woman has, it is said, no history”: Relational Utopia in A Woman of To-Morrow: A Tale of the Twentieth Century
British novelist and feminist essayist Alice Coralie Glyn is rarely mentioned in studies on Victorian feminism or speculative fiction, despite the distinctive nature of her literary work and biography. Alongside the feminist critical trend exploring the paradigm of the “lost,” “forgotten,” or “overlooked” female author,5 this paper argues that the hybridity of Glyn’s work may also have further contributed to her marginalization.
Imagination, Reading, and Cognitive Development: Early Insights in Edith Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle
In “Reading Fiction is Good for Children’s Cognitive, Emotional, and Social Development,” Maria Nikolajeva explains that cognitive theory can contribute much to literary studies and that a fledgling field of study exists that combines cognitive theory and cognitive science with literary criticism to create an approach known as cognitive literary criticism (4). She makes a case for the many useful insights that can be gained from using cognitive literary theory to understand how reading affects young developing minds. Specifically, she focuses on “how fiction stimulates young readers’ perception, attention, imagination, memory and other cognitive activity” (1). Literary critics have long asserted that reading helps stimulate the imagination, which is an essential aspect of cognition that starts to develop in childhood. Furthermore, reading allows one to enter situations and conflicts vicariously as a kind of practice. When a situation similar to one they have read about comes up in the readers’ lives, they will have some simulated experience with it gathered from reading. However, that literature can improve the cognitive abilities of readers appears to be a new insight for the scientific community.
Whenever I consider how best to make an argument for the study of the humanities, the first thing that pops into my mind is Louis Armstrong’s response when he was asked what jazz is: “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.” For those of us who love the humanities, it is easy to see the value of disciplines such as art, history, and literature: they shape us, help us navigate the world, give value and meaning to our lives. Yet explaining this to administrators and politicians who weigh “value” only in monetary terms often proves difficult, and they view the humanities only as a superfluous pastime. We have struggled with an assault on the humanities—once widely considered the foundation of the university.
The Incredible Nineteenth Century: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Fairy Tale (I19) seeks to publish the finest scholarship on the century that was, in many ways, the time period in which the modern genres of science fiction and fantasy began, and in which the academic study of fairy tale and folklore has its roots. I19 interprets “the nineteenth century” broadly, using the dates of “The Long Nineteenth Century”—roughly, from the beginning of the French Revolution to the end of World War I—but even these dates are just notable historical markers as they approximately coincide with Romanticism and Modernism, respectively. Scholarship on works from the eighteenth century that anticipated or influenced writers in the nineteenth century or ways in which nineteenth-century literature influenced later authors both fall within the interests of this journal. I19 also publishes scholarship on Neo-Victorianism, Steam Punk, or any other contemporary genres that react to the time periods contained within The Long Nineteenth Century. Genres such as horror and mystery, though not strictly within the realms of the fantastic, are also welcome, due to their close affinity with science fiction and fantasy. Scholarship on early film is also welcome. Additionally, I19 is dedicated to maintaining a scope that is both multicultural and global, and we encourages submissions on works from marginalized communities and from around the world. In addition to literary scholarship, I19 also publishes works on pedagogy. These pieces may be personal reflections, strategies on course design, innovative assignment sheets with commentary, or anything else that educators teaching nineteenth-century literature may find useful. Finally, I19 maintains robust Book Reviews and Media Reviews sections. Book reviews cover a wide array of recent scholarly works, and media reviews cover film, television, video games, and any other form of mass media. Queries and submissions may be sent to i19@mtsu.edu. We accept submissions on a rolling basis, and there are no author fees. Generative AI may not be used to produce text.
Cameron, Brooke, and Lara Karpenko, editors. The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century Literature: A Feast of Blood. Routledge, 2022.
Vampire is other, a symbol that inhabits the edges of boundaries and exists in liminal spaces. The vampire is a figure that at once inspires fear and longing within itself and in those with whom the creature comes into contact. The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century Literature: A Feast of Blood outlines the cultural characteristics of the Victorian vampire figure, arguing that John William Polidori’s 1819 The Vampyre: A Tale solidified vague and fragmented folk tales and legends about the walking, life-feasting dead into a new version that set the standard for the Victorian literary vampire and beyond (1). The book also looks at other Victorian iterations of the vampire that contributed to its currently recognized version. Through collected essays focusing on four major themes—race and postcolonization, desire and sexuality, time and history, and adaptation (6)—this volume examines how the vampire represents shifting cultural norms and fears of the Victorians in an era of unprecedented social and economic upheaval. The collection also traces the wanderings of the vampire, “not[ing] the distinctly global exchange of ideas” (3) that contribute to its modern conception, as the volume explores the colonial influences of the monster (4).
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Baudemann, Kristina. The Future Imaginary in Indigenous North American Arts and Literatures. Routledge, 2022.
Kristina Baudemann’s The Future Imaginary In Indigenous North American Arts and Literatures draws together texts by Indigenous authors that share a common trope: dreaming of “a common future while nevertheless being mindful of their cultural differences” (2). Her case studies address six novels and eight stories that imagine the future against the backdrop of the past. Positing that the “gradual disappearance of Indigenous people is a narrative—rather than historic fact or natural necessity,” Baudemann explains how that narrative is “grounded in the circular logic according to which their supposed absence in times to come justifies the colonizers’ past and present genocidal dealings with them” (5-6). Yet, as Baudemann’s meticulously researched book documents, the future is not a cemented truth but rather malleable and dependent on actions in both the past and present. As she sets forth in her opening chapter, Baudemann’s method of “future analysis” requires that she develop and apply new theoretical parameters that highlight how each text she examines “creates its own future imaginary” (7, emphasis in original). Collectively, these new imaginaries overturn the past by offering futures with endless possibilities for indigenous peoples.
Massachi, Dina Schiff, editor. The Characters of Oz: Essays on Their Adaptation and Transformation. McFarland, 2023.
When people think of “Oz,” they tend to think of the 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz or the 1939 MGM film The Wizard of Oz. But the Oz franchise is larger than those two works. It is so large, in fact, that a specialized term is required to fully appreciate its mass and the concepts pulled into its orbit. In the introduction to their essay collection Third Person, Patrick Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin establish a list of five qualities and claim that a text should satisfy at least one to qualify as what they call a “vast narrative” (2). Two of these are closely connected to new digital media forms (vastness through procedural potential or multiplayer interaction) and another involves a sharp deviation from expected form (vastness narrative extent). The remaining two traits are vastness through world and character continuity, and vastness through cross-media universes. Beginning with the 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and extending to this very day, then, L. Frank Baum’s Land of Oz is doubly vast, first through its ever-expanding cast and adventures in Baum's fourteen-book original series and through its multitudes of retellings and adaptations, ranging from the early plays to the 1939 MGM classic film to the upcoming 2024 film release of Wicked, still two months away as I write this review.
Garst, John. John Henry and His People: The Historical Origins and Lore of America’s Great Folk Ballad. McFarland, 2022.
The origins of the John Henry myth have vexed scholars since the nineteenth century. Who was this man who fought a steam-powered drill only to die in his victory? Did he even exist? What was the genesis of the folk ballad that cropped up in his name, ever-changing in its details related to location and specifics? John Garst explores these questions and more in his work: John Henry and His People: The Historical Origin and Lore of America’s Great Folk Ballad. While Garst is a chemist by trade, he is also a “folk song enthusiast, hobbyist, and amateur scholar [with a] sixty-five-year interest in American folksong” (7). His interest in folklore stems from the fluidity of form: “For folklore, time also brings recognition of value, but folklore has a great advantage over fixed art. Folklore is winnowed in another sense. It is changed” (51). As Garst writes, the popular ballad has continued to resonate because it adapts to its cultural context as it is just specific enough to be plausible, but also vague enough to imbue significance across generations. These shifts—in verbiage, but more importantly, in meaning—are the heart of John Henry and His People’s long-form excavation of the Henry myth.
Joshi, S. T. The Recognition of H. P. Lovecraft: His Rise from Obscurity to World Renown, Hippocampus Press, 2021.
S. T. Joshi’s latest contribution to the field of Lovecraft Studies, a field to which he has tirelessly and notably dedicated his publishing career, offers a concept that is an invaluable addition to the Lovecraftian critical oeuvre—an overview of the way in which Lovecraft has been received and recognised over the past century, including both critical and academic voices alongside the response of lay readership. Indeed, Joshi presents a chronologically organised narrative of Lovecraft in print and (eventually) media, detailing Lovecraft’s own publication history as well as reviews and letters connected to Lovecraft. Joshi covers roughly a decade in each chapter and pulls from a large variety of sources in order to construct this history of Lovecraft’s writing. As a matter of fact, this chronology of Lovecraft in print is the real strength of Joshi’s book, and the most cogent aspect of his work in general. It is certainly meticulously researched, with an impressive attention to detail in terms of dates, names, locations and general information pertaining to each publication Joshi includes. However, the sheer volume of information included within the work leads it to feel, at times, little more than an annotated bibliography.
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: A Maligned Video Game Masterpiece
With innumerable adaptations, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson endures as a cornerstone of the Victorian Gothic literary canon. Adapting the complexities and nuances of Jekyll’s troubling scientific discovery and consequent double-life is no easy feat. While film and stage productions have historically functioned as popular and accessible vehicles for creative adaptation, the viewer is sorely limited by their role as a spectator. However, there exists one medium that encourages active participation from its audience— electronic video games. 1988’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, developed by Advanced Communication, Co. and published by Toho, is a rarity, being one of relatively few games inspired by the novella.
The Intersections of Epistolarity and Sentimentalism in The Sorrows of Young Werther and Frankenstein
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is a text that literary critics have long noted for its formal complexity. From layering multiple narrative levels to incorporating epistolary narration, the novel stands out as a fusion of diverse literary forms that is as hybridized as the Creature it depicts. This narrative structure inevitably carries interpretive weight while also shedding light on literature’s ability to reflect and complicate the cultural values that shape it. Sentimentalism, in particular, is a prominent social ideal with which Frankenstein engages, and the novel’s formal qualities affect how sentimentalism functions in the text. For instance, Kirsten Martin notes that “Shelley’s frames layer on top of one another to guide the reader through all of the novel’s disparate pieces. This technique … creates the conditions for sympathetic engagement” between readers and characters (601-02). Similarly, Hyewon Shin posits that “the epistolary frame fosters affective connections between characters (letter writers) and readers (their addressees)” (546). Such scholars associate sentimental emotions with the novel’s epistolary, multi-level structure, a formal quality that Frankenstein shares with one of the many texts that its characters reference, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). Of course, the explicit mention of this work in Frankenstein is admittedly brief; however, both texts’ combining of epistolary and framed narrative structures merits a closer reading that considers the evolving relationships between literary forms and cultural values that these novels exemplify. In short, a comparison of these works will bring to light a structural and functional shift in epistolarity, beginning as a vehicle for communicating interior emotional experience and transitioning into a simultaneous call for and performance of outwardly focused sentimental response. This transition will help to elucidate Frankenstein’s Gothic complication and distortion of cultural values, such as, in this case, sentimentalism.
For the Dead Travel Fast’: Foreign Contagion in Dracula
Existing as a “dead man made alive” (Stoker, Notes 17), Count Dracula reflects Victorian fears of foreignness and illness spreading into the individual bodies of English citizens and the national body of English society. Lorenzo Servitje notes that cholera, in particular, was linked to the understanding of disease as enemy (34). Throughout Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), the Count exists as a physical manifestation of this diseased, foreign enemy threatening the safety and civilization of England. Between 1831 and 1866, cholera epidemics in England resulted in the deaths of over a hundred thousand men, women, and children in three waves of contagion (Underwood 173), which served to emphasize and reinforce racial understandings of the disease.
Destabilizing Happily Ever After: Dickens’s Conflation of the False Bride/Fairy Bride Motifs in David Copperfield
In Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849-50), naïve David calls his wedding to Dora Spenlow a “fairy marriage” (531), apparently using the term in the same sense that “fairy-tale wedding” is popularly used today: to describe the romantic obtainment of happily-ever-after between a bride and groom, characterized by a sense of the fantastic or unreal. As a child, Dickens too had been seduced by a dream of fairy-tale ecstasy: in a nostalgic description of finding “Little Red Riding Hood” on his Christmas Tree, he reminisces, “She was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding-Hood, I should have known perfect bliss. But,” he continues significantly, “it was not to be” (Christmas 291). While David is a blind young dreamer, Dickens the adult writer is made sadder and wiser not only by his deeper understanding of fairy tales but also by his own life experience. Dickens knew by then that traditional fairy tales don’t always end on the wedding day—often as not, they go on to relate the continued torments visited upon the bride and groom by nightmarish in-laws, or by one another—and this knowledge runs through the heart of the novel. The truth is, as Kelly Hager explains, “Dickens’s most autobiographical novel is concerned in a multiplicity of ways with the institution of marriage and the miseries it causes” (990). Dickens’s use of the phrase reveals his understanding of its true implications: “fairy marriages” are as likely to result in misery as in happiness.
Copyright (c) 2024 Amy Bennett-Zendzian https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Those of us who study nineteenth-century literature are sometimes met with sneers by some who think the literature of this era has nothing to say about our contemporary world or who believe that anything worth saying about these works has already been said. Of course, neither of these erroneous ideas could be further from the truth. To counter the first misconception, I like to recommend that people read the first twenty pages or so of Oliver Twist (1837-39). This novel’s exploration of the lives of the poor and of the government’s role in relieving poverty is strikingly current nearly two hundred years later. As to the second misconception, I can only suggest that a willful ignorance would cause a person to hold such an opinion. The richness, complexity, and diversity of nineteenth-century texts provides an inexhaustible source for scholarly commentary and debate. Moreover, the age that produced these works was steeped in social, political, cultural, scientific, and intellectual upheaval, and we are still coming to terms with many of the changes that occurred during this time. Clearly, there is still much to be said about nineteenth-century literature. In order to help facilitate scholarship about this incredibly complex field, the editorial staff of this journal has expanded to include a Pedagogy Editor and a Media Reviews Editor. Any academic journal has college educators as a core constituent of its readership, and many academics can attest that being a skilled researcher in a field is quite different than being an expert teacher, and vice versa. With this in mind, I19 seeks to publish pedagogical pieces in which scholars of nineteenth-century literature can share assignments, course designs, and classroom activities with others to help facilitate the teaching texts in our field. We are therefore pleased to introduce Vivian Delchamps of the Dominican University of California as our Pedagogy Editor who will lead our efforts in publishing scholarship on teaching the fantastic literature of this era. The Incredible Nineteenth Century (Volume 2, Issue 2; Whole Number 4) Fall 2024 6 Dr. Delchamps’s areas of expertise include nineteenth-century literature, illness, pain, and disability, and she studies how nineteenth-century women writers such as Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Frances E. W. Harper “used literature to supplement diagnostic ways of knowing and capture the raw potential of disabled embodiment.” She has published essays in Poetry and Pedagogy, Insurrect!, and other venues, and she has an article forthcoming on The Wizard of Oz. Teaching science fiction, fantasy, and fairy tale of the nineteenth century is complex on many fronts. Firstly, as shocking as it may be for those of us who grew up loving these genres, many students are not as familiar with the fantastic as we assume they will be. The first novel I ever taught was Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), and near the end of the first class, after a minimally successful discussion, a dismayed-looking student raised her hand and asked, “Why doesn’t she just write about things on Earth?” At that point I realized how badly I had failed, and that I should have begun the discussion of this book, before we had even started reading, about the conventions of science fiction and how authors often use this genre as a way to displace problems from our everyday reality so that issues are defamiliarized and we can look at them with a fresh point of view. Better preparation would have helped my students be more open to the ways Le Guin explores sex, gender, and culture in this novel. Secondly, as mentioned above, the nineteenth century was a time of unprecedented change, and students studying literature from this time need to understand its history and culture. Nineteenth-century society can be both alien and startlingly similar to our own, and helping students see how this era in many ways gave birth to the world we live in can help them to appreciate its literature. Finally, the teaching of literature from any time period and of any genre is a complex undertaking, and as educators we are always looking for better ways of reaching our students. The Incredible Nineteenth Century (Volume 2, Issue 2; Whole Number 4) Fall 2024 7 The stories the nineteenth century produced maintain a central spot in popular imagination still today. Consider, for instance, how many reinterpretations of Frankenstein (1818) or Dracula (1897) have been produced by film studios in just the past two years. Or, think about the ways the works of Edgar Allan Poe have remained a staple of American cinema and television for decades, ranging from Vincent Price movies to The Simpsons (1989-present). Even beyond these canonical works and authors, the nineteenth century remains a time period that Hollywood loves to engage with and recreate. Because of the popularity of nineteenth-century fantasy, science fiction, and fairy tale throughout various forms of media, this journal has expanded to include a Media Reviews Editor, a position that will be filled by Joe Conway. Dr. Conway studies early American literature, pop culture, and economics in literature and culture, and he is the Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He writes that our culture in the twenty-first century still needs “the tropes and characters of the nineteenth century in order to make sense of itself. Moby Dick was Big Oil before Exxon and BP, Dracula foreshadows vulture capitalism, Frankenstein’s monster continues to embody marginalized consciousness.” In regards to contemporary recreations of the nineteenth century in contemporary media, he says “Despite changing technologies—videogames replacing books, for example—we can’t shake the sense we are still citizens of the nineteenth century.” He teaches early sf writers such as Shelley, Hawthorne, and Wells along with their twenty-first century descendants like Nnedi Okorafor and Silvia Moreno-Garcia. He also teaches neo-slave narratives beside nineteenth-century autobiographies of formerly enslaved people, and Edgar Allan Poe beside Toni Morrison. He writes that “Anna Kornbluh describes our contemporary culture as one of pure ‘immediacy,’ and so one way to ensure the work of previous writers continues to hold relevance for our students is by demonstrating how much a part of the past continues to haunt the present.” The Incredible Nineteenth Century (Volume 2, Issue 2; Whole Number 4) Fall 2024 8 In our media reviews section, we plan to highlight not only fantastic writings from the nineteenth century, but also science fiction and fantasy set in this time. One of the most interesting aspects of studying literature from previous eras is the ability to trace how succeeding generations have interpreted those works, and how they have injected their own concerns and ideas into it. Also, especially in the context of nineteenth-century literature, contemporary media set in this time provides the opportunity for previously silenced voices to be heard. Populations that suffered atrocities during the nineteenth century—those who suffered from industrialism, class oppression, sexism, homophobia, global colonization, slavery, or Manifest Destiny, for example—now have the chance to tell their own stories. Nineteenth-century studies is a field that is ever-expanding, and having these two new positions will enhance I19’s ability to engage in conversations about teaching texts written in this century and about new media inspired by this time. We hope the contributions of this journal will have a meaningful impact on the study of this complex and intriguing field.
Williams, Christy. Mapping Fairy-Tale Space: Pastiche and Metafiction in Borderless Tales. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2021
Christy Williams explores fairy-tale structures in an innovative way by using a geographic metaphor to trace the history and interconnections of the fairy-tale genre. The map and web concepts are effective for explaining how these stories intersect across time and space and for decentering the European fairy-tale tradition by expanding beyond that canon. The main focus of Williams’s book is to use the notion of mapping to analyze twenty-first century fairy tales, and she does so by organizing her study into two parts with two chapters in each that cover a range of examples from both television and written texts. At the core of this analysis lies an exploration of the ways in which familiar, well-known fairy tales are reconfigured and made relevant for modern audiences.
Faflak, Joel and Tilottama Rajan. William Blake: Modernity and Disaster. U of Toronto P, 2020.
William Blake was perhaps best known for his highly allusive and synesthetic work that syncretically mixed personal revelation with traditional religion as much as he generically mixed literature and art. Joel Faflak and Tilottama Rajan have collected essays that likewise explore the ruptures between categories and bodies of knowledge. As one might expect from its subtitle “Modernity and Disaster,” these essays map a constellation of recurring terms, especially “disaster,” “apocalypse,” and “science.” Like Roland Barthes emphasizes in Writing Degree Zero (1953), these terms are treated “encyclopedicly,” stretching their multivarious affordances to the limit. For example, in the introduction the editors establish the term “disaster” as a unifying theme among the essays; its etymology (bad + star) necessarily invokes astrology and prediction as well as “apocalypse,” which in turn is both an “uncovering” and an ending. They also provide a secondary definition of “disaster” as “aftermath,” thus recursively rewriting the book’s subtitle as “Modernity and Its (Post-Modern) Aftermath.” Such cyclical and iterative (re)interpretation describes not only William Blake’s theology, but also the approach of many of his scholars.
Calhoon, Kenneth S. The Long Century’s Long Shadow: Weimar Cinema and the Romantic Modern. U of Toronto P, 2021.
Kenneth S. Calhoon’s The Long Century’s Long Shadow: Weimar Cinema and the Romantic Modern is an ambitious study that explores connections among Weimar films (that is, films made in Germany between the wars, particularly Expressionist films), Romantic literature and painting, and modern art. As a scholar of nineteenth-century literature and culture, I appreciated the book’s insistence on the relevance of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works to twentieth-century film; however, I found several aspects of the book to be frustrating.
The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023) and Renfield (2023)
For those of us who appreciate interesting adaptations of Dracula, 2023 was an exciting year, with the release of two films that encourage us to rethink both Stoker’s novel and its numerous adaptations. While neither Renfield (Universal; directed by Chris McKay) or The Last Voyage of the Demeter (Universal, directed by Andre Overdal) attempts to recapture the novel as a whole in the way that Francis Ford Coppola did in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1993), each film takes something from Stoker’s novel (the character Renfield or “The Captain’s Log” in Demeter) and uses it to provide the center for a fresh reading/viewing. Moreover, what is even more interesting for someone like me who tends to see books and films as means of providing insights into the period that produced them is that fact that both unabashedly focus on the primal evil of the Dracula character. There is no inkling of the romantic vampire seeking his lost love in Bram Stoker’s Dracula or the charming character in Badham’s Dracula (1979). Instead, there is only hunger and a vague desire to dominate the humans who appear ill-equipped to challenge him. What, if anything, does this emphasis on unremitting violence tell us about the time in which we live?
What Else Is Out There? American Women’s Progressive Era Utopian Societies in Outer
Utopian and dystopian texts typically fall under the larger umbrella of science fiction and fantasy, as they create alternative worlds that could include various governmental structures, environmental situations, technological advancements, and more. Many American utopian texts written in the Progressive Era explore a revision of current or future American culture, a remote society on Earth, a depiction of the afterlife, or a discovered society on another planet. For Progressive Era women writers, revisions to gendered norms in their utopian literary works were common as many fought for greater equality with men in their own world. Setting the society on another planet can interestingly pose gender equality as an otherworldly, alien phenomenon; however, outside of not only American but potentially also human constructs, this framework allows authors to imagine entirely new systems that promote gender equality. When the setting is on another planet, authors are not bound by any cultural, legal, or religious boundaries, other than those that permeate their minds while constructing these new worlds.