The article explores the reception of ‘1821’ in Victorian popular culture, focusing on the representation of Greek women in stories published in contemporary periodicals. The two dominant tropes of Greek womanhood that emerge in popular fiction and poetry published from the 1830s to the 1890s – the captive harem slave and the intrepid warrior – arouse sympathy for the enslaved women but also evoke liberal ideas on women’s national and social roles. These texts foreground the position of Greek women within a nineteenth-century social context and imbue in them virtues and conflicts such as radicalism, the enfranchisement of women and middle-class domesticity that concerned Britain as much as Greece. Greek women, as represented in these stories, construct a Victorian narrative of ‘1821’ and of the Greek nation that oscillates between familiarity and strangeness, freedom and enslavement, real and imaginary. These largely neglected texts challenge traditional definitions of philhellenism, which depended on the legacy of ancient Greece as justification for the cause of the country’s liberation, and instead construct new myths about Greece, participating in the discursive production of its national fantasy. They also provide the opportunity of reconsidering the cultural position of Modern Greece in the Victorian period beyond the division between Hellenism and Orientalism.
This article examines women's mobility in the work of Rhoda Broughton, looking closely at her use of the railway as a means of rendering not only the movement but also the drifting consciousness of her heroines. Combining privacy and publicity, movement and stasis, the railway in Broughton's work affects the subjectivity and everyday routine of women, becoming a literary means of exploring woman's complex response to the transitory nature of experience, the rapidly shifting states of consciousness, and modernity's fleeting images -all of which are reflected in Broughton's idiosyncratic style.
is best known for his psychological novels, in which characters spend at least as much time navigating their inner lives as their outer. His nuanced descriptions of Victorian manners, although they neglect to address broader social realities, are intricately beautiful portraits of a small subclass of people. These aesthetics notwithstanding, it would be a mistake to classify all of James's work as serious or philosophical. Along with criticism and travel sketches, stories were among his first published works, and several of these stories feature ghosts or ghostly occurrences. Eighteen of them have been collected by Leon Edel into a volume entitled Stories of the Supernatural. The anthology includes early examples written in the tradition of gothic romance. These are broad brushstrokes for a writer usually concerned with finer detail-at first such subjects don't seem to fit with the rest of James's output. How can an author to whom raw emotion is so antithetical write a convincing horror tale? This thesis will attempt to answer that question by focusing on Henry James's explorations into the ghostly, and on the stylistic traits which set his stories apart from other well-known pieces of American supernatural fiction. There are two halves to my thesis. First, I will show that experiences are recreated for the reader, passed on intact, unmediated, unsorted. Second, I will demonstrate that the supernatural is depicted in a positive light in many stories, and discovery is closely linked to desire. In the conclusion, the case is made that the majority of these stories embrace the supernatural rather than presenting it as something to be dreaded. This welcoming approach is what makes the stories truly unique.
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