Victorian Literature and Culture 

About: Victorian Literature and Culture is an academic journal published by Cambridge University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Poetry & Empire. It has an ISSN identifier of 1060-1503. Over the lifetime, 993 publications have been published receiving 6752 citations.

Materiality

Abstract: An actuary generally will not have the time to quantify all the assumptions in a model. An important aspect of modeling is to distinguish between the material (important) assumptions that need to be accurately quantified, and the assumptions that are immaterial and can be quickly estimated. The knowledge of which assumptions are material can often be obtained through sensitivity testing. In short, sensitivity testing involves changing an assumption and measuring the effect of the change on the model’s result. If a small change in the assumption causes a large change in the result, then the assumption is likely material.

The dead still among us: victorian secular relics, hair jewelry, and death culture

Abstract: By the time the nineteenth century reached its close, it was already possible to look back at Victorian death culture with nostalgia. With the rise of secularism, the slide toward what Diana Fuss has called the death of death had begun. No longer was it common practice to hold onto the remains of the dead. Rarely would a lock of hair be kept by, to be worn as jewelry, nor did one dwell on the deathbed scene, linger upon the lips of the dying to mark and revere those last words, record the minutiae of slipping away in memorials, diaries, and letters. Rooms of houses were increasingly less likely to hold remains; no one had died in the beds in which the living slept. Walter Benjamin, who wrote often about what was lost in the nineteenth century, sees the turning away from death as going hand in hand with the disappearance of the art of storytelling. Writing in the early 1930s, he called his contemporaries “dry dwellers of eternity” because “today people live in rooms that have never been touched by death” (Illuminations 94). Avoiding the sight of the dying, Benjamin argues, one misses the moment when life becomes narrative, when the meaning of life is completed and illuminated in its ending. He privileges the shared moment of death, when relatives, and even the public, gather around the dying to glean final words of wisdom, to know perhaps, in the end, the whole story. Historian of death Philippe Aries describes a Christian account of the final ordeal of the death bed, when in the moment of death the salvation or damnation of the dying is determined, thus changing or freezing, for good, the meaning of the whole life. Scholars of nineteenth- and twentieth-century death culture tend, on the whole, to agree that towards the end of the century, a process that began earlier reached a completion – that the death of the other not only became less of a shared experience among a community, but last things such as final words and remains were increasingly to be pushed to the back of consciousness and hence to the lumber room of meaning and importance.

The counter-invasion of britain by buddhism in marie corelli's a romance of two worlds and h. rider haggard's ayesha: the return of she

Abstract: PRIOR TO THE MIDDLE of the nineteenth century, Europeans had heard of Buddhism, if at all, as an aside in tales of the exotic Orient in which the Buddha figured as a minor Hindu deity or a celestial sun god. Eastern thought had trickled back toward the seats of Western empires for centuries along the same routes used for tea and opium, but serious engagement with that thought only began in the late eighteenth century with translations of the Bhagavadgita, and systematic study of Eastern sacred texts did not begin in France, Germany, and England until around the 1820s.I draw here and throughout on a number of historical studies, in particular Almond, Batchelor, Lopez, and Welbon. As Almond notes, it was only in the first half of the century “that the term ‘Buddha’ (‘Buddoo’, ‘Bouddha’, ‘Boudhou’, etc.) began to gain currency… and that the term ‘Buddhism’ first made its appearance in English in the scholarly journals which appeared, in part at least, as a consequence of the developing imperial interest of both England and France in the Orient“ (7). The first English study of Buddhism that I have found is Upham (1829). As late as the 1860s, but rapidly at that point, Buddhism “hit” Europe, becoming a wide-spread topic that peaked in London's “Buddhism-steeped Nineties” and then declined after the turn of the century (Caracciolo 30).This claim is supported by the fact that a search of the PCI (Periodicals Content Index) database for articles published with “Buddha” or “Buddhism” in the title reveals this pattern: 3 in the period 1840–50; 0 in 1851–60; 13 in 1861–70; 74 in 1871–80; 148 in 1881–90; 367 in 1891–1900; 287 in 1901–10; and 243 in 1911–20. One indicator of burgeoning British interest was the publication in the last three decades of the century of at least three book-length poems recounting the life of Buddha. In particular, Edwin Arnold's The Light of Asia. Being The Life and Teaching of Gautama, Prince of India and Founder of Buddhism (1879) became a best-seller in Europe, India, and America and was credited with inspiring conversions to Buddhism, as well as with influencing Rudyard Kipling's creation of the character of the Teshoo Lama in Kim (1901).The other two poems I refer to are Philips's The Story of Gautama Buddha and his Creed: An Epic (1871) and Alexander's Sakya-Muni: The Story of Buddha (1887), which was the Newdigate Prize poem at Oxford in 1887. The most famous conversion attributed to reading The Light of Asia was of Charles Bennett, who in 1901 became Ananda Metteyya, the first British Buddhist monk. As Humphreys puts it in The Development of Buddhism in England, Bennett, “like many before him and untold thousands since, found that a new world of spiritual adventure was opened before his eyes” by The Light of Asia (13). On Arnold's influence on Kipling, see Whitlark “Nineteenth-Century ‘Nirvana Talk’.” The initial premise of this essay is that through the latter decades of the century themes and figures drawn in part or whole from Buddhism increasingly made their way into British literary discourse. This appears to be especially true of “sensational” and “romance” novels, a fact significant in itself for understanding how Buddhism filtered into British culture (though full consideration of the relationship between those sub-genres and Eastern thought will have to await another occasion). But to the extent that one can detect such concepts as reincarnation, karma, and nirvana, for instance, in works of literature of the time, they generally are hybridized with Christian, Gnostic, Rosicrucian, alchemical, Greek pantheistic, ancient Egyptian, and other occult figures. This hybridization is another significant aspect of the ways in which Victorians struggled to construct a Buddhism in their own image. Buddhism pervaded late nineteenth-century European thought, though diffusely. It was woven into the complex fabric of discourses concerning empire, the crisis in Christianity (recently exacerbated by Schopenhauer, Darwin, and Nietzsche, among others), and the general perception that spirituality had come under increasing threat in a society dominated by the materialism of the market and the rationality of science.On the influence of Buddhism on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, see Welbon and Schwab, as well as analysis in Dumoulin.

Primitive ballads, modern criticism, ancient skepticism: macaulay's lays of ancient rome

Abstract: O NE OF THE BEST selling volumes of Victorian verse, as Donald Gray has shown, was Thomas Babington Macaulay’s The Lays of Ancient Rome first published in 1842 ( Complete Writings 19: 167–279). For a generation after its publication, the Lays also generally enjoyed the praise of critics and poets. 1 But in 1860, just months after Macaulay had been interred in Poets’ Corner, Matthew Arnold offered up the Lays as a touchstone of the grandly bad. In his lectures On Translating Homer, Arnold said that “a man’s power to detect the ring of false metal in those Lays is a good measure of his fitness to give an opinion about poetical matters at all” (1: 211). Arnold’s put-down was echoed in later works such as Thomas Humphry Ward’s multi-volume anthology The English Poets (1880), which opened with Arnold’s essay “The Study of Poetry.” Ward cited the continuing popularity of the Lays, but he pointed out that “the higher critical authorities have pronounced against them, and are even teaching us to wonder whether they can be called poetry at all. They find in the Lays the same faults which mar the author’s prose — commonplaceness of ideas, cheapness of sentiment and imagery, made to prevail by dint of the writer’s irresistible command of a new rhetorical force; in a word, eloquent Philistinism” (4: 540).

Pathological possibilities: contagion and empire in doyle's sherlock holmes stories

Abstract: BY THE TIME “THE ADVENTURE OF THE DYING DETECTIVE” appeared in the Strand magazine in 1913, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's readers were already familiar with the dynamics of the relationship between Sherlock Holmes and his “friend and colleague” Dr. Watson. They would thus not have been surprised to see Holmes, lying apparently delirious and deathly ill, pointing out with his last breath the intellectual limitations of the friend who has come to cure him: “Shall I demonstrate to you your own ignorance? What do you know, pray, of Tapanuli fever? What do you know of the black Formosa corruption?”“I have never heard of either.”“There are many problems of disease, many strange pathological possibilities, in the East, Watson.” He paused after each sentence to collect his failing strength. “I have learned so much during some recent researches which have a medico-criminal aspect. It was in the course of them that I contracted this complaint. You can do nothing.” (DYIN 2: 388)I cite from the two-volume Bantam Classic edition, Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories. Like other Holmes scholars, I have also followed the convention of using the standard four-letter abbreviations set out by Jack Tracy's The Encyclopedia Sherlockiana. But this dissertation on the good doctor's “ignorance” is more than a commentary on Watson's personal shortcomings; it is the voice of the specialist declaring that the “general practitioner” is not competent to treat this kind of complaint. Disease has slipped out of the realm of medicine and into the province of the “medico-criminal” expert. Britain's expansion into “the East” has introduced it to “pathological possibilities” that cannot be shut down through the operations of ordinary medical science and which must instead be contained by Holmes's own special “powers” (388).