Victorian Studies 

About: Victorian Studies is an academic journal published by Indiana University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Empire & Poetry. It has an ISSN identifier of 0042-5222. Over the lifetime, 1533 publications have been published receiving 9064 citations.

Strategic Formalism: Toward a New Method in Cultural Studies

Abstract: ince the demise of the New Criticism, literary critics have struggled to articulate links between literary forms and social formations. From Georg Lukaics to Pierre Macherey and Fredric Jameson, Marxists have been inclined to understand literary forms as expressions of social and economic realities. To be sure, literary forms do not reflect economic arrangements in any simple way in this critical tradition. In The Political Unconscious (1981) -perhaps the most sustained articulation of a Marxist incorporation of formalist concerns-Jameson defines an attention to the ideology of form as an effort to grasp the "symbolic messages transmitted to us by the coexistence of various sign systems which are themselves traces or anticipations of modes of production" (76). Traces or anticipations: for Jameson, the form of the literary artifact is by no means simply an aftereffect of the "real"; it may itself promise or predict a new reality. Urging us to move beyond political readings that focus on a text's content-its representation of class relations, for example -Jameson argues that the "historical or ideological subtext ... is not immediately present as such, not some common-sense external reality," but "rather must itself always be (re) constructed after the fact" (81). Thus it is literary forms, read in their rich complexity as struggles among conflicting sign systems, that bear witness to a dialectical social agon, offering us our best access to both existent and emergent systems of social relations. Foucauldian and New Historicist critics, too, have argued that literary forms do not merely reflect social relationships but may help bring them into being. Powerfully influential accounts of the

Unenglish and unmanly: Anglo-Catholicism and homosexuality.

Abstract: ESPITE THE TRADITIONAL teaching of the Christian Church that homosexual behaviour is always sinful, there are grounds for believing that Anglo-Catholic religion within the Church of England has offered emotional and aesthetic satisfactions that have been particularly attractive to members of a stigmatised sexual minority. This apparent connection between Anglo-Catholicism and the male homosexual subculture in the English-speaking world has often been remarked upon, but it has never been fully explored. In 1960, for example, in a pioneering study of male homosexuality in Britain, Gordon Westwood stated:

Providence and putrefaction: Victorian sanitarians and the natural theology of health and disease.

Abstract: The daisies grow on matter made free by the mouldering corpse, and the image is similar to the rose and briar that intertwine above the graves of lovers and signify their eternal love. In both cases, what is praiseworthy is the transformation of matter from one beautiful and useful occupation to the next, or, in more technical (and more evocative) terms, the putrefaction, decomposition, or decay of organic matter and its subsequent reconstitution in a new form.2 Putrefying matter claimed a great deal of attention in midVictorian cities. While some pre-industrial cities may have sustained a rough organic matter equilibrium with the surrounding countryside, returning as manure the plant nutrients taken from the land, this had surely vanished by the early 1840s when the Health of Towns Commissioners followed their noses into the back courts of British cities. There they found enormous accumulations of rotting matter in stagnant sewers and cesspools, in heaps of garbage and excrement, in church-