2024-03-29T15:56:24Z
http://journals.library.mun.ca/index.php/index/oai
oai:journals.library.mun.ca:article/89
2010-09-17T06:14:12Z
ate:ART
Class, Suffering, and Sensibility in Godwin's Caleb Williams
Grace, Bryan
Caleb Williams
William Godwin
Political Justice
class
sensibility
suffering
pain
politics
animals
species
Louis Althusser
Edmund Burke
David Hume
Adam Smith
This paper explores the connections between the so-called cult of sensibility and class consciousness in eighteenth-century England as they are negotiated in William Godwin’s Things as they Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams. It traces the connections between elitist sensibility and political oppression in prominent thinkers like David Hume and Edmund Burke. While these men argue that refined sensibility is the result of essential differences between men, Godwin counters their arguments in the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice by insisting that differences in sensibility are not the result of the natural superiority of one class of men over another, but the result of inherited regimes of power and “impressions.” For Godwin, the assumption that the upper classes have more refined sensibilities is a lie, a false ideology perpetuated to justify the extortion of the lower classes and uphold rank structures. In Caleb Williams, this ideology precipitates Tyrrel’s persecution of Emily because Tyrrel believes that his “injuries” are more important than hers. This dynamic is echoed in the relationship between Falkland and Caleb in two ways: Caleb views Falkland’s past suffering as a valuable treasure to be extorted; and, Falkland pursues Caleb in order to disproportionately repay him for the imagined injuries caused by the servant. This paper concludes by examining how these tensions are resolved differently in the alternate dénouements of the manuscript and published versions of the novel.
at the EDGE
2010-09-16
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Peer-reviewed Article
application/pdf
http://journals.library.mun.ca/index.php/ate/article/view/89
at the EDGE; Vol. 1 (2010): Romantic Bodies; 21-40
1923-4996
eng
http://journals.library.mun.ca/index.php/ate/article/view/89/44
oai:journals.library.mun.ca:article/90
2010-09-17T06:14:12Z
ate:ART
Cry Like You Mean It: Sensibility and Class in William Wordsworth’s “Sonnet on Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress”
Morgan, Janice
William Wordsworth
sensibility
sympathy
class
pain
aesthetic pleasure
pleasure-in-pain
Steven Bruhm
Edmund Burke
performativity
Helen Maria Williams
body language
suffering
This article addresses the class implications of the eighteenth-century discourse of sympathy and suggests that theatricalized performances of sympathy can be seen as expressions of class. On this account, refined society’s protocols regarding the physical and emotional display of sympathy were a means of ensuring social conformity and meeting cultural expectations. Although eighteenth-century medical discoveries enabled society to adopt a more democratic view of humanity, it also provided the more fortunate with a further means of maintaining their distance from the downtrodden. William Wordsworth’s 1787 “Sonnet on Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress” effectively reads the text of the human body in distress, and considers the mechanisms by which one individual reacts to the pain of another. Through the imagined observation of a body engaged in sympathetic response, Wordsworth invokes several facets of the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility, including its luxurious excesses and the arguably class-conscious aesthetics of pain. This article concludes by suggesting that the artistic engagement with suffering is not necessarily an act for the betterment of society, but a performance that highlights the class distinctions between many Romantic-period artists and the general population.
at the EDGE
2010-09-16
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Peer-reviewed Article
application/pdf
http://journals.library.mun.ca/index.php/ate/article/view/90
at the EDGE; Vol. 1 (2010): Romantic Bodies; 41-61
1923-4996
eng
http://journals.library.mun.ca/index.php/ate/article/view/90/45
oai:journals.library.mun.ca:article/91
2010-09-17T06:14:12Z
ate:ART
“You Have Bewitched Me Body and Soul”: Masculinity and the Female Gaze in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice
Malone, Meaghan
Jane Austen
sexuality
body
the gaze
gender
performativity
visuality
masculinity
Pride and Prejudice
Novel of Sensibility
Man of Feeling
feminist theory
psychoanalytic theory
Mary Wollstonecraft
Edmund Burke
Though academic discussions of sexuality in Jane Austen’s novels have become increasingly popular in recent years, examinations of masculinity are markedly absent from Austen scholarship. Rarely considered as objects of female desire or as sexual subjects in and of themselves, Austen’s male characters are generally examined solely as facilitators of her heroines’ growth and development. Acknowledging her contemporaries’—such as Edmund Burke’s and Mary Wollstonecraft’s—discussions of masculinity, however, Austen fashioned her men as both subjects and objects of desire. Because her male characters are filtered through multiple female perspectives, masculinity is essentially created by women, with the female gaze acting as a catalyst in the development of masculinity in Austen’s novels. In discussing this point, this article focuses on Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy, the infamous hero of Pride and Prejudice. The ideal of masculinity constructed in Pride and Prejudice via the female gaze facilitates equality between Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, and requires his response and adaptation to her expectations of what a man ought to be.
at the EDGE
2010-09-16
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Peer-reviewed Article
application/pdf
http://journals.library.mun.ca/index.php/ate/article/view/91
at the EDGE; Vol. 1 (2010): Romantic Bodies; 62-91
1923-4996
eng
http://journals.library.mun.ca/index.php/ate/article/view/91/46
oai:journals.library.mun.ca:article/92
2010-09-17T06:14:12Z
ate:ART
All Text and No Image Makes Blake a Dull Artist: Inseparable Interplay Between Poetry and Picture in Blake's Multimedia Art
Heath, Peter
William Blake
Songs of Innocence and Experience
image and text
multimedia
canon
anthologies
“The Sick Rose”
“Earth's Answer”
“The Chimney Sweeper”
formalism
Romanticism
Though certain Blake scholars may assert that it is superfluous to argue for the need to read or experience his illuminated works as both image and text, major canonical anthologies print the Songs of Innocence and Experience as written text without visuals. Incorporating and refuting ideas from W.J.T. Mitchell, Christopher Heppner, and Joseph Viscomi, this article argues that word-only representations of Blake's multimedia art are fundamentally flawed, and then proposes and demonstrates a practice for reading Blake's works as a multiplication between image and text. Taking “The Sick Rose,” “Earth's Answer,” and “The Chimney Sweeper” as examples, this argument develops potential readings of the interactions between Blake's media, and offers simple yet logical interpretations by viewing Blake's plates as comprehensive wholes rather than two distinct, separable works that happen to bear the same title.
at the EDGE
2010-09-16
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Peer-reviewed Article
application/pdf
http://journals.library.mun.ca/index.php/ate/article/view/92
at the EDGE; Vol. 1 (2010): Romantic Bodies; 92-114
1923-4996
eng
http://journals.library.mun.ca/index.php/ate/article/view/92/47
oai:journals.library.mun.ca:article/93
2010-09-17T06:14:12Z
ate:ART
Sensuous Embodiment in The Eve of St. Agnes
Housser, Kathie
John Keats
The Eve of St. Agnes
Madeline
sexuality
the senses
sensuality
the body
contrasts
religious imagery
Christian iconography
This article explores the embodied language Keats uses in The Eve of St. Agnes to capture the senses and emotions of his characters within a framework of contrasts such as life and death, heat and cold, and youth and age. Through a close examination of these and related pairings, which are so effectively established in the opening forty-one lines, this essay highlights the sensuality of Keats’s text, and focuses particularly on the often overlooked or ignored incipient sexuality of the young heroine, Madeline. By doing so, it demonstrates that the crucial scene between Madeline and Porphyro ought to be viewed as love-making between equals, rather than as a seduction.
at the EDGE
2010-09-16
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Peer-reviewed Article
application/pdf
http://journals.library.mun.ca/index.php/ate/article/view/93
at the EDGE; Vol. 1 (2010): Romantic Bodies; 115-36
1923-4996
eng
http://journals.library.mun.ca/index.php/ate/article/view/93/48
oai:journals.library.mun.ca:article/94
2010-09-17T06:14:12Z
ate:ART
Body Work: The Representation of Labouring Bodies in John Keats’s Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil
Hyslop, Maggie
John Keats
Isabella
or
the Pot of Basil
labour
class
bodies
luxury
murder
ghosts
decapitation
anti-capitalist
Boccaccio
Decameron
This article examines the portrayal of labouring bodies and the work they perform in Keats’s Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil. Specific attention is paid to the ways in which the human body is physically affected by the work that it carries out, and to how the labouring body is valued or devalued based upon the relative physicality of its labour. The author also considers the extent to which the poem's divergence from its source material in Boccaccio's Decameron can be read as evidence of Keats's anti-capitalist critique of class structures.
at the EDGE
2010-09-16
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Peer-reviewed Article
application/pdf
http://journals.library.mun.ca/index.php/ate/article/view/94
at the EDGE; Vol. 1 (2010): Romantic Bodies; 137-57
1923-4996
eng
http://journals.library.mun.ca/index.php/ate/article/view/94/49
oai:journals.library.mun.ca:article/95
2010-09-17T06:14:12Z
ate:ART
The Arctic and “Other Spaces” in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Bachinger, Jacob
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley
Arctic
ice
Northern narratives
Michel Foucault
“Of Other Spaces”
heterotopias
polar exploration
ships in literature
This article reads the frame narrative of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein through the lens of Michel Foucault’s theory of heterotopias. It begins by contextualizing Shelley’s Arctic settings, and demonstrates that the Arctic was an issue in the news during the period when Shelley was working on the novel. It then surveys the critical literature on Shelley’s narrative, in which her Arctic sequence is generally read as a condemnation of Britain’s imperialist policy toward northern exploration. Turning from those strictly historically inflected concerns, this essay analyzes Shelley’s representation of Arctic and northern spaces, and especially Walton’s icebound ship, as heterotopias. In doing so, it examines how Shelley represents the Arctic as an other(ed) space where Captain Walton hopes to transform himself from a failed poet to a renowned explorer. It also examines the relationship in Shelley’s novel between these other(ed) spaces and narrative itself.
at the EDGE
2010-09-16
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Peer-reviewed Article
application/pdf
http://journals.library.mun.ca/index.php/ate/article/view/95
at the EDGE; Vol. 1 (2010): Romantic Bodies; 158-74
1923-4996
eng
http://journals.library.mun.ca/index.php/ate/article/view/95/50
oai:journals.library.mun.ca:article/96
2010-09-17T06:14:12Z
ate:ART
An Excess of the Deficient: Attempts to Normalize the Body of Frankenstein’s “hideous progeny”
Dickinson, Alice
Mary Shelley
Frankenstein
ugly body
normal body
abnormal
abhuman
othering
Frankenstein's monster
ugliness
Romantic grotesque
This article takes into account previous scholarship regarding the body of Frankenstein's creation and explores possible ways of approaching the ugly body. Using Denise Gigante's categories of excess and deficiency and the distinctions between abnormality and anomaly in Georges Canguilhem's On the Normal and the Pathological as grounding points, this essay locates the ugly body in pre-existing categories and explores how normalized bodies attempt to “other” the ugly body through destruction, containment, or exhibition. This othering process occurs both to reinforce the normal body's identity and its right to other—a right that Victor protects in Shelley's novel. While considering the distinctions enacted between “ugly” and “normal” bodies in Shelley's text, this article emphasizes the deliberate narrowing of constructed parallels between human beings and abhuman creations, and suggests that narrowing or blurring the binary categories of human/abhuman creates uneasiness in both Victor and in Shelley’s readers. Shelley's deliberate attempts to make Frankenstein's monster more human and Victor less human unsettle the reader and force him or her to re-examine the subconsciously delineated categories of human and non-human.
at the EDGE
2010-09-16
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Peer-reviewed Article
application/pdf
http://journals.library.mun.ca/index.php/ate/article/view/96
at the EDGE; Vol. 1 (2010): Romantic Bodies; 175-96
1923-4996
eng
http://journals.library.mun.ca/index.php/ate/article/view/96/51
oai:journals.library.mun.ca:article/175
2012-10-11T21:45:37Z
ate:INTRO
These Living Hands: An Introduction to At the Edge
Lokash, Jennifer
Keats
Romanticism
Bodies
Poetry
Open Access
Readers
An introduction to "Romantic Bodies," the first issue of At the EDGE.
at the EDGE
2010-09-16
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
application/pdf
http://journals.library.mun.ca/index.php/ate/article/view/175
at the EDGE; Vol. 1 (2010): Romantic Bodies; 1-20
1923-4996
eng
http://journals.library.mun.ca/index.php/ate/article/view/175/118
http://journals.library.mun.ca/index.php/ate/article/view/175/119
oai:journals.library.mun.ca:article/177
2012-10-11T00:23:15Z
ate:INTRO
Botanizing in the Mushroom Cities
Loman, Andrew
"Botanizing in the Mushroom Cities" offers a detailed introduction to At the Edge 2: City Types.
at the EDGE
2012-10-02
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
application/pdf
http://journals.library.mun.ca/index.php/ate/article/view/177
at the EDGE; Vol. 2 (2012); 1-79
1923-4996
eng
http://journals.library.mun.ca/index.php/ate/article/view/177/251
oai:journals.library.mun.ca:article/373
2012-10-11T00:23:15Z
ate:ART
Whoring the Flâneur: Re-visioning the American Woman of the Town
Malone, Meaghan
flâneur
prostitution
sexuality
gender
disease
commodification
19th-century American city
“My Kinsman
Major Molineux”
Arthur Mervyn
City Crimes
Hawthorne
Brockden Brown
George Thompson
Lydia Maria Child
Baudelaire
Poe
Analyzing a range of nineteenth-century texts, this article argues that the spatially fixed and commodified literary prostitute is a curious—and ultimately inaccurate—analogue to the flâneur. Immortalized by Charles Baudelaire, the flâneur is European, male, and financially secure. A part of and apart from the crowd, he is anonymous and autonomous, independent even within his crowded metropolis. While twentieth-century discussions of female flânerie frequently posit the prostitute as an example of a female flâneur, this article complicates the assumption that female flânerie could exist in nineteenth-century America. Restrictions on the literary prostitute’s mobility undermine her potential for flânerie, and in “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” Arthur Mervyn, and City Crimes, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Brockden Brown, and George Thompson present prostitutes fettered by their gender and profession. Associated with lax morals, physical contamination, and superfluous consumption, these women remain sequestered in the home, unable to traverse their cities independently or freely.
at the EDGE
2012-10-02
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Peer-reviewed Article
application/pdf
http://journals.library.mun.ca/index.php/ate/article/view/373
at the EDGE; Vol. 2 (2012); 80-103
1923-4996
eng
http://journals.library.mun.ca/index.php/ate/article/view/373/243
oai:journals.library.mun.ca:article/374
2012-10-11T00:23:15Z
ate:ART
"This Departure From the Nature of the Words": Matsell's Attempt to Un-Babelize New York
Lidstone, Matt
George Washington Matsell
Vocabulum
Babel
Rogue’s Lexicon
cant
slang
Flash
nineteenth-century New York
Jacques Derrida
“Des tours de Babel”
This essay examines and unravels the ties between criminal behaviour and the cant dialect in nineteenth-century New York, as sketched by George W. Matsell’s Vocabulum. By deploying a theoretical framework rooted in Jacques Derrida's exploration of the Babel myth, I expose how Matsell’s supposed documentation of a total language is meritless. Examining literature published contemporaneously with the Vocabulum, I highlight the recurring linkage of working-class dialects and crime, noting how Matsell’s specious lexicon played upon bourgeois prejudices that linked poverty and delinquency. By strategically distorting recognizable phrases and slang, Matsell’s attempt to expose the criminal underbelly of New York documents actual language, but language that has been narrowed in scope and heavily manipulated in an attempt to represent criminals as a particular class of people with a particular common language.
at the EDGE
2012-10-02
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Peer-reviewed Article
application/pdf
http://journals.library.mun.ca/index.php/ate/article/view/374
at the EDGE; Vol. 2 (2012); 104-22
1923-4996
eng
http://journals.library.mun.ca/index.php/ate/article/view/374/244
oai:journals.library.mun.ca:article/375
2012-10-11T00:23:15Z
ate:ART
All Children Must Be in Class: Popular Representations of Class and Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America
Moffett, Paul
Richard Outcault
Yellow Kid
Hogan’s Alley
childhood
George Thompson
City Crimes
city
class
city-mysteries
Focusing on George Thompson’s City Crimes and on Richard Outcault’s Yellow Kid newspaper comics, this article argues that nineteenth-century urban childhood is a constructed, classed identity. Though it has attracted less critical attention than gender, race, and class, age is also a social construct. Shared cultural assumptions mediate the way society imagines childhood and the way children are expected to behave. These assumptions play out in fiction, specifically in the ways children are depicted in fiction. Thompson and Outcault’s different depictions of childhood reflect the differing way the two writers associate childhood with class. Thompson depicts children as innocent, and as threatened by the corrupting influence of the city, because Thompson’s children are symbols of bourgeois purity. Outcault, by contrast, depicts children as a wild and corrupting influence upon the city, because Outcault’s children are symbols of poverty and its threat to bourgeois safety.
at the EDGE
2012-10-02
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Peer-reviewed Article
application/pdf
http://journals.library.mun.ca/index.php/ate/article/view/375
at the EDGE; Vol. 2 (2012); 123-55
1923-4996
eng
http://journals.library.mun.ca/index.php/ate/article/view/375/245
oai:journals.library.mun.ca:article/376
2012-10-11T19:24:01Z
ate:ART
(Illicit) Sex and the City: Transgressive Female Sexuality and the "Porno Gothic" Genre in George Thompson's City Crimes
White, Zaren Healey
American
feminism
female sexuality
free-love
George Thompson
City Crimes
porno-gothic
city mysteries
sensation fiction
flash press
New York City
Boston
Focused on George Thompson’s “porno-gothic” City Crimes (1849), this article rebuts the claim, put forth by Reynolds and Gladman in their introduction to a volume of his work, that Thompson “may have created for woman readers a tantalizing space of sexual imagination.” The editors suggest that Thompson’s depiction of sexually voracious women can be read as provocatively feminist, specifically in its evocation of the free-love movement. This article seeks to undermine that claim by examining how the novel constructs female sexuality as transgressive and deviant, thereby eroding any feminist potential. By showcasing sexually insatiable female characters who seek lovers and kill their husbands in order to preserve their sexual freedom, and who ultimately suffer violent and ignominious deaths, City Crimes fuses female sexual appetite and fulfillment with criminality. As a result, Thompson’s portrayal of women is not only unsympathetic but misogynist, and reflects the nineteenth-century gendered double standard.
at the EDGE
2012-10-02
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Peer-reviewed Article
application/pdf
http://journals.library.mun.ca/index.php/ate/article/view/376
at the EDGE; Vol. 2 (2012); 156-80
1923-4996
eng
http://journals.library.mun.ca/index.php/ate/article/view/376/246
oai:journals.library.mun.ca:article/379
2012-10-11T00:23:15Z
ate:ART
Image Credits
Loman, Andrew
This file provides the complete credit information for all images used in At the Edge 2: City Types.
at the EDGE
2012-10-02
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Peer-reviewed Article
application/pdf
http://journals.library.mun.ca/index.php/ate/article/view/379
at the EDGE; Vol. 2 (2012); 192-95
1923-4996
eng
http://journals.library.mun.ca/index.php/ate/article/view/379/247
oai:journals.library.mun.ca:article/382
2012-10-11T00:23:15Z
ate:ART
at the Edge 2: The Cover
Loman, Andrew
This file contains information about the images used for the cover of this issue.
at the EDGE
2012-10-02
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Peer-reviewed Article
application/pdf
http://journals.library.mun.ca/index.php/ate/article/view/382
at the EDGE; Vol. 2 (2012); 181-91
1923-4996
eng
http://journals.library.mun.ca/index.php/ate/article/view/382/249