Books by Jill Ehnenn
Guest editor, special issue by Jill Ehnenn
Victorian Poetry, 2022
This special issue focuses on the affordances of poetry as a site of visual imagination. How migh... more This special issue focuses on the affordances of poetry as a site of visual imagination. How might looking at the intersections of the Victorian visual imagination and the field of nineteenth-century poetry provide new insights into continued conversations surrounding both poetics and visual culture?
Nineteenth Century Contexts, 2016
Papers by Jill Ehnenn
The Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature
Victorian Studies, 2021
While ekphrasis, or the verbal representation of a visual representation, has long been discussed... more While ekphrasis, or the verbal representation of a visual representation, has long been discussed in relation to theories of sight, in this essay I argue that scholars of the nineteenth century should also attend to matters of the haptic (defined here as including both emotion and touch) as a crucial aspect of understanding ekphrasis. Here I make three claims:(1) haptic ekphrasis is particularly relevant to the context of the nineteenth century and thus to Victorian examples of the form; (2) haptic ekphrasis
is exceptionally useful for minoritarian (specifically women and queer) writers of the period; and (3) the manner in which haptic elements appear in nineteenth-century ekphrastic poetry resonate with Victorian discursive shifts from moral sympathy, early and mid-century, to the physiological aesthetics of aesthetic empathy (Einfühlung or feeling- into) by century’s end.
Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 2021
Quite a while ago, I took a summer research trip to Queen's University, Belfast to read the lette... more Quite a while ago, I took a summer research trip to Queen's University, Belfast to read the letters and diaries of "Somerville and Ross," two women who, under the joint pseudonym, wrote some really great novels about Anglo-Irish life at the turn of the century. If you like Middlemarch, imagine it with a badass anti-heroine and you'll love The Real Charlotte. While I was in Northern Ireland, I did all the touristy things: I walked on Giant's Causeway, visited a whiskey distillery, and roamed Belfast exploring shops and gawking at street art. Writing this now in the year of COVID, the freedom to get on a plane and indulge in such roaming seems unthinkableso unthinkable that my hitherto guilty pleasure of watching airport and train station flashmobs on YouTube now makes me recoil in horror: "All those people! So close together!" Yet, when I put aside thoughts of crowded airports and even more crowded airplanes, I recall many such summers with tremendous pleasure: afternoons exploring after mornings in an archive, reading diaries and letters. Traveling across the pond to travel back in time. I miss it terribly. In the mornings of that particular Irish summer, I concluded that many nineteenthcentury diaries are really boring. I was finishing a book project on late-Victorian female co-authors and most of my hands-on experience with archival life-writing was with the juicy, solipsistic details of the heart-rending and sometimes backbiting diaries of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who together wrote as "Michael Field." I guess I erroneously expected these other diaries to be similar. I thought I'd wallow in Somerville and Ross's deepest hopes and fears, ineffable thoughts and tender feelings. Boy was I wrong. Instead of long, frank entries characterized by exclamation points, dashes, and tearstains, Somerville and Ross's diary entries were brief, repetitive, and orderly. Each entry described the weather, the health of those in the household and neighborhood, and what was served for dinner. Some entries mentioned a walk, a brief visit, a snippet of news. As I've learned more about nineteenth-century women's diaries, I've discovered that Bradley and Cooper's diary is the outlier; Somerville and Ross's the norm. Nineteenth-century women did not tend to pour out their inmost thoughts even on the privacy of a diary page. Mostly they recorded, with surprising neutrality, the simple details of their lives. This puzzled me. Why record a banal and repetitive set of facts day after day, year after year? Such passionless depiction of clockwork existence. Weather, health, food, occasional short visits. Why would anyone record this? Why would one care?
Michael Field, Decadent Moderns, 2019
The paper demonstrates how Michael Field sought to become Catholic poets by appropriating the for... more The paper demonstrates how Michael Field sought to become Catholic poets by appropriating the formal, including metric, conventions of devotional poetics while also maintaining many of the queer characteristics of their earlier work; in terms of meter, these queer characteristics manifest themselves in shifting, ambiguous metrics that resonate with today’s thinking about queer temporality. By drawing upon recent insights from disability studies, I also explore how Michael Field’s Catholic verses articulate spiritual and homoerotic love and desire specifically in context of being, seeing, and desiring an embodied (female) subject in pain. Throughout, my approach to Poems of Adoration and Mystic Trees is not be to categorize them as post-conversion texts posited against pre-conversion texts. Instead, I argue here that a more useful and interesting shift can be observed among the poems before and after Edith’s diagnosis of bowel cancer in February, 1911, when devotional poetry becomes a new way to navigate pain, desire, and disability.
Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Poetry, 2019
Lucas Malet, Dissident Pilgrim: Critical Essays , 2019
This article examines intersections of disability and queerness in the context of Victorian narra... more This article examines intersections of disability and queerness in the context of Victorian narratives about progress, legacies, and heritability. While late nineteenth-century Britain suffered unease about failed inheritances and the precarious futures of individuals, families, and nation, the popular genre of the Bildungsroman provided progress narratives that reinforced Victorian ideals of development and improvement. The project examines two examples whose protagonists are influenced by inherited curses: Lucas Malet’s The History of Sir Richard Calmady and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. Following Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, the essay explores how these novels orient their protagonists in the world and asks: how do queerness and disability operate in these texts, making certain kinds of lives and movement possible while foreclosing others? Ultimately, the article demonstrates how, in these unique Bildungsromane, the inherited curse does not reinforce but works against a genre otherwise characterized by impulses to enforce normalcy through compulsory ablebodiedness and compulsory reproductive heterosexuality. Thus, the curses in Calmady and Jude offer unlikely opportunities to challenge conventional narratives about progress, queerness, and disability.
Victorian Literature and Culture, 2019
This essay reflects upon the future of Victorian feminist scholarship in an era of increasing pre... more This essay reflects upon the future of Victorian feminist scholarship in an era of increasing precarity that also has seen radical scholarly re-interpretations of sexuality, gender, and sex. Using examples from the life and work of collaborative authors "Michael Field" as a case study, this essay suggests that re-imagining subjects from the past may help us address urgent, politically-inflected disciplinary and pedagogical debates in the present.
BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History, 2017
Studies of women’s ekphrasis prior to modernism have, so far, tended to focus on individual women... more Studies of women’s ekphrasis prior to modernism have, so far, tended to focus on individual women writers rather than attempt to identify trends that female authors from a particular time period might share. This essay intervenes in this gap in the scholarship by analyzing ekphrastic prose and poetry by Vernon Lee, Graham R. Tomson, and the co-authors who wrote as Michael Field. As female Aesthetes well-versed in art history and art criticism, as well as contemporary market practices, these nineteenth-century women writers anticipate today’s feminist theorists in the ways in which they were quite conscious of woman’s role as art object and the various functions of that role.
Here I examine Vernon Lee’s somewhat well-known novella Amour Dure (1887) as a foundational case study and then turn to two considerably lesser studied poems: Graham R. Tomson’s “A Silhouette” (1889) and Michael Field’s “Saint Katharine of Alexandria” (1892), for which I also identify the long-lost ekphrastic referent. These three texts all demonstrate how a specific form of aesthetic intertextuality—ekphrastic representational friction—operates as a powerful vehicle for early feminist criticism. In the examples I discuss, gendered critiques drive representational friction between the word, the visual medium, and its original referent—slippages that these art-savvy authors would have easily recognized and had opinions about in the work of others, and intentionally created and/or appropriated in their own work. Importantly, I also argue that a helpful way to think about ekphrastic writing by women writers associated with nineteenth-century British Aestheticism is to consider representational friction with particular regard to how their texts treat objects—seemingly unimportant objects—associated with their subjects.
Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 2016
The 31 st annual Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS) meeting, hosted by Appalachi... more The 31 st annual Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS) meeting, hosted by Appalachian State University, convened from March 10-13, 2016 in Asheville, North Carolina. Nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Asheville possesses a layered history-as a railroad town, as a Gilded Age destination, and as an enduring haven for artists and writers. With its breathtaking natural setting, its many distinct and often radical subcultures, its ethos of sustainability, and its multifaceted past and present, quirky Asheville was certainly a fitting location for this year's interdisciplinary inquiries organized around the theme of Natural and Unnatural Histories. The conference theme invited attendees to investigate and reflect upon the long nineteenth century's complex preoccupations with histories and natures. As we know, the nineteenth century was a time of contradictions; and fittingly, this year's INCS conference program included conventional engagements with the concepts of nature, the natural, and history, as well as contestations of these terms and suggestions of new and perhaps contradictory ways of thinking about and employing them for both abstract and practical means. Conference sessions, plenaries, and keynotes questioned: How do natures, environments, or ecologies interact with histories at different scales-the local, the national, the transnational, or the planetary? What role does the nineteenth century play in the recent idea of an Anthropocene era? How might nineteenth-century natural histories help us to rethink historicism in the present? What are the risks and promises of presentist approaches to the nineteenth century? Thursday's opening plenary and reception was held on the Biltmore Estate. There, in a venue that used to be a humble nineteenth-century calving barn, now ironically situated alongside the architectural magnificence of the Biltmore mansion, we began to contemplate our theme of Natural and Unnatural Histories. After a welcome from Anthony Calamai, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Appalachian State University, and a welcome and brief history of the Estate by Biltmore CEO, Bill Cecil, Jr., the opening plenary was delivered by Phil Jamison. His talk, "Appalachian Music and Dance: A Confluence of Diverse Traditions," was punctuated by live banjo, fiddle, and dance performances; and during the post-lecture reception, Phil enticed a fair number of attendees to put down their wine glasses and give some traditional regional dances a try. Friday morning's plenary roundtable, "Towards a Strategic Presentism: a V21 Collective Roundtable on the 21st-Century Urgencies of 19th-Century Study," brought together representatives of the
Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 2017
This article examines intersections of disability and queerness in the context of Victorian narra... more This article examines intersections of disability and queerness in the context of Victorian narratives about progress, legacies, and heritability. While late nineteenth-century Britain suffered unease about failed inheritances and the precarious futures of individuals, families, and nation, the popular genre of the Bildungsroman provided progress narratives that reinforced Victorian ideals of development and improvement. The project examines two examples whose protagonists are influenced by inherited curses: Lucas Malet’s The History of Sir Richard Calmady and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. Following Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, the essay explores how these novels orient their protagonists in the world and asks: how do queerness and disability operate in these texts, making certain kinds of lives and movement possible while foreclosing others? Ultimately, the article demonstrates how, in these unique Bildungsromane, the inherited curse does not reinforce but works against a genre otherwise characterized by impulses to enforce normalcy through compulsory ablebodiedness and compulsory reproductive heterosexuality. Thus, the curses in Calmady and Jude offer unlikely opportunities to challenge conventional narratives about progress, queerness, and disability.
Economies of Desire at the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Libidinal Lives, 2015
in Queering Popular Culture:Literature, Media, Film and Television, 2nd edition. , 2011
South Atlantic Review, 1999
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
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Books by Jill Ehnenn
Guest editor, special issue by Jill Ehnenn
Papers by Jill Ehnenn
is exceptionally useful for minoritarian (specifically women and queer) writers of the period; and (3) the manner in which haptic elements appear in nineteenth-century ekphrastic poetry resonate with Victorian discursive shifts from moral sympathy, early and mid-century, to the physiological aesthetics of aesthetic empathy (Einfühlung or feeling- into) by century’s end.
Here I examine Vernon Lee’s somewhat well-known novella Amour Dure (1887) as a foundational case study and then turn to two considerably lesser studied poems: Graham R. Tomson’s “A Silhouette” (1889) and Michael Field’s “Saint Katharine of Alexandria” (1892), for which I also identify the long-lost ekphrastic referent. These three texts all demonstrate how a specific form of aesthetic intertextuality—ekphrastic representational friction—operates as a powerful vehicle for early feminist criticism. In the examples I discuss, gendered critiques drive representational friction between the word, the visual medium, and its original referent—slippages that these art-savvy authors would have easily recognized and had opinions about in the work of others, and intentionally created and/or appropriated in their own work. Importantly, I also argue that a helpful way to think about ekphrastic writing by women writers associated with nineteenth-century British Aestheticism is to consider representational friction with particular regard to how their texts treat objects—seemingly unimportant objects—associated with their subjects.
is exceptionally useful for minoritarian (specifically women and queer) writers of the period; and (3) the manner in which haptic elements appear in nineteenth-century ekphrastic poetry resonate with Victorian discursive shifts from moral sympathy, early and mid-century, to the physiological aesthetics of aesthetic empathy (Einfühlung or feeling- into) by century’s end.
Here I examine Vernon Lee’s somewhat well-known novella Amour Dure (1887) as a foundational case study and then turn to two considerably lesser studied poems: Graham R. Tomson’s “A Silhouette” (1889) and Michael Field’s “Saint Katharine of Alexandria” (1892), for which I also identify the long-lost ekphrastic referent. These three texts all demonstrate how a specific form of aesthetic intertextuality—ekphrastic representational friction—operates as a powerful vehicle for early feminist criticism. In the examples I discuss, gendered critiques drive representational friction between the word, the visual medium, and its original referent—slippages that these art-savvy authors would have easily recognized and had opinions about in the work of others, and intentionally created and/or appropriated in their own work. Importantly, I also argue that a helpful way to think about ekphrastic writing by women writers associated with nineteenth-century British Aestheticism is to consider representational friction with particular regard to how their texts treat objects—seemingly unimportant objects—associated with their subjects.