Books by Victoria Margree
British Women's Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860-1930: Our Own Ghostliness, 2019
This book explores women’s short supernatural fiction between the emergence of first wave feminis... more This book explores women’s short supernatural fiction between the emergence of first wave feminism and the post-suffrage period, arguing that while literary ghosts enabled an interrogation of women’s changing circumstances, ghosts could have both subversive and conservative implications. Haunted house narratives by Charlotte Riddell and Margaret Oliphant become troubled by uncanny reminders of the origins of middle-class wealth in domestic and foreign exploitation. Corpse-like revenants are deployed in Female Gothic tales by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Edith Nesbit to interrogate masculine aestheticisation of female death. In the culturally-hybrid supernaturalism of Alice Perrin, the ‘Marriage Question’ migrates to colonial India, and psychoanalytically-informed stories by May Sinclair, Eleanor Scott and Violet Hunt explore just how far gender relations have really progressed in the post-First World War period. Study of the woman’s short story productively problematises literary histories about the “golden age” of the ghost story, and about the transition from Victorianism to modernism.
Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex proved immediately controversial on its publication in... more Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex proved immediately controversial on its publication in 1970. The book’s thesis is that the origins of women’s oppression lie in biology: in the fact that it is women and not men who conceive and give birth to children. Firestone’s solution is revolutionary: since it is biology that is the problem, then biology must be changed, through technological intervention that would have as its end the complete removal of the reproductive process from women’s bodies. With its proposal for the development of artificial wombs, its call for the abolition of the nuclear family, and its vision of a cybernetic future, Firestone’s manifesto may seem hopelessly out-dated – a far-fetched, utopian hangover of Swinging Sixties radicalism. This book, on the contrary, will argue for its importance to the resurgent feminism of today, as a text that interrogates issues around gender, biology, sexuality, work and technology, and the ways in which our imaginations in the 21st century continue to be in thrall to ideologies of maternity and the nuclear family.
This edited collection comprises an introduction and ten essays on fin de siecle popular fiction ... more This edited collection comprises an introduction and ten essays on fin de siecle popular fiction writer, Richard Marsh. Although Marsh is best known for his 1897 gothic bestseller, The Beetle, he in fact wrote widely across a range of genres, including crime and detective fiction, humour, sensation and romance. The volume considers Marsh as both a representative figure of the literary marketplace in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and as a writer whose somewhat marginal position and troubled past sometimes led him to take unusual perspectives on fin de siecle themes. The essays explore Marsh's work using a range of approaches, including Thing Theory, crime fiction scholarship, New Economic Criticism, postcolonialism, new humour and psychoanalysis.
Papers by Victoria Margree
Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 2002
English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, 2016
Abstract:The final decades of the nineteenth century witnessed new opportunities for authors thro... more Abstract:The final decades of the nineteenth century witnessed new opportunities for authors through expansion in the market for fiction. The literary establishment thought this imperilled literature by making it a trade. This article considers the question of professional authorship at the fin de siècle not from the perspectives of “established” writers but those of Richard Marsh and Guy Boothby. They captured the public imagination with stories of crime, adventure and the supernatural and were astonishingly prolific, which attracted fierce censure from the elite. Marsh and Boothy portray characters who aspire to succeed in this new life of letters. This article considers these fictions as self-conscious reflections on the pleasures and pains of professional authorship through which Marsh and Boothby respond to their critics. The discussion offers a richer view of the complexities of the debate by looking beyond the more familiar accounts of the self-consciously “highbrow” authors.
Victorian Review, 2019
M uch Victorian short fiction has for a long time lain unrecovered by modern scholarship. This is... more M uch Victorian short fiction has for a long time lain unrecovered by modern scholarship. This is in part due to the ephemeral nature of the periodical publishing in which it often appeared, but it is also a result of the critical bias of twentieth-century canon builders who deemed the short story an inferior form. For too long, the short story was considered either a form in which novelists experimented with ideas that they developed properly in longer narratives or a "popular" genre turned to by writers of "serious" fiction or poetry only when in need of fast pecuniary reward. The essays featured in this forum, however, argue for the short story as a distinctive aesthetic form, and one that has the capacity to reveal unexpected aspects of Victorian popular and literary culture. In some cases, the essays demonstrate how renewed attention to the short story brings to light work by forgotten writers whose reinstatement into the corpus of "Victorian literature" promises to enrich our understanding of the diversity of voices that it comprises. In other cases, they show how new and perhaps surprising perspectives can be achieved on well-known writers when we turn to their neglected short story output. The Victorian Review forum seems a particularly apposite space for thinking about shortness. I wonder how many of the contributors to this issue's forum, tasked with producing an academic essay in fifteen hundred words, felt something of the challenge that may have been experienced by Victorian short story authors, many of whom were accustomed to the expansiveness of the Victorian three-volume novel. The gambit of the short story, howeverand, I take it, of the forum-is that brevity need not be a constraint but might actually be liberating, enabling, through the discipline of concision, different kinds of writing and effect to be created. Indeed, there is a longalbeit intermittent and somewhat marginalized-tradition of conceptualizing short fiction in this way. In the nineteenth century, Edgar Allan Poe espoused this view in his 1842 review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's fiction, in which he argued for the "prose tale" as the form second only to the "rhymed poem" in its ability to display "high genius." 1 For Poe, the brevity of both poem and tale, which make them capable of being "read at one sitting," puts "the soul of the reader. .. at the writer's control," enabling the delivery with undiluted force of the impression produced by the work in its "totality." In the twentieth century, a number of writers reprised Poe's interest in the power of concision, theorizing that the short story's differences from the novel made it a form particularly well suited to the expression of heterodox values and viewpoints. Short fiction writer Frank O'Connor saw this difference as being "not so much formal. .. as ideological" (qtd. in Hanson 3), while Clare Hanson declared the short story a "form of the margins" (2) in which
Richard Marsh, popular fiction and literary culture, 1890-1915, 2018
This collection of essays seeks to question the security of our assumptions about the fin de sièc... more This collection of essays seeks to question the security of our assumptions about the fin de siècle by exploring the fiction of Richard Marsh, an important but neglected professional author. Richard Bernard Heldmann (1857–1915) began his literary career as a writer of boys’ fiction, but, following a prison sentence for fraud, reinvented himself as ‘Richard Marsh’ in 1888. Marsh was a prolific and popular author of middlebrow genre fiction including Gothic, crime, humour, romance and adventure, whose bestselling Gothic novel The Beetle: A Mystery (1897) outsold Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Building on a burgeoning interest in Marsh’s writing, this collection of essays examines a broad array of Marsh’s genre fictions through the lens of cutting-edge critical theory, including print culture, New Historicism, disability studies, genre theory, New Economic Criticism, gender theory, postcolonial studies, thing theory, psychoanalysis, object relations theory and art history, producing innovative...
Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 2002
Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 2002
Journal of Historical Sociology, 2011
Taking the example of the intermittent presence and absence of narratives of slavery, colonialism... more Taking the example of the intermittent presence and absence of narratives of slavery, colonialism, and race within standard accounts of the US, we examine how Tocqueville's sociological account of the emergence of democracy in America is transformed when read together with the novel, Marie, written by his friend and travel companion, Beaumont, which addresses issues of American slavery and racism. Our interdisciplinary project proceeds by considering the possible contributions to historical sociology of analysis of literary narratives, and by exploring the translation of social realities into fiction. These interdisciplinary translations, we argue, highlight the specific issue of silences within mainstream narratives about American democracy and enable us to reassess the significance of silences within historiographies of modernity. In particular, the neglect of Beaumont's contribution has given rise to an appropriation of Tocqueville to a largely celebratory account of Amer...
Economic and Political Weekly, 2010
Victorian Popular Fictions Journal, 2020
This essay argues for greater inclusion of Victorian short fiction in university teaching. In the... more This essay argues for greater inclusion of Victorian short fiction in university teaching. In the first part of the essay I argue that Victorian short fiction has been subject to a double marginalisation in scholarship. This has resulted, firstly, from the minor status of short fiction in general, and secondly, from the focus of attempts to redeem the short story upon proto-modernist stories. This leaves underexplored the greater part of short fiction from the nineteenth century – particularly highly plotted popular fictions, and fictions published before the 1890s. Part two contends that this scholarly neglect is reflected in an insufficiency of pedagogic scholarship on Victorian short fiction. It argues for the teaching potential of this material in terms of moving beyond the canon, enabling students to become producers of knowledge, and decolonising the curriculum. Part three provides a case study of a digital platform – the Victorian Short Fiction Project – and an 1862 tale coll...
Please find abstract attached. Full journal article is available in English Literature in Transit... more Please find abstract attached. Full journal article is available in English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, 59/3 (2016).
Gothic Studies, Nov 2014
This article explores Riddell's representational strategies around gender: in particular her male... more This article explores Riddell's representational strategies around gender: in particular her male narrators and her female characters made monstrous by money. It argues that Riddell, conscious of social prohibitions on financial knowledge in women, employs male protagonists to subversive effect, installing in her stories a 'feminine' wisdom about the judicious use of wealth. Her narratives identify the Gothic potential of money to dehumanise, foregrounding the culpability of economic arrangements in many of the horrors of her society. While they contain pronounced elements of social critique, they ultimately however defend late-Victorian capitalism by proff ering exemplars of the ethical financial practice by which money's action is to be kept benign.
Women's Writing, Jun 2014
For a long time critically neglected or disparaged, Edith Nesbit's Gothic fiction is beginning to... more For a long time critically neglected or disparaged, Edith Nesbit's Gothic fiction is beginning to receive the scholarly attention it deserves. This essay extends analysis beyond the much anthologized “Man-Size in Marble” (1893) to argue that a feminist orientation is in evidence more widely in her works of supernatural short fiction. A preoccupation with gender is discernible in several stories that offer distinct gender critiques, and in further tales through imagery of the dead female body and the female revenant, as well as through the recurrent character motifs of the female Cassandra and the male Frankenstein. The essay also argues that the anti-vivisectionism of several stories is an aspect of this feminist orientation. The article recognizes Nesbit as being a problematic figure for scholarly attempts to reclaim feminist authors, since she herself evinced ambivalence about the women's movement and the New Woman, but argues that the unleashing of Nesbit's most counter-hegemonic impulses in her Gothic writings points to the political significance of this generic form, making Nesbit a figure of substantial interest for scholars working on women's supernatural fiction.
Critical Survey, 2007
In common with its contemporary Dracula, Marsh’s gothic novel The Beetle identifies a series of t... more In common with its contemporary Dracula, Marsh’s gothic novel The Beetle identifies a series of threats to the stability of late Victorian British identity. This paper focuses on the novel’s engagement with the problems of class and gender instability. It reads the narrative device in which the New Woman character is disguised as the out-of-work clerk, as equating two figures who were problematic for late Victorian culture: the proto-feminist and the unemployed male. This sub-textual identification of the two expresses a logic according to which the feminist is equivalent to the man emasculated by unemployment: both are inadequate versions of the masculinity to which they aspire. This equation, and its ideological meaning, is reinforced by the text’s problematising of these characters’ narrations in contrast to the more authoritative narratives of the male establishment figures. However, while the novel labours to establish a model of virile masculinity as its hope for the future sovereignty and security of Britain, what is perhaps most interesting is the text’s profound ambivalence about the central male character who is charged with embodying this. Like Dracula, The Beetle proposes a solution to fin de siécle anxiety; but unlike that more famous novel, it persistently undermines this solution, and emerges as a text whose irreducible mode is that of uncertainty and equivocation.
Journal of Historical Sociology, Jan 1, 2011
Taking the example of the intermittent presence and absence of narratives of slavery, colonialism... more Taking the example of the intermittent presence and absence of narratives of slavery, colonialism, and race within standard accounts of the US, we examine how Tocqueville's sociological account of the emergence of democracy in America is transformed when read together with the novel, Marie, written by his friend and travel companion, Beaumont, which addresses issues of American slavery and racism. Our interdisciplinary project proceeds by considering the possible contributions to historical sociology of analysis of literary narratives, and by exploring the translation of social realities into fiction. These interdisciplinary translations, we argue, highlight the specific issue of silences within mainstream narratives about American democracy and enable us to reassess the significance of silences within historiographies of modernity. In particular, the neglect of Beaumont's contribution has given rise to an appropriation of Tocqueville to a largely celebratory account of American democracy and has elided his concern with the lasting consequences of slavery and racism.
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Books by Victoria Margree
Papers by Victoria Margree