Papers by Ben Moore
The Bloomsbury Handbook to Literature and Psychoanalysis, 2023
This chapter focuses on Freud’s seminal 1919 essay 'The Uncanny', and its ramifications for think... more This chapter focuses on Freud’s seminal 1919 essay 'The Uncanny', and its ramifications for thinking through the conjunction between literature and psychoanalysis. After providing a conceptual overview of the major contributions to the uncanny since Freud, the chapter asks how the uncanny can be deployed as a tool for literary reading, with reference to Hamlet (1609), Jekyll and Hyde (1886), and especially Frankenstein (1818/1831). Mary Shelley’s novel is read not only as an archetypal uncanny encounter, but one which places the creation of the uncanny at the very centre of the text, represented by Frankenstein’s first sight of the creature’s eyes as it comes to life. This reading leads to a discussion of Lacan’s reinterpretation of the uncanny as an element of anxiety, associated with the destabilising emergence of the Thing. Ultimately, the chapter argues for a form of reading which places both literature and the uncanny at the core of psychoanalysis, showing this to be one of the implications of Freud’s original essay.
Modernism/modernity, 2020
Journal of Victorian Culture, 2020
ABSTRACT This article analyses Margaret Oliphant's novel Hester (1883), arguing that it dramatize... more ABSTRACT This article analyses Margaret Oliphant's novel Hester (1883), arguing that it dramatizes a complex interplay of surplus labour, surplus capital, the figure of the surplus woman, and surplus jouissance. The central character, Hester, is read as a figure who embodies the surplus jouissance which is both necessary to and disruptive of modern capitalism, and which in the novel stands in opposition to the steady state of the respectable country bank, taken here to align with the Freudian pleasure principle. In support of this reading, the article traces a line from Hester back to the 'surplus women debate' of the 1850s and 60s, including Oliphant's contribution to this debate in her 1858 article 'The Condition of Women'. The novel itself is analysed through its epigraph, taken from a Charles Lamb poem of 1803, and through the multiple meanings of the concept of 'chance' which the text presents. My analysis proceeds by way of Freud, J. S. Mill, Marx and Lacan, finding that Lacan's rereading of surplus labour as surplus jouissance ultimately provides the most productive way to read the text's rearticulation of the surplus women problem.
The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies, 2020
The flâneur is an urban type who first emerges in early nineteenth-century Paris. As classically ... more The flâneur is an urban type who first emerges in early nineteenth-century Paris. As classically understood, he is a wanderer in and voyeur of the modern city, who observes the spectacle of urban life while strolling the streets at his leisure. This encyclopedia entry gives a historical and conceptual overview of this figure, from its origins up to the present.
Gaskell Journal, 2018
Building on previous critical accounts, this article analyses the insufficiently considered role ... more Building on previous critical accounts, this article analyses the insufficiently considered role of architecture in Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South and explores its relationship to the text's social, aesthetic and political concerns. Proceeding from an initial discussion of 'invisible architecture' , understood as what is unseen or unseeable in the modern city, with reference to Mary Barton and the writing of Friedrich Engels and James Kay-Shuttleworth, the article contends that Marlborough Mills is central to the tensions of the novel, acting as a locus around which the dynamics of industrial Manchester are explored. It also considers moments where architecture is directly mentioned in the novel, including the comparison between Oxford and Milton, as well as Mr Hale's lectures on Ecclesiastical Architecture, which take place at a 'neighbouring Lyceum'. The article ends by arguing that the Manchester Lyceum schools, established in the city in 1838, serve as an important lens through which to consider the novel's final rapprochement between Mr Thornton and Mr Higgins.
Focusing on Chapter 36 of Charles Kingsley’s novel Alton Locke (1850), where the hero recounts a ... more Focusing on Chapter 36 of Charles Kingsley’s novel Alton Locke (1850), where the hero recounts a dream during which he undergoes a series of transformations into various animals, beginning at ‘the lowest point of created life’ as a madrepore or coral, and culminating with the early history of humanity, this article explores the relation between Kingsley’s text and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘becoming-animal’. It argues that the evolutionary fantasy Alton Locke recounts plays out a tension between the restoration of fixed, ‘molar’ identity and the ‘molecular’ disruption of identity. The relevance of the dream’s origin in pestilence and fever is also considered, as is the repetition of death within the dream. The article concludes by considering the possibility that Kingsley’s text might help formulate a concept of ‘becoming-evolutionary’, building on Deleuze and Guattari.
The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and the City
Dickens and the Virtual City: Urban Perception and the Production of Social Space, 2017
This chapter analyses the railway and the river as two key conduits of Dickens's imaginary city, ... more This chapter analyses the railway and the river as two key conduits of Dickens's imaginary city, arguing that each simultaneously connects and fractures the modern urban world he depicts. Focusing on Dombey and Son and Our Mutual Friend, the chapter explores how railway and river combine modernity with the primordial past, arguing that these are not separable but overlay and interpenetrate one another, forming a spatio-temporal palimpsest. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, the essay proposes that these conduits are signs of a spatial or architectural unconscious which thrusts to the surface the ruination that the city tries to repress. Through this drawing together of new and old, known and unknown, railway and river come to embody Dickens's vision of modernity.
The Urban Uncanny: A Collection of Interdisciplinary Studies, 2016
Victorian Literature and Culture, 2016
This article discusses Jenny Wren, the “dolls’ dressmaker” of Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend... more This article discusses Jenny Wren, the “dolls’ dressmaker” of Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1865), as a figure of social and philosophical critique. Jenny’s indeterminate identity, as both corrupted and divine, is analysed in light of her job as a maker of dresses for the dolls of the wealthy. Along with her production of dresses, it is argued, Jenny produces parodies of childhood, adulthood, femininity and fashion, revealing apparently fixed identities (adult, child, angel, devil, doll) to be mere forms of appearance rather than transcendent truths. She shows that divinity and devilishness are not essential components of childhood but dependent on the context in which children develop, undermining polarized “Romantic” and “Evangelical” views of childhood. The article draws on Professor Teufelsdröckh’s “philosophy of clothes” in Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833-34), and Walter Benjamin’s writings on fashion, to argue that Jenny offers a “philosophy of dolls,” which is disruptive to language and to the realist novel, splitting signifier and signified apart and unsettling conventional meanings.
MLR, Jan 2015
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5699/modelangrevi.110.issue-1
This essay undertakes a re-readin... more http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5699/modelangrevi.110.issue-1
This essay undertakes a re-reading of Disraeli’s novel Sybil (1845), arguing that the novel engages in the construction of authority as a lost origin which is also projected into the future as a political goal. The essay draws on Derrida’s concept of the ‘supplement’ to trace how the text combines names, buildings and documents in ‘archi-textual’ structures that seek to establish and secure this lost authority. The tension between the need to construct authority and the need to project it as a pre-existing origin can never be settled and operates as a driving force within the text.
Dickens Quarterly, Dec 2012
This essay aims to consider the nature and function of the threshold, understood in a broad sense... more This essay aims to consider the nature and function of the threshold, understood in a broad sense, in Dickens's London, taking Great Expectations as its focus. Of particular interest are the ways in which thresholds can operate as areas of intensity; places where transformation between opposing or contradictory states occurs.
Book Reviews by Ben Moore
English Studies, 2021
initial review of the play, the Guardian's chief theatre critic awarded it three out of a possibl... more initial review of the play, the Guardian's chief theatre critic awarded it three out of a possible five stars. That sums up Tom Stoppard's flamboyant dramatic career.
For Matthew Beaumont, in this fascinating literary and cultural history of nightwalking, Dickens ... more For Matthew Beaumont, in this fascinating literary and cultural history of nightwalking, Dickens represents something like the culmination of a tradition stretching back to at least the middle ages, when night was legally defined as a separate sphere, and those who trespassed against the daily curfew (beginning between 8 and 10pm) were subject to persecution and arrest. It is this social and cultural division between the nocturnal and the diurnal that Beaumont is interested in tracing, and especially in identifying those more or less marginalized figures who walked at night in London, the "great wen" as Cobbett called it, where night-time was at once an ordeal (or refuge) for the poor and a playground for the rich. Dickens's Master Humphrey is one such nightwalker, who wanders "by night and day, at all hours and seasons, in city streets and quiet country parts" (385), making him, like many others in this book, "the victim of popular prejudices about men of slightly odd appearance who walk about the metropolis at night because they do not feel at home in it during the day" (385). His fading from view after the opening chapters of The Old Curiosity Shop is lamented by Beaumont, for whom "Dickens squandered a subtle and insidiously unsettling sense of moral and psychological danger when he expelled Master Humphrey" (390). Perhaps the major success of Nightwalking is its excavation, across a period of five hundred years, of the historical and cultural conditions that allowed this sense of "moral and psychological danger" which Dickens partially suppressed to attach itself to the nightwalker in Britain.
Dickens Quarterly 31.3 (Sep 2014), 262-65.
Modern Language Review, 107.1 (Jan 2012), 280-81.
Books by Ben Moore
Rethinks the relationship between architecture, literature and (in)visibility in the nineteenth-c... more Rethinks the relationship between architecture, literature and (in)visibility in the nineteenth-century city
- Presents a new approach to reading urban modernity, through the categories of the hidden, the mobile and the transparent
- Develops the theoretical concept of ‘invisible architecture’ as a tool for analysing nineteenth-century literature
- Intervenes in the growing field of literature and architecture studies
- Offers new readings of important novels by Gaskell (Mary Barton), Dickens (Dombey and Son, Our Mutual Friend) and Zola (The Kill, The Ladies’ Paradise)
- Makes new arguments for reading the Gothic cathedral, the arabesque and pre-modernist whiteness in the context of urban modernity
Ben Moore presents a new approach to reading urban modernity in nineteenth-century literature, by bringing together hidden, mobile and transparent features of city space as part of a single system he calls ‘invisible architecture’. Resisting narratives of the nineteenth-century as progressing from concealment to transparency, he instead argues for a dynamic interaction between these tendencies. Across two parts, this book addresses a range of apparently disparate buildings and spaces. Part I offers new readings of three writers and their cities: Elizabeth Gaskell and Manchester, Charles Dickens and London, and Émile Zola and Paris, focusing on the cellar-dwelling, the railway and river, and the department store respectively. Part II takes a broader view by analysing three spatial forms that have not usually been considered features of nineteenth-century modernity: the Gothic cathedral, the arabesque and white walls. Through these readings, the book extends our understanding of the uneven modernity of this period.
This Pivot engages with current debates about anthropocentrism and the Anthropocene to propose a ... more This Pivot engages with current debates about anthropocentrism and the Anthropocene to propose a reappraisal of the realist novel in the second half of the nineteenth century. Through three case studies, it argues for ‘human tissue’ as a conceptual tool for reading that brings together biology, literature and questions of layering. This new approach is shown to be especially salient to the Victorian period, when the application of ‘tissue’ to biology first emerges. The book is distinctive in bringing together theoretical concerns around realism and the Anthropocene – two major topics in literary criticism – and presenting a new methodology to approach this conjunction, demonstrated through original readings of Charles Kingsley, George Eliot, and Emile Zola and two English-language writers he influenced (George Moore and Vernon Lee).
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Papers by Ben Moore
This essay undertakes a re-reading of Disraeli’s novel Sybil (1845), arguing that the novel engages in the construction of authority as a lost origin which is also projected into the future as a political goal. The essay draws on Derrida’s concept of the ‘supplement’ to trace how the text combines names, buildings and documents in ‘archi-textual’ structures that seek to establish and secure this lost authority. The tension between the need to construct authority and the need to project it as a pre-existing origin can never be settled and operates as a driving force within the text.
Book Reviews by Ben Moore
Books by Ben Moore
- Presents a new approach to reading urban modernity, through the categories of the hidden, the mobile and the transparent
- Develops the theoretical concept of ‘invisible architecture’ as a tool for analysing nineteenth-century literature
- Intervenes in the growing field of literature and architecture studies
- Offers new readings of important novels by Gaskell (Mary Barton), Dickens (Dombey and Son, Our Mutual Friend) and Zola (The Kill, The Ladies’ Paradise)
- Makes new arguments for reading the Gothic cathedral, the arabesque and pre-modernist whiteness in the context of urban modernity
Ben Moore presents a new approach to reading urban modernity in nineteenth-century literature, by bringing together hidden, mobile and transparent features of city space as part of a single system he calls ‘invisible architecture’. Resisting narratives of the nineteenth-century as progressing from concealment to transparency, he instead argues for a dynamic interaction between these tendencies. Across two parts, this book addresses a range of apparently disparate buildings and spaces. Part I offers new readings of three writers and their cities: Elizabeth Gaskell and Manchester, Charles Dickens and London, and Émile Zola and Paris, focusing on the cellar-dwelling, the railway and river, and the department store respectively. Part II takes a broader view by analysing three spatial forms that have not usually been considered features of nineteenth-century modernity: the Gothic cathedral, the arabesque and white walls. Through these readings, the book extends our understanding of the uneven modernity of this period.
This essay undertakes a re-reading of Disraeli’s novel Sybil (1845), arguing that the novel engages in the construction of authority as a lost origin which is also projected into the future as a political goal. The essay draws on Derrida’s concept of the ‘supplement’ to trace how the text combines names, buildings and documents in ‘archi-textual’ structures that seek to establish and secure this lost authority. The tension between the need to construct authority and the need to project it as a pre-existing origin can never be settled and operates as a driving force within the text.
- Presents a new approach to reading urban modernity, through the categories of the hidden, the mobile and the transparent
- Develops the theoretical concept of ‘invisible architecture’ as a tool for analysing nineteenth-century literature
- Intervenes in the growing field of literature and architecture studies
- Offers new readings of important novels by Gaskell (Mary Barton), Dickens (Dombey and Son, Our Mutual Friend) and Zola (The Kill, The Ladies’ Paradise)
- Makes new arguments for reading the Gothic cathedral, the arabesque and pre-modernist whiteness in the context of urban modernity
Ben Moore presents a new approach to reading urban modernity in nineteenth-century literature, by bringing together hidden, mobile and transparent features of city space as part of a single system he calls ‘invisible architecture’. Resisting narratives of the nineteenth-century as progressing from concealment to transparency, he instead argues for a dynamic interaction between these tendencies. Across two parts, this book addresses a range of apparently disparate buildings and spaces. Part I offers new readings of three writers and their cities: Elizabeth Gaskell and Manchester, Charles Dickens and London, and Émile Zola and Paris, focusing on the cellar-dwelling, the railway and river, and the department store respectively. Part II takes a broader view by analysing three spatial forms that have not usually been considered features of nineteenth-century modernity: the Gothic cathedral, the arabesque and white walls. Through these readings, the book extends our understanding of the uneven modernity of this period.