Publications

On a regular basis, we compile and circulate a bulletin highlighting recent publications in the field. Past bulletins are archived below:

December 2025

Brorby, Joshua. “Villette and the Victorian Paul: Religious Nationalism, Identity, and Non-Conversion.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol. 80, no. 2-3, 2025. pp. 111-138.

Abstract: This essay addresses two gaps in criticism of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853)—the lack of incisive analysis of its Hindu imagery, and inattention to the specifically Victorian commentaries on Paul the Apostle that the novel harnesses—to argue that they are crucially connected in the novel’s conception of religious identity. Villette’s anti-Catholic rhetoric has been explored extensively, particularly with regard to Lucy’s acceptance of M. Paul’s faith. What Villette’s strained, qualified toleration of Catholicism intimates, carried along to readers in its Pauline allusions, is a surprising extension of near-universal forbearance and a mobile view of religious identity, which together permit a richer critical vision of midcentury anxieties around nationalism and empire. With attention to missionary writing and liberal broad-church theology, this essay traces overlaps in midcentury discussions of Paul and imperial worries over the conversion of Hindus, which Brontë exploits with carefully placed references to Hinduism and other alternatives to orthodox Christianity. Additionally, the essay argues that Brontë deserves status as an imaginative Biblical hermeneut whose dramatic interpretation of Paul places her alongside Matthew Arnold as one of Victorian England’s principal literary readers of the Apostle.

Brorby, Joshua. “Feeling Religious: Cosmopolitanism, Translation, and the Mobility of Belief.” Cusp: Late 19th- and Early 20th-Century Cultures, special issue “Cosmopolitanism on the Cusp,” vol. 3, no. 2, 2025, pp. 182-191.

Abstract: This essay explores how comparative religious scholars and translators of the fin de siècle exercised a contingent, instrumental view of religious identity that permitted them to establish problematic claims of similitude between cultures. If cosmopolitanism necessitates a sense of detachment, I argue that the self-conscious work of figures like F. Max Müller shows how detachment functionally permitted thinkers to temporarily attach to other religious traditions. With attention to G. U. Pope, Gu Hongming, and others, I ultimately suggest that translators’ faith in affect represents a contradiction at the heart of fin-de-siècle cosmopolitanism.

Burstein, Miriam. “Victorian Dissent” with Oxford Bibliographies.

Dickinson, Christian. Sonnets From the Psalms, Volume II. Orison Publishers, June 2025.

Dickinson, Christian. “Mistaken Identities and other Failures of Observation: Thematic Unity in Sketches by Boz.” Dickens Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 4, 2025, pp. ?. [Forthcoming]

Dyck, Denae. “Surprised by Hope: Possibilities of Spiritual Experience in Victorian Lyric Poetry.” Religions, vol. 16, no. 2 (2025), article 255, 18 pp. doi: 10.3390/rel16020255.

Abstract: This article reconsiders literature’s capacity to express and evoke spiritual experiences by turning to William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, especially his discussion of mysticism and his suggestion that poetry can bring about such states. James’s ideas are especially promising given recent developments in postsecular and postcritical scholarship that problematize a religious/secular divide and call into question a hermeneutics of suspicion. Bringing James into conversation with Paul Ricoeur, I aim to show how receptivity to spiritual experiences in literature might generate expansive models of both poetics and hermeneutics. To pursue these possibilities, my study analyzes three examples of Victorian lyric poems that probe the edges of wonder: Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush”, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Nondum” and Dollie Radford’s “A Dream of ‘Dreams’”. These case studies strategically select work by writers of various belief or unbelief positions, highlighting the dynamism of the late nineteenth-century moment from which James’s writings emerged. I argue that this poetry facilitates a re-imagination of hope, beyond a faith/doubt dichotomy, as well as a re-framing of revelation, from proclamation to invitation. Building on insights from both James and Ricoeur, my discussion concludes by making the case for cultivating an interpretive disposition that does not guard against but opens toward poetry’s latent potential to take readers by surprise.

Dyck, Denae. “The Flood Narrative in Feminist and Queer Perspectives.” The Hebrew Bible in Contemporary Fiction and Poetry, edited by Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer. Routledge, 2025, pp. 11–25, doi: 10.4324/9781003280347-2.

Abstract: This chapter analyses four postmodern retellings of the flood narrative that foreground characters who are marginalised in or excluded from the biblical account, including Noah’s wife and other women: Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984), Madeleine L’Engle’s Many Waters (1986), Anne Provoost’s Die Arkvaarders (In the Shadow of the Ark) (2001), and Sarah Blake’s Naamah (2019). Focusing on the ethical implications and literary effects of this narrative decentering, this discussion considers how these novels both subvert and transform their biblical sources. As they take up the concerns of today’s feminist and queer reading communities, these texts unsettle western culture’s dualistic, hierarchical, and heteronormative constructions. More radically still, they invite readers to consider how biblical traditions might be simultaneously critiqued for their patriarchal logic and reclaimed for their imaginative potentials.

King, Joshua, Chris Adamson and Dino Franco Felluga. “Introduction: Conferencing, Crisis, and the Profession,” special issue of Victoriographies 15.2 (July 2025), pp. 101-117 (6,619 words). Free access online.

King, Joshua, Chris Adamson and Dino Franco Felluga. Special issue on “Conferencing, Crisis, and the Profession” in Victoriographies 15.2 (July 2025). Free access online.

King, Joshua. “Ecology.” Gerard Manley Hopkins in Context, ed. Marton Dubois, Cambridge series on Literature in Context (Cambridge University Press 2025), pp. 149-156 (3,000 words).

King, Joshua, Chris Adamson, Emily Allen, Dino Franco Felluga, and Monica Wolfe. “Event 2024: Embodied and Virtual Events across Nations and Time,” Victorian Review 50.1 (pub. 2025 [issue for Spring 2024]), contribution to special “Forum: Thinking Relationally: Victorian Studies and the Climate Crisis” guested edited by Barbara Leckie, pp. 31-35.

LaPorte, Charles. “Victorian Poetry in an Age of Cultural Secularization,” Victorian Poetry 61.4 (Winter 2024): 561-568.

LaPorte, Charles. “Questioning the Bible in Victorian Poetry,” in The Bible and Western Christian Literature: Books and The Book, Volume 4: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Elisabeth Jay.  T&T Clark, 2024: 297-321.

Wiebracht, Ben and Amir Tevel, “Tennyson and the Troubled Manliness of Victorian Doubt,” Religion and Literature 56.1 (Spring 2024, but really published Winter 2025).

16th Modern Language Association Prize for a Scholarly Edition: Ben Wiebrecht, Stanford Online High School, and students Madeline Ayer, Aidan Bekendam, Jacob Bryant, Ferris Haukom, Mayuko Karakawa, Edithe Lam, Sabine Mazzeo, Rathan Muruganantham, Isabella Romagnoli, Annika Ross, April Y. Wen, Silas Wesner, Noelle Wu, Ethan Yun, Nicolás A. Zepeda, and Jiayun Zhang, for The Tour of Doctor Syntax in Search of the Picturesque, by William Combe (Pixelia Publishing, 2024).

Holly Wiegand, “Antebellum Black Women Preachers’ Feminist Typology.” ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, vol. 71, no. 1, 2025, pp. 31-80. https://doi.org/10.1353/esq.2025.a967870

Abstract: Holly Wiegand argues that antebellum African American preachers Zilpha Elaw (c. 1793–1873) and Jarena Lee (1783–1864) develop a Black feminist typology in their memoirs. Black feminist typology is an interpretive mode and praxis that claims authority for women by reviving, reinterpreting, and revising Scripture to center women’s roles. Black feminist typology specifically resists linear and future-focused timescales, instead emphasizing iteration and cyclicality. Wiegand assembles all of Elaw and Lee’s female typological allusions to underscore the power of recursive citation and/as trans-temporal communal legacy building.

December 2024

Blumberg, Ilana. George Eliot: Whole Soul. Oxford University Press, 2024. Discount code: AAFLYG6.

In this new account of George Eliot’s spiritual life, George Eliot: Whole Soul, Ilana Blumberg reveals to us a writer who did not simply lose her faith once and for all on her way to becoming an adult, but devoted the full span of her career to imagining a wide religious sensibility that could inform personal and social life. As we range among Eliot’s letters, essays, translations, poetry, and novels, we encounter here a writer whose extraordinary art and intellect offer us company, still today, in the search for modern meaning.

Dau, Duc. Sex, Celibacy, and Deviance: The Victorians and the Song of Songs. Ohio State  University Press, 2024.

Sex, Celibacy, and Deviance is the first major study to explore the Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon) in Victorian literature and art. As the Bible’s only erotic poem, the Song of Songs is the canonical Judeo-Christian book about love, furnishing the Victorians with an authoritative and literary language for love, marriage, sex, mourning, and religious celibacy. Duc Dau adopts a queer and feminist lens to consider how Victorians employed and interpreted the Song of Songs in their work. How did writers and artists fashion and, most importantly, challenge the norms of gender, romantic love, and marriage? Spanning the early Victorian era through the first two decades of the twentieth century, Sex, Celibacy, and Deviance considers the works of Charlotte Brontë, Thomas Hardy, Christina Rossetti, John Gray, Michael Field, Edward Burne-Jones, and Simeon Solomon alongside two lesser-known figures: Irish-born Scottish artist Phoebe Anna Traquair and the Catholic religious leader Augusta Theodosia Drane. By addressing the relevance of the Song of Songs in light of shifting and conflicting religious and social contexts, Dau provides a fresh perspective on Victorian literature, religion, and culture.

Dyck, Denae. Biblical Wisdom and the Victorian Literary Imagination. Bloomsbury Academic, 2024. Discount code: GLR AQ4.

Examining the creative thought that arose in response to 19th-century religious controversies, this book demonstrates that the pressures exerted by historical methods of biblical scholarship prompted an imaginative recovery of wisdom literature. During the Victorian period, new approaches to the interpretation of sacred texts called into question traditional ideas about biblical inspiration, motivating literary transformations of inherited symbols, metaphors, and forms. Drawing on the theoretical work of Paul Ricoeur, Denae Dyck considers how Victorian writers from a variety of belief positions used wisdom literature to reframe their experiences of questioning, doubt, and uncertainty: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George MacDonald, George Eliot, John Ruskin, and Olive Schreiner. This study contributes to the reassessment of historical and contemporary narratives of secularization by calling attention to wisdom literature as a vital, distinctive genre that animated the search for meaning within an increasingly ideologically diverse world.

Dwor, Richa. “Two Diasporas, One Exodus: Jewish Freedom and Jamaican Slavery in Grace Aguilar’s Sephardic Histories.” Victorian Popular Fictions, vol. 5, no. 2, Autumn 2023, pp. 104-118, https://doi.org/10.46911/PMUK7383.

This paper reads Anglo-Jewish author Grace Aguilar’s (1816–47) writings on Sephardic history in light of the financial benefits accrued by Aguilar’s family from the ownership of enslaved people in Jamaica. It also emphasizes the influence of the messianic writings of her great-grandfather Benjamin Dias Fernandes to argue that the intensity of Aguilar’s identification with English literary forms and perspectives does not indicate a tendency toward assimilation. Rather, Britain was for her a site of redemption. Its status as a haven for persecuted Sephardim – as the end point of their exile and wanderings – was not merely civic, but also eschatological.

Hurley, Michael D. Angels and Monotheism. Cambridge University Press, 2024.

While angels have played a decisive role in all the world’s major religions and continue to loom large in the popular religious and creative imagination, modern theology has tended to ignore or trivialize them. The comparatively few scholarly works on angels over the last century have typically interpreted them as mere symbols and metaphors: they are said to offer glimpses not of the divine order, but of human desires, anxieties, and ideologies. Angelology has collapsed into anthropology. By contrast, this polemical book argues for the indispensable importance of studying angels as divinely created beings, for theology at large, and for understanding the defining doctrine of monotheistic religions in particular. Additionally, the book contends that the spirit of modern science did not originate with the so-called Scientific Revolution but was actually inspired centuries earlier by the angelological lucubrations of medieval scholastics.

Johnson, Alyssa Q. “Prophecies and Parables in Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘Lois the Witch.'” Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, vol. 145 (2024), pp. 71 – 86,  https://doi.org/10.1353/vct.2024.a931643.

King, Joshua. “The Democratisation of the Bible: Education, Economics, Ecology.” The Nineteenth Century, ed. Elisabeth Jay in The Bible and Western Christian Literature: Books and the Book, 5 vols., ed. Elisabeth Jay and Stephen Pricket et al.    (T&T Clark Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024), pp. 353-396.

Lecourt, Sebastian, and Winter Jade Werner (eds). Special issue on “Transimperial Religion.” Victorian Studies vol. 66 no. 2 (Winter 2024), pp. 193–200. Read the open-access introduction here and a short blog post here. Contributions listed below:

Lee, Helen. “Dissonant Poetics in George Eliot’s ‘A College Breakfast Party.” Victorian Poetry vol. 61 no. 1 (2023), pp. 55–69, https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2023.a905521.

This article examines George Eliot’s understudied poem “A College Breakfast Party” (1878), analyzing how its dissonant poetic elements reflect deeper philosophical tensions about faith, knowledge, and intellectual discourse in the period. Through close readings of the poem’s irregular meter, shifting perspectives, and deliberately awkward philosophical debates, Lee demonstrates how Eliot employs formal dissonance to mirror the fragmentary nature of modern knowledge and the limitations of purely rational discourse. By situating the poem within both Eliot’s later career and broader Victorian debates, this study reveals how “A College Breakfast Party” uses its challenging poetic form to engage with questions about the integration of scientific and humanistic knowledge.

McQueen, Joseph. Liturgy, Ritual, and Secularization in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Cambridge University Press, 2024. Discount code: LRSN2024.

Simultaneously spiritual and material, liturgy incarnates unseen realities in concrete forms – bread, wine, water, the architectural arrangement of churches and temples. Nineteenth-century writers were fascinated with liturgy. In this book Joseph McQueen shows the ways in which Romantic and Victorian writers, from Wordsworth to Wilde, regardless of their own personal beliefs, made use of the power of the liturgy in their work. In modernity, according to recent theories of secularization, the natural opposes the supernatural, reason (or science) opposes faith, and the material opposes the spiritual. Yet many nineteenth-century writers are manifestly fascinated by how liturgy and ritual undo these typically modern divides in order to reinvest material reality with spiritual meaning, reimagine the human as malleable rather than mechanical, and enflesh otherwise abstract ethical commitments. McQueen upends the dominant view of this period as one of scepticism and secularisation, paving the way for surprising new avenues of research.

Stainthorp, Clare. “Periodical Form and Chatterton’s Commune, the Atheistic Communistic   Scorcher (1884–1895): ‘the most Unique Production of the—Nineteenth Century.’  Media History vol 30 no. 2 (2024), pp. 148–70, https://doi.org/10.1080/13688804.2024.2329065.

Werner, Winter Jade. “Spatial Contingency: Digital Networks, James Hogg, and the Religious Politics of Space.” Romantic Circles Praxis.

Writing on the relationship between unboundedness and fanaticism, Winter Jade Werner’s essay on the politics of despatialization in Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner demonstrates a like investment in the tangible and bounded while demonstrating the pitfalls of assuming virtuality’s equivalence with parity. Charting the rhetorical similarities between the international Protestantism of the early nineteenth century and more recent cyber-utopianism, Werner analyzes the novel’s intersection of spatial and religious politics. Drawing from Hogg’s deft analysis of fanaticism, Werner demonstrates how we, like Hogg, might usefully counter presentist myopia by resisting history’s artifactualization in order to reveal the contingencies of the now.

William Combe, The Tour of Doctor Syntax in Search of the Picturesque. Edited by Ben Wiebracht et al. Williamsburg, VA: Pixelia Publishing, 2024.

Wiebracht, Ben et. al. “Jane Austen, Doctor Syntax, and the Regency Mass Market.”  Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal Online. Forthcoming in early 2025.

Vernon, Amanda. “Speaking with the Dead: Resurrective Reading and Pneumatological Imagination in George MacDonald. Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature vol. 146 (Winter 2024), pp. 279 – 295.  https://doi.org/10.1353/vct.00022

December 2023

December 2022

February 2022

Sept 2021

May 2021