Victorian Surfaces in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

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2. How to Do Things with Surfaces: The Politics and Poetics of Victorian Surfaces

   • Sibylle Baumbach, Ulla Ratheiser

   Pages 1-23Open Access

3. The Semantics of Surfaces: Victorian Panoramas, the Panoramic Gaze, and Thereness

   • Heidi Liedke

   Pages 25-41

4. Touching Skins, Spreading Stains: Contesting, Affirming, and Penetrating Surfaces in the Work of Thomas Hardy

   • Felicitas Meifert-Menhard

   Pages 43-58

5. Skin Deep: Reading Race in the Nineteenth-Century Novel

   • Pamela K. Gilbert

   Pages 59-77

6. Twinship and Tactile Anxieties in Wilkie Collins’ Poor Miss Finch (1872)

   • Wieland Schwanebeck

   Pages 79-96

7. Reading Victorian Skin: Perspectives in (English) Literary/Cultural Studies and Medical Humanities

   • Monika Pietrzak-Franger

   Pages 97-115

8. Dickens’ Dirty Children

   • Franziska Quabeck

   Pages 117-133

9. Gothic Cloth: Textures of the Unknown

   • Sophia C. Jochem, Cordula Lemke

   Pages 135-154

10. Physiognomic Flânerie in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent

    • Eike Kronshage

    Pages 155-175

11. Revisiting Victorian Surfaces in Recent Biopics: Imperial Hauntings in the Durbar Room

    • Jan Rupp

    Pages 177-195

12. Afterword: Bark

    • Kate Flint

    Pages 197-212

13. Back Matter

    Pages 213-220

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This volume explores the politics and poetics of Victorian surfaces in their manifold manifestations. In so doing, it examines various cultural products ‘as they are’ and highlights the art of surface composition in the Victorian era as well as the socio-cultural ramifications of the preoccupation with the exterior. By closely reading the various surfaces materialising in Victorian literature and culture, the individual contributions explore the dialectics of surface and depth in Victorian (and Neo-Victorian) cultures as well as the legibility of surfaces. They look into the surfaces of literary narratives, paintings, and film but also into natural surfaces such as skin or bark. Each chapter foregrounds what is present rather than absent in a text, while also paying attention to the surfaces that become manifest on the diegetic level of the text, be they cloth, landscapes, or human bodies or faces.

This is an open access book.

• Material culture
• Surface reading
• Design
• Body
• Artwork
• Consumer culture
• Technology
• Aesthetics
• Exteriors
• Appearances
• Decadence
• Material Culture
• Open Access

• Department of English Literatures and Cultures, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany

  Sibylle Baumbach

• Department of English, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria

  Ulla Ratheiser

Sibylle Baumbach is Professor of English Literature and Culture at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. Her research areas include early modern literature and cognitive literary studies, especially literary attention. She is the author of Literature and Fascination (2015) and Shakespeare and the Art of Physiognomy (2008). 

Ulla Ratheiser is Senior Scientist for English Literatures and Cultures at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. She has a background in postcolonial studies, while her more recent research focuses on popular culture and the representation of monarchies.

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