Browsing by Author "Stetz, Margaret D."
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Item The Age of Decadence(Victorian Literature and Culture, 2022-05-25) Stetz, Margaret D.What does “decadence” mean? Does it mean anything at all? Is it sinister or irresistibly appealing? Regardless of the ambiguity that surrounds the word “decadence” (often with a small “d”), no one can deny that decadence (frequently with a capital “D,” especially when it alludes to the late nineteenth-century European cultural movement) has been sweeping the world of academic publishing. Seen from the perspective of 2022, the past few years appear to have been, at least among scholars, a decade of decadence. Joseph Bristow opens his chapter on “Female Decadence” for the 2016 volume The History of British Women's Writing, 1880–1920 by saying, “There is no question that by the mid-1890s one word had come to define avant-garde art and literature in Britain,” and that word was decadence. Judging by the recent proliferation of books and art exhibitions on both sides of the Atlantic, history appears to be repeating itself and on a broader scale. Decadence is now defining, or at least preoccupying, many of us.Item Class and Classrooms: Teaching Jane Eyre with Adele Grace and Celine(Victorian Review, 2024-04-23) Stetz, Margaret D.In an influential 2019 essay, Carolyn Betensky calls on teachers of Victorian fiction to address seriously the racism in these texts—not only the examples of it that are pervasive and central to the narratives but also “racist references” that are fleeting and seemingly offhand (723). “Casual racism” of this sort, she writes, “abounds in Victorian novels,” but this is no reason to treat it casually in our pedagogy (724). Especially for students of colour, who are subjected to being “treated as a racial other” in their daily lives, seeing “casual Victorian racism” accepted in the classroom “as merely routine without further discussion amounts here to an act of aggression” (736). At the same time, such a lack of attention signals to white students that merely noting the presence of historical racism is sufficient, without considering its relevance to their own lives and its continuing power in shaping current-day attitudes.Item Ella Erskine, Elkin Mathews, and the “Long Aesthetic Century”(Women's Writing, 2024-04-23) Stetz, Margaret D.Scholars have used terms such as the “long nineteenth century” to convey the fact that the characteristics, principles, and artistic debates of the Victorian era did not suddenly vanish in 1900, but continued to inform British literature throughout the Edwardian era and into the start of the First World War. From work written by women, in particular, during the first decade of the twentieth century, it is obvious that one of the most significant developments of late-Victorian literature – i.e. the Aesthetic Movement – continued to enjoy an active life. This chapter uses a 1909 volume of prose poems, Shadow-shapes by Ella Erskine, to make that point, while demonstrating the important role played by Elkin Mathews, her publisher, in keeping Aestheticism before the public.Item Exhibition Talk(2017-03-17) Stetz, Margaret D.Item Full Session - Introduction / Exhibition Talk (3:00 – 4:30 pm)(2017-03-17) Tomlinson, Janis; Stetz, Margaret D.Item Miss-Taken Identities: The Comedy of Misrecognition in New Woman Short Stories(Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens, 2022-10-01) Stetz, Margaret D.This essay will illuminate a surprisingly common trope in British New Woman comic short stories from the late-1880s through the end of the nineteenth century—that is, the social misrecognition of women (almost always young women) by men. Often, this misidentification takes a class-based turn, with men of the upper classes assuming that the girls they encounter in socially ambiguous spaces belong to a class lower than their own and are, therefore, undeserving of the usual forms of respectful courtesy, or are even appropriate targets for sexual predation. These same men often display pre-existing prejudices against women who are smart, talented, and independent. In the course of the narratives that follow, the misidentified female protagonists offer comic correction, re-educating not only the erring men, but also the reader beyond the text. Such stories use the structure of a joke to reshape the understanding of both the diegetic masculine figures within the story and the extradiegetic audience and to advance the cause of the “New Woman” in general by representing this controversial social type as clever, wise, competent, appealing, and even funny. The essay focuses on a number of examples of this phenomenon, including stories by Mabel E. Wotton, Beatrice Harraden, Sarah Grand, and Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler.