Joseph Phelan, “‘Bloomluxuriance’: Compound Words in the Poetry of the 1830s and 1840s” (pp. 1–23) The brief interregnum between Romanticism and Victorianism saw the emergence of and retreat from a number of formal and linguistic experiments in poetry. One of the most striking of these is the ostentatious employment of compound words; the early verse of Alfred Tennyson and some of his less-illustrious contemporaries is littered with coinages such as “tendriltwine,” “mellowmature,” and “bloomluxuriance.” The impetus behind this phenomenon came from developments in philology that emphasized the affinities between English and German and from the attempt to broaden the range of English verse by naturalizing metrical forms such as the hexameter, and was often associated with an impassioned if politically unfocused radicalism. In revising “Œnone” for republication in his 1842 Poems , Tennyson excised almost all of these compound words, a gesture of linguistic conformity that is the stylistic counterpart to what Isobel Armstrong calls the “loss of nerve” apparent in his work during this decade, and one that is paralleled in the work of some of his contemporaries. This experimental impulse did not disappear from Victorian poetry completely, however, and its survival helps to explain some of the quainter and more ungainly phenomena of later nineteenth-century verse.

Brianna Beehler, “The Doll’s Gift: Ventriloquizing Bleak House ” (pp. 24–49) This essay offers a new reading of the split narrative in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53). Previous critics of the novel’s split narrative have primarily focused on the unequal knowledge and authority positions of the all-knowing third-person narrator and the unknowing first-person narrator, Esther Summerson. This division, however, does not fully account for the apparent slips and narrative exchanges between the two narrators, in which one narrator takes on the voice or knowledge position of the other. This essay takes up Robert Newsom’s suggestion that the only way to explain these “slips” is to conclude that Esther Summerson writes not only her own narration, but also that of the third-person narrator. However, the essay further argues that Esther uses the third-person narration to ventriloquize the voice of her mother, Lady Dedlock, in an effort to provide herself with the emotional support otherwise denied her. Readers may better understand Esther’s ventriloquism of the third-person narration by tracing how it mirrors her early daily ritual with her doll, in which she assumed both narrative positions at once. Object relations and gift theory further show how this dialogue creates a bond between the two narrations. Thus, characters and family structures that appear in the third-person narration and that may appear distant from Esther are actually her meditations on alternative maternal and familial relationships.

Brook Thomas, “The Galaxy , National Literature, and Reconstruction” (pp. 50–81) The North’s victory in the Civil War preserved the Union and led to the abolition of slavery. Reconstruction was a contentious debate about what sort of nation that union of states should become. Published during Reconstruction before being taken over by the Atlantic Monthly , the Galaxy tried, in Rebecca Harding Davis’s words, to be “a national magazine in which the current of thought of every section could find expression.” The Galaxy published literature and criticism as well as political, sociological, and economic essays. Its editors were moderates who aesthetically promoted a national literature and politically promoted reconciliation between Northern and Southern whites along with fair treatment for freedmen. What fair treatment entailed was debated in its pages. Essayists included Horace Greeley, the abolitionist journalist; Edward A. Pollard, author of The Lost Cause (1866); and David Croly, who pejoratively coined the phrase “miscegenation.” Literary contributors included Davis, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Mark Twain, Constance Fenimore Woolson, John William De Forest, Julian Hawthorne, Emma Lazarus, Paul Hayne, Sidney Lanier, and Joaquin Miller. Juxtaposing some of the Galaxy ’s literary works with its debates over how the Union should be reimagined points to the neglected role that Reconstruction politics played in the institutionalization of American literary studies. Whitman is especially important. Reading the great poet of American democracy in the context of the Galaxy reveals how his postbellum celebration of a united nation—North, South, East, and West—aligns him with moderate views on Reconstruction that today seem racially reactionary.

Sarah Anne Kuczynski, “Acquisitive Liaisons: Collecting and Alternative Valuing in Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware ” (pp. 82–109) This essay reads Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896) as an attempt to reimagine human relationships amid the unsettling of traditional, effortful methods for establishing personal value amid the socioeconomic stratification of Gilded Age America. Foregrounding the novel’s imbrication within late-nineteenth-century America’s “collecting mania,” this study contends that the relationship that forms between the Octavius elite and the title character closely resembles that between collector and recent acquisition. The idea that Theron is treated as an object by Celia and her friends might appear to lend support to the prevailing reading of the novel as a tale about a naive young minister who is used and abused by the worldly figures he idolizes. However, I offer a contrarian challenge to this dominant interpretation by demonstrating that Theron, in fact, consistently pursues objecthood and the fate of acquisition over the course of the novel—not in a masochistic sense but because, as this essay argues, within the Gilded Age social world of The Damnation of Theron Ware , the life of a prized possession has the potential to be a fulfilling one. Theron may talk of his grand plans for renovating his character but in reality he seizes every opportunity to retreat to a space where passivity is encouraged, where personal value is assigned rather than earned or enacted.

Clayton Carlyle Tarr, “Stillborn Plots: Revolution, Imagination, and the Failure of Romanticism” (pp. 415–447) The metaphor “fell stillborn from the press” was used frequently by Romantic-era critics to disparage unsuccessful literary productions. Stillbirth statistics began to be collected in earnest in the late eighteenth century alongside an explosion of midwifery texts and obstetric advances. Since Romantic authors often referred to their texts as offspring, it is useful to understand stillbirth plots in these texts as evidence of the authors’ anxiety over imaginative or revolutionary failure. Stillbirth plots are a recurrent theme in Romantic literature, appearing in both novels and poetry, and they are tied together by the mental struggle of the creator, either female or male. In Romantic novels, stillbirth plots signal the defeat of radical theories, whereas in poetry they express the failure of the imagination. Ultimately, these metaphors of failed parturition demonstrate Romantic writers’ fascination with contemporary obstetrics, which made extraordinary advances in the late eighteenth century only to remain static throughout the nineteenth century.

Alexandra Urakova,“‘ I do not want her, I am sure’: Commodities, Gifts, and Poisonous Gifts in Uncle Tom’s Cabin ” (pp. 448–472) This essay focuses on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) in discussing the interrelation of sentimentality, slavery, and race. It asks what happens when a slave himself or herself becomes a gift in the way that Mr. Shelby buys Eliza as a present for his wife, and St. Claire seems to bestow Uncle Tom upon Eva and ultimately gives Topsy to his cousin Ophelia. Although much has been said about “sentimental property” or “sympathetic ownership” in Stowe, the instances of exchanging slaves as gifts in the novel have been surprisingly overlooked. Touching upon one of the novel’s important and precarious themes—the distinction between people and things—the aforementioned episodes not only contribute to our understanding of the novel’s gift economy but also invite us to revise the complex attitude to racial otherness in Uncle Tom’s Cabin . I claim that while pursuing a sentimental ideology of the gift that comes to support racialist implications of its abolitionist rhetoric, Stowe’s novel also contains a radical potential of its critique embodied in the image of the poisonous gift of a slave child, Topsy, who figures as an unwelcome, wasteful, and repellent present. Concurring with critical opinion that Stowe’s racism is in the sentiment, this essay suggests that the novel’s unsentimental, explicitly racist metaphors paradoxically inform one of Stowe’s strongest antislavery arguments.

Pascale M. Manning, “‘There is nothing human in nature’: Denying the Anthropocene in Richard Jefferies” (pp. 473–501) This essay contends that the work of the nineteenth-century British writer and naturalist Richard Jefferies embodies both a recognition and a radical denial of the Anthropocene, expressing a nascent form of the ambivalence that stalks our contemporary recognitions and misrecognitions of the human in/and nature. Drawing upon a range of Jefferies’s writings—both his essays and his autobiography in addition to his fiction—it argues that there exists in Jefferies’s work a recurring vein of anti-ecological thought, particularly evidenced in the way it frequently depicts strict boundary lines, whether between agricultural and urban spaces, between civilization and wild nature, or between the human and the natural world. Taking issue with recent ecocritical accounts of Jefferies’s post-apocalyptic novel After London (1885), this essay rereads Jefferies’s novel in light of the wider range of his writings to argue that it is most usefully read not as a proto-ecological rebuke to the unsustainability of human agro-industrial practices, nor as a prophetic evocation of a world re-greened by the collapse of those practices, but rather as the irresolute culmination of a career spent both testifying to the essential inviolability of nature and bearing witness to the mounting evidence of anthropogenic rupture.

Pablo A. Ramirez, “The Woman of Tomorrow: Gertrude Atherton and the Latina Foremother of the Californian New Woman” (pp. 502–534) Throughout the 1890s, Gertrude Atherton employs the figure of the aristocratic Californiana (Mexican Californian woman) to extend classical liberalism’s economic model of individualism to include women. By joining the aristocratic Californiana with American liberalism, Atherton transforms California’s history of capitalist development into a romance in which the creation of new markets generates not only profits, but the New Woman as well. In Atherton’s stories of Alta California, which I call “tales of romantic liberalism,” the history and evolution of California and the New Woman is narrated through the promises (or contracts) that a Californiana character makes and the obligations she accepts or rejects. The Californiana in The Doomswoman (1893) and Before the Gringo Came (1894) becomes the foundation for the New Woman, whose personal development and advancement promises to perfect liberal capitalism through her consensual romantic unions. As the decade drew to a close and the war with Spain became imminent, however, one can see in Atherton’s The Californians (1898) her growing fear that the massification of politics and culture imperiled not only liberal capitalism and democracy, but the evolution of women’s individuality as well. As a result, the evolution of the Californiana character is no longer reliant on a union with a capitalist contractarian partner but on the reaffirmation of her aristocratic individualism. Through her Californiana heroines, Atherton engages the Californio past in order to imagine the evolution of women’s individuality as the United States undergoes a shift from classical liberalism to modern liberalism and from republic to overseas empire.