Daniel Williams, “Transatlantic Climate and Gulf Stream Aesthetics” (pp. 57–91) The Gulf Stream gained scientific prominence in the nineteenth century as a test case for theories about the dynamics of ocean currents and the equilibrium of transatlantic climate. Discourse about the current supplied descriptions, analogies, and myths that persist into the present. Triangulating oceanic, ecological, and transatlantic approaches to literary study, this essay argues that the nineteenth-century discourse of the Gulf Stream included a significant aesthetic dimension organized by a dialectic between stability and variability. First, the essay traces the Gulf Stream’s presence in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific writing and print culture, showing how memorable figures and vivid illustrations accentuated the risk of climate variability even as they charted an apparently stable oceanic system. Next, it considers the work of two poets separated by the ocean, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Sidney Lanier. While ostensibly using the Gulf Stream motif to reflect on geographic identity and cultural belonging, Hopkins and Lanier use formal and figurative techniques that register the threat of climate instability, offering a deeper sense of climate disquiet than the scientific materials on which they drew. Finally, the essay looks at the poetry of Derek Walcott, sketching the afterlife of the Gulf Stream discourse, extending its formal and figurative lineage, and renewing the present ecological urgency of thinking with an Earth-system process as a motif of climatic connection and obligation.

Richard Lansdown, “Suicide, Melancholia, and Manic Defense in Byron's Manfred ” (pp. 1–32) This essay presents a literary-critical account of Lord Byron’s verse drama Manfred (1817) from the perspective of Freudian and Object Relations psychological theories, in particular as regards the distinction between melancholia and mourning and the presence of part-objects within the psyche. It argues that whereas it is important to preserve a distinction between the poet and his works, such a distinction can never be total: like Childe Harold, Manfred is clearly in part a personal projection, given Byron’s state of mind at the time of composition. To provide context for these discussions the essay surveys both Byron’s personal views concerning suicide and the history of self-slaughter in Western culture, with Romanticism as a particular focus. The poet’s attitudes were many and various, depending on which cases he had in mind. Furthermore, the Romantic tradition initiated by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and continued by Byron’s numerous treatments of suicide mark a complication of the attitudes we find voiced by Enlightenment philosophers and, indeed, by Sigmund Freud himself.

Adrian A. Husain, “Counter-narratives: Wuthering Heights and the Intervals of the Brutalized Self” (pp. 33–56) This essay is concerned with meaning and genre and how these become accessible in our encounter with the critically strange. The focus is on a deconstruction and redefinition, by Emily Brontë in Wuthering Heights (1847), of “reality” as a given of domestic realism and a situating of the “real” in the interstices of Gothic romance and domestic realism. The essay contends that Brontë perceives the question of reality and the related question of genre as initially arising at the level of reading and as a problematic of perception necessarily linked to the esoteric nature of literary discourse itself. That reality, to be inclusive, must allow for the crucial idea of pain and the sentient self is understood. The departure from contemporary fiction is seen as involving a symbiosis and at the same time a radical disjunction between civil and visceral, localized and phantasmagorical, whereby a renewed reality—a new narrative space—is enabled to come about. Wuthering Heights is perceived as moving away, with a view to achieving a realized meaning, from the deliberate construct of language toward an involuntary and fragmented mimetic mode—or a language of the gut—more directly expressive of emotion. The essay argues that the production of a hybridized temporal perspective—or a “Bergsonian” time—is equally part of Brontë’s quest for reality.

Maxwell Sater, “Hardy's Trees: Ecology and the Question of Knowledge in The Woodlanders ” (pp. 92–115) This essay attends to one of the stranger episodes in Thomas Hardy’s fiction: the inexplicably linked deaths of John South and the elm tree outside his house. I argue that this subplot is of central importance to The Woodlanders (1887) and to Hardy’s ecological thinking more generally. Hardy posits an episode that resists narrative accommodation: simply, it does not make sense. Its senselessness, I contend, indexes a broader discomfort with, and rejection of, what Stanley Cavell would call relations of knowing as the foundation of ecology. By reading The Woodlanders alongside Cavell, I suggest that Hardy develops an ecological mode of relation dependent neither on knowledge of nor on continuity with nonhuman worlds but, rather, on a negotiation of the epistemological and ontological limits inhering between, in this instance, humans and trees. For Hardy, humane ecological relations are possible in spite of those limits; in fact, seeking to transcend them, as the elm tree plot parodically demonstrates, can be counterproductive.

Amy Coté, “‘A Handful of Loose Beads’: Catholicism and the Fictional Autobiography in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette ” (pp. 473–494) This essay considers the influence of confession as a Catholic liturgical sacrament and as a literary genre informing the fictional autobiography in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853). In her earlier novel Jane Eyre (1847), Brontë used the tradition of Protestant spiritual autobiography as a literary genre focused on the individual’s spiritual development. Villette , written as it was at the height of a wave of anti-Catholic sentiment in England in the 1840s and 1850s, has understandably been read as a nationalistic rebuke of Catholicism. This essay complicates this narrative, and shows how Brontë looks to Catholic liturgical traditions, most notably the sacrament of confession, to trouble the generic conventions of the Protestant spiritual autobiography and, by extension, of fictional autobiography.

Chris Townsend, “‘The Very Music of the Name’: Uncertainty as Aesthetic Principle in Keats’s Endymion ” (pp. 441–472) It is well known that John Keats thought that true poets were those who are capable of being in “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts” without feeling the need to reach after solid facts. And “uncertainty” is a recurrent term in his 1818 poem Endymion and its preface. But what does it mean for the figure of Endymion to follow an “uncertain path,” and what role do experimental poetics play in that experience of not knowing? This essay reflects on three aspects of the rhythms of Endymion —the relation of line to sentence, the transformative quality of the poem’s rhymes, and the rhythmical malleability of the name “Endymion” itself—to argue that what Keats’s early critics were hostile to in his poem was precisely what he strove to produce: a poetics of uncertainty. By turning close attention to the local effects of Keats’s rhythms, and by mounting an argument about the structure of his thinking that concerns the shape of his verses, I also want to reopen a perennial question in both Formalist and New Historicist branches of Keats scholarship: whether it makes sense to think of Keats as a “political” or “ideological” poet, and of what that might mean in relation to his aesthetics.

Vanessa Smith, “Wasted Gifts: Robert Louis Stevenson in Oceania” (pp. 527–551) This essay takes some letters from Robert Louis Stevenson’s travels in the South Seas as a starting point to rethink both Stevenson’s South Seas oeuvre and the Victorian cross-cultural encounter. Reengaging with Marcel Mauss’s classic theorization of gift exchange, the essay suggests that Stevenson’s encounters with Oceanic systems of exchange were experienced in terms not of cultural dominance, but of ontological lack. The practices of gifting to which Stevenson found himself subject in the Marquesas, Tuamotus, and Tahiti rendered both British etiquette and largesse ineffectual. The essay relates Stevenson’s growing sense of the complexities of Oceanic gifting to the tendency of his metropolitan readers to understand his South Seas “exile” as a waste of his own gifts. Focusing in particular on The Wrecker (1892) and “The Bottle Imp” (1891), it proposes that Stevenson deployed his expanded understanding of what Oceanic gifting entailed to replenish his fiction in both structural and figurative terms, even as he was forced to acknowledge those failures of reciprocation that continued to inform its production.

Lindsay Wilhelm, “Bright Sunshine, Dark Shadows: Decadent Beauty and Victorian Views of Hawai‘i” (pp. 495–526) Inspired by the recent global turn in aestheticism and decadence studies, this essay considers how late-Victorian discourses surrounding beauty, pleasure, and morality inform contemporary literary representations of Hawai‘i as both supremely inviting and dangerously languorous. The essay begins with a short overview of the broader geopolitical and historical circumstances that helped shape nineteenth-century understandings of Hawai‘i—a place renowned abroad for its beauty and hospitality, but nonetheless still notorious as the site of James Cook’s death in 1779. Next, the essay traces the peculiar ambivalence with which travel memoirs such as Isabella Bird’s The Hawaiian Archipelago (1875) and Constance Gordon-Cumming’s Fire Fountains (1883) describe their authors’ experiences in the islands. In these memoirs, Hawai‘i evidences the same convergence between beauty and decay that undergirds the controversial aesthetics of Algernon Charles Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, and other adherents of the creed of “art for art’s sake.” Focusing particularly on Robert Louis Stevenson’s fairy tale “The Bottle Imp” (1891), the essay then examines the ways in which Victorian writers utilize Hawai‘i’s leprosy epidemic as an occasion for exploring the perils of aesthetic hedonism. The essay concludes by briefly turning to the work of nineteenth-century Hawaiian historian Samuel Kamakau, whose own depictions of the decaying Hawaiian village reveal, by contrast, how these British accounts enlist the language of decadence in the service of empire.

Michael Greaney, “‘The Meaner & More Usual &c.’: Everybody in Emma ” (pp. 417-440) This essay aims to read Jane Austen’s Emma (1815) not as a portrait of a pampered individual but as a story of collective or communal selfhood—that is, as the story of everybody . “Everybody”—the term is used approximately one hundred times in this novel—in Emma is both more and less than a village or a neighborhood. Spread and shared across people, discourses, bodies, and institutions, “everybodiness” is variously apprehended as public opinion, or a ubiquitous collective gaze, or a shared repertoire of constantly updated gossip-narratives, without ever being quite reducible to any one of these. With a mixture of disdain and disquiet, Emma equates everybodiness with banal group-think, senseless chatter, lackluster mediocrity, and oppressive sameness—but, even as it thinks these superciliously undemocratic thoughts, Austen’s novel grants “everybody” narrative space in which to contest the terms of its own marginalization.