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INCS Susan Morgan Graduate Essay Prize 2024
Winner: Evan Horne, “Transmedial Signification in Turner”
In J. M. W. Turner’s “Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus” (1829), Evan Horne contends that the meaning of the painting depends on the viewer’s reading of its title and verbal elements. Without the title, Horne asks, would a viewer even know the painting represented the Homeric scene at all? The two titular figures of Odysseus and Polyphemus are impossible to identify. All one sees is a ship sailing away from an island, its prow of horses and sea nymphs cutting through the water. Horne points out that the ship’s flags provide visual and verbal signs – to an attentive reader and viewer – of Odysseus’s heroic insistence on defiant self expression. Yet why does Turner confuse the issue by using the hero’s name as it appears in Virgil? Why is the name left visually incomplete in the flag, leaving it to the viewer to fill in the blank? As Horne’s deft analysis shows, Turner’s use of transmedial elements offers us the simultaneity of the figure of Odysseus as both duplicitous villain and Homeric champion – but only if we read the visual and verbal as mediating each other. To understand the painting fully, we must read and interpret the verbal cues against what we already know as readers of Homer and the Virgil, and then bring that to bear on the painting’s visual elements. Turner is thereby able to decenter the human even in a painting about two larger-than-life characters by relying on the viewer’s gaze to read the visual and verbal together for the full meaning of the work.
Honorable Mention #1: Riley Wilkins, ”The Transgender Jane Austen”
For transgender readers facing societal prejudice in the present, Riley Wilkins finds an unlikely ally in beloved novelist Jane Austen, whose novels sympathetically portray the consciousness of socially marginalized characters. Drawing on the discourses of cognitive linguistics, narratology, and trans studies, Wilkins explores Austen’s mastery of free indirect discourse, a “trans-narrative form” that resists binary identification with author or character alone. The essay presents a memorable reading of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, whose heroine Anne Elliot “stands against her family’s and society’s negative perspectives” on her personal worth and social value, “but ultimately banishes their impact on her mind and attains stronger belief in herself.” In her depiction of friendship between the spinster Anne and the invalid Mrs. Smith, Austen gives readers a model for creating a “community of outsiders.” Making an impassioned case for the continued relevance of Austen’s novels to readers facing personal and political struggles, Wilkins persuasively argues that loving literary characters can teach us how to care for others and ourselves.
Honorable Mention #2: Hannah Schultz, “‘My Heart is Too Thoroughly Dried to be Broken’: Preserved Desires in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall”
This polished reading of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall skillfully weaves together a close reading of the botanical metaphors in the text with larger questions of gender and agency. Most impressively, it argues that the use of botanical metaphors in the novel offer a vision of a more egalitarian relationship through their connection to differing visions of temporality. Rather than conflating women and nature, Schultz argues, the text contrasts “hothouse” time and its “consumptive, accelerated, or stunted temporalities” with a model of natural time that privileges long-term growth and stability. In doing so, Schultz complicates the botanical metaphors that we have all become accustomed to seeing in nineteenth-century depictions of gender, suggesting that beyond Ruskinian paeans to separate spheres, these tropes alluded to varying visions of chronotypes and human control.
Susan Morgan Prize Committee 2024: Sumangala Bhattacharya and Kirsten Andersen
CFP NCSA Annual Conference / “Fusions of Culture, Time, and Space” / Deadline: September 30, 2024
The Nineteenth-Century Studies Association conference is coming to New Orleans, March 27-31, 2025! More information and the CFP can be found here: https://ncsaweb.net/2025-conference-information/
CFP Victorian Poetry / “Poetry’s Parts” Keyword Series / Deadline: rolling
Victorian Poetry is pleased to announce a new keyword series called “Poetry’s Parts.” We invite proposals for short keyword essays (ca. 1,100 – 1,300 words) exploring Victorian poetry’s parts, whether formal (“sonnet”) or figural (“apostrophe”), cultural (“cosmopolitan”) or critical (“lyricization”). Considered and published on an ongoing basis (as opposed to appearing in a designated special issue), essays should apprehend pressing conceptual, aesthetic, historical, cultural, political, archival, and / or methodological questions and problems that shape the field (or, alternatively, that have been neglected to the field’s detriment). As warranted, authors might also consider the ways the field (as revealed by the keyword under discussion) is animated by or animates other (sub)disciplines or genealogies of thought in ways recognized or unrecognized.
Keywords need not be limited to those that fall strictly within the specialist purview of Victorian poetry. For instance, essays exploring the resonances of broad concepts such as “atmosphere” or “race” as refracted distinctively by and through Victorian poetry (broadly construed) are most welcome. Because these essays should make arguments as opposed to offering handbook-style overviews, proposals revisiting keywords explored in prior issues will eventually be accepted as the series unfolds. Pedagogical discussion may be appropriate if it serves an illustrative purpose that keeps in view the series’ focus.
Proposals are subject to editorial review (with an eye toward giving deliberate shape to the series, especially in its early stages) and keyword essays to peer review. If contemporaneous appearance in print is necessary for offering substantive insight, the editor will consider joint proposals (ideally, featuring scholars of different ranks and affiliations, on and off the tenure track), whether on the same keyword from quite distinct vantages or on different but productively entangled keywords. Joint proposals should be limited to two or three scholars, as larger groups are difficult to accommodate in print outside the confines of a special issue. Direct queries and proposals to the editor at [email protected].
INCS Stein Prize 2023:
Winner: Trish Bredar, “‘A Voyage of Discovery’: Reimagining the Walking Woman through Nineteenth-Century Diaries.” Victorian Literature and Culture 50.4 (2022): 609-38.
Theories of how pedestrians in the Nineteenth Century interacted with their environments powerfully inform the ways in which literary scholars and art historians interpret works from this period. In “‘A Voyage of Discovery’: Reimagining the Walking Woman through Nineteenth-Century Diaries,” Trish Bredar radically undermines dominant conceptualizations of female mobility. She argues that our current understanding of physical mobility in prior centuries is based largely on men’s experiences and on readings of Rousseau, Wordsworth, Thoreau, Benjamin, and de Certeau. In making this case, she builds on the work of feminist scholars, “who have done much to expose the gender disparities that shape the way that people physically navigate the world.” However, she challenges the popular idea that female mobility was “marginal or transgressive.” Bredar draws on a corpus of over a hundred manuscript diaries in which women document their attitudes toward strolls and outings. Based on this grass-roots approach, she proposes abandoning rather than adapting the male-inspired model of le flâneur. She advocates replacing it with “new paradigms of mobility that emerge from women’s experience.” By providing insights into “how women practiced, conceptualized, and narrated their pedestrian mobility,” this article invites scholars to rethink their understandings of perspective, embodiment, and agency in literature and artistic representations from this period.
Runner Up: Mary Bowden, “Cultivating Arboreal Time in Hardy’s Fiction,” Dibur Literary Journal 11 (2022): 89-100.
In “Cultivating Arboreal Time in Hardy’s Fiction,” Mary Bowden examines how the novels Under the Greenwood Tree and The Woodlanders counterpoint the timescales and rhythms of human lives and the lives of trees. Richly situated in wider critical conversations about Hardy, ecology, and the natural world, Bowden’s compelling and well written essay advances these discussions with ingenious analyses of how the novels incorporate Hardy’s knowledge of practices such as coppicing and pollarding. Through these silvicultural methods, a tree might live on indefinitely, sending out fresh shoots again and again from its stump, remaining always in a state of growth and development. Bowden shows how the characters in these works too are attracted to the promise of a life of recursive youth and renewal. Such dreams must prove illusory, but with the juxtaposition of biotemporal patterns, cadences, and scales, Hardy—like Bowden—demonstrates the power of incorporating the time of trees into the human form of the novel.
Runner Up: Aisha Motlani, “Architecture as Enemy: Felice Beato’s Photographs of Lucknow.” Oxford Art Journal 44.3 (2022): 419-44.
Analyzing the work of war photographer Felice Beato in 1857 India, Aisha Motlani’s “Architecture as Enemy” offers compelling insights into the weaponization of popular forms (the souvenir photograph, for example) in imperial battle. As Motlani illustrates, the British had critiqued the perceived excesses, flourishes and hybridity of Lucknow architecture before 1857, their denigration operating as a thinly-veiled critique of India itself. In the aftermath of the 1857 rebellion, ideological and physical destruction coincided; targets of aesthetic critique became military targets. Motlani’s essay covers impressive and fascinating ground, introducing the reader to Nawabi architecture (“a distinctly eclectic architectural style that combined Indian, Persian, and European forms”), to Felice Beato’s strategies for staging and representing conquered territory, to the role of architecture in colonial domination, and to the conventions of nineteenth-century war photography.
Stein Prize Committee 2023: Rebecca Stern (Chair), Richard Menke, and Darci Gardner.