Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Mobility in the Victorian Novel
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://charlottemathieson.wordpress.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: British
https://charlottemathieson.wordpress.com/about/ * http://www.surrey.ac.uk/englishandlanguages/staff_list/complete_staff_list/165290/ *
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2014018305
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2014018305
HEADING: Mathieson, Charlotte
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374 __ |a Research fellow
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670 __ |a Gender and space in rural Britain, 1840-1920, 2014: |b t.p. (Charlotte Mathieson) p. x (Charlotte Mathieson is a research fellow at the University of Warwick’s Institute of Advanced Study. She was awarded her PhD from the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies in March 2011. Her research focuses on mobility, nation and space in the mid-nineteenth century novel, including the works of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot)
670 __ |a Mobility in the Victorian novel, 2015: |b ECIP t.p. (Charlotte Mathieson) data view (b. 7/1/1985)
PERSONAL
Born July 1, 1985.
EDUCATION:University of Warwick, B.A., 2006, M.A., 2007, Ph.D., 2011.
ADDRESS
CAREER
University of Warwick, Institute of Advanced Study, research fellow, 2012-15; University of Cagliari, Sardinia, visiting lecturer, 2013; Newcastle University, School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, teaching fellow, 2015-16; University of Surrey, School of English and Languages, lecturer, 2016-,
Supervises students at the undergraduate, master’s, and Ph.D. levels. Has worked as online and social media administrator for Warwick Words Festival of Spoken Word. Has organized symposia and seminars and delivered papers at numerous conferences.
AWARDS:Doctoral Award, Arts and Humanities Research Council, 2007-2010; Doctoral Fellowship Award, Humanities Research Centre, University of Warwick, 2008-09; Graduate Scholarship, British Women Writers Association (USA), 2010; Early Career Fellowship, University of Warwick Institute of Advanced Study, 2011; Roberts Funding Award, University of Warwick, 2011; Roberts Funding Award, University of Warwick Institute of Advanced Study, 2011; Global Research Priority Award, University of Warwick, 2012-14; Humanities Research Centre Conference Award, 2014; Arts Faculty Conference Award, 2014; Research Network Award, University of Warwick, Institute of Advanced Study, 2012-15.
WRITINGS
Has contributed chapters to books, including Shakespeare on the Global Stage: Performance and Festivity in the Olympic Year, edited by Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan, Arden/Bloomsbury (London, England), 2015; Transport in British Fiction: Technologies of Movement, 1840-1940, edited by Adrienne Gavin and Andrew Humphries, Palgrave Macmillan (London, England), 2015; Britain and the Narration of Travel in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Kate Hill, Ashgate (Farnham, England), 2016. Has written articles for journals, including Journal of International Women’s Studies and Victorian Network.
Coeditor of the series “Palgrave Studies in Mobilities, Literature and Culture.” Author of a blog.
SIDELIGHTS
Charlotte Mathieson was born on July 1, 1985. She attended the University of Warwick, where she earned a B.A. in English and American literature in 2006, an M.A. in English literature in 2007, and a Ph.D. in English literature in 2011. Her thesis focused on transit and mobility in nineteenth-century novels, topics that she has made the focus of her research and writing, especially as they appear in the works of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charlotte Brontë. She participates in the Travel and Mobility Studies Network—an interdisciplinary project that draws in scholars working on travel and mobility studies in a variety of disciplines.
Mathieson began her career as a research fellow at the University of Warwick, Institute of Advanced Study, from 2012 to 2015. She then went to the University of Cagliari, Sardinia, as visiting lecturer in 2013. In 2015, she became a teaching fellow at Newcastle University, School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics. In 2016 she took a position with the University of Surrey, School of English and Languages, where she is a lecturer in nineteenth-century English literature. She is also chair of the Feminist and Women’s Studies Association UK and Ireland and series coeditor for “Palgrave Studies in Mobilities, Literature and Culture.”
Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840-1920
With Gemma Goodman, Mathieson coedited, in 2014, Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840-1920, an interdisciplinary collection of essays from scholars of history, geography, and literature exploring the ways in which rural life was represented in the nineteenth century.
Josephine McDonagh, reviewing the book at the Victorian Studies Web site, pronounced that its “most valuable contribution is its treatment of a number of writers and works rarely discussed in recent scholarship.” She also called attention to “the focus on gender,” which “highlights another theme that emerges in the volume: the ways in which rural scenes are a backdrop to moments of transcendence or freedom in the works of some women writers.” All in all, she found that the joint focus on gender and space “yields some intriguing insights.”
Mobility in the Victorian Novel and Sea Narratives
In 2015, Mathieson published Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation. Writing in Choice, N. Birns explained that the book looks at nineteenth-century British novels through the lens of travel—by walking, taking trains, and other modes—which “rends traditional assumptions of organic belonging but also accelerates conceptual national unity.” Birns called the book “informative and helpful.” In Open Letters Monthly, critic Sara Malton reported that Mathieson’s book studies the “connection between national identity and the increasing individual mobility made possible by the expansion of modes of travel in the Victorian period—a process that she terms ‘placing the nation.’” Malton faulted her difficulty in “maintaining the connection between these strands of inquiry throughout her study” and pronounced that “the result is an overall lack of argumentative coherence.” Still, she noted that the “book’s claims become most fulsome and compelling” in the third chapter, with the “discussion of . . . characters’ travels to Italy and the idea of the foreign tour. Here the author writes clearly and effectively about the appeal of the Continent for British travellers.”
Mathieson served as editor of Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600-Present, published in 2014. The collection took shape out of a symposium on the topic held at the University of Warwick. As she describes it at her Web site, the collection takes stories of the sea to examine the relationship between the sea and culture through “letters, diaries, films, newspapers, novels, poems, plays, scientific and political documents, material artefacts and travel writing . . . through cultures, across historical periods.” Writing at the New Books Network, David O’Brien called the essays “eclectic, but unified” and termed each “fascinating in its own right.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, Volume 53, number 8, 2016, N. Birns, review of Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation, p. 1167.
Victorian Studies, 2016, Josephine McDonagh, review of Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920, pp. 383-385.
ONLINE
Charlotte Mathiesen Home Page, https://charlottemathieson.wordpress.com/ (March 21, 2017).
Open Letters Monthly, http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/how-we-got-from-there-to-here/ (June 1, 2016), Sara Malton, “How We Got from There to Here.”
New Books Network, http://newbooksnetwork.com/ (October 27, 2016), Dave O’Brien, review of Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600-Present.
University of Surrey Web site, http://www.surrey.ac.uk/ (March 21, 2017), author profile.*
RESEARCH
I research travel and mobility in nineteenth century literature, with a particular interest in ideas of nation, global space, and the travelling body. I look at the works of authors including Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Charlotte Brontë, and work with ideas from cultural and feminist geography, travel and mobility studies, and nineteenth-century cultural studies.
Current projects:
Sunburn and tanning in Victorian medicine and culture
I am currently developing a new project on sunburn and tanning in Victorian medicine and culture: I have blogged further about this here.
Relevant work
“‘A brown sunburnt gentleman’: Masculinity and the Travelling Body in Dickens’s Bleak House.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 36.4 (September 2014): 323-334.
Book section on Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford in Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation.
Mobility and the Great Exhibition
“All the world going to see the Great Exhibition”, by Henry Cruikshank
I am currently researching a transport history of the Great Exhibition of 1851, exploring the movement of people and things to the Crystal Palace, and the impact upon the meaning of mobility in this era. I am blogging about this work in a series on “writing a transport history of the Great Exhibition.“
Relevant work
“This moving panorama of life”: Re-inserting transport into the history of the Great Exhibition
Blog posts on the Great Exhibition of 1851
Past projects
Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600-present
The edited collection Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600-present was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016.
51hwpAP6j5L._SX352_BO1,204,203,200_The book explores the relationship between the sea and culture from the early modern period to the present. The collection uses the concept of the ‘sea narrative’ as a lens through which to consider the multiple ways in which the sea has shaped, challenged, and expanded modes of cultural representation to produce varied, contested and provocative chronicles of the sea across a variety of cultural forms within diverse socio-cultural moments. Sea Narratives provides a unique perspective on the relationship between the sea and cultural production: it reveals the sea to be more than simply a source of creative inspiration, instead showing how the sea has had a demonstrable effect on new modes and forms of narration across the cultural sphere, and in turn, how these forms have been essential in shaping socio-cultural understandings of the sea. The result is an incisive exploration of the sea’s force as a cultural presence.
Mobility in the Victorian Novel
My monograph Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation was published by Palgrave Macmillan, September 2015.
The book examines the book coversignificance of journeys in the mid-nineteenth century English novel, including Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855-7), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Villette (1853), George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848).
Travel is present in many and varied forms throughout these texts: walking, carriage and railway journeys within England, across Europe, and into the world beyond reflect the growing expansion of travel possibilities in the mid-century period. I identify how these journeys are significant to the structure and thematic concerns of the novel, providing crucial sites through which novels contend with the idea of national place in a changing global landscape.
Related work
Article: “‘A moving and a moving on’: Mobility, Space and the Nation in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House.”English (Winter 2012) 61(235): 395-405.
Book chapter: “‘A perambulating mass of woollen goods’: Bodies in transit in the mid-nineteenth century railway journey.” Transport in British Fiction: Technologies of Movement, 1840-1940, ed. Adrienne Gavin and Andrew Humphries. [Palgrave Macmillan 2015].
Book chapter: “‘The Formation of a Surface’: Europe in Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit.” Britain and the Narration of Travel in the 19th Century, ed. Kate Hill. [Ashgate 2016].
Gender and Space in Rural Britain
Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840-1920, which I co-edited with Gemma Goodman, was published by Pickering and Chatto in March 2014.
The collection explores the relationship between gender and space in rural environments, re-situating the rural as a vital context for understanding the meanings of gender and space in this period and within a British context. Bringing together scholars from different disciplinary perspectives, the collection aims to understand the diverse experiences of gendered rural spaces, and contributes to discussions about theoretical approaches to the space-gender intersection.
Contributors look at rural spaces including farms, coasts, fens, countryside, and gardens, in fictional and non-fictional accounts from authors across the long Victorian period.
Review in Victorian Studies 58.2 (Winter 2016).
Related work
“”Wandering Like a Wild Thing’: Rurality, Women and Walking in George Eliot’s Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss” in Gender and Space in Rural Britain 1840-1920, pp. 87-102.
On this blog, see my posts on rurality.
Literary Tourism – Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë
Buckingham Street, London
Buckingham Street, London
In this line of research, I am exploring the contemporary legacies of Victorian authors in relation to place and mobility in the present day. This has taken the focus of two authors:
Dickens 2012: I have presented several papers and written a number of online pieces about the literary tourism legacy in the year of Dickens’s bicentenary.
Published work on this includes the essay “A Tale of Two Londons: Locating Shakespeare and Dickens in 2012” (co-written with Peter Kirwan), in Shakespeare on the Global Stage: Performance and Festivity in the Olympic Year ed. Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan. On this blog, see my Dickens 2012 pieces and my public engagement work.
Charlotte Brontë: my latest work has begun to explore Charlotte Brontë’s legacy of place in Brussels. I am writing an essay titled “Brontë countries: nation, gender and place in the literary landscapes of Haworth and Brussels” for a collection on Charlotte Brontë’s afterlives. On this blog, see my Brontë pieces and my discussion piece on Brontë for JVC online.
Relevant work
“A Tale of Two Londons: Locating Shakespeare and Dickens in 2012” (co-written with Dr Peter Kirwan). Shakespeare on the Global Stage: Performance and Festivity in the Olympic Year ed. Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan. [Arden/Bloomsbury, 2015].
Forthcoming chapter: “Brontë countries: nation, gender and placein the literary landscapes of Haworth and Brussels” in Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and Afterlives, ed. Amber K. Regis and Deborah Wynne (Manchester University Press, 2016).
Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture
Lynn Shepherd, Tom-All-Alone's
Lynn Shepherd, Tom-All-Alone’s
I am developing new work on themes of mobility, place and the past in neo-Victorian literature and culture, exploring the continuities between literary tourism and literary spaces.
The first of these pieces draws on my work into Dickens literary tourism , titled “Locating the Victorians: mobility, place and the past in neo-Victorian culture”, for a collection on re-visioning the Victorians.
In a second piece, I am writing about the resonances between literary tourism and neo-Victorian fiction, in an essay on Lynn Shepherd’s novel Tom-All-Alone’s (2012) titled “Walking the Victorian city: Space and mobility in Lynn Shepherd’s Tom-All-Alone’s” for a collection on neo-Victorian cultures.
ABOUT ME
At a glance
I am Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century English Literature in the School of English and Languages at the University of Surrey. I specialise in Victorian literature and culture, and have published on travel and mobility in the mid-nineteenth century novel, focusing on authors including Dickens, Eliot, Gaskell and Charlotte Bronte.
I am Chair of the Feminist and Women’s Studies Association UK & Ireland.
I am co-editor of the series Palgrave Studies in Mobilities, Literature and Culture and currently co-organising the Mobilities, Literature, Culture conference at Lancaster in April 2017.
I co-convene the Transport and Mobility History Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, London.
I previously worked as a Research Fellow at Warwick’s Institute of Advanced Study (2012-15), and as a Teaching Fellow in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University (2015-16). I gained my PhD in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick in 2011, where I previously completed my MA in 2007 and BA (Hons) in 2006.
More about my past work can be found below.
Education & Qualifications
Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick
PhD in English Literature, October 2007 – November 2010 (awarded March 2011). Thesis: “Bodies in Transit: Mobility, Embodiment and Space in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Novel.” Supervised by Dr Gill Frith and Dr Pablo Mukherjee; funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (2007-2010).
MA in English Literature, October 2006 – September 2007. Awarded with Distinction.
BA in English and American Literature, September 2003 – June 2006. Awarded with First Class Honours.
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Publications
Books
Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600-present. Ed. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Gender and Space in Rural Britain 1840-1920. Ed. Gemma Goodman and Charlotte Mathieson. Pickering and Chatto, 2014.
Peer-reviewed articles
“‘A brown sunburnt gentleman’: Masculinity and the Travelling Body in Dickens’s Bleak House.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 36.4 (September 2014): 323-334.
“‘A moving and a moving on’: Mobility, Space and the Nation in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House.” English (Winter 2012) 61(235): 395-405.
Book chapters
“Brontë countries: nation, gender and place in the literary landscapes of Haworth and Brussels.” Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and Afterlives, ed. Amber K. Regis and Deborah Wynne. Manchester University Press, 2016. (forthcoming)
“‘The Formation of a Surface’: Europe in Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit.” Britain and the Narration of Travel in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Kate Hill. Ashgate, 2016.
“‘A perambulating mass of woollen goods’: Bodies in transit in the mid-nineteenth century railway journey.” Transport in British Fiction: Technologies of Movement, 1840-1940, ed. Adrienne Gavin and Andrew Humphries. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
“A Tale of Two Londons: Locating Shakespeare and Dickens in 2012” (co-written with Dr Peter Kirwan). Shakespeare on the Global Stage: Performance and Festivity in the Olympic Year ed. Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan. Arden/Bloomsbury, 2015.
“Wandering like a wild thing: Rural mobility in George Eliot’s Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss.” Gender and Space in Rural Britain 1840-1920. Ed. Gemma Goodman and Charlotte Mathieson. Pickering and Chatto, 2014, pp. 87-102.
Journal editions
“New Writings in Feminist Studies: Winning and Shortlisted Entries from the 2015 FWSA Student Essay Competition.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 17.2 (February 2016).
“Sex, Courtship and Marriage in Victorian Literature and Culture” Victorian Network 4.2 (Winter 2012). Guest editor: introduction, pp. 1-9.
Book reviews (journals)
The Brontë Sisters In Other Wor(l)ds by Shouhua Qi and Jacqueline Padgett. Victorian Studies 58.4 (Summer 2016): 751-753.
British Settler Emigration in Print, 1832–1877 by Jude Piesse. Literature & History 25.2 (November 2016)
The Reception of Charles Dickens in Europe, by Michael Hollington. Victoriographies 4.2 (November 2014).
Victorian Women and the Economies of Travel, Translation and Culture, 1830-1870 by Juliet Johnston. Studies in Travel Writing 18.1 (March 2014).
George Eliot in Society: Travel Abroad and Sundays at the Priory, by Kathleen McCormack. Studies in Travel Writing 18.1 (March 2014).
Eaton Stannard Barrett’s The Heroine, Mrs Costello’s The Soldier’s Orphan: A Tale, and Sarah Green’s, Romance Readers and Romance Writers. BARS Bulletin & Review (39, December 2011): 22-23.
Routledge Annotated Bibliography of English Studies contributor (19th century section, ed. Johanna M. Smith), 2009-2012.
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Work in preparation
“‘What Connection can there be?’ Objects, People and Place in Henry Mayhew’s 1851: or, the Adventures of Mr and Mrs Sandboys.”
“Walking the Victorian city: Space and mobility in Lynn Shepherd’s Tom-All-Alone’s.”
“Locating the Victorians: mobility, place and the past in neo-Victorian culture.”
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Online Publications
For podcasts, blogs, online articles, book reviews and more see blogging.
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Awards and Fellowships
Research Network Award (£400/year), University of Warwick Institute of Advanced Study, 2012-15
Awarded for Travel and Mobility Research Network
Global Research Priority Award, 2012-14 (£500/year)
Awarded for ‘Contact and Connections’ (2013) and ‘Travelling between the Centre and Periphery: Creating a Feminist Dialogue for the Diaspora’ (2014) conferences by the Connecting Cultures Global Research Priority programme, University of Warwick.
Humanities Research Centre conference award, 2014 (£500)
Awarded for ‘Travelling between the Centre and Periphery: Creating a Feminist Dialogue for the Diaspora’ (2014) conference.
Arts Faculty Conference award, 2014 (£250)
Awarded for ‘Travelling between the Centre and Periphery: Creating a Feminist Dialogue for the Diaspora’ (2014) conference.
Roberts Funding Award (£1000), University of Warwick Institute of Advanced Study, September 2011
Awarded for organisation of the symposium Rural Geographies of Gender and Space: Britain 1840-1920
Roberts Funding Award (£500), University of Warwick, July 2011
For presentation at Travel in the 19th Century, University of Lincoln.
Early Career Fellowship, University of Warwick Institute of Advanced Study, April – September 2011
6-month award (£3400) at the Institute of Advanced Study for the advance of interdisciplinary work and career development.
Graduate Scholarship ($300), 18th-19th Century British Women Writers Association (USA), April 2010
Awarded for paper presentation at annual conference.
Doctoral Fellowship Award, Humanities Research Centre (University of Warwick), 2008-09
Awarded for organisation of conference Women Writing Space: Gender and Space in post-1850 British Women’s Writing.
Doctoral Award, Arts and Humanities Research Council, 2007-2010
PhD funded for the duration of study.
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Teaching
School of English, University of Surrey (2016-present)
In 2016-17 I am teaching on the modules Theories of Reading, History of English Literature (year 1), Romantic Literature, and Radical Subjectivities (year 2).
I supervise at undergraduate, masters, and PhD level.
I am Professional Training Year tutor for English and Creative Writing.
School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, University of Newcastle (2015-16)
SEL1030: Approaches to Reading (stage 1)
SEL2207 Modernisms (stage 2)
SEL2204: Victorian Passions, Victorian Values (stage 2)
Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick (2008-15)
The English Nineteenth-Century Novel (Honours level undergraduate, 2011- 2013)
Teaching responsibilities for 3 lecture-seminar groups on The English Nineteenth-Century Novel (honours-level undergraduate); see also my teaching blog for this module.
Modes of Reading (1st year undergraduate; 2008-09, 2010-11, 2011-12)
Seminar tutor for 2 classes of 10 students. I have a teaching blog for my classes.
The European Novel (Honours-level undergraduate; 2010-11)
Seminar tutor for 2 classes of 10 students.
Lecturer, “Nation and Narration in Great Expectations” (2012-present)
Sexual Geographies: Gender and Place in British Fiction, 1840-1940 (MA module; 2014-15)
Lecturer on “Gendering the Nation in Villette” and “Wandering Women: The Mill on the Floss“.
Academic Writing Programme, University of Warwick
Professional Skills for Computer Science (1st-year undergraduate, 2011-12)
2 hour lecture-seminars on academic writing and communication skills.
Communicating Science (Department of Physics, Honours-level undergraduate; 2009-12)
2 hour lecture-seminars on academic writing and communication skills.
MSc Dissertation Tuition (Warwick Manufacturing Group; 2007-2012)
1-1 academic writing sessions.
MSc in Accounting and Finance (Warwick Business School, 2011-12)
Lecturer and academic writing tutor.
Undergraduate Academic Writing Mentor, Student Careers and Skills Service (January – June 2011)
1-1 consultancies on academic writing for undergraduate students across all disciplines.
University of Cagliari, Sardinia
Visiting lecturer (April 2013) on the Masters’ programme module Dickens and London: 2-hour research seminars on “The nation in Bleak House” and “Dickens and Europe in Little Dorrit”.
Teaching Qualifications
Postgraduate Award Introduction to Academic and Professional Practice (parts 1 and 2), University of Warwick Learning and Development Centre (awarded January 2012)
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Professional service
Palgrave Studies in Mobilities, Literature and Culture
Series co-editor; 2016-present.
Feminist and Women’s Studies Association
Chair; 2016- present; Executive Committee, Essay Competition Officer; 2014-16.
Arts and Humanities Research Council
Research Careers and Training Advisory Group (RCTAG) member, 2012-present.
***
Other work experience
Warwick Words Festival of Spoken Word; September 2012.
Online and social media administrator.
Early Career Researcher project officer, Wolfson Research Exchange (June 2011 – July 2012)
Position supporting interdisciplinary and collaborative research practice for early career researchers at the University of Warwick: maintaining a university-wide network of ECRs, editing a collaborative blogging project, and providing ECR support around the REF 2014, including running skills training and workshops. For outputs of this work see ECR pages above.
Research Assistant (June 2011)
Working for Professor Jackie Labbe under an IAS Capacity Building Award to prepare an AHRC Research Networking Grant application.
Postgraduate Staff-Student Liaison Committee (2007-10)
Chair (2008-09) and PhD representative.
Academic mentor (2006-08)
Mentoring an English literature undergraduate student with learning difficulties.
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Public engagement
See my public engagement page.
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Conference Papers
See my talks page.
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Events Organised
The Future of Interdisciplinary Research (The Shard/University of Warwick, May 2015)
Travelling between the Centre and Periphery: Creating a Feminist Dialogue for the Diaspora (University of Warwick, July 2014)
Symposium funded by the IAS, Humanities Research Centre, and Arts Faculty; keynote speaker Professor Miriam Cooke.
Sea Narratives symposium, Travel and Mobility Studies Network (University of Warwick, January 2014)
Symposium funded by the IAS Network.
Contact and Connections, Travel and Mobility Studies Symposium (University of Warwick, June 2013)
Symposium funded by the IAS and Global Research Priority funding; keynote Tim Youngs.
Rural Geographies of Gender and Space, Britain 1840-1920 (September 2011, University of Warwick)
Interdisciplinary symposium funded by Roberts award and IAS Early Career Fellowship; keynote speaker Professor Jo Little.
Faculty of Arts Early Career Researchers’ Group (2011-12)
Research and professional development seminars for post-doctoral researchers.
Women Writing Space: Representations of Gender and Space in post-1850 British Women’s Writing (Mach 2009 University of Warwick)
One-day conference funded by Humanities Research Centre Doctoral Fellowship Award. keynote speakers Dr Lynne Walker and Rosa Ainley.
Arts Faculty Postgraduate Seminar Series (2008-09)
Interdisciplinary seminar series for postgraduate research students.
English Department Postgraduate Symposium (2008)
Symposium for PhD students and academics in the English Department.
***
Creative Commons Licence
Dr Charlotte Mathieson by Charlotte Mathieson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at charlotte.mathieson@ncl.ac.uk
Dr Charlotte Mathieson
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BIOGRAPHY
Lecturer in English Literature
Publications
I joined Surrey in 2016 as Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century English Literature. I previously worked as a Teaching Fellow in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University (2015-16) and Research Fellow at Warwick’s Institute of Advanced Study (2012-15). I gained my PhD in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick in 2011.
I specialise in Victorian literature and culture, with an interest in travel and mobility in the mid-nineteenth century novel, focusing on authors including Dickens, Eliot, Gaskell and Charlotte Bronte. My publications include a monograph, Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and two edited collections, Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600-present
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840-1920 (Pickering and Chatto, 2014). I am co-editor of Palgrave Studies in Mobilities, Literature and Culture, and Chair of the Feminist and Women’s Studies Association UK & Ireland (2016-19).
RESEARCH INTERESTS
My research interests include
Victorian fiction
Travel literature
Mobilities studies
Cultural geographies
Gender and feminist theory
Medical humanities
Neo-Victorian fiction
Teaching
In 2016-17 I am teaching :
ELI1010: Theories of Reading I (convenor)
ELI1022: History of English Literature II (convenor)
ELI2031: Romantic Literature 1789-1830 (convenor)
ELI2024: Radical Subjectivities
Departmental Duties
Professional Training Year liaison tutor
CONTACT ME
E-mail: c.mathieson@surrey.ac.uk
Phone: 01483 68 9756
Find me on campus
Room: 41 AC 05
My office hours
Tuesday 9-11 am,
Friday 11-12pm
PUBLICATIONS
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Journal articles
Mathieson CE, Olowookere K. (2016) 'Introduction: New Writings in Feminist Studies'. Bridgewater State College Journal of International Women’s Studies, 17 (2), pp. 1-4.
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Mathieson CE. (2014) 'The Reception of Charles Dickens in Europe, by Michael Hollington (ed). (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 2 vols. 978-1847060969'. Edinburgh University Press Victoriographies, 4 (2), pp. 191-195.
doi: 10.3366/vic.2014.0175
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Mathieson CE. (2014) ''A brown sunburnt gentleman’: Masculinity and the Travelling Body in Dickens’s Bleak House'. Taylor & Francis Nineteenth-Century Contexts: an interdisciplinary journal, 36 (4), pp. 323-334.
doi: 10.1080/08905495.2014.954421
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Mathieson CE. (2014) 'George Eliot in Society: Travel Abroad and Sundays at the Priory, by Kathleen McCormack.'. Taylor & Francis Studies in Travel Writing, 18 (1), pp. 90-92.
doi: 10.1080/13645145.2013.879763
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Mathieson CE. (2014) 'Victorian Women and the Economies of Travel, Translation and Culture, 1830-1870, by Juliet Johnston. Ashgate ISBN 978-1-4094-4823-5'. Taylor &Francis Studies in Travel Writing, 18 (1), pp. 88-90.
doi: 10.1080/13645145.2013.877227
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Mathieson CE. (2012) ''A moving and a moving on’: Mobility, Space and the Nation in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House'. Oxford University Press English, 61 (235), pp. 395-405.
doi: 10.1093/english/efs043
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Mathieson CE. (2012) 'Introduction: Sex, Courtship and Marriage in Victorian Literature and Culture'. Victorian Network Victorian Network, 4 (2), pp. 1-9.
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Books
Mathieson C. (2016) Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600–Present. Springer , pp. 1-21.
Repository URL: http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/811796/
Abstract
BOOK (AUTHORED & EDITED)
Mathieson C. (2015) Mobility in the Victorian Novel Placing the Nation. Springer
BOOK (AUTHORED & EDITED)
Mathieson C, Goodman G. (2014) Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920. Pickering and Chatto
BOOK (AUTHORED & EDITED)
Book chapters
Mathieson CE. (2016) 'Introduction: The Literature, History and Culture of the Sea, 1600–Present'. in (ed.) Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600–Present Palgrave Macmillan Article number Introduction , pp. 1-21.
doi: 10.1057/978-1-137-58116-7_1
CHAPTER
Mathieson CE. (2016) 'Brontë countries: nation, gender and place in the literary landscapes of Haworth and Brussels'. in Regis AK, Wynne D (eds.) Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and Afterlives Manchester University Press
[ Status: In preparation ]
CHAPTER
Mathieson CE. (2015) '‘The Formation of a Surface’: Europe in Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit.''. in Hill K (ed.) Britain and the Narration of Travel in the Nineteenth Century Routledge
CHAPTER
Mathieson CE, Kirwan P. (2015) 'A Tale of Two Londons: Locating Shakespeare and Dickens in 2012'. in Prescott P, Sullivan E (eds.) Shakespeare on the Global Stage: Performance and Festivity in the Olympic Year 1st Edition. Bloomsbury Article number 9
CHAPTER
Mathieson CE. (2015) 'A perambulating mass of woollen goods’: Bodies in transit in the mid-19th century railway journey'. in Gavin A, Humphries A (eds.) Transport in British Fiction: Technologies of Movement 1840-1940 Palgrave Macmillan Article number 2 , pp. 44-56.
CHAPTER
Mathieson CE. (2014) ''Wandering like a wild thing’: Rurality Women and Walking in George Eliot’s Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss'. in Mathieson C, Goodman G (eds.) Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840-1920 Routledge 3 Article number 6
Dr Charlotte Mathieson
I am a Research Fellow in the Institute of Advanced Study and teach in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies. I completed my PhD in November 2010, and successfully passed my viva in March 2011. Details of my PhD research can be found here.
*Please note this site is no longer being updated with my current research; my new website and blog contain full information on research and other activities.*
Teaching 2012-13
EN245 The English Nineteenth-Century Novel
Teaching blog
Teaching times:
Monday: 9.30-11am; 12-1.30pm; 3-4.30pm
Office hour:
Monday 2-3pm, H521
Previous teaching
Full details of my previous teaching experience can be found on my CV.
Charlotte Mathieson
Mathieson
Dr Charlotte Mathieson is an Associate Fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, and also works as an Early Career Researcher Project Office in the Wolfson Research Exchange. She blogs about her research and edits Researcher Life: the Early Career Researcher Experience, where this post first appeared.
Creating an online identity as a researcher
Posted on 15 July, 2016 by Crabtree
Charlotte Mathieson
Charlotte Mathieson offers some useful and practical tips on how to develop and manage your digital identity.
Earlier this year I spoke to NU Women about my experience of creating a digital identity as a researcher, and in this post I outline some of the key points of my talk. Since I started my PhD at the University of Warwick in 2007 digital tools have been essential to my practice as an academic, and especially useful to me in navigating the post-PhD years as an early career researcher.
Getting started
I started blogging as a PhD student in 2007 on the University of Warwick’s Warwick Blogs platform, using my blog to write about my research from new angles, engage with relevant news and current affairs, and to reflect upon conferences and events I’d attended. An institutional platform such as Warwick blogs provides a good starting point to build up an online presence: the institutional stamp helps to give credibility and provides an established community of colleagues and students to read and respond to posts; institutional sites will also perform highly in search rankings, thereby helping to promote your work.
As I developed from PhD to ECR, my needs for blogging evolved and I moved to a new WordPress site soon after I finished my PhD. This move coincided with wanting to establish more of an independent identity as a post-PhD researcher, and also reflected my anticipation of institutional mobility as an early career scholar: I have moved jobs twice in the last year and having most of my online content on an independent site reduces the need for transferring my digital presence each time. This also allowed me to expand my online presence beyond the blog: WordPress sites can be as simple or as complex as you want but essentially have most of the functionality of a website, and a lot of flexibility in terms of layout and content design. This has allowed me to build the site into an online portfolio of my academic life – I have separate pages dedicated to research, teaching, and early career researcher activity – alongside the blog itself.
Charlotte blog
Charlotte’s research blog
I have also blogged for a number of other sites, which has helped to further increase my online visibility. These sites – such as the Journal of Victorian Culture Online, and Feminist and Women’s Studies Association blog – all have institutional or academic association connections; this ensures professionalism and credibility, while expanding my networks of contacts both within the UK and internationally.
Social media
Social media has also been instrumental in online networking and expanding my digital presence. Twitter has been the most useful of these sites, bringing me into contact with a huge online academic community of scholars in my field, peers across disciplines, and institutional and academic associations. Using various hashtags I connect with cross-disciplinary groups such as #ecrchat (early career researcher chat) and #acwri (academic writing support), and with colleagues in my field through #twitterstorians, #maritimestudies and others.
There is a great deal of fluidity between on- and off-line networks and Twitter not only brings me into contact with new people, the majority of whom I would never meet otherwise, but also allows me to maintain connections with people I meet at conferences. It’s also a highly useful source of academic news and information about events and publications, allows for crowd-sourcing answers to research questions, and the increasing use of conference hashtags provides a way to follow the conversations of many more events than I could possibly attend in person (this has been especially useful as a time- and money-poor ECR).
Other social media sites such as Facebook are also increasingly instrumental in connecting with colleagues and associations, while sites such as academia.edu, LinkedIn and ResearchGate provide professional social networking opportunities. The relevance and use of these varies substantially across disciplines, so it is worth checking out a few to see which best serves your interests.
The benefits of an institutional homepage also shouldn’t be forgotten, as this will rank highly on search engines and will likely be the first port-of-call for anyone searching for you online. Although it can take a little time to maintain, it is worth investing in an up-to-date profile populated with key information; it is not only frustrating to search for someone online only to find that the information is several years out of date, but could also lead to being overlooked for opportunities (the statistics of my blog reveal that a good number of hits come from people searching for colleagues with whom I’ve worked who don’t have a digital presence of their own).
Managing your digital identity (c) Can Stock Photo Inc. / cienpies
Tips and tricks
Across these sites I follow a few key rules:
I make sure to cross-link the sites to one another, so it is easy for someone landing on one page to reach the site they need to;
I am consistent in use of profile pictures across sites, to give coherence and again, make it easy to identify my pages;
I regularly update each site to ensure that anyone looking at my profile can find the information they are after.
Be aware
There are challenges in maintaining a digital identity and online visibility brings risks. With social media in particular, the boundaries between personal and professional identities, and how much of the personal appears online, is an individual decision, but it is key to keep in mind the way in which your online presence is perceived by others and remember that anyone, anywhere can view your profile; tweets in particular are at risk of being read out of context. Time is also a big factor, especially the start-up time of creating a blog or building up a Twitter following; this needn’t be overly complicated though if you focus on starting with a small and simple presence, and once you are up and running there are ways to minimise the time taken to maintain different online profiles – a little and often approach works well, and I have gradually streamlined how many sites I populate with full content, instead directing traffic to my website.
For me, the time investment is easily off-set by the benefits of a digital presence. I have vastly expanded my network of contacts in the field, and had many useful opportunities and collaborations come about as a result (this co-written chapter started as a Twitter conversation). It’s also an effective way to boost the visibility of your publications and engage in conversations about your work: my latest book has been building up steady interest across social media for several months prior to publication thanks to a host of tweeting contributors, which has not only helped to promote the work but also given me useful insights into who will be reading it and how it will be valuable to them (on this note, see also this study of whether tweeting about a journal paper boosts academic citations).
Useful resources
If you’re looking to get started in establishing a digital presence then the following resources provide a good way in:
Using Twitter in University Research, Teaching, and Impact Activities from LSE
Social Media for Academics, Mark Carrigan (Sage, 2016)
Follow the Leaders: the best social media accounts for academics, Guardian Higher Education Network
About Charlotte
Charlotte is a Teaching Fellow in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, where she researches and teaches Victorian to Modernist literature. Prior to this Charlotte was at the University of Warwick, where she did her PhD in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies from 2007-2010 and then held a position as Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study from 2012-15, working on public engagement and early career researcher programmes alongside developing her research.
Charlotte Mathieson
Teaching Fellow at Newcastle University
Newcastle upon Tyne, United KingdomHigher Education
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Newcastle University
Previous
University of Warwick
Education
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Experience
Newcastle University
Teaching Fellow
Newcastle University
September 2015 – Present (1 year 7 months)
University of Warwick
Research Fellow
University of Warwick
October 2012 – 2015 (3 years)
Education
University of Warwick
University of Warwick
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), English literature
Introduction: New Writings in Feminist Studies
Charlotte Mathieson
Kehinde Olowookere
Note on the Author
Dr. Charlotte Mathieson is a Teaching Fellow in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University. She has been on the FWSA executive committee as Essay Competition officer since 2014. Her research focuses on themes of mobility, space and gender in Victorian literature, and her publications include Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
Kehinde Olowookere is a research student in the School of Management and Languages at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. She holds an MSc in International Human Resource Management from Sheffield Hallam University. Her current research investigates the management and experiences of Mental Health Conditions within the workplace, with particular focus on how difference is constructed within normative organizational contexts. Her research interests include the management of diversity in the workplace and identity construction at work.
Recommended Citation
Mathieson, Charlotte and Olowookere, Kehinde (2016). Introduction: New Writings in Feminist Studies. Journal of International Women's Studies, 17(2), 1-4.
Available at: http://vc.bridgew.edu/jiws/vol17/iss2/1
am an early career academic recently appointed as Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century English
Literature at the University of Surrey. Prior to this I worked as Teaching Fellow in the School of
English at Newcastle University (2015-16), and Research Fellow at the University of Warwick
(2012-15), where I completed my PhD in the Department of English and Comparative Literary
Studies in 2011. My work is grounded in feminist approaches to travel and mobility in Victorian
literature and culture, with publications including Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Alongside teaching and research I have substantial experience in
supporting early career researchers, which has given me a strong working knowledge of the wider
context of contemporary higher education in which the Feminist and Women’s Studies Association
operates. As an FWSA member since 2007 and having served on the Executive Committee since
2014 as Essay Competition Officer, I would be delighted to develop my longstanding connection
with the Association in the position of Chair. I am strongly committed to the mission and ethos of
the FWSA, and through my experience of working on the Executive Committee I have gained a
detailed understanding of the key priorities which will inform my vision and strategy as Chair.
My primary mission will be to strengthen connections within and beyond the FWSA to ensure a
strong, sustainable future for the Association. I will advance this by:
Developing relationships with institutional centres and related associations in order to
more firmly embed our position within the UK Higher Education landscape. The FWSA
benefits from a wide network of contacts across the UK and I will seek to further consolidate
this through more concrete collaborations with feminist centres, associations and journals; I
have approached the editorial board of Feminist Theory, for example, to discuss collaborating
on future lectures and workshops. I will make it a key priority to identify and pursue
opportunities for financial support to sustain and grow the FWSA’s work.
Strengthening cross-generational links within the Association to support scholars at
all career stages. Our work in supporting early career academics is of paramount importance
to the FWSA and I would like to supplement this by developing greater provision for feminist
academics as they progress in their careers, particularly through schemes that facilitate
network-building and resource-sharing among our membership. To this end I propose to
establish an FWSA mentoring network which will enable academics at all career stages to
benefit from the knowledge and experience of those more senior to them, while fostering a
supportive cross-generational community of feminist academics within the FWSA.
My second priority as Chair will be to balance our provision for research and teaching activities. At
present the FWSA’s focus is largely directed towards research-support initiatives, and I would like
to complement this with greater attention to feminist teaching in UK higher education. I propose:
To develop our support for excellence in feminist teaching. Building on the success of
our research schemes I propose to launch an annual FWSA Teaching Award to reward and
encourage excellence in feminist teaching. I will also develop resources enabling the sharing
of best practice among feminist academics, for example through creating a more prominent
“Feminism in the Classroom” strand on the FWSA blog.
To promote the involvement of undergraduate students in FWSA activities. The FWSA
already supports undergraduates through the annual essay prize, and I will build on this with
schemes that encourage more active participation from students, such as introducing a
dedicated panel for undergraduate and masters students to present at the FWSA conference.
Overall, my objective as Chair will be to develop the FWSA in ways that make best use of its
greatest asset – a dynamic and diverse community of feminist academics – while ensuring that we
are proactive in addressing challenges ahead in order to secure an
Impact, inspiration and interdisciplinarity: interview with Charlotte Mathieson
October 23, 2013 by Jenny Delasalle
Charlotte Mathieson is a Research Fellow with the IAS at the University of Warwick. Her specialism is 19th Century Literature. Interview by Thomasin Bailey, PhD student in English and Comparative Literature.
Art
Why is collaboration important?
For me, collaboration is important for a few key reasons and the main one is interdisciplinarity. Collaboration is the main way that you can get truly interdisciplinary work. It’s a great way of opening up new frameworks in which to articulate your research and to think about the ways in which your research is important, and to potentially expand the reach and impact of your work.
I work in Victorian studies, which means I’m always working between English and History, and perhaps History of Art, or Geography, and other frameworks as well. Working with scholars based in those disciplines is really important for us to understand those different frameworks and methodologies, and also the different historical approaches that we might take. For Arts and Humanities it can be important to go outside that discipline and work with Social Sciences, for example. It’s a really key way to think about cultural impact and cultural values.
Talk about a collaborative project you have been involved in.
One project I’ve been involved in is the Travel and Mobility Studies Network. It’s an interdisciplinary research network that was set up a year ago, and it draws together scholars from across the university, working on travel and mobility studies from different disciplines. It provides a forum for discussion across those disciplines, about the cultural meanings of travel, travel literatures, and other things produced through travel.
What are the benefits of working with others?
It’s a brilliant way to generate new ideas and explore new directions in your research. It’s very inspiring working with someone else because you can constantly bounce ideas off each other. It’s a great way to build networks of contact , especially if you’re working with someone from another discipline, you’ve immediately got a whole new area to explore. It can help you articulate your ideas better as well, particularly if you’re co-writing. You’ve got the kind of rigour you get from peer-review coming in at a much earlier stage because you’re constantly reviewing each other’s work. That can be really beneficial. For early career researchers it can be particularly beneficial because it helps you get through that post PhD lull, perhaps you don’t know what to do next, maybe you’re suffering with time and motivation. Working on a number of collaborative projects in those early days helped me get my inspiration back again.
What are the pitfalls of collaborative work?
I suppose everything has its complementary downside! Sometimes you can have too many ideas. It can be difficult to hone it down and get a good argument. Especially in the Arts and Humanities, where so much of our writing is about argument. It can take time to build up a good working relationship as well, so taking the time to get a really effective partnership is worthwhile. It’s different with everyone you work with and it may take a bit of time to feel your way into how best you’re going to work together. If you’re doing interdisciplinary work then finding a common language can take time.
What is your favourite historical collaboration and why?
Today we think about novels as being very much single-authored, and this one big volume, but of course in the nineteenth century, people like Dickens, Collins, Elliot, were writing often in periodical form or for weekly or monthly journals, so their work would actually appear alongside other types of writing in a very fragmented form. There’s a flavour of collaboration inherent in that because you’re reading your Dickens alongside articles about this that and the other. In Nineteenth Century journals like Household Words you often have co-authored pieces. One particularly interesting relationship was between Charles Dickens and Wilke Collins. It’s not necessarily a model of good collaboration, but it is an example of two strong personalities, and two well-known, literary authors, working together. You get a lot of personal tensions in there as well.
How could a service like Piirus help you?
I think it’s going to be really useful in helping to find collaborators. I think it will be particularly good for finding unexpected collaborators. People you’re perhaps not aware of. To be able to search across different universities and internationally as well to find people you’re perhaps not aware of. I think the international focus is going to especially useful for finding collaborators.
What are you working on at the moment?
At the moment, one of the things I’m trying to develop further is our Travel and Mobility Studies Research Network. This is an expanding network of scholars at the University of Warwick who are interested in travel and mobility studies from all different disciplines. We’ve also got a number of contacts at other universities, and we’re looking at more international collaboration. This will be a particularly good area to be able to use Piirus to help us to identify further collaborators.
The Daily Dose presents: Dr. Charlotte Mathieson and “Traveling Bodies”
Brandy Schillace
4 years ago
DailyDose2Welcome back to the Daily Dose, where humanities get medical and medicine waxes poetic! Today I am pleased to feature an admired colleague, Dr. Charlotte Mathieson. Her first monograph, Journeys in the Victorian Novel: Gendered Mobilities and the Place of the Nation, surprises and delights with its exploration of journeys (of bodies and space) in the mid-nineteenth century English novel (forthcoming Pickering and Chatto, March 2014). Thank you for joining us, Charlotte, and for sharing your thoughts on “traveling bodies”!
Author bio
Dr Charlotte Mathieson is a Research Fellow at the University of Warwick’s Institute of Advanced Study, where she researches and teaches 19th century literature. Her research focuses on journeys in the Victorian novel, with a particular interest in issues of nation, global space, and the traveling body in the works of authors including Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Charlotte Brontë. She is also interested in ideas of mobility and rural geography, the relationship between literature, nation, and place, and contemporary practices of literary tourism. Her first monograph Journeys in the Victorian Novel: Gendered Mobilities and the Place of the Nation is currently in preparation, and she is editing a collection of essays on Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840-1920 (forthcoming). Charlotte blogs at http://charlottemathieson.wordpress.com/ and can be found on Twitter @cemathieson
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Print Marked Items
The Bronte Sisters In Other Wor(l)ds
Charlotte Mathieson
Victorian Studies.
58.4 (Summer 2016): p751.
http://dx.doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.58.4.21
COPYRIGHT 2016 Indiana University Press
http://www.iupress.indiana.edu
Full Text:
The Bronte Sisters In Other Wor(l)ds, edited by Shouhua Qi andJacqueline Padgett; pp. 215. Basingstoke and New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 60.00 [pounds sterling], 57.50 [pounds sterling] paper, $95.00, $90.00 paper.
The critical and cultural reception of the Bronte sisters has received no shortage of scholarly attention in recent years:
numerous adaptations of their works have been produced in cultures across the world, and scholarly criticism on the
reception of the Brontes has generated a wealth of writings from diverse critical contexts. Yfet the focus of this
attention has overwhelmingly been on British, European, and American cultural production, leaving a significant
lacuna in understanding the presence of the Bronte sisters within other global contexts. The Bronte Sisters In Other
Wor(l)ds thus marks a timely, original, and valuable start in situating the Bronte sisters "in other wor(l)dslanguages
and cultures," aiming to "study the migrations of the Brontes' works outside of the more familiar EuroAmerican
haunts" (1). From a transcultural and transnational perspective, the collection moves beyond European and Englishspeaking
worlds to China, the Caribbean, France,Japan, and Mexico to explore resonances of the Brontes' global
afterlives that not only help us to understand their cultural presence in diverse national contexts, but that also open up
new approaches to interpreting the wor(l)ds of the Brontes' texts. As Shouhua Qi and Jacqueline Padgett write,
"viewing the Brontes from other cultural milieux deepens, even changes, our reading and interpretation of their works"
(7).
The introduction to this edited collection is a particularly valuable contribution, undertaking an impressive survey of
the cultural and critical presence of the Brontes' works across the world; it effectively establishes the need for the
present work, and will be of value to the Bronte scholar beginning to explore the sisters' histories within transnational
contexts. It comes as little surprise to the reader to discover that certain themes predominate in this initial survey of
criticism and culture: the focus of global scholarly work on the Brontes has been on Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea
(1966), and in cultural adaptations of Bronte works it is Jane Eyre (1847), and to a lesser extent Wuthering Heights
(1847), that represent the key points of interest across the world. Yet Qi and Padgett reveal a rich vitality of materials
beyond this, from scholarship on the transcultural resonances of the Bronte sisters in such contexts as Puerto Rico,
Canada, and Zimbabwe, to the global cultural afterlives in Sri Lankan television, Indian film, and Chinese ballet, to
name but a few examples.
The essays that follow elucidate these themes, offering nuanced and detailed readings of the ways in which the
Brontes' works have been reimagined within national contexts to take on new and evocative meanings. The works of
the two editors stand as the most impressive and significant of these essays, presenting diverse yet complementary
conceptual approaches to the collection's themes. Qi's essay "No Simple Love: The Literary Fortunes of the Bronte
Sisters in PostMao, MarketDriven China" is a nuanced and attentive sociohistoric exploration of how and why
authors come to matter within cultural contexts. Qi's detailed historical analysis of the reception of the Brontes in
China since the late 1970s persuasively argues for how particular socioeconomic and cultural forces were responsible
for the "extraordinary literary fortune of [Jane Eyre], and indeed of the Bronte sisters in postMao China," and in doing
so neatly elucidates relationships between text, context, and reception in a cogent and insightful analysis (20). Qi's
cataloguing of recent Chinese works inspired by the Bronte canonincluding translations, film and theater productions,
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and academic scholarshipis also highly valuable in positing the contemporaneity of interest in the Brontes; it is clear
that China will offer the opportunity for much further work along similar lines.
Padgett's work on Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Maryse Conde's La Migration des couers (1995), and Richard
Philcox's translation of Conde's Windward Heights (1998) forms a strong conceptual counterpart to Qi's work, turning
from socioeconomic factors to consider the intricacies of translation practice. Exploring the threeway relationship
between Bronte, Conde, and Philcox, Padgett examines the transcultural politics of migration that are entailed in
translation, working with the term metissagethe notion "of hybridity or miscegenation or the mixing of cultures"to
create a beautiful and complex reading which, like the concepts with which she works, constructs a rich theoretical
fabric of ideas and interpretations (76).
While Qi's and Padgett's works establish the conceptual pillars of this book, Kevin Jack Hagopian's essay on Mexican
film marks the meeting point of the two approaches. In another strong chapter, Hagopian reads Luis Bunuel's film
Abismos depasion (1954) through the idea of "transplantation," a process in which source material is uprooted and
relocated in ways that radically reimagine the original text for the receiving culture: Bunuel reads the film as "less an
'adaptation' of Wuthering Heights than an intercultural reworking of the source material to defamiliarize the original
tale's conflicted melodramatic form" (127). His work offers another nuanced consideration of the transcultural politics
of translation and adaptation, but he locates this within the social context in which the film was received, positing how
this version of Wuthering Heights served to critique and reperceive the specific cultural moment of postWorld War II
Mexico in which Bunuel was working.
These evocative, insightful, and original essays carve out fruitful possibilities for further study, yet the rest of the
collection meets up against some limitations. Other works here would do well to undertake more of the illustrative
sociohistoric work of Qi and Hagopian; Saviour Catania's essay on Japanese film, for example, would benefit from
more grounding within its Bronte context; as it stands, it speaks more to the film scholar than the Bronte critic, and its
potential impact in this collection thus falls short. The overall bearing of the collection is limited by the small number
of essays includedsix, two of which are by the editorsand is further restricted by the focus of two essays, which tread
familiar cultural ground. With Suzanne Roszak's chapter on Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea we are called to question
the justification for including a chapter on Rhys given the abundance of scholarly material on Rhys that exists already;
while the essay is valuable in its reconsideration of the Gothic in Rhys's text, the piece speaks more to the particular
relationship between Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea than it serves to open up new directions for reading the other
worlds of the Brontes. JeanPhilippe Heberle's discussion of an operatic rewriting of Jane Eyre is similarly limited in
its transcultural impact; while the opera was written as a collaboration between a British composer and an Australian
director, it was performed at the Cheltenham Music Festival in the United Kingdom, and Heberle's discussion of its
reception, while indicative in its attention to the multilayered nuances of translation, makes little gesture towards the
transcultural contexts that otherwise distinguish this collection.
Despite these shortcomings, this collection is a valuable study, and one which is timely in the wake of critical turns in
scholarly work on other Victorian authors, most notably the attention to global Dickens in recent years. An
understanding of the Brontes' "other wor(l)ds" is long overdue, and it is hoped that Qi's and Padgett's work will mark
the start of a resurgence of interest in global Brontes across the critical and cultural sphere.
doi: 10.2979/victorianstudies.58.4.21
CHARLOTTE MATHIESON
University of Surrey
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Mathieson, Charlotte. "The Bronte Sisters In Other Wor(l)ds." Victorian Studies, vol. 58, no. 4, 2016, p. 751+. General
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Mathieson, Charlotte. Mobility in the Victorian
novel: placing the nation
N. Birns
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1167.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
Mathieson, Charlotte. Mobility in the Victorian novel: placing the nation. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 217p bibl index
afp ISBN 9781137545466 cloth, $90.00; ISBN 9781137545473 ebook, contact publisher for price
533402
PR878
201518582 CIP
Building on Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (1991; rev. ed., 2006) and Linda Colley's Britons (CH,
Apr'93, 304552), Mathieson (Univ. of Warwick, UK) argues that the 19thcentury British novel extends beyond a
purely national frame. Whereas Little Nell in Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop uses walking as a way of achieving a
semidissident "alternative connectedness to the nation" (chapter 1), the arrival of the railroad (discussed in chapter 2),
as seen in Gaskell's Mary Barton and Dickens's Dombey and Son, rends traditional assumptions of organic belonging
but also accelerates conceptual national unity. Mathieson goes on to examine Victorian fiction's portrayal of England's
relations with the outer worldthrough European identity and through empire. She points out that the Victorian novel's
"Europe" is "limited to a handful" of countriesItaly, Germany, and (as seen in novels by Charlotte Bronte, Trollope,
and Braddon) Belgium. With regard to the last, Mathieson speaks intelligently about the country's key role in the
Victorian imaginary, as a "little Britain," albeit Catholic. Dickens's Little Dorrit begins in Marseilles, an extramural
commencement that takes the novel beyond national space. Equally, overseas settings in Victorian novels stage a
"renegotiation" of novelistic givens through "colonial contact." Mathieson's book, though not extravagantly inventive,
is informative and helpful. Summing Up: ** Recommended. Upperdivision undergraduates; researchers/faculty.N.
Birns, The New School
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Birns, N. "Mathieson, Charlotte. Mobility in the Victorian novel: placing the nation." CHOICE: Current Reviews for
Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016, p. 1167. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
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Accessed 1 Mar. 2017.
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Charlotte Mathieson, ‘Victorians Decoded: Art and Telegraphy’
2017 JANUARY 16
by lucinda matthews-jones
Dr Charlotte Mathieson is a Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century English Literature at the University of Surrey. She works on travel and mobility in Victorian literature and culture, with publications including Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600-present (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
“Victorians Decoded: Art and Telegraphy” at Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London until 22nd January 2017
Celebrating the 150th anniversary of the laying of the trans-Atlantic telegraph cable in 1866, “Victorians Decoded: Art and Telegraphy” brings to light the many ways in which the telegraph resonated through the Victorian cultural imagination. Moving beyond the more obvious impacts of the cable’s construction, “Victorians Decoded” invites its audience to contemplate the wider reverberations of the telegraph across the cultural sphere, pressing at deeper conceptual questions of space, time, and what it meant to be human in a technologically advancing world. Channelled through themes of signals, transmission, coding, resistance and distance, the exhibition presents a diverse collection of sea- and landscapes alongside an intriguing selection of scientific objects and archival documents. Many of the artworks are displayed for the first time, while even the more familiar images are perceived anew through the imaginative arrangements of each room; throughout the exhibition we move from the urban river scene of Walter Greaves’ The Pool of London (c. 1863-69), to the domestic intimacy of Frederic Leighton’s The Music Lesson (1877) and on to the biblical history of Edward John Poynter’s Israel in Egypt (1867). The informative signage throughout – developed further in the excellent catalogue available to download online – richly elucidates the connections between these works, interpreting the presence of telegraphic imaginings in thoughtful and original ways.
COL; (c) City of London Corporation; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation
The exhibition is a product of the four-year AHRC-funded project Scrambled Messages: The Telegraphic Imaginary 1857-1900, a group of literary scholars, physicists, art historians, engineers, and archaeologists, whose discussions explore the telegraph in Victorian science and culture (an insight into which is provided on the project blog). The interdisciplinarity of the team is a fitting reflection of the construction of the telegraph cable, an endeavour requiring expertise spanning oceanographers, meteorologists, electricians, navigators, and engineers. The mechanics of the telegraph are displayed through objects such as the Daniell cell battery, a nickel silver micrometer, samples of Siemens’ Atlantic Telegraph cables, as well as sketches and diagrams, handwritten notes and pamphlets, from the Sir Charles Wheatstone collection. These objects give an indicative insight into the scientific advances behind the cable’s construction and establish issues of scale and space that the telegraph engendered, illustrating the inherent contrasts between the vast distances that the cable covered (2,300 miles), while depending upon minute degrees of accuracy (a micrometer could measure up to one ten thousandth of an inch).
This establishes the context for the first room focusing on Distance, where changing concepts of space, time and scale in the Victorian period come to light. Space was re-shaped in multiple contexts, but it is images of seascapes and coasts that emerge as the most powerful and prominent presence of a new spatial imaginary. In works by J.C. Hook, William Lionel Wyllie, John Brett and others, the sea features as a vast presence suggestive of immense distance, depth, and sometimes danger: Brett’s Echoes of a Far-Off Storm (1890) carries a sense of foreboding at the sea beyond, a threat realised in Henry Moore’s The Wreck (1875). At the same time, these artists centre upon the human need for connection across space, depicting figures whose actions are intent upon communication: in Hook’s Words from the Missing (1877) a young boy finds a message in a bottle washed up on the shore, while in Caught by the Tide (1869) a child signals out to sea with an improvised flag. Issues of generational change are suggested too: Hook’s children make use of older technologies of communication, but they are poised on the shore of a new technological world in which new media will allow them to surpass distance in previously unimaginable ways.
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If the sea represented a seemingly insurmountable distance then the cable marked the overcoming of space by human technological force, and telegraph charts depict the sea as a blank, inert and benign force, confidently criss-crossed by the firm black lines of cable connections. The story of the telegraph’s overcoming of nature by human force was not, however, a simple one: the successful laying of the cable in July 1866 was the result of years of failed efforts (four attempts were made between 1857 and 1865, including a complete trans-Atlantic line in 1858 which lasted only a few weeks). Once the crossing was achieved the cable remained susceptible to the corrosive effects of sea water and the damaging impact of storms. The possibilities of connection were therefore accompanied by the frustrations and failures of interruption and disconnection, and these themes are brought to light in a room on Resistance. The opposition of the natural world to smooth transmission is evoked in landscapes of resistance and thwarted passage by artists such as Peter Graham and John Linnell, while the confrontation with nature is violently illustrated in a striking display of Edwin Landseer’s Man Proposes, God Disposes (1864).
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The positive possibilities of connectivity are returned to in the theme of Transmission, which draws the telegraph into the context of wider notions of communication and contact. Here it is the human presence, and particularly the materiality of the body, that takes precedence in images that reassert the power and place of the human in a connected landscape. Works such as Frank William Warwick Topham’s Rescued from the Plague, London, 1665 (1898) put the body centre-stage to evoke questions about the value and purpose of human connectivity, while positing implicit contrasts between the material physicality of the human body and the imaginary space of telegraph transmission. Meanwhile the very form of these bodies can be seen to be shot through with technological impulses, as suggested in Clare Pettitt’s essay in the exhibition catalogue (pp. 87-92) which reads currents of electricity permeating through the coppery hair and silver sky of Evelyn De Morgan’s Moonbeams Dipping into the Sea (1900).
While the telegraph promised direct, intimate connection between individuals across vast distances it also brought about fears of interrupted intimacy due to the public nature of the medium, and this comes to light in the final section on Coding. Code manuals and cryptographs enabled people to communicate with the reassurance of secrecy, and these show another manifestation of cultural change effected by the telegraph as a new language of technology came into being. Issues of privacy and public space run through the surrounding artworks too, most evocatively in James Tissot’s The Last Evening (1873) which is neatly decoded in Anne Chapman’s essay (pp. 145-50) on the multi-layered patterns and structures of repetition in Tissot’s work.
Across this diverse collection a strong but always nuanced narrative unfolds which keeps in view the overarching theme while remaining sensitive to the individual contexts of different works. Far from “Scrambled Messages”, the exhibition succeeds in clearly communicating intricate arguments about the resonances of cable technology throughout Victorian art, and posits new ways of thinking about the relationship between technology and culture: not as one of direct, telegraphic transmissions, but rather encouraging us to read for subtler currents of influence permeating through the Victorian imagination in richly inventive ways.
How We Got From There to Here
By Sara Malton (June 1, 2016) No Comment
Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation
By Charlotte Mathieson
Palgrave MacMillan 2016
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
— Tennyson, “Ulysses”
Mobility in the Victorian NovelEarlier this month, I happened to tune into CBC Newsworld precisely as a replica of the Palmyra Monumental Arch, an architectural marvel dating from 3rd century Syria, was being unveiled in London’s Trafalgar Square. The new arch was produced by the UK’s Institute of Digital Archaeology with the wonders of 3D printing technology. Although my immediate response was suspicion about what seemed like an imperialist gesture, I soon had to correct my own reflexive “correctness,” as I listened to the words of a man originally from Syria being interviewed by a CBC reporter. The man stood in utter amazement just a few feet before the arch and expressed his deep joy to be able to see again this beautiful structure from his home country, whose original is believed to have been destroyed by ISIS.
The re-creation and exhibition of such an artifact in Trafalgar Square seemed remarkable, and I have pondered it — and the man’s heartfelt response — many times since. The new arch was not only a monument of technological achievement, but also a visual rendering of a new world that simultaneously produces the images (at least) of revered history as it confronts an intensifying modernity marked by extensive cultural destruction and violence. The latter reality was emphatically underscored by the man’s displacement from his home country. The recreated arch at once signifies, memorializes, and seemingly defies one nation’s cultural destruction. Its erection in Trafalgar Square seems an act of resistance and progress and — for the man interviewed — a reconstitution of home. Yet, this act remains to me deeply haunting, occurring as it does necessarily outside the borders of that nation whose history it strives to preserve. And, furthermore, might its location — in Trafalgar Square, in the shadow of Nelson’s Column — also prompt us to ask if the exhibition of the arch and its reproduction are also a form of cultural appropriation? When we look at the new arch do we not only wonder at its arrival, but also ask, Just where are we? and How did we get here?
The experience of cultural disorientation that the new Palmyra Arch produces is in many ways the subject at the heart of Charlotte Mathieson’s book, Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation. The world that developed in the wake of Lord Nelson’s naval victory at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, its technological and industrial advances, especially in terms of transport, are the chief subjects of this book, which shows in some measure how we got from there to here — from the days of nineteenth-century imperialism to the moment that a symbol of ancient achievement would be erected in Trafalgar Square. And today, we hope, the arch is not seen merely as a symbol of foreign exoticism and imperial triumph as it may have been one hundred and fifty or two hundred years ago.
Mathieson’s book considers the connection between national identity and the increasing individual mobility made possible by the expansion of modes of travel in the Victorian period — a process that she terms “placing the nation.” This is a worthy thesis. I agree heartily with her opening claims for the journey’s centrality to the Victorian novel, its “vital and active presence there.” As she explains early on, “The journey creates a mapping-out of the space of the nation, unfolding a vision of what the nation is, who inhabits it, and how its interconnections are forged.” Although Victorianists such as myself may have considered such issues at length in the heady days of cultural materialism in, say, the 1990 (a time when little seemed more exciting than introducing a class of undergraduates to the relationship between the Victorian novel and the railway, the telegraph, or the typewriter) the time is right to revitalize the assumptions that accompanied such courses of study.
Taking up the challenge, Mathieson strives to reconsider the “placing [of] the nation” over the course of four chapters. Drawing upon theories of mobility and space, as well as imperialism and national identity, she addresses novels by Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre, Villette), Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Lady Audley’s Secret), George Eliot (Adam Bede), Charles Dickens (The Old Curiosity Shop, Dombey and Son, Little Dorrit, David goodol'tessCopperfield), Elizabeth Gaskell (Mary Barton, Cranford), and Wilkie Collins (The Moonstone). Other less well-known works also receive mention.
Given the length of this list, Thomas Hardy’s novels, obsessed as they are with mobility, travel, and dislocation, seem a glaring omission: Jude the Obscure, for instance, is a novel whose six parts correspond to railway stops, and Tess Durbeyfield’s walk to Stonehenge in Hardy’s 1895 Tess of the d’Urbervilles is arguably the most famous “death march” in nineteenth-century literature. Mathieson’s chosen chronological parameters, however, conclude at 1868: Collins’s detective novel of that year, The Moonstone, forms the focus of the book’s conclusion, which examines the novel’s well-known treatment of empire — especially Britain’s relationship to India — in order to claim that it marks a movement toward those “new structures of narration [required] to delineate and understand the new structures of nation.” Mathieson’s conclusion is thus outward- and forward-looking as it seeks to bring together those strands of national contact and modes of mobility that she examined hitherto.
Unfortunately, Mathieson has a hard time maintaining the connection between these strands of inquiry throughout her study, and the result is an overall lack of argumentative coherence. There are two significant reasons for this. The chief of these is, broadly speaking, a structural problem: the first two chapters focus primarily on modes of transportation, Chapter One examining the way that characters’ walks serve to delimit or expand the individual’s position as a national subject, and Chapter Two turning to the railway’s role in inscribing individual and national identity both in the individual body and the landscape of the nation. Following these chapters, I naturally assumed that the author would move on to consider other significant modes of transport, such as the steamship, and their attendant technological developments, in relation to nineteenth-century ideas of nation and place. Instead, in Chapter Three Mathieson turns to examine the novel’s depiction of travels to Europe and, finally, in Chapter Four we find ourselves “Travelling Beyond,” as we first witness the “collapse of the local” in David Copperfield and then turn to the repeated importation of “the Orient” into the ostensibly small world of Gaskell’s Cranford.
CranfordIn this way, the very structure of the book seems to replicate the structures of imperialism identified by Edward Said (whom the author draws upon) and others since, as it moves from the “center” of things outward, first toward Europe and then finally to the periphery of India and “the antipodes.” But even setting that reservation aside, it sometimes feels as if one is reading two separate studies, the first concerned with how we get there, the second with where we are going. Showing in a convincing way the significance of the connection between these two central questions requires a deepening of the overall argumentative framework of the study from the outset.
The range of authors and texts addressed in the study may in part contribute to — or be symptomatic of — the book’s second, and perhaps more frustrating, limitation. Frequently the author moves away from sustained argument and analysis, lapsing instead into cataloguing images in a manner that fails to sufficiently explore their connection to the central thematic issues at stake in the novels examined. In such moments it is as if the reader is herself roving across a landscape populated by Victorian texts, finding here and there illustrations of the use of various forms of transport technology or references to India, the Orient, and elsewhere. For example, while a novel such as Mary Barton may indeed include a railway journey, the reader is left wanting to know much more about the way that journey — and the gossip about Mary overheard by the heroine herself while aboard the train — significantly contributes to the novel’s treatment of ideas about what it means to be a “public woman” — about testimony, truth, and exposure. How, we might ask, is travel in general and the railway in particular thus linked to the law’s privileging of male-authored narratives of history? We would do well to remember that it is not finally Mary’s truth-telling on the witness stand but rather the last-minute arrival of Will Wilson (the MaryBartonsailor) that provides the alibi necessary to ensure that Mary’s beloved Jem Wilson escapes the scaffold.
In many ways, I really did admire Mathieson’s approach — take her pairing of Jane Eyre’s and Hetty Sorrel’s walks, for instance. The narratives, Mathieson claims, use the “experience of moving into the vast world as a means by which to reorient the undefined nation-space into a mapped, knowable space.” Yet, at the same time, it seems impossible that one could address Jane’s movement across the land and to understand her journeys as “moments of rupture” and potential liberation in the context of Victorian “nation-space” without so much as mentioning her infamous imprisoned — and foreign — alter ego, Bertha Mason. Bertha’s very presence within the walls of Thornfield has been made possible by expansive imperial transport networks that Mathieson’s study documents. Here, Hetty’s imprisonment, like her eventual transportation, seemed a natural opportunity to tie together the two texts’ representation of women in bondage and would have deepened the author’s analysis.
Form and content, as I tell my students ad nauseum, remain inextricable: Mathieson’s book is a case in point. For just as the overarching structure of the book’s argument suffers from some conceptual fuzziness, so too does Mathieson’s language repeatedly lapse into imprecision and repetition in a manner that insufficiently represents the depth of the author’s ideas and the profundity of texts that she examines. Discussing, for instance, the significance of the image of the individual aboard the train wrapped up in railway blankets in a novel such as Lady Audley’s Secret, Mathieson claims that
the image of the wrapped-up body brings to the forefront the role of modern mobilities in producing space, making visible how space, mobility, and the human subject are connected in the landscapes of mobile modernity. The mobility of the body becomes a point through which to make sense of the new landscapes of modern mobility and the situation of the human subject within, because, as these representations register, it is through the mobility of the body that space is produced.
If nothing else, this is disorienting prose.
The book’s claims become most fulsome and compelling in Chapter Three, especially in Mathieson’s discussion of Little Dorrit’s depiction of its characters’ travels to Italy and the idea of the foreign tour. Here the author writes clearly and effectively about the appeal of the Continent for British travellers and the expansion of travel to Europe in the early nineteenth century as she examines the “growing ideological unity” of Europeans. Mathieson, of course, could have not predicted how resonant her discussion of Belgium in relation to Charlotte Brontë’s Villette would become by the time I began reading her book earlier this year. I could not read her discussion of the way that Brussels “occupied a distinct position in the British imagination” without thinking constantly of the place that Brussels has assumed in the Western cultural imagination since the terrorist bombings there in March. It seems so striking that Europe seems to be coming unfixed as an entity in a manner already documented by the likes of Brontë and Dickens, the latter for whom, according to Mathieson, “Europe appears as a confused landscape in which the relative certainties of space collapse.”
This, our own cultural moment, is likewise one of spatial and geographical collapse — a collapse that may be taking place directly at the site of its resistance: beneath the Palmyra Arch in Trafalgar Square. The arch’s reconstruction suggests that a book like Mathieson’s is in many ways timely, as the world is once more confronted with the unraveling of the idea of nation, what Mathieson terms the “collapse of the global.” In the fallout of the expansion of ISIS, the ongoing refugee crisis, and the potential of Brexit, we, like Mathieson, might do well to call on Dickens and his literary compatriots for an understanding of the new world around us: “Borders, the novel finally suggests, are ineffectual.”
CHARLOTTE MATHIESON
Sea Narratives
Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600-Present
PALGRAVE 2016
October 27, 2016 Dave O'Brien
What is the relationship between the sea and culture? In Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600-Present (Palgrave, 2016) , Charlotte Mathieson, a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Surrey, assembles a new collection of essays to explore this question. The book develops the concept of a “sea narrative,” thinking through the connection between this and a variety of forms of cultural production. The essays are eclectic, but unified, reflecting the emerging interest in both the subject and the approach the book uses. The book travels across the globe as well as across the centuries since 1600, taking in French accounts of the Atlantic crossing; prisoners of war; newspaper articles; Soviet technology and propaganda; Irishness and Ireland’s sense of itself; Du Maurier’s understanding of the coast; A S Byatt’s work; the idea of the Anthropocene; and “coastal exceptionalism.” Each essay is fascinating in its own right, but the collection builds to reorientate the study of the sea for historians and literary scholars, as well as any academic interested in how we narrate and culturally produce the sea.
Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920 ed. by Gemma Goodman and Charlotte Mathieson (review)
Josephine McDonagh
From: Victorian Studies
Volume 58, Number 2, Winter 2016
pp. 383-385
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Reviewed by
Josephine McDonagh (bio)
Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920, edited by Gemma Goodman and Charlotte Mathieson; pp. 256. London and Brookfield, VT: Pickering & Chatto, 2014, £79.99, £34.00 paper, $150.00, $52.95 paper.
This collection of essays addresses various aspects of rural representation in British texts written over a period that the editors, Gemma Goodman and Charlotte Mathieson, refer to as “the long Victorian period” (7). Its most valuable contribution is its treatment of a number of writers and works rarely discussed in recent scholarship, each of which [End Page 383] represents some element of life within rural Britain: from the Ruskinian socialist and rural commentator George Sturt, author of a series of works about changes in rural life published in the early twentieth century, to the feminist author and anti-foot binding campaigner Alicia Little, who established the Natural Foot Society in Shanghai in 1895, and whose My Diary in a Chinese Farm (1894) sheds some comparative light on British rural life. This literature about rural life is varied and diverse and provides interesting and sometimes contradictory commentary on rural poverty and social change. The focus on gender highlights another theme that emerges in the volume: the ways in which rural scenes are a backdrop to moments of transcendence or freedom in the works of some women writers, including George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, and the Scottish writers Mary and Jane Findlater. Other essays in the volume deal more squarely with women’s work in rural environments, in particular an elegant examination of the achievements of the garden designer and author Gertrude Jekyll, who “pushed the boundaries of what were considered typical pursuits for a late-Victorian woman of comfortable means,” according to Christen Ericsson-Penfold (129).
Together the essays in the volume address a number of questions relating, on the one hand, to the occlusion of rural life from recent analyses of Victorian modernity, and on the other hand, to the idealization (and thus obfuscation) of rural life in Victorian literature itself. The editors’ introduction to the volume opens with a quotation from Eliot’s famous indictment of literary misrepresentations of “rosy” “village children” and “buxom” “cottage matrons” in her 1856 essay “The Natural History of German Life” (The Essays of George Eliot, edited by Thomas Pinney [Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963], 268–9). As the editors point out, rural life was—and is—much more diverse, and they sketch a more complex picture of rural Britain which includes mining, fishing, and the activities of the country estate, as well as agriculture. Some of this variety of rural activity is made evident in the essays: for example, in Goodman’s discussion of the mixed economy of Cornwall represented in the work of the regional novelist Charles Lee. Moreover, the landscape, its inhabitants, and those who worked on it changed dramatically over the century with enclosure, new forms of farming, industrial development, and large scale migration from country to city and to settler colonies, all of which took their toll on the rural environment. This is a theme dealt with most directly by Barry Sloan in “‘Between Two Civilizations’: George Sturt’s Construction of Loss and Change in Village Life.” Sturt’s knotty ideological commitments come out clearly in this discussion. His anti-cosmopolitanism, which makes him sound unfortunately like a proto-UK Independence Party member, requires some more probing, although Sloan is alert to the complicated nature of Sturt’s often wistful nostalgia.
Of the two terms in the volume’s title, the first, “gender,” is more actively engaged than the second, “space.” The latter is taken in a neutral way to refer simply to rural locations (rather than a more phenomenologically inflected concept that readers might expect). Yet the shared focus on gender yields some intriguing insights. For Roger Ebbatson, in his essay on the works of Thomas Hardy and Richard Jefferies, the figure of the woman field worker is an eloquent symptom of the complex pressures that rural labor was undergoing in this period. Hardy and Jefferies, as they sympathetically—if paternalistically—describe the plight of women field workers, demonstrate the contradictions of rural life in—to use Ebbatson’s nicely...