Spheres within spheres: nineteenth-century interstitial spaces and Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (2013)

ABSTRACT

The introductory essay to this special issue on Nineteenth-Century Interstitial Spaces begins by noting the period’s pertinence for scholars exploring interstitiality, which as a concept may have existed in earlier historical eras but, as Tim Ingold, Roger Luckhurst, and others have argued, can be more forcefully aligned with the post-Enlightenment values of modernity. We tease out connections within and between the eight contributions to the issue, exploring the relationship between nineteenth-century spaces and other possible (spiritual) worlds, interstitial elements in the Victorian rural, colonial, and urban landscape, and, finally, interstitiality and interior spaces such as the Victorian office. Our own contribution then applies the idea of interstitiality to Eleanor Catton’s neo-Victorian novel The Luminaries (2013), pinpointing its attunement to the nineteenth-century experience of interstitial spaces and its allusion to particular Victorian practices and stories. Building on existing research influenced by the so-called spatial turn, the eight essays gathered here represent another, more recent scholarly shift highlighting the material properties of technological artefacts against their phenomenological or ideological impact.

KEYWORDS:

• Materiality
• mobility studies
• literature and colonialism
• neo-Victorian literature
• Eleanor Catton

Acknowledgments

This special issue would have remained a blank page without the assistance that we received from Birte Christ, Talin de Jeu, Esther Folkersma, Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou, Ghidy de Koning, László Munteán, Lilla Papp, Marle Zwietering, and the various anonymous reviewers. We gratefully acknowledge the vital role played by our co-editor, Joanna Hofer-Robinson.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The corridor also plays a role in other periods and art movements; for an illuminating account of the corridor in American modernism, which looks at the corridor as a structure, or even a programme, for the channelling of information, see Marshall (2013).

2. Barbara Franchi (2018) suggests that the novel represents the quest for a postcolonial and feminine modernity through the trope of the woman traveller.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Frederik Van Dam

Frederik Van Dam is Assistant Professor of European Literature at Radboud University, Nijmegen (NL). His scholarship is situated at the intersection of intellectual history and literary criticism, with a focus on the long nineteenth century. He is the author of Anthony Trollope’s Late Style: Victorian Liberalism and Literary Form (2016) and the main editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Anthony Trollope (2019). His articles have appeared in journals such as English Literary History, Studies in Romanticism, and Partial Answers. He is currently developing a project that revolves around the relationship between literature and cultural diplomacy. In 2015, he interviewed the éminence grise J. Hillis Miller for a documentary, The Pleasure of that Obstinacy.

Chris Louttit

Chris Louttit is Assistant Professor of English Literature and a member of the Radboud Institute for Culture & History (RICH) at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. His research focuses on the mid-Victorian novel and its multimedia afterlives, and he has published a number of articles on these topics in venues such as Adaptation, Book History, Gothic Studies, Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, Philological Quarterly, and Women’s Writing. He has co-edited special issues of Nineteenth-Century Prose (on Dickens’s non-fiction) and Neo-Victorian Studies (on screen Victoriana), and other forthcoming publications include a chapter on the uses of Dickens in the work of a New Yorker cartoonist in Adaptation and Illustration: Towards a Front-Line Approach (2024). He is currently Editor-in-Chief of English Studies, serves as the President of the Dickens Society, and is at work on a study of the Victorian Bohemian novel.