The 37th annual meeting of the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Association was held in Knoxville, Tennessee, in March of 2023 and was sponsored by the University of Tennessee Departments of English and Africana Studies, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the University of Tennessee Humanities Center. The conference explored the theme of Nineteenth-Century Movement(s). Since this was the second in-person conference following the restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic, we as organizers were still thinking about what it meant to return to movement and about changes in the way we move today (electric vehicles, self-driving cars), unprecedented dislocations and migrations around the world, and recent movements for political change and racial justice.
The nineteenth century was one of movement: physically, geographically, technologically, ideologically, and affectively. The period was characterized by new forms of transportation and communication, as well as new patterns of colonialism and migration. Theater, dance, music, sports, and literature experimented with forms of physical movement, as well as means to move audiences emotionally. Political, social, and aesthetic movements shaped culture and society across and between national traditions. Particularly noteworthy were attempts to capture movement in art that intersected with science and technology from dioramas, panoramas, mechanical theater, pantomimes, and magic lantern shows to photography and early cinema.
Setting the tone for the 2023 conference were keynote addresses by anthropologist Karla Slocum (UNC Chapel Hill), who spoke on “The Long Movement for Black Towns,” and literary historian Josephine McDonagh (University of Chicago), who spoke on “Heathcliff and Other Child Refugees in Literature and History.”
The articles in this Special Issue have been selected from papers presented at the conference and offer an impressive range of meditations on the broad theme of movement. We let the submissions educate us on the kinds of exciting research being conducted today. We found that the essays fell into two overlapping categories, which we have used to organize the Special Issue: “Travel and Migration” and “Popular Culture and Visual Art.”
Travel and migration
Catherine Robson’s close examination of Charles Dickens’s novel A Tale of Two Cities (1859) traces the movements in the novel from England to France and their financial and racial implication into the present in “Movements Between Dover and Calais: A Tale of Two Cities and Britain’s Island Fantasy.” In “Romanticism on ‘the Line?’: Wordsworth’s Anti-Railway Poetics,” Anna Wingfield explores William Wordsworth’s late sonnet “At Furness Abbey” (1845) as the poet’s ambivalent response to the expanding railway system during his life. Hyunjoo Yu, in “Zitkala-Ša’s Indisputably Moody, Beautiful Evolution(s),” traces affective transmission in Zitkala-Ša’s “The School Days of an Indian Girl” (1900) and “An Indian Teacher Among Indians” (1900) to index how anger transforms the perceived odor and infectiousness of Indigenous bodies into a refusal of settler-colonial eugenicist control. Allison Curseen questions how attempts to track the movements of Hannah Crafts, author of The Bondwoman’s Narrative, are unaligned with the novel’s inherent fugitivity in “Something About Rock Glen: Fugitive Movement and Queer Black Geographies in Hannah Crafts’ The Bondwoman’s Narrative.” In particular, she posits that Crafts’s productive tension between writing about specific geographies while also making those geographies elusive is part of a strategy to gesture towards the “ever-elusive space of fugitive black female sociality.” In “Slum Orientations: Race, Confinement, and Cartography in The Nether World,” Sophia Hsu reads George Gissing’s The Nether World (1889) to reveal the racialized slum logic underpinning white bourgeois England’s spatial and colonial ideologies. Linda Hughes’s essay, “Women’s Minds and Bodies on the Move: Nineteenth-Century British Women’s Reading Parties and Study Abroad,” uncovers the implications women’s study abroad and reading groups had in altering gender roles and expectations for university women. Drawing on research by keynote speaker Karla Slocum in his essay “Reimagining the Sense of Black Place: The Struggle for Survival in Toni Morrison’s Paradise,” Danny Sexton offers a reading of Toni Morrison’s novel Paradise (1997) within the context of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century migration to Black Towns in the U. S.
Popular culture and visual art
Sharon Weltman’s essay “Victorian London’s Black Playwrights” explores the crucial role Black playwrights had on the English stage by examining writers like Ira Aldridge and the Alexandre Dumas father-son pair to see how conversations on race, religion, and nationality moved between the stages of France and Victorian Britain. Christina Jen’s essay “‘D’ye hear?’: Listening for Echoes of Empire in Dion Boucicault’s Jessie Brown; or, The Relief of Lucknow,” focuses on the Scottish airs that form part of Boucicault’s melodrama of the 1857 Indian Rebellion to argue that this choice of music complicates the play’s relationship to English nationalism. In “The Early Panorama as Aesthetic Producer,” Ann Kristine Eriksen argues for the influence of pre-1820 panoramas as a radical development in visual technology and aesthetics that incorporated both physical and visual movement. Amy Elliot explores British motherhood and femininity as presented on the British stage in productions of Aladdin in her essay “Never Had a Mom Like Me: Staged Maternity in Nineteenth-Century Theatrical Productions of Aladdin.” In “The Great Historical Clock of America: An Object Biography,” Carlene E. Stephens writes that like “dioramas, magic lantern shows and other animated spectacles,” the mechanical theater represented by the “Great Historical Clock of America,” “aided the formation of media culture.” This unique work of craftsmanship from the 1890s traveled first as a forgotten form of mechanized entertainment and later as an object on display in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Shalyn Claggett illuminates the obscure history of the once widely popular “a service of song” magic lantern shows and the influence they had on ideological beliefs for a mass cultural audience in her essay “Immersive Media: Communal Identity and the Victorian Magic Lantern Show.” In “Pressing Matters, Degas’s Ironers and the Main-d’oeuvre of the Artist,” Aleksandra Bursac pays close attention to Edgar Degas’s paintings of working-class ironing women, arguing that the movement of the women’s ironing may be read as a self-conscious reflection on his own distinctive brushstrokes in painting them. She also speculates on connections between the black arms of some ironers and the enslaved and indentured Black workers whose labor supplied the cotton for the fabrics that the women are shown ironing. Ani Bezirdzhyan, in “Vanishing Into Light: The ‘Literary Photographs’ of Julia Margaret Cameron and the Figuration of Ephemerality,” connects Julia Margaret Cameron’s photography to George Eliot’s concept of “literary photographs,” compellingly comparing Cameron’s earlier allegorical photographic work with her later work in Ceylon. Ultimately, Bezirdzhyan views Cameron’s earlier interests in home, nation, and empire as unsettled when re-staged in Ceylon, revealing “the ephemerality of the authority she held on her plantation or the authority Britain held over its Empire.” Finally, Rebecca Mitchell, in “Uncovering Same-Sex Desire in Fin-de-siècle Advertising,” examines an understudied economic visual art – trade cards – and reads the composition of bodies in various states of dress and positioning as evidence of a circulating queer desire in fin-de-siècle advertising culture.
We are pleased with the way these essays speak to each other, in the spirit of interdisciplinarity, on movement and also on such subjects as race (Sexton, Hsu, Weltman, Jen, Bezirdzhyan, Curseen, Yu, Robson), gender (Hughes, Bursac, Jen, Elliot, Mitchell), class (Bursac, Hsu, Sexton), empire (Jen, Bezirdzhyan), literature (Sexton, Robson, Wingfield, Yu, Curseen), theater history (Weltman, Jen, Elliot), art history (Bursac, Bezirdzhyan), and visual technologies (Claggett, Stephens, Eriksen).
Our contributors include historians, literary scholars, art historians, and museum curators. They also include graduate students, early career researchers, senior scholars, and independent scholars representing diverse perspectives and methodologies. We hope that readers will find other connections among the interdisciplinary essays, as well as ways in which these reflections on nineteenth-century movement speak to our present moment.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Nancy Henry
Nancy Henry is the Nancy Moore Goslee Professor of English at the University of Tennessee. She is the author of Women, Literature and Finance in Victorian Britain: Cultures of Investment (2018), The Life of George Eliot: A Critical Biography (2012), the Cambridge Introduction to George Eliot (2008), and George Eliot and the British Empire (2001). She is a co-editor of the Journal of Victorian Culture and George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies.
Amber Walters-Molina
Amber Walters-Molina is a PhD student in the English Department at the University of North Texas. Her studies focus on nineteenth-century British literature, women writers, speculative fiction, and digital humanities. Her research interests investigate issues of gender, socioeconomic disparity, and monstrosity in work by authors like Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and George Eliot.
Eliza Alexander Wilcox
Eliza Alexander Wilcox is a PhD student in the English Department at the University of Tennessee. They study queer femininity and disability in the traditional long eighteenth and nineteenth century archive and in new media representations. Their research on queer fem(me)ininity and Regency-era media is forthcoming from feral feminisms, and their dissertation will trace the emergence and visibility of queer femmes and queer fem(me)ininity in the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.