Victorian Surfaces in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture Skin, Silk, and Show

This volume explores the politics and poetics of Victorian surfaces in their manifold manifestations. In so doing, it examines various cultural products ‘as they are’ and highlights the art of surface composition in the Victorian era as well as the socio-cultural ramifications of the preoccupation with the exterior. By closely reading the various surfaces materialising in Victorian literature and culture, the individual contributions explore the dialectics of surface and depth in Victorian (and Neo-Victorian) cultures as well as the legibility of surfaces. They look into the surfaces of literary narratives, paintings, and film but also into natural surfaces such as skin or bark. Each chapter foregrounds what is present rather than absent in a text, while also paying attention to the surfaces that become manifest on the diegetic level of the text, be they cloth, landscapes, or human bodies or faces.

This is an open access book.

Preface (Pamela K. Gilbert).- 1 How to Do Things with Surfaces: The Politics and Poetics of Victorian surfaces (Sibylle Baumbach and Ulla Ratheiser).- 2 The Semantics of Surfaces: Victorian Panoramas and the Panoramic Gaze (Heidi Liedke).- 3 Twinship and Tactile Anxieties in Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch (1872) (Wieland Schwanebeck).- 4 Touching Skins, Spreading Stains: Contesting, Affirming and Penetrating Surfaces in the Work of Thomas Hardy (Felicitas Meifert-Meinhard).- 5 Dickens’ Dirty Children (Franziska Quabeck).- 6 Gothic Cloth: Textures of the Unknown (Sophia Jochem and Cordula Lemke).- 7 Imperial Hauntings in the Durbar Room: Spurious Materiality in Neo-Victorian Biopics (Jan Rupp).- 8 “Red-hot applications on their vile skins.” Ironic Transparency in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (Eike Kronshage).- 9 Making Skin Legible: Surface and Symptomatic Readings of Victorian Culture (Monika Pietzrak-Franger).- 10 Afterword (Kate Flint).

Sibylle Baumbach is Professor of English Literature and Culture at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. Her research areas include early modern literature and cognitive literary studies, especially literary attention. She is the author of Literature and Fascination (2015) and Shakespeare and the Art of Physiognomy (2008).