Call for papers for the Victorian Review

Topic:

Victorian Posthumanism

Editor and Contact E-mail:

Lara Karpenko, Associate Professor of English, Carroll University: lkarpenk@carrollu.edu

Submission Date:

Please send articles of 5,000-8,000 words to lkarpenk@carrollu.edu  by March 31st 2021. Articles should be in MLA format and not under consideration at any other journal. Queries or letters of interest are welcome.

Issue Description:

Victorian Review invites submissions for a special issue devoted to the topic of Victorian Posthumanism. While many prominent theorists of the posthuman associate the plastic and prosthetic posthuman human body with mid-to-late twentieth-century scientific and aesthetic productions, such genealogies miss the visionary, surprising, and sometimes disconcerting aspects of much nineteenth-century literature, art, and science. As concurrent scientific advancements (such as evolutionary theory or early experimentations in robotics) emphasized the uncertain delineations of the very category of the human, Victorian literature featured boundless, pliable, and liminal bodies ranging from androids that would pass any Turing test to murderous plants to nightmarish animal hybrids.

This journal issue will not only provide a forum for discussing these fascinating yet overlooked cultural and aesthetic productions, but will also offer an alternate history of posthumanism, one that promises to nuance our understanding of Victorian and postmodern subjectivities.

Potential Topics (others welcome):

• Androids and robotics.
• Animal-human, plant-human, or animal-plant hybrids.
• Industrial utopias and dystopias.
• Tech-human fusions.
• Mind-body cohesions and fractures.
• Non-human sentience.
• Technology as entertainment and spectacle.
• Evolutionary and devolutionary theories and cultural representations.
• Technological innovations and failures concerning embodiment, sentience, and/or ways of knowing.
• Non-normative or extraordinary bodies, minds, and subjectivities.
• Disability / ability.
• Popular cultural responses to technological and scientific innovations/crises.
• Technology and its intersections with gender, race, and/or national identity. 
• Bodily plasticity and transformation.
• Prosthesis and prosthetic imaginings.

by Elsa Richardson

Over the last decade the so-called paleo diet has garnered popularity among the health-conscious as a sure route to increased energy and weight loss. Sometimes referred to as the ‘caveman diet’, the regime assumes that modern farming practices have encouraged a way of eating that is dangerously out of step with the natural rhythms of the body. Advocates of the diet insist that instead of consuming legumes, pulses and grains -–the products of agricultural practices— we should adopt the eating habits of Palaeolithic man, who ate mostly meat, fish, nuts and vegetables. Looking back to the end of the last Ice Age for alimentary inspiration, paleo enthusiasts often call on evolutionary science to substantiate their claims, but within the field the question of what our ancestors ate and whether we should follow their example today, remains up for debate. Behavioural ecologist Marlene Zuk argues that our digestive systems have  actually developed in parallel with changes to global food production and elsewhere researchers from the Evolutionary Studies Institute (ESI) at Wits University in Johannesburg have recently discovered that in parts of southern Africa starchy carbohydrates were eaten hundreds of thousands of years ago.

This dietary debate may seem peculiar to our wellness-obsessed age, but a similar argument was staged through the latter decades of the nineteenth century. One of the unintended consequences of the popularisation of evolutionary theory, was a growing interest –evident in not only science and medicine, but also in popular culture– with the eating habits of early humans. The subject was of particular interest to proponents of vegetarianism, who were convinced the consumption of flesh -–far from being universal and timeless— was in truth a gross distortion of man’s natural diet. Writing for the Vegetarian Messenger in 1888, George T. B. Watters cited ‘anatomical considerations’ as proof that humans are herbivorous and praised our common ancestor, the ape, for having had the good sense to stick to fruit. The consumption of animals constituted, for Watters and other evolutionarily-minded vegetarians, a betrayal of basic biology that invited illness and spread disease. Like followers of the paleo diet, nineteenth-century vegetarians saw eating out of time with the stomach as the source of many of the debilitating health problems plaguing the modern world. While today’s ‘caveman’ diet is a pretty fleshy affair, for some Victorians prehistoric man was a strict vegetarian.

To read more, see Richardson, Elsa. “Man Is Not a Meat-Eating Animal: Vegetarians and Evolution in Late-Victorian Britain.” Victorian Review, vol. 45 no. 1, 2019, p. 117-134. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/vcr.2019.0034.

by Christie L. Harner

Mowgli grows up. He receives a jungle-appropriate education, experiences puberty and sexual attraction, and accepts a position as ranger in the Government Forest Service. Toomai, in the story that bears his name, also grows up – to be a renowned tracker in the imperial service – as does the “mutiny baby” who, as an adult, shoots and kills a legendary village crocodile. Outside the bounds of fiction, Robert Baden-Powell’s boy scouts grew up and into the militaristic roles for which they were trained: positions modeled, in the language of the scouts, on Rudyard Kipling’s stories.

The linear, progressive, and imperialist temporality of Kipling’s stories seems self-evident. Yet this reading has always troubled me. It is too determinist, prescriptive, and, above all, anthropocentric. It focuses too exclusively on the human characters in The Jungle Books and on what we might call “human” (unquestionably British) time. Even Jessica Straley’s wonderful reading, in her Evolution and Imagination in Victorian Children’s Literature, which probes the uneven temporalities of the stories and argues for a non-progressive teleology, attends only to Mowgli, to the exclusion of non-human species.

I began this article with a question: what other temporalities exist in Kipling’s stories, and how do those temporal scales and rhythms disrupt and reorient our reading practices? In turning attention away from the human, a multiplicity of temporal forms in The Jungle Books comes into focus: mating seasons, monsoon cycles, and diurnal and nocturnal behaviors. Moreover, given that in every story, the human presence has disrupted an existing ecosystem, Kipling’s collection also provides a series of case studies that depict the temporal instabilities of human-animal interactions. What the stories narrate is not so much “human time” as ecological regime shifts.

Drawing on the languages of political science and systems theory, the ecological term regime shift characterizes the irregular processes through which environmental states change. The phrase may invoke a tipping point, a temporal drag, or an adjustment to introduced time scales and rhythms. In my account, the term focuses our attention on the collisions of sociocultural time spans (hunting seasons, historical periods, memory) with animal and ecological timescales. The texts in Kipling’s collection ask us to move between temporal scales of magnitude that may map in one register but not in another: for example, breeding cycles that adhere to conceptions of nature but not to Anglo-Indian geopolitical timelines, or animal instincts that belong to theories of evolutionary time but challenge historical chronologies.

In The Jungle Books time is not linear or progressive. It is fragmented and multiscalar; it runs at different speeds and has its actors switch costumes mid-play. It makes us uncomfortable as readers: it undermines assertions of anthropocentrism and British dominance. It suggests that in a given ecosystem – and imperial geography – competing time spans overlap and exist in multiple tenses.

For more, see Harner, Christie. “Geopolitical Temporalities and Animal Ecologies in The Jungle Books.” Victorian Review, vol. 45 no. 1, 2019, p. 135-152. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/vcr.2019.0035.

In most modern productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare’s king and queen of the fairies have a volatile, passionate relationship that is rooted in the sexual chemistry of two powerful figures colliding.  This explosive dynamic is particularly alluded to in visual portrayals of Oberon, where the king of the fairies is teeming with masculine virility. Consider, for example, recent portrayals of the fairy king: from a bare-chested Rupert Everett in the 1999 movie version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to a bare-chested John Light in the 2013 Globe production to a bare-chested David Harewood in Julie Taymor’s 2013 filmed staged version, Oberon is a warrior who is formidable, sexy, and abounding with machismo. 

Yet it was not always this way.  For several generations of playgoers, women usually played all of the fairies, including the masculine Oberon.  From 1840 until 1914, with only a couple minor exceptions, women always played the fairy king.  This trend was originated by Lucia Elizabeth Vestris, better known to her contemporaries as Madame Vestris, in a highly influential production in 1840 at Covent Garden wherein she cast herself as the King of Shadows.  Vestris’s portrayal proved seminal, and for almost seventy-five years, no American or English production featured a man in the role.

But why was Vestris’s portrayal so influential?  What is it about distinctly female fairies that made them such a potent image on the Victorian stage?  And how were these feminine fairies integral in revitalizing interest in the full-text version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of the most excised, expurgated, reduced, and adapted of Shakespeare’s plays?  

The answers to these questions are deceptively complex—and contradictory.  Throughout the Victorian and early Edwardian age, the fairies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream were the objects through which the era’s anxieties about innocence, idealism, passivity, and femininity were debated, and Vestris’s self-fashioned and gender-bending performance was indicative of the nineteenth-century impulse to idealize and infantilize women.  However, this feminine docility was moderated, perhaps even overpowered, by the sight of the voluptuous Vestris in breeches, which titillated the audience and hinted at the power and sexuality of Shakespeare’s fairy king.  Vestris’s feminized Oberon thus showcased the contradictions and complexities of Victorian society regarding the display of the female body, and Vestris’s performance worked on two different and contradictory levels through capitulating to feminine idealization while covertly coopting masculine aggression.

To read more about how Shakespeare’s play in text and in performance has served as a Rorschach test for each era’s anxieties about gender roles—and to see how productions from Madame Vestris’s to Julie Taymor’s have captured the cultural zeitgeist by altering the fairies’ roles to accommodate changing social attitudes about the power, idealism, docility, and maturity of women—see

Marija Reiff, “‘More Aerial, More Graceful, More Perfect’: Madame Vestris’s Oberon, Victorian Culture, and the Feminized Fairies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1840–1914” Victorian Review vol 44, no 2, Fall 2018, pp. 251-268.