Victorian Antipathies

Negative Feelings in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Erscheinungsjahr 2026
ISBN: 978-3-032-23163-5
Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan

Buch, Englisch, 246 Seiten, Format (B × H): 148 mm x 210 mm

Reihe: Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions

This book identifies antipathy as an emotion of key concern in Victorian literature and culture by studying discourses and representations of antipathy in fictional and non-fictional texts. The selected texts cover a broad range of thematic concerns and cultural contexts, engaging with different facets, manifestations, and functions of antipathy, and demonstrating its historically specific meanings in nineteenth-century British and imperial literature and culture. The contributors demonstrate how antipathy was presented as an emotional experience, discursive strategy, and aesthetic device that expressed, shaped, and interrogated Victorian power relations, and how it was used to negotiate structural dynamics of gender, class, and race. Bringing the study of Victorian literature and culture into conversation with approaches in the history of emotions, the volume explores the potential for considering historical conceptualisations of antipathetic feelings in and through literature, and offers methodological insights into the uses of literature in the history of emotions.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Engelhardt, Nina

Hartl, Anja

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein Historiographie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Stoffe, Motive und Themen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Chapter 1. Feeling Against: Antipathy in Victorian Literature and Culture.- Part I Conceptions and Manifestations of Antipathy.- Chapter 2. When Rage Became Noble: Antipathy and Noble Rage in the Nineteenth Century.- Chapter 3. Ecologies of Displeasure in John Ruskin’s Aesthetic Theory.- Chapter 4. “Anger Hate and Bitter Scorn”: The Endurance of Hatred in the Poetry of Emily Brontë.- Part II Antipathy, Gender, and Class.- Chapter 5. Maternal Antipathy: Puerperal Insanity and the Preservation of the Maternal Ideal in Late-Victorian Trials.- Chapter 6. Strange Encounters: Performative Antipathy in the Poetry of May Kendall.- Chapter 7. Strange Encounters: Performative Antipathy in the Poetry of May Kendall.- Chapter 8. “Abominable Publications”: Antipathies and the Penny Dreadful.- Part III Racial and Colonial Antipathies.- Chapter 9. The Limits of Sympathy: (Anti-)Slavery, Racial Difference, and Negative Affect in Carlyle, Mill, and Dickens.- Chapter 10. Contagious Racial Antipathy: Negotiating Indigenous Genocide in Anthony Trollope’s Australia and New Zealand (1873).- Chapter 11. Imperial Antipathies: Reporting the 1857 Uprising in the Calcutta Review.

Über Autor(innen)

Nina Engelhardt is Professor of English Literature at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. Her research project was funded by the Baden-Württemberg Stiftung, Germany, and won the Dr. Bertold Moos Award.

Anja Hartl is Assistant Professor at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Her research interests include Victorian fiction, the history of emotions, adaptation studies, and contemporary British theatre. She is currently working on her second monograph on .