Rebecca N. Mitchell | University of Birmingham (original) (raw)

Books by Rebecca N. Mitchell

Offering a unique anthology of primary texts, this sourcebook opens a window on the writing that ... more Offering a unique anthology of primary texts, this sourcebook opens a window on the writing that shaped and mirrored Victorian fashion, taking us from corsets to crinolines, dandies to decadent 'New Women'. A user-friendly collection that provides a solid grounding in the fashion history of the nineteenth century, it brings together for the first time sources that trace the evolution of dress and the social, cultural and political discourses that influenced it.

Featuring seminal writings by authors and commentators such as Oscar Wilde, Thorstein Veblen and Sarah Stickney Ellis, plus satirical cartoons, illustrations and fashion plates from key sources such as Punch magazine, it combines primary texts and illustrations with accessible explanatory notes to offer a wide-ranging overview of the period for both students and researchers.

Each section opens with an introduction that examines the major trends in Victorian clothing – and the material, economic, scientific and cultural forces driving those trends – situating the texts in the pressing social anxieties and pleasures of the time. Exploring both menswear and womenswear, and key topics such as corsetry, dress reform and mourning, Mitchell extends her analysis into interdisciplinary fields including gender studies and literature, and guides the reader with a timeline, glossary and further readings.

Late nineteenth-century Britain experienced an unprecedented explosion of visual print culture an... more Late nineteenth-century Britain experienced an unprecedented explosion of visual print culture and a simultaneous rise in literacy across social classes. New printing technologies facilitated quick and cheap dissemination of images—illustrated books, periodicals, cartoons, comics, and ephemera—to a mass readership. This Victorian visual turn prefigured the present-day impact of the Internet on how images are produced and shared, both driving and reflecting the visual culture of its time.

From this starting point, Drawing on the Victorians sets out to explore the relationship between Victorian graphic texts and today’s steampunk, manga, and other neo-Victorian genres that emulate and reinterpret their predecessors. Neo-Victorianism is a flourishing worldwide phenomenon, but one whose relationship with the texts from which it takes its inspiration remains underexplored.

In this collection, scholars from literary studies, cultural studies, and art history consider contemporary works—Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Moto Naoko’s Lady Victorian, and Edward Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies, among others—alongside their antecedents, from Punch’s 1897 Jubilee issue to Alice in Wonderland and more. They build on previous work on neo-Victorianism to affirm that the past not only influences but converses with the present.

Mitchell, rebecca n. (rebecca nicole), 1976victorian lessons in empathy and difference / rebecca ... more Mitchell, rebecca n. (rebecca nicole), 1976victorian lessons in empathy and difference / rebecca n. Mitchell.

Papers by Rebecca N. Mitchell

Burlington Magazine, 2018

Papers of the Bibliographic Society of America, 2018

Papers of the Bibliographic Society of America, 2017

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 2013

First introduced to England by France’s Empress Eugénie in the late 1850s, the cage crinoline sig... more First introduced to England by France’s Empress Eugénie in the late 1850s, the cage crinoline signaled a new era in fashion, reaching peak popularity (and peak circumference) in the early 1860s. While the garment has often been understood as a symbol of a repressive patriarchal order intent on confining women, contemporary reporting shows that it was regarded instead as a potentially threatening tool of emancipation. It replaced layers of heavy petticoats with a light and flexible alternative, offering women greater mobility and comfort, and the proportions of the skirts obviated the need for tight-laced corsets. What is more, donning crinoline allowed women to assert physical space in the public sphere, their voluminous skirts forcing men to the margins of the sidewalk or the omnibus—at least according to complaints. Perhaps the most pernicious quality of crinoline, though, was its potential to hide things from the male gaze: bad ankles or smuggled goods might be hidden by the cage, but the risk of concealed pregnancy loomed largest. Reports of death by crinoline fire were matched in their fevered pitch by warnings that crinoline sharply increased rates of infanticide. The range of Victorian responses that accrued around the fashion demonstrates that it was not simply a tool for unilateral oppression or reducible to the manifestation of empty, thoughtless vanity.

Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius (1869, reissued 1892) claimed to be the first statistical stud... more Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius (1869, reissued 1892) claimed to be the first statistical study of genius. Drawing on data culled from biographies and biographical dictionaries of “eminent” figures, he argued that creative and intellectual exceptionalism was measurable and heritable. Despite their claims of objectivity, the two editions demonstrate the extent to which scientific theories of intelligence and creativity were shaped by popular discourse, particularly that surrounding the figure of the Romantic genius and the ascendant Aesthete. This essay explores the influence of cultural notions of genius on Galton’s studies and notes briefly the lasting impact of his methodology, which forms the basis of IQ testing still in use today.

Notes & Queries, May 2016

While most scholars agree that the Victorian fancy dress ball differs fundamentally from its eigh... more While most scholars agree that the Victorian fancy dress ball differs fundamentally from its eighteenth-century predecessor —the masquerade—few studies detail the nature of those differences. This article suggests that central to this shift was the Victorian embrace of self-revelation in fancy dress, as opposed to disguise or antithesis. Late Victorian fancy dress allowed participants to negotiate rather than to escape their self-presentation and their milieu: revealing aspects of their character (including, for men, the novelty of sartorial pleasure) by choosing costumes from a prescribed set of identifiable roles and tropes, and by choosing costumes that directly engaged with issues of their day. Considering mass-market guidebooks and a range of contemporary popular works, this article explores the representational strategies of late nineteenth-century fancy dress, including abstract and overtly gendered costumes.

Word and Image, 2016

This article defines two visions of artistic creation prevalent in the mid-to-late nineteenth cen... more This article defines two visions of artistic creation prevalent in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. The first is typified by Ford Madox Brown’s Work (1852-65), an image that champions the nobility of physical labor, and sees its literary rendering in Thomas Carlyle’s oeuvre. Using the story of the writing and destruction of Carlyle’s French Revolution manuscript as a guiding example, I argue that a narrative equating intellectual and creative production with hard, physical labor was consciously developed and mediated by the press and public. While this model of authorial industry and effort has for many come to stand for high Victorian creative agency, it was not uncontested in its time. In contrast, I trace an equally compelling, concurrent counter-narrative, one that was codified by Henry Wallis’s post-Romantic image of the dying poet Chatterton and that was exemplified in Oscar Wilde’s affectation of authorial indolence. These contrasting versions of artistic agency demonstrate the negotiation of creative labor that defined the reception of British authors and their work from the 1850s through the fin de siècle.

Victorian Periodicals Review 46, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 123-148. , Apr 2016

While most accounts of Oscar Wilde’s reception history agree that his work was paid little attent... more While most accounts of Oscar Wilde’s reception history agree that his work was paid little attention by French critics until the 1890s, this article suggests that the French press responded to Wilde’s writing both earlier—throughout the 1880s—and in a more sustained fashion than previously thought. Tracing dozens of contemporary articles never before discussed, it shows that the periodical press in France attended to each of the major developments in Wilde’s career, including his first volume of poetry and the essays that marked his shift from lecturing aesthete to writer of consequence.

Notes & Queries, Nov 2014

Modern Philology, Aug 2015

in Rethinking Empathy through Literature. Ed. Sue J. Kim and Meghan Hammond.

Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 41, no. 4, 2013

University of Texas – Pan American On the occasion of her Golden Jubilee, Queen Victoria was depi... more University of Texas – Pan American On the occasion of her Golden Jubilee, Queen Victoria was depicted in a woodcut by William Nicholson that was to become extremely popular (Figure 1). So stout that her proportions approach those of a cube, the Queen is dressed from top to toe in her usual black mourning attire, the white of her gloved hands punctuating the otherwise nearly solid black rectangle of her body. Less than thirty years later, another simple image of a woman in black would prove to be equally iconic: the lithe, narrow column of Chanel's black dress (Figure 2). Comparing the dresses depicted in the two images – the first a visual reminder of the desexualized stolidity of Victorian fidelity, the second image an example of women's burgeoning social and sexual liberation – might lead one to conclude that the only thing they have in common is the color black. And yet, twentieth- and twenty-first-century fashion historians suggest that Victorian mourning is the direct antecedent of the sexier fashions that followed. Jill Fields writes, for example, that “the move to vamp black became possible because the growing presence of black outerwear for women in the nineteenth century due to extensive mourning rituals merged with the growing sensibility that dressing in black was fashionable” (144). Valerie Mendes is more direct: “Traditional mourning attire blazed a trail for the march of fashionable black and the little black dress” (9). These are provocative claims given that most scholarly accounts of Victorian mourning attire – whether from the perspective of literary analysis, fashion history or theory, or social history or theory – offer no indication that such progressive possibilities were inherent in widows’ weeds. Instead, those accounts focus almost exclusively on chasteness and piety, qualities required of the sorrowful widow, as the only message communicated by her attire: “Widows’ mourning clothes announced the ongoing bonds of fidelity, dependence, and grieving that were expected to tie women to their dead husbands for at least a year” (Bradbury 289). The disparity in the two accounts raises the question: how could staid, cumbersome black Victorian mourning attire lead to dresses understood to embrace sexuality and mobility?

Burlington Magazine, 2018

Papers of the Bibliographic Society of America, 2018

Papers of the Bibliographic Society of America, 2017

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 2013

Notes & Queries, May 2016

Word and Image, 2016

Victorian Periodicals Review 46, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 123-148. , Apr 2016

Notes & Queries, Nov 2014

Modern Philology, Aug 2015

in Rethinking Empathy through Literature. Ed. Sue J. Kim and Meghan Hammond.

Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 41, no. 4, 2013

Nineteenth-Century Literature 66.3 , Dec 2011

Literature Compass 8.3 (March 2011): 142-150., Mar 2011

This article offers an overview of criticism of George Meredith’s poetry in the last century and ... more This article offers an overview of criticism of George Meredith’s poetry in the last century and a half and situates Meredith’s work within current and emergent trends in Victorian studies. The first section addresses the original critical response to Meredith’s verse and the early, influential studies that serve as the basis for later scholarship, noting the emphasis on ‘Modern Love’ to the near exclusion of Meredith’s corpus beyond that poem. It then traces the reasons for these limitations, including the access problems created by the lack of current print editions of Meredith’s poetry. Next, it surveys recent additions to Meredith criticism. The article concludes by suggesting scholarly and pedagogical directions for working with Meredith’s poetry, arguing that it is particularly well suited to the interdisciplinary, neoformalist, and narratological approaches now defining Victorian poetry scholarship.

Fashion Theory 14.1 (March 2010): 45-64., Mar 2010

Neo-Victorian Studies, Jan 1, 2010

How to make sense of Dickens World, an "indoor visitor attraction" which resists the conventions ... more How to make sense of Dickens World, an "indoor visitor attraction" which resists the conventions defining similar enterprises? Though it promises to "take visitors on a journey of Dickens lifetime," transporting them "to Dickensian England," it is not precisely a Disney-style theme park, a site of literary tourism, or a site of historical significance. Bringing to life the worlds of Dickens's novels -wherein physical environments, events, and characters are inextricable -depends upon a process of adaptation analogous, we argue, to cinematic or literary adaptation. This article considers Dickens World as a case study in adaptation; we suggest that its attractions demonstrate fundamental adaptive concerns: structure, nostalgia, spectacle, narrative, and commodification. Approaching Dickens World as the spectacularisation of the dynamics of literary encounter, the resulting analysis expands the boundaries of adaptation theory while delineating the aspects of Dickens's work which make its adaptation compelling but ultimately -as Dickens World showschallenging.