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Books by Pamela Gilbert
“Responsibility and Community: Narrating the Individual and the Collective in Pandemic Times.” Special Issue Forum on the Pandemic. Journal of Victorian Culture, https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcac013 Published online: 13 April 2022. Paper edition: 27.2, 2022., 2022
Epidemics are times of negotiation between the individual and the collective. The British realist... more Epidemics are times of negotiation between the individual and the collective. The British realist novel, with its emphasis on possessive individualism, turns in the mid-nineteenth century to engage a larger population brought into view, in large part, by the emergence of statistical models of public health. Dickens is critically engaged in this process in Bleak House, which shows the difficulties of negotiating between the plot of individual agency and representing collective suffering and responsibility. Moreover, it highlights one of the major problems of defining such a collective. At a moment when Britons were beginning to understand themselves as part of a worldwide system, specifically in the light of pandemics such as cholera, what is the definition of the society to which one belongs and has responsibility? Dickens reaches for inclusion in his insistence on the linkage between events and bodies in England, but does so in part by implying that other, racialized, bodies-in Borrioboola-gha for example-are beyond that collective and its concerns. In so doing, he appeals to the notion of an ethnically coherent nation-state that was gaining ground in the period. Now we, supposedly beyond the nation-state model, find that we must think about global community within the terms of COVID-19 (and climate change)-precisely when regressive fantasies of the self-enclosed, homogenous nation are being peddled by some of the most politically reactionary governments the West has seen in many decades. This essay uses Dickens to think about the problems and opportunities of representing our global interdependence.
"The Other ‘Other Victorians’: Normative Sexualities in Victorian Literature." Ed Andrew Mangham. Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge UP, May 2021., 2021
Looks at the medical and fictional context of Victorian sexualities: Even as we denounced a gener... more Looks at the medical and fictional context of Victorian sexualities: Even as we denounced a generation of historians and scholars for thinking Victorians were repressed, we canonized a literature based on heteronormative courtship narratives and traditional gender roles. We then critiqued that literature for adhering to – or championed it for subverting – those traditional narratives. This is perhaps particularly true of narratives of feminine sexuality. When the process of feminist recovery began, we sought out literature that seemed to challenge those narratives, but in insisting on this ‘subversive’ feminist content, whether we found it explicitly in New Woman fiction or implicitly in sensational fiction that we could read as critical of patriarchy, we looked for dialogue with these traditional narratives. In fact, Victorian fiction was
always wilder and woollier than we gave it credit for being."
SEL, 2019
A review essay of books on Nineteenth Century British literature for the year prior
Mary Elizabeth Braddon: Beyond Sensation, 2000
Introduction for co-edited volume on Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Cholera and Nation, 2008
Introduction to the book, Cholera and Nation, 2008
The Citizen's Body (Introduction), 2007
Introduction to book, The Citizen's Body. 2007
DISEASE, DESIRE, AND THE BODY IN VICTORIAN WOMEN'S POPULAR NOVELS, 1997
Introduction to book, DISEASE, DESIRE, AND THE BODY IN VICTORIAN WOMEN'S POPULAR NOVELS
A Companion to Sensation Fiction, 2011
Introduction to a collection on sensation fiction.
Mapping the Victorian Social Body, 2004
Introduction to book, Mapping the Victorian Social Body
Imagined Londons, 2002
Essays on nineteenth and twentieth century London, its representations and narratives. Examples ... more Essays on nineteenth and twentieth century London, its representations and narratives. Examples range from literature to cultural geography, art to music, drama to tourist guides.
The Writing Instructor, 1991
Introduction to a 1991 special issue ofThe Writing Instrauctor on Black English.
La Peauologie, 2020
The tattoo was a common “mark” of both travelling and openness to local experience or to simply g... more The tattoo was a common “mark” of both travelling and openness to local experience or to simply going native. It was both indelible and peculiarly identifying, and yet one that could seem both alien and alienating. It was often considered barbaric, but was also a peculiarly modern sign of travel and sophistication. Here, I would like to place tattooing in the history of its imagined relationship to the domestic and the exotic, as well as the new and the old. First, I will offer a brief historical consideration of how perceptions of the practice developed in three phases over the century, and subsequently talk a bit about Thomas Hardy’s novel A Laodicean in which a tattoo figures prominently in his representation of links between cosmopolitanism and atavism, aristocratic decadence and Philistine propriety.
Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History., 2019
This is the Introduction to my new book, Victorian Skin Surface, Self, History.
This is the first book to address the entire career of this key Victorian author. Mary Elizabeth... more This is the first book to address the entire career of this key Victorian author.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, journal editor and bestselling author of more than eighty novels during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was a key figure in the Victorian literary scene. This volume brings together new essays from a variety of perspectives that illuminate both the richness of Braddon's oeuvre and the variety of critical approaches to it.
Best known as the author of Lady Audley's Secret and Aurora Floyd, Braddon also wrote penny dreadfuls, realist novels, plays, short stories, reviews, and articles. The contributors move beyond her two most famous works and reflect a range of current issues and approaches, including gender, genre, imperialism, colonial reception, commodity culture, and publishing history.
Offers discussion of criticism on popular Victorian fiction, specifically sensation and gothic by... more Offers discussion of criticism on popular Victorian fiction, specifically sensation and gothic by Cvetkovich, Hurley, and Jones. Suggests present directions for research on sentimental fiction and affect.
“Responsibility and Community: Narrating the Individual and the Collective in Pandemic Times.” Special Issue Forum on the Pandemic. Journal of Victorian Culture, https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcac013 Published online: 13 April 2022. Paper edition: 27.2, 2022., 2022
Epidemics are times of negotiation between the individual and the collective. The British realist... more Epidemics are times of negotiation between the individual and the collective. The British realist novel, with its emphasis on possessive individualism, turns in the mid-nineteenth century to engage a larger population brought into view, in large part, by the emergence of statistical models of public health. Dickens is critically engaged in this process in Bleak House, which shows the difficulties of negotiating between the plot of individual agency and representing collective suffering and responsibility. Moreover, it highlights one of the major problems of defining such a collective. At a moment when Britons were beginning to understand themselves as part of a worldwide system, specifically in the light of pandemics such as cholera, what is the definition of the society to which one belongs and has responsibility? Dickens reaches for inclusion in his insistence on the linkage between events and bodies in England, but does so in part by implying that other, racialized, bodies-in Borrioboola-gha for example-are beyond that collective and its concerns. In so doing, he appeals to the notion of an ethnically coherent nation-state that was gaining ground in the period. Now we, supposedly beyond the nation-state model, find that we must think about global community within the terms of COVID-19 (and climate change)-precisely when regressive fantasies of the self-enclosed, homogenous nation are being peddled by some of the most politically reactionary governments the West has seen in many decades. This essay uses Dickens to think about the problems and opportunities of representing our global interdependence.
"The Other ‘Other Victorians’: Normative Sexualities in Victorian Literature." Ed Andrew Mangham. Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge UP, May 2021., 2021
Looks at the medical and fictional context of Victorian sexualities: Even as we denounced a gener... more Looks at the medical and fictional context of Victorian sexualities: Even as we denounced a generation of historians and scholars for thinking Victorians were repressed, we canonized a literature based on heteronormative courtship narratives and traditional gender roles. We then critiqued that literature for adhering to – or championed it for subverting – those traditional narratives. This is perhaps particularly true of narratives of feminine sexuality. When the process of feminist recovery began, we sought out literature that seemed to challenge those narratives, but in insisting on this ‘subversive’ feminist content, whether we found it explicitly in New Woman fiction or implicitly in sensational fiction that we could read as critical of patriarchy, we looked for dialogue with these traditional narratives. In fact, Victorian fiction was
always wilder and woollier than we gave it credit for being."
SEL, 2019
A review essay of books on Nineteenth Century British literature for the year prior
Mary Elizabeth Braddon: Beyond Sensation, 2000
Introduction for co-edited volume on Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Cholera and Nation, 2008
Introduction to the book, Cholera and Nation, 2008
The Citizen's Body (Introduction), 2007
Introduction to book, The Citizen's Body. 2007
DISEASE, DESIRE, AND THE BODY IN VICTORIAN WOMEN'S POPULAR NOVELS, 1997
Introduction to book, DISEASE, DESIRE, AND THE BODY IN VICTORIAN WOMEN'S POPULAR NOVELS
A Companion to Sensation Fiction, 2011
Introduction to a collection on sensation fiction.
Mapping the Victorian Social Body, 2004
Introduction to book, Mapping the Victorian Social Body
Imagined Londons, 2002
Essays on nineteenth and twentieth century London, its representations and narratives. Examples ... more Essays on nineteenth and twentieth century London, its representations and narratives. Examples range from literature to cultural geography, art to music, drama to tourist guides.
The Writing Instructor, 1991
Introduction to a 1991 special issue ofThe Writing Instrauctor on Black English.
La Peauologie, 2020
The tattoo was a common “mark” of both travelling and openness to local experience or to simply g... more The tattoo was a common “mark” of both travelling and openness to local experience or to simply going native. It was both indelible and peculiarly identifying, and yet one that could seem both alien and alienating. It was often considered barbaric, but was also a peculiarly modern sign of travel and sophistication. Here, I would like to place tattooing in the history of its imagined relationship to the domestic and the exotic, as well as the new and the old. First, I will offer a brief historical consideration of how perceptions of the practice developed in three phases over the century, and subsequently talk a bit about Thomas Hardy’s novel A Laodicean in which a tattoo figures prominently in his representation of links between cosmopolitanism and atavism, aristocratic decadence and Philistine propriety.
Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History., 2019
This is the Introduction to my new book, Victorian Skin Surface, Self, History.
This is the first book to address the entire career of this key Victorian author. Mary Elizabeth... more This is the first book to address the entire career of this key Victorian author.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, journal editor and bestselling author of more than eighty novels during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was a key figure in the Victorian literary scene. This volume brings together new essays from a variety of perspectives that illuminate both the richness of Braddon's oeuvre and the variety of critical approaches to it.
Best known as the author of Lady Audley's Secret and Aurora Floyd, Braddon also wrote penny dreadfuls, realist novels, plays, short stories, reviews, and articles. The contributors move beyond her two most famous works and reflect a range of current issues and approaches, including gender, genre, imperialism, colonial reception, commodity culture, and publishing history.
Offers discussion of criticism on popular Victorian fiction, specifically sensation and gothic by... more Offers discussion of criticism on popular Victorian fiction, specifically sensation and gothic by Cvetkovich, Hurley, and Jones. Suggests present directions for research on sentimental fiction and affect.
![Research paper thumbnail of Course Syllabus ENG 4953 [section 231C] W per 9-11 (405pm-705pm) CBD 0210 Department Seminar: Victorian Masculinities](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/116659640/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](This course will focus on Victorian genders with a special emphasis on masculinities, especially ... more This course will focus on Victorian genders with a special emphasis on masculinities, especially as manifested at mid-century Britain (mostly the 1840s-1870s) in the novel. Additionally, we will spend time reading and thinking about secondary works which interrogate and historicize our principal terms. By the end of the course, you will have read a substantial amount of important secondary work regarding mid-century masculinities, as well as a good selection of Victorian novels.
Syllabus 3122 Spring 2016 17A9 TUR 2342 pers 9-177 (405-705pm) Reading list: Jane Austen, Pride... more Syllabus 3122 Spring 2016 17A9 TUR 2342 pers 9-177 (405-705pm) Reading list: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South Charles Dickens, Bleak House George Eliot, Mill on the Floss Braddon, M.E. Lady Audley's Secret Kipling, Rudyard Kim Several short articles, to be available on Canvas I recommend the Broadview editions of these novels where possible, except for North and South. (If you already own these books in a good unabridged form, I do not require you to buy new ones. They are also all available online on Project Gutenberg.) I will give you a URL and ISBN to get a discount on the Broadview editions. The Course: This course samples key developments in the British novel through the nineteenth century. We will examine the novels within three contexts: historical, literary-historical, and critical. If you have not had English 2022, you should plan to familiarize yourself with the period: the Norton Anthology ...
Configurations, 2011
Page 1. 68 Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies 14.2 (2009) BOOK REVIEWS William A. Cohen, E... more Page 1. 68 Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies 14.2 (2009) BOOK REVIEWS William A. Cohen, Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 2009. ISBN 0-8166-5013-2 There is an indelible ...
The American Historical Review, 2009
Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701 www. ohioswallow. com © 2008 by Ohio University Press P... more Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701 www. ohioswallow. com © 2008 by Ohio University Press Printed in the United States of America All rights reserved Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress ...
The Writing Instructor, 1991
By Paulo Freire. In this text, transcribed from a speech given by Freire at USC and published wit... more By Paulo Freire. In this text, transcribed from a speech given by Freire at USC and published with Freire's permission, in an issue of The Writing Instructor dedicated to Black English, and edited by Pamela K. Gilbert, Freire discusses the importance of taste as both a lived experience and a metaphor for community, and its role in building democratic institutions.
The Writing Instructor, 1992
Co-authored introduction to a 1992 issue of the Writing Instructor devoted to Risking Authority.
Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, 2021
Nineteenth Century Studies
The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature, 2019
Framing and Imagining Disease in Cultural History, 2003
In the early nineteenth century, new techniques in cartography and printing made maps far more wi... more In the early nineteenth century, new techniques in cartography and printing made maps far more widely available in Europe than had previously been possible. From the late 1820s on, social, sanitary and medical experts began to combine statistics and cartography in thematic maps that enabled medics, sanitarians and urban dwellers alike to understand their environment in new ways. The cholera pandemic of the late 1820s and early 1830s sparked a host of medical maps, which were used both as epidemiological tools and as arguments for developments in social policy. As such, they also became powerful representations of and arguments for certain models of the social body, as well as revolutionary tools for envisioning both diseases and diseased populations. Such maps became crucial in defining community and the boundaries of place, at the levels both of social imaginary and of policy.
19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 2014
... Contents vii 26 Sensational Variations on the Domestic Romance: Charlotte M. Brame and Mary C... more ... Contents vii 26 Sensational Variations on the Domestic Romance: Charlotte M. Brame and Mary Cecil Hay in the Family Herald 332 Graham ... Stoddard Holmes and Mark Mossman 39 The Law and Sensation 507 Jane Jordan 40 Sensation and Detection 516 Heather Milton 41 ...
University of Toronto Quarterly, 2011
Queensland.’ Their essay mistrusts data alone, suggesting that there is much to learn from the wo... more Queensland.’ Their essay mistrusts data alone, suggesting that there is much to learn from the words of perpetrators and witnesses of suicide. This reader found their concentration on motives refreshing after the many analyses of statistical and detailed ‘official’ evidence. Motivation also has an important place in essays like ‘‘Overwork Suicide’ in Twentieth-Century Japan,’ by Junko Kitanaka, who looks at Japanese suicide less as a demonstration of gallantry and pride than as an expression of exhaustion from overwork. As postwar Japanese and their descendants worked to restore their nation and its image and to compete in world markets, he suggests that some drove themselves to death. Kitanaka notes that in the consecutive ten years after 1998, 30,000 victims of suicide were recorded. Because of this increase, he suggests, Japanese psychiatry has been forced to re-evaluate the nature of the act. Kitanaka’s essay on Japan points to the importance of culture in studies of suicide, as does Kenneth M. Pinnow’s essay, ‘Suicide and Social Integration in Bolshevik Russia.’ According to Pinnow, theories of individuality are of little use in his kind of study, where the collective is considered the living entity and individuals only its members. Individuals comprise both the collective’s ‘greatest resource and its greatest threat’ (202), since acts of self-destruction are also destructive of the group. Such a diverse collection of essays might prove too daunting for the reader if it were not well introduced. But instead of simply preparing for each individual essay to follow, the editors’ introduction takes care to make comparisons and contrasts and provide a rich context for the book. As the two editors tell us, the analyses are meant to reflect the core values of diverse societies, answering questions about re-conceptualizing self-murder medically and demographically, about suicide and modernization, and suicide as reflected in power relations. Suicide, they say, is ‘all about discourses’ (12), a contention borne out in the many essays that follow their intelligent introduction. (BARBARA T. GATES)