Louise Lee | Roehampton University (original) (raw)
Uploads
Talks by Louise Lee
Victorian Studies, 2022
Review of Victorian Comedy and Laughter by Laura Kasson Fiss
Romanticism on the Net, 2016
Romanticism on the Net, 2016
Critics have often noted Darwin’s enthusiastic curiosity (Beer, Levine, Amigoni, Schmitt, Browne)... more Critics have often noted Darwin’s enthusiastic curiosity (Beer, Levine, Amigoni, Schmitt, Browne) in the Journal of Researches (1839)—particularly its “intensely libidinous” nature (Beer)—but his “strange antics” and numerous instances of “amusement” have been treated as little more than biographical gloss, or charming digressions on the way to a much larger story. But re-reading these understatedly comic episodes through the interpretive prism of incongruity produces a new set of emphases; and intellectual and affective affinities. For, like Michel Foucault’s laughter at the beginning of The Order of Things (1966), Darwin’s “scientific wit” has distinctly taxonomic implications.1 Incongruity figures the splicing of two previously un-apprehended interpretive frames, a kink in the logic of expectation. While Darwin later naturalizes (rather than spectacularizes) incongruity into his scientific method, in its first iteration in the Journal, it performs vital cultural and aesthetic work: upturning sublimity and delivering detail and present-ness rather than vastness and transcendental awe. Building on Arthur Koestler’s theory of “bisociation”, I argue that incongruity—a gentlemanly and Enlightenment theory of comedy that is fundamentally horizontal rather than vertical in its purview—operates by making Darwin’s own previous expectations, rather than any object, animal or person, the butt of the joke. The “clash” of comic frames at the point of observation limns incongruity’s usefulness as a form of visually self-stimulating agon. These “shifts of attention” (Koestler), I propose, have significant implications in his early evolutionary theorizing: gesturing towards Darwin’s own “nonsense” aesthetic: one that is highly suggestive of non-essentialist approaches to species thinking.
Reading Wuthering Heights through Roland Barthes's seminal essay "The Death of the Author" (1968)... more Reading Wuthering Heights through Roland Barthes's seminal essay "The Death of the Author" (1968), this essay explores the internal dissonances and sometimes barely restrained licence of Brontë's self-narrating characters. It argues that the novel both disrupts (and even appears to taunt) its readers' efforts at narrative unification-even at moments of powerful emotional intensity. Taking Heathcliff's illegible death mask as a starting point, it suggests that Wuthering Heights, like its violent and Byronic anti-hero, wages war on bourgeois morality and conventional generic expectation, in a wider argument about deep and surface reading.
Books by Louise Lee
Victorian Comedy and Laughter: Conviviality, Jokes and Dissent, 2020
George Eliot’s seriousness is often treated as a genre in itself by twenty-first-century critics.... more George Eliot’s seriousness is often treated as a genre in itself by twenty-first-century critics. This chapter aims to reset the aesthetic dial by reading her novels Middlemarch, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss and Daniel Deronda through her forgotten Westminster Review essay on laughter, ‘German Wit: Heinrich Heine’ (1856). This was one of a number of essays Eliot wrote on Heine, a notorious iconoclast whose work also provided the literary mainstay of Sigmund Freud’s allusions in The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious (1905). Considering Eliot’s advanced interests in the short-form of the joke alongside her theorisation of the more ‘prolix’ humour (‘the incongruous aspects of everyday life’) renders new ways to interpret both sympathy and the ‘real’ in her work.
This innovative collection of essays is the first to situate comedy and laughter as central rathe... more This innovative collection of essays is the first to situate comedy and laughter as central rather than peripheral to nineteenth century life. Victorian Comedy and Laughter: Conviviality, Jokes and Dissent offers new readings of the works of Charles Dickens, Edward Lear, George Eliot, George Gissing, Barry Pain and Oscar Wilde, alongside discussions of much-loved Victorian comics like Little Tich, Jenny Hill, Bessie Bellwood and Thomas Lawrence. Tracing three consecutive and interlocking moods in the period, all the contributors engage with the crucial critical question of how laughter and comedy shaped Victorian subjectivity and aesthetic form. Malcolm Andrews, Jonathan Buckmaster and Peter Swaab explore the dream of print culture togetherness that is conviviality, while Bob Nicholson, Louise Lee, Ann Featherstone, Louise Wingrove and Oliver Double discuss the rise-on-rise of the Victorian joke -- both on the page and the stage -- while Peter Jones, Jonathan Wild and Matthew Kaiser consider the impassioned debates concerning old and new forms of laughter that took place at the end of the century.
Papers by Louise Lee
Palgrave Macmillan, Aug 1, 2020
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
Laughter is under-determined in twentieth and twenty-first-century critical accounts of Victorian... more Laughter is under-determined in twentieth and twenty-first-century critical accounts of Victorian culture. While the turn to affect and the rise of performance studies has done something to redress this imbalance, finding a common disciplinary language has historically proven problematic. Focusing on the practices of Victorian middlebrow literary reviewers, and also descriptive accounts of critics watching stage comedians, I argue that terms like ‘wit’, ‘humour’, ‘fancy’ and ‘incongruity’ may appear static—even recondite—but they are nonetheless important markers of changing subjectivity, and are dynamically shifting in the period. Considering particularly the rise of the joke from the 1850s onwards, the chapter also introduces a new cultural figure: the jokeur, the professional or semi-professional joke-writer, less visible than the flâneur, but increasingly significant.
Romanticism on the net, 2016
Critics have often noted Darwin’s enthusiastic curiosity (Beer, Levine, Amigoni, Schmitt, Browne)... more Critics have often noted Darwin’s enthusiastic curiosity (Beer, Levine, Amigoni, Schmitt, Browne) in the Journal of Researches (1839)—particularly its “intensely libidinous” nature (Beer)—but his “strange antics” and numerous instances of “amusement” have been treated as little more than biographical gloss, or charming digressions on the way to a much larger story. But re-reading these understatedly comic episodes through the interpretive prism of incongruity produces a new set of emphases, and intellectual and affective affinities. For, like Michel Foucault’s laughter at the beginning of The Order of Things (1966), Darwin’s “scientific wit” has distinctly taxonomic implications. Incongruity figures the splicing of two previously un-apprehended interpretive frames, a kink in the logic of expectation. While Darwin later naturalizes (rather than spectacularizes) incongruity into his scientific method, in its first iteration in the Journal, it performs vital cultural and aesthetic wor...
Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net:, 2016
I want to start with a useful rather than a funny question posed by the critic Hilary M. Schor: '... more I want to start with a useful rather than a funny question posed by the critic Hilary M. Schor: 'What acts of information-organization do we perform on the Eliot career?'! The answer is possibly a succession of familiar base-touchings: Eliot's Warwickshire childhood and family life, the loss of her evangelical faith, her London journalism and reviewing, the development of her artistic values through engagement with European art and literature-the works of Baruch Spinoza, Ludwig Feuerbach, David Strauss, and Auguste Comte-and, of course, her partnership with George Henry Lewes. Other notable Eliot 'themes' might include science, religion, history, natural history, gender, music, and Darwinism. In this endless list of possible configurations, a category we're most unlikely to come up with is Eliot and laughter. The ideological shaping of Eliot's career talks to a wider bourgeois preference in the mid-Victorian period-and beyond-for lachrymose respectability, one that publicly, at least, occluded laughing or gelastic narratives, even when these were enjoyed in camera. While George Henry Lewes, for example, famously professed to admiring Eliot's 'fun' in her first work of fiction, 'The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton' (1858), it was her 'pathos' that he ultimately plumped for.' Both Eliot and Lewes 'cried together' over the scenes of Milly Barton's deathbed, a marital act of affective communion that is tacitly invoked when Eliot published the story in Scenes of Clerical Life, in 1858. Her narrator directly addresses her readers with the words, 'I wish to stir your sympathy with commonplace troubles-to win your tears for real sorrow." The emphasis on 'real sorrow' connotes sympathy's peculiar grammar of affect, a generic predisposition for crying following from reading novels and letters that interfaces shared sympathies and weeping in a transactional exchange of ink for tears. Yet despite this, Eliot participated in increasingly widespread debates about the ideological and aesthetic place of laughter in Victorian society, begun by writers like William Hazlitt, Charles Dickens, W. M. Thackeray, George Meredith, and continued by scientists and philosophers, Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, James Sully and later Sigmund Freud. In 1856, writing anonymously for the Westminster Review in 'German Wit: Heinrich Heine', she quotes Goethe's comment that 'nothing is more significant of man's character than what they find laughable'" Eliot, however, adds a notable modification: 'The truth of the observation would be more apparent if Goethe had said culture [my emphasis] instead of character." What is remarkable here, considering Eliot's enduring status as a canonically serious author, is her stridency about laughter's irreducible significance in the public realm. What a society collectively finds ticklish is, she suggests, such a reliable indicator, such an accurate thermometer of a social body's hidden structures of feeling, that neither politics, nor art, nor religion can render such a complete and truthful picture. And there is an extent, surely, to which Eliot is right. What makes a society break into hilarity, to snort, to snigger, to guffaw, or to laugh inwardly, is far more symptomatic perhaps of a collective identity than the quieter and infinitely more containable pleasures of sympathy. While laughter, like sympathy, can be congenial and smooth, about social politesse, it can also be (unlike sympathy) riotous and bodily-causing potentially, rictus, loudness and even wetness; but most of all, because of its often involuntary nature, upset. As James Wood argues in his elegant study oflaughter and the novel The Irresponsible 56 The George Eliot Review 45 (2014)
Journal of Victorian Culture, 2008
On the morning of the much-feared 'Monster'Chartist rally of 10 April 1848, London rese... more On the morning of the much-feared 'Monster'Chartist rally of 10 April 1848, London resembled a ghost town: two million protesters were expected to march on the capital; the Queen and Prince Albert had fled to the Isle of Wight; shops were closed; and an ageing ...
Victorian Studies, 2022
Review of Victorian Comedy and Laughter by Laura Kasson Fiss
Romanticism on the Net, 2016
Romanticism on the Net, 2016
Critics have often noted Darwin’s enthusiastic curiosity (Beer, Levine, Amigoni, Schmitt, Browne)... more Critics have often noted Darwin’s enthusiastic curiosity (Beer, Levine, Amigoni, Schmitt, Browne) in the Journal of Researches (1839)—particularly its “intensely libidinous” nature (Beer)—but his “strange antics” and numerous instances of “amusement” have been treated as little more than biographical gloss, or charming digressions on the way to a much larger story. But re-reading these understatedly comic episodes through the interpretive prism of incongruity produces a new set of emphases; and intellectual and affective affinities. For, like Michel Foucault’s laughter at the beginning of The Order of Things (1966), Darwin’s “scientific wit” has distinctly taxonomic implications.1 Incongruity figures the splicing of two previously un-apprehended interpretive frames, a kink in the logic of expectation. While Darwin later naturalizes (rather than spectacularizes) incongruity into his scientific method, in its first iteration in the Journal, it performs vital cultural and aesthetic work: upturning sublimity and delivering detail and present-ness rather than vastness and transcendental awe. Building on Arthur Koestler’s theory of “bisociation”, I argue that incongruity—a gentlemanly and Enlightenment theory of comedy that is fundamentally horizontal rather than vertical in its purview—operates by making Darwin’s own previous expectations, rather than any object, animal or person, the butt of the joke. The “clash” of comic frames at the point of observation limns incongruity’s usefulness as a form of visually self-stimulating agon. These “shifts of attention” (Koestler), I propose, have significant implications in his early evolutionary theorizing: gesturing towards Darwin’s own “nonsense” aesthetic: one that is highly suggestive of non-essentialist approaches to species thinking.
Reading Wuthering Heights through Roland Barthes's seminal essay "The Death of the Author" (1968)... more Reading Wuthering Heights through Roland Barthes's seminal essay "The Death of the Author" (1968), this essay explores the internal dissonances and sometimes barely restrained licence of Brontë's self-narrating characters. It argues that the novel both disrupts (and even appears to taunt) its readers' efforts at narrative unification-even at moments of powerful emotional intensity. Taking Heathcliff's illegible death mask as a starting point, it suggests that Wuthering Heights, like its violent and Byronic anti-hero, wages war on bourgeois morality and conventional generic expectation, in a wider argument about deep and surface reading.
Victorian Comedy and Laughter: Conviviality, Jokes and Dissent, 2020
George Eliot’s seriousness is often treated as a genre in itself by twenty-first-century critics.... more George Eliot’s seriousness is often treated as a genre in itself by twenty-first-century critics. This chapter aims to reset the aesthetic dial by reading her novels Middlemarch, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss and Daniel Deronda through her forgotten Westminster Review essay on laughter, ‘German Wit: Heinrich Heine’ (1856). This was one of a number of essays Eliot wrote on Heine, a notorious iconoclast whose work also provided the literary mainstay of Sigmund Freud’s allusions in The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious (1905). Considering Eliot’s advanced interests in the short-form of the joke alongside her theorisation of the more ‘prolix’ humour (‘the incongruous aspects of everyday life’) renders new ways to interpret both sympathy and the ‘real’ in her work.
This innovative collection of essays is the first to situate comedy and laughter as central rathe... more This innovative collection of essays is the first to situate comedy and laughter as central rather than peripheral to nineteenth century life. Victorian Comedy and Laughter: Conviviality, Jokes and Dissent offers new readings of the works of Charles Dickens, Edward Lear, George Eliot, George Gissing, Barry Pain and Oscar Wilde, alongside discussions of much-loved Victorian comics like Little Tich, Jenny Hill, Bessie Bellwood and Thomas Lawrence. Tracing three consecutive and interlocking moods in the period, all the contributors engage with the crucial critical question of how laughter and comedy shaped Victorian subjectivity and aesthetic form. Malcolm Andrews, Jonathan Buckmaster and Peter Swaab explore the dream of print culture togetherness that is conviviality, while Bob Nicholson, Louise Lee, Ann Featherstone, Louise Wingrove and Oliver Double discuss the rise-on-rise of the Victorian joke -- both on the page and the stage -- while Peter Jones, Jonathan Wild and Matthew Kaiser consider the impassioned debates concerning old and new forms of laughter that took place at the end of the century.
Palgrave Macmillan, Aug 1, 2020
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
Laughter is under-determined in twentieth and twenty-first-century critical accounts of Victorian... more Laughter is under-determined in twentieth and twenty-first-century critical accounts of Victorian culture. While the turn to affect and the rise of performance studies has done something to redress this imbalance, finding a common disciplinary language has historically proven problematic. Focusing on the practices of Victorian middlebrow literary reviewers, and also descriptive accounts of critics watching stage comedians, I argue that terms like ‘wit’, ‘humour’, ‘fancy’ and ‘incongruity’ may appear static—even recondite—but they are nonetheless important markers of changing subjectivity, and are dynamically shifting in the period. Considering particularly the rise of the joke from the 1850s onwards, the chapter also introduces a new cultural figure: the jokeur, the professional or semi-professional joke-writer, less visible than the flâneur, but increasingly significant.
Romanticism on the net, 2016
Critics have often noted Darwin’s enthusiastic curiosity (Beer, Levine, Amigoni, Schmitt, Browne)... more Critics have often noted Darwin’s enthusiastic curiosity (Beer, Levine, Amigoni, Schmitt, Browne) in the Journal of Researches (1839)—particularly its “intensely libidinous” nature (Beer)—but his “strange antics” and numerous instances of “amusement” have been treated as little more than biographical gloss, or charming digressions on the way to a much larger story. But re-reading these understatedly comic episodes through the interpretive prism of incongruity produces a new set of emphases, and intellectual and affective affinities. For, like Michel Foucault’s laughter at the beginning of The Order of Things (1966), Darwin’s “scientific wit” has distinctly taxonomic implications. Incongruity figures the splicing of two previously un-apprehended interpretive frames, a kink in the logic of expectation. While Darwin later naturalizes (rather than spectacularizes) incongruity into his scientific method, in its first iteration in the Journal, it performs vital cultural and aesthetic wor...
Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net:, 2016
I want to start with a useful rather than a funny question posed by the critic Hilary M. Schor: '... more I want to start with a useful rather than a funny question posed by the critic Hilary M. Schor: 'What acts of information-organization do we perform on the Eliot career?'! The answer is possibly a succession of familiar base-touchings: Eliot's Warwickshire childhood and family life, the loss of her evangelical faith, her London journalism and reviewing, the development of her artistic values through engagement with European art and literature-the works of Baruch Spinoza, Ludwig Feuerbach, David Strauss, and Auguste Comte-and, of course, her partnership with George Henry Lewes. Other notable Eliot 'themes' might include science, religion, history, natural history, gender, music, and Darwinism. In this endless list of possible configurations, a category we're most unlikely to come up with is Eliot and laughter. The ideological shaping of Eliot's career talks to a wider bourgeois preference in the mid-Victorian period-and beyond-for lachrymose respectability, one that publicly, at least, occluded laughing or gelastic narratives, even when these were enjoyed in camera. While George Henry Lewes, for example, famously professed to admiring Eliot's 'fun' in her first work of fiction, 'The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton' (1858), it was her 'pathos' that he ultimately plumped for.' Both Eliot and Lewes 'cried together' over the scenes of Milly Barton's deathbed, a marital act of affective communion that is tacitly invoked when Eliot published the story in Scenes of Clerical Life, in 1858. Her narrator directly addresses her readers with the words, 'I wish to stir your sympathy with commonplace troubles-to win your tears for real sorrow." The emphasis on 'real sorrow' connotes sympathy's peculiar grammar of affect, a generic predisposition for crying following from reading novels and letters that interfaces shared sympathies and weeping in a transactional exchange of ink for tears. Yet despite this, Eliot participated in increasingly widespread debates about the ideological and aesthetic place of laughter in Victorian society, begun by writers like William Hazlitt, Charles Dickens, W. M. Thackeray, George Meredith, and continued by scientists and philosophers, Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, James Sully and later Sigmund Freud. In 1856, writing anonymously for the Westminster Review in 'German Wit: Heinrich Heine', she quotes Goethe's comment that 'nothing is more significant of man's character than what they find laughable'" Eliot, however, adds a notable modification: 'The truth of the observation would be more apparent if Goethe had said culture [my emphasis] instead of character." What is remarkable here, considering Eliot's enduring status as a canonically serious author, is her stridency about laughter's irreducible significance in the public realm. What a society collectively finds ticklish is, she suggests, such a reliable indicator, such an accurate thermometer of a social body's hidden structures of feeling, that neither politics, nor art, nor religion can render such a complete and truthful picture. And there is an extent, surely, to which Eliot is right. What makes a society break into hilarity, to snort, to snigger, to guffaw, or to laugh inwardly, is far more symptomatic perhaps of a collective identity than the quieter and infinitely more containable pleasures of sympathy. While laughter, like sympathy, can be congenial and smooth, about social politesse, it can also be (unlike sympathy) riotous and bodily-causing potentially, rictus, loudness and even wetness; but most of all, because of its often involuntary nature, upset. As James Wood argues in his elegant study oflaughter and the novel The Irresponsible 56 The George Eliot Review 45 (2014)
Journal of Victorian Culture, 2008
On the morning of the much-feared 'Monster'Chartist rally of 10 April 1848, London rese... more On the morning of the much-feared 'Monster'Chartist rally of 10 April 1848, London resembled a ghost town: two million protesters were expected to march on the capital; the Queen and Prince Albert had fled to the Isle of Wight; shops were closed; and an ageing ...
In numerous ways, it is the Victorians who taught the 21 st century how to be modern. Many of the... more In numerous ways, it is the Victorians who taught the 21 st century how to be modern. Many of their concerns are our concerns, from debates about sexuality and science, to those on race, religion, politics and technology. In this course we trace some of the similarities, and the differences; paying close attention to the vast array of textual forms adopted by writers of the period, each articulating something unique about Victorian subjectivity, and the problems of consciousness. While one of the texts we study is H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895), we treat the literature of the Victorian period, itself, as a form of time travel, allowing us to experience from the inside out something of what it was like to live and breathe in another century.
