John Kucich
Biographic Data
| ID | 1131810 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John Kucich |
| GIVEN NAMES | John |
| FAMILY NAME | Kucich |
| SIGNATURE | KUCICH J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Ridgewater College |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 21 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Genre Fusion and the Origins of the Female Political Bildungsroman
Organicism
O RGANICISM pervades nearly every sphere of nineteenth-century lit- erature and culture. Most obviously, it infuses representations of economic and social interdependence in Victorian novels-at local and national levels, and also globally, as when Thomas Hardy invokes "the great web of human doings . . . weaving in both hemispheres from the White Sea to Cape Horn." 1 But Herbert Spencer also makes
Secrecy and Disclosure in Victorian Fiction
Secrecy and Disclosure in Victorian Fiction is a rigorous, wide-ranging study of the construction of subjectivity in and through Victorian fiction. It draws on May’s sophisticated command of variou
Ethnology and Empire
Scholars such as Michael Elliot, Joshua Bellin, and Lauren Mielke have long noted ethnology’s origins in the crucible of empire, tracing how this emerging science’s efforts to understand indigenous cultures have served, wittingly or not, the grim business of colonialism. Robert Lawrence Gunn’s well-researched and carefully crafted monograph falls within this general trend. His work is valuable in focusing on some long-neglected incidents in this …
The “Organic Appeal” in Felix Holt
Nineteenth-century social problem fiction anticipated state-centralized collectivism by modernizing Britain's centuries-old organic ideology. George Eliot's Felix Holt, the Radical (1866) exemplifies modernized organicism in two ways, combining moderate upward mobility with traditional social hierarchy and relocating paternalism to impersonal state structures. The novel authorizes these projects through creative forms of consent. Formally, Felix …
Organic Imperialism
Empire studies has largely overcome tendencies to view metropole and periphery as oppositional. Nevertheless, critics’ focus on sexual and racial forms of reciprocal cultural constitution has eclipsed analysis of how competing conceptions of social order interrogated each another at sites of cross-cultural exchange. What has chiefly escaped revision is the notion that the empire was based on an organic social model that remained fundamentally con…
Reverse Slumming
This essay explores a mode of performativity in Victorian fiction that viewed class dualistically—as a regulative hierarchy constituted by self-fashioning actors. “Reverse slumming” designates a mode of middle- or lower-middle-class performance that mimics upper-class behaviors so as to reaffirm social hierarchy in the very process of denaturalizing it. This cross-class performativity reconciled politically progressive mid-century notions about s…
The Unfinished Historicist Project
Historicism remains relatively robust in Victorian Studies, but it has developed rather quietly in two contrary directions – synchronic and diachronic – that have long constituted an important theoretical fault line. The first half of this essay surveys these two ongoing types of Victorian historicism and urges the importance of integrating them; the second defends historicism from a recent theoretical movement that deflects attention from that p…
Awaiting the Heavenly Country
Journal Article Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America's Culture of Death. By Mark S. Schantz. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. xviii, 245 pp. $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8014-3761-8.) Get access John J. Kucich John J. Kucich Bridgewater State CollegeBridgewater, Massachusetts Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 96, Issue 1, June 2009, Pages 227–228, https:/…
The Remarkable Life of John Murray Spear
Most recent accounts of Spiritualism have approached this mutable movement from a specific critical perspective, reading Spiritualism's intersections with feminism, psychology, modernism, and the like. John Benedict Buescher's biography of John Murray Spear offers instead a transect through Spiritualism's heyday, from its rise in the reformist circles of the mid-nineteenth century to its increasingly eccentric and esoteric manifestations that mar…
Working Fictions
Reviewed by: Working Fictions: A Genealogy of the Victorian Novel John Kucich (bio) Working Fictions: A Genealogy of the Victorian Novel, by Carolyn Lesjak; pp. x + 272. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006, $79.95, $22.95 paper, £54.00, £13.99 paper. Working Fictions proposes nothing less than "a new genealogy of the Victorian novel" (1), defining its development in relation to the antithesis that nineteenth-century culture constructed…
Imperial masochism
In Imperial Masochism, John Kucich reveals the central role masochistic forms of voluntary suffering played in late-nineteenth-century British thinking about imperial politics and class identity. Placing the colonial writers Robert Louis Stevenson, Olive Schreiner, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad in their cultural context, Kucich shows how the ideological and psychological dynamics of empire, particularly its reorganization of class identities…
Sadomasochism and the Magical Group
Set in office o'er us; And they beat on us with rodsFaithfully with many rodsDaily beat us on with rods, For the love they bore us. -from A School Song, Prelude to Stalky & Co. (1899)
Victorian Afterlife
Amy M. King, South Central Review, Vol. 19/20, Vol. 19, no. 4 - Vol. 20, no. 1, Murdering Marianne?: Violence, Gender and Representation in French Literature and Film (Winter, 2002 - Spring, 2003), pp. 158-160
Introduction
(2000). Introduction: Histories of the present. Nineteenth-Century Contexts: Vol. 22, Postmodern Victorians, pp. 1-20
Cultural Studies, Victorian Studies, and Graduate Education
L IKE MANY OTHER PEOPLE these days, I’m concerned about the speed-up in graduate education. The chief cause of our students’ premature professionalization is, of course, the terrible job market — which John Guillory has faulted for propagating intellectual shallowness among our students, by forcing them to become active scholars too soon. Guillory remarks, incidentally, that the social marginalization of literary studies reflected in the job cris…
Melodramatic Tactics
Introduction: staging the melodramatic mode 1. Unromantic melodrama 2. The old price wars: melodramatising the public sphere in early nineteenth-century England 3. Storming the Bastille: Oliver Twist and the melodramatic resistance to the new Poor Law of 1834 4. The Queen's English: melodramatic rhetoric in Victoria's England 5. Blows into whispers: the melodramatic mode and intellectual culture in the 1870s and 1880s
Transgression in Trollope
Trollope was long ago enshrined as supreme literary embodiment of middle-class stodginess. He has been called, variously, the apotheosis of normality; last unalienated English novelist; and Victorian writer most at ease with mechanisms of power and wealth. Mario Praz scorned him as quintessential novelist, finding him to be the most typical representative ... of Biedermeier spirit. David Skilton disdained his general conformity to everyday, middl…
Passionate Reserve and Reserved Passion in the Works of Charlotte Bronte
When first began to write, Charlotte Bronte told George Henry Lewes, I restrained imagination, eschewed romance, repressed excitement.' This pattern of general reserve, a point of self-definition freely avowed both by Bront& as writer and by all of her major characters, is a pattern we have grown accustomed to think of as a tragic psychic compromise, a martyring of creative potential. Such reserve, by which mean deliberate refusals of self-expres…
Melodramatic Tactics
Introduction: staging the melodramatic mode 1. Unromantic melodrama 2. The old price wars: melodramatising the public sphere in early nineteenth-century England 3. Storming the Bastille: Oliver Twist and the melodramatic resistance to the new Poor Law of 1834 4. The Queen's English: melodramatic rhetoric in Victoria's England 5. Blows into whispers: the melodramatic mode and intellectual culture in the 1870s and 1880s
The Unfinished Historicist Project
Historicism remains relatively robust in Victorian Studies, but it has developed rather quietly in two contrary directions – synchronic and diachronic – that have long constituted an important theoretical fault line. The first half of this essay surveys these two ongoing types of Victorian historicism and urges the importance of integrating them; the second defends historicism from a recent theoretical movement that deflects attention from that p…
Sadomasochism and the Magical Group
Set in office o'er us; And they beat on us with rodsFaithfully with many rodsDaily beat us on with rods, For the love they bore us. -from A School Song, Prelude to Stalky & Co. (1899)
Cultural Studies, Victorian Studies, and Graduate Education
L IKE MANY OTHER PEOPLE these days, I’m concerned about the speed-up in graduate education. The chief cause of our students’ premature professionalization is, of course, the terrible job market — which John Guillory has faulted for propagating intellectual shallowness among our students, by forcing them to become active scholars too soon. Guillory remarks, incidentally, that the social marginalization of literary studies reflected in the job cris…
Passionate Reserve and Reserved Passion in the Works of Charlotte Bronte
When first began to write, Charlotte Bronte told George Henry Lewes, I restrained imagination, eschewed romance, repressed excitement.' This pattern of general reserve, a point of self-definition freely avowed both by Bront& as writer and by all of her major characters, is a pattern we have grown accustomed to think of as a tragic psychic compromise, a martyring of creative potential. Such reserve, by which mean deliberate refusals of self-expres…
Transgression in Trollope
Trollope was long ago enshrined as supreme literary embodiment of middle-class stodginess. He has been called, variously, the apotheosis of normality; last unalienated English novelist; and Victorian writer most at ease with mechanisms of power and wealth. Mario Praz scorned him as quintessential novelist, finding him to be the most typical representative ... of Biedermeier spirit. David Skilton disdained his general conformity to everyday, middl…
Cultural Studies, Victorian Studies, and Graduate Education
L IKE MANY OTHER PEOPLE these days, I’m concerned about the speed-up in graduate education. The chief cause of our students’ premature professionalization is, of course, the terrible job market — which John Guillory has faulted for propagating intellectual shallowness among our students, by forcing them to become active scholars too soon. Guillory remarks, incidentally, that the social marginalization of literary studies reflected in the job cris…
Melodramatic Tactics
Introduction: staging the melodramatic mode 1. Unromantic melodrama 2. The old price wars: melodramatising the public sphere in early nineteenth-century England 3. Storming the Bastille: Oliver Twist and the melodramatic resistance to the new Poor Law of 1834 4. The Queen's English: melodramatic rhetoric in Victoria's England 5. Blows into whispers: the melodramatic mode and intellectual culture in the 1870s and 1880s
Introduction
(2000). Introduction: Histories of the present. Nineteenth-Century Contexts: Vol. 22, Postmodern Victorians, pp. 1-20
Victorian Afterlife
Amy M. King, South Central Review, Vol. 19/20, Vol. 19, no. 4 - Vol. 20, no. 1, Murdering Marianne?: Violence, Gender and Representation in French Literature and Film (Winter, 2002 - Spring, 2003), pp. 158-160
Sadomasochism and the Magical Group
Set in office o'er us; And they beat on us with rodsFaithfully with many rodsDaily beat us on with rods, For the love they bore us. -from A School Song, Prelude to Stalky & Co. (1899)
The Remarkable Life of John Murray Spear
Most recent accounts of Spiritualism have approached this mutable movement from a specific critical perspective, reading Spiritualism's intersections with feminism, psychology, modernism, and the like. John Benedict Buescher's biography of John Murray Spear offers instead a transect through Spiritualism's heyday, from its rise in the reformist circles of the mid-nineteenth century to its increasingly eccentric and esoteric manifestations that mar…
Working Fictions
Reviewed by: Working Fictions: A Genealogy of the Victorian Novel John Kucich (bio) Working Fictions: A Genealogy of the Victorian Novel, by Carolyn Lesjak; pp. x + 272. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006, $79.95, $22.95 paper, £54.00, £13.99 paper. Working Fictions proposes nothing less than "a new genealogy of the Victorian novel" (1), defining its development in relation to the antithesis that nineteenth-century culture constructed…
Imperial masochism
In Imperial Masochism, John Kucich reveals the central role masochistic forms of voluntary suffering played in late-nineteenth-century British thinking about imperial politics and class identity. Placing the colonial writers Robert Louis Stevenson, Olive Schreiner, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad in their cultural context, Kucich shows how the ideological and psychological dynamics of empire, particularly its reorganization of class identities…
Awaiting the Heavenly Country
Journal Article Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America's Culture of Death. By Mark S. Schantz. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. xviii, 245 pp. $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8014-3761-8.) Get access John J. Kucich John J. Kucich Bridgewater State CollegeBridgewater, Massachusetts Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 96, Issue 1, June 2009, Pages 227–228, https:/…
The Unfinished Historicist Project
Historicism remains relatively robust in Victorian Studies, but it has developed rather quietly in two contrary directions – synchronic and diachronic – that have long constituted an important theoretical fault line. The first half of this essay surveys these two ongoing types of Victorian historicism and urges the importance of integrating them; the second defends historicism from a recent theoretical movement that deflects attention from that p…
Reverse Slumming
This essay explores a mode of performativity in Victorian fiction that viewed class dualistically—as a regulative hierarchy constituted by self-fashioning actors. “Reverse slumming” designates a mode of middle- or lower-middle-class performance that mimics upper-class behaviors so as to reaffirm social hierarchy in the very process of denaturalizing it. This cross-class performativity reconciled politically progressive mid-century notions about s…
Organic Imperialism
Empire studies has largely overcome tendencies to view metropole and periphery as oppositional. Nevertheless, critics’ focus on sexual and racial forms of reciprocal cultural constitution has eclipsed analysis of how competing conceptions of social order interrogated each another at sites of cross-cultural exchange. What has chiefly escaped revision is the notion that the empire was based on an organic social model that remained fundamentally con…
Ethnology and Empire
Scholars such as Michael Elliot, Joshua Bellin, and Lauren Mielke have long noted ethnology’s origins in the crucible of empire, tracing how this emerging science’s efforts to understand indigenous cultures have served, wittingly or not, the grim business of colonialism. Robert Lawrence Gunn’s well-researched and carefully crafted monograph falls within this general trend. His work is valuable in focusing on some long-neglected incidents in this …
The “Organic Appeal” in Felix Holt
Nineteenth-century social problem fiction anticipated state-centralized collectivism by modernizing Britain's centuries-old organic ideology. George Eliot's Felix Holt, the Radical (1866) exemplifies modernized organicism in two ways, combining moderate upward mobility with traditional social hierarchy and relocating paternalism to impersonal state structures. The novel authorizes these projects through creative forms of consent. Formally, Felix …
Organicism
O RGANICISM pervades nearly every sphere of nineteenth-century lit- erature and culture. Most obviously, it infuses representations of economic and social interdependence in Victorian novels-at local and national levels, and also globally, as when Thomas Hardy invokes "the great web of human doings . . . weaving in both hemispheres from the White Sea to Cape Horn." 1 But Herbert Spencer also makes
Secrecy and Disclosure in Victorian Fiction
Secrecy and Disclosure in Victorian Fiction is a rigorous, wide-ranging study of the construction of subjectivity in and through Victorian fiction. It draws on May’s sophisticated command of variou
Genre Fusion and the Origins of the Female Political Bildungsroman
Art (14 works) · Sociology (12 works) · History (11 works) · Literature (11 works) · History (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · Aesthetics (7 works)