Ruth Livesey
Biographic Data
| ID | 1627080 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ruth Livesey |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ruth |
| FAMILY NAME | Livesey |
| SIGNATURE | LIVESEY R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Royal Holloway University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8976-1380 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 11 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 19 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Afterword
This Afterword argues that the history of literary languages in the long nineteenth century is one of conflict between a desire for local authenticity and the global extension of a standardizing anglophone culture. It suggests that the articles on literary languages in this issue of 19 foreground three key themes that each flourish within different literary genres. First, dialect literature is embodied in vernacular and dialect poetics during the…
Restructuring with Anthony Trollope
This article examines the series of novels by Anthony Trollope, known as the Barsetshire Chronicles, in relation to the idea of living through infrastructural transition. It contends that the novels, set in and around the fictional cathedral city of Barchester, stage a macro-level experience of living through infrastructural transition for implied readers. While the narrator’s asides convey a sense of privileged early access to the informational …
Provincialism at Large
This introduction situates the contributions to the New Agenda in the context of an apparent resurgence of the term ‘provincial’ and ‘provincialism’ in Britain since the Brexit debates and the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum. It takes the resurgence of provincial thinking as an invitation to explore the cultural history of provincialism in Victorian Britain and the unexpected part it played in the formation of Empire. By …
Middleness
This article argues that the rise of the provincial novel in Britain during the 1860s set loose a radically democratizing aesthetic of everyday discriminations. The article suggests – through examples from the works of Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot – that provincial fiction embodies an aesthetics of what is termed ‘middleness’: a means of reading in which the social, cultural and geographical middle became an object of careful evaluative jud…
Right to Roam? Nineteenth-Century Commons and Caroline Lesjak's The Afterlives of Enclosure
It is August 2022, and I am sitting in the British Library completing a shamefully late review (this one) when I see the headline: “Trespassers Demand Right to Roam Minister's 12,000 Acre Estate.” One hundred fifty protesters led by activist Nadia Shaikh and complete with a Morris dancing troupe walked into the Englefield estate of Richard Benyon, the UK government minister responsible for access to nature, as part of a campaign around public acc…
George Eliot and Van Gogh
Vincent Van Gogh had a deep and abiding interest in the fiction of George Eliot and her mode of depicting the ordinary matter of ‘provincial life’ in luminous detail. This article argues that Eliot’s influence on Van Gogh can be seen in the formal, and not just thematic, radicalism shared by both. How might we read Van Gogh’s works as an ekphrastic reworking of Eliot’s insistence on the full colour spectrum of aesthetic experience lurking within …
Regenia Gagnier , Literatures of Liberalization
George Eliot, Presentism, and Generational Thinking
The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic
When Frederic Jameson demanded that his readers “always historicize,” to be an historicist in the academy – it almost went without saying back then in 1981 – was to be a critical theorist invested
On writing portable place
This article draws on work by Peter Adey, Peter Merriman, Kevin Hannam and others to counter a significant body of literary criticism that suggests nineteenth-century fiction is invested in representing place as static. In nineteenth-century Britain, realist fictions of provincial life were often cast – then and now – as nostalgic places, miniaturized and immobile. In a case study of the nineteenth-century realist writer George Eliot this article…
The American Experiment and the Idea of Democracy in British Culture, 1776–1914
Aestheticism and the Politics of Pleasure
The late nineteenth-century Aesthetic movement challenged many aspects of Victorian literature and culture. This chapter explores how the emphasis on pleasure within Aestheticism was central to that challenge. The pursuit of ‘art for art’s sake’ might seem to imply a step away from the politics of the day, but the hedonism of the movement, the chapter suggests, subverted dominant arguments about culture and society in an age of democratization. T…
Charles Dickens's Networks
Living through the transport developments of the nineteenth century seems to have been a pretty dizzying experience. In 1851, Charles Dickens celebrated the opening of the new railway line from Boulogne to Paris by the South-Eastern Railway in an article in Household Words. No longer would the French side of the journey be drawn out by travel in that throwback to an earlier age – a horse-drawn Diligence or public coach from the coast to the capit…
JVC Online
We are pleased to announce that on 1 September 2010 our publisher, Taylor and Francis, launched ‘JVC Online’. This interactive website, which has been designed by David Burgoyne, gives readers access to a wealth of information relating to not only the contents of the Journal of Victorian Culture (JVC) but also current developments in Victorian studies, including links to conferences, notices of forthcoming publications, and relevant online resour…
Medievalism
Reviewed by: Medievalism: The Middle Ages in the Modern World, and: William Morriss Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality Ruth Livesey (bio) Medievalism: The Middle Ages in the Modern World, by Michael Alexander; pp. xxviii + 306. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007, $45.00, €25.00. William Morriss Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality, by Marcus Waithe; pp. xvi + 2…
Dollie Radford and the Ethical Aesthetics of Fin-De-Siècle Poetry
I got your poems, my dear Dollie. They made me sad. They make me think of the small birds in the twilight, whistling brief little tunes, but so clear, they seem almost like little lights in the twilight, such clear vivid sounds. I do think you make fine, exquisite verse...I hear your voice so plainly in these, so like a bird too, they are, the same detachment. —D. H. Lawrence to Dollie Radford, January 1916
Socialism and Victorian Poetry
This article outlines the intimate relationship between socialism and poetry, politics and aesthetics during the revival of socialist activism in Britain from the early 1880s as exemplified in the work of, among others, William Morris. It also traces the development of dialogue between historians interested in language and literary scholars concerned with political identity and the consequent formation of a canon of radical poetry from the Charti…
Reading for Character
Reading for Character: Women Social Reformers and Narratives of the Urban Poor in Late Victorian and Edwardian London Ruth Livesey Ruth Livesey 1Royal Holloway, University of London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Victorian Culture, Volume 9, Issue 1, January 2004, Pages 43–67, https://doi.org/10.3366/jvc.2004.9.1.43 Published: 01 January 2004
Morris, Carpenter, Wilde, and the Political Aesthetics of Labor
I N JUNE 1885 a group of radical intellectual Londoners gathered for the evening at that hub of nineteenth-century free thought, the South Place Institute. The event was organized by the Socialist League, a revolutionary socialist organization which counted William Morris, Eleanor Marx, and Edward Aveling as its most prominent members at that point in time. But this was no ordinary meeting. There were no lectures and no debates, just popular song…
The politics of work
This article is a case study of the first women appointed as official government factory inspectors in Britain. It uses the diaries, memoirs and official documentation left by these women – most notably, Lucy Deane – to explore the tensions surrounding the meaning of ‘work’ and the shifting alignments within the women's movement in 1890s Britain. The article questions existing feminist interpretations of both the work of the women inspectors and …
Morris, Carpenter, Wilde, and the Political Aesthetics of Labor
I N JUNE 1885 a group of radical intellectual Londoners gathered for the evening at that hub of nineteenth-century free thought, the South Place Institute. The event was organized by the Socialist League, a revolutionary socialist organization which counted William Morris, Eleanor Marx, and Edward Aveling as its most prominent members at that point in time. But this was no ordinary meeting. There were no lectures and no debates, just popular song…
Reading for Character
Reading for Character: Women Social Reformers and Narratives of the Urban Poor in Late Victorian and Edwardian London Ruth Livesey Ruth Livesey 1Royal Holloway, University of London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Victorian Culture, Volume 9, Issue 1, January 2004, Pages 43–67, https://doi.org/10.3366/jvc.2004.9.1.43 Published: 01 January 2004
On writing portable place
This article draws on work by Peter Adey, Peter Merriman, Kevin Hannam and others to counter a significant body of literary criticism that suggests nineteenth-century fiction is invested in representing place as static. In nineteenth-century Britain, realist fictions of provincial life were often cast – then and now – as nostalgic places, miniaturized and immobile. In a case study of the nineteenth-century realist writer George Eliot this article…
Dollie Radford and the Ethical Aesthetics of Fin-De-Siècle Poetry
I got your poems, my dear Dollie. They made me sad. They make me think of the small birds in the twilight, whistling brief little tunes, but so clear, they seem almost like little lights in the twilight, such clear vivid sounds. I do think you make fine, exquisite verse...I hear your voice so plainly in these, so like a bird too, they are, the same detachment. —D. H. Lawrence to Dollie Radford, January 1916
Socialism and Victorian Poetry
This article outlines the intimate relationship between socialism and poetry, politics and aesthetics during the revival of socialist activism in Britain from the early 1880s as exemplified in the work of, among others, William Morris. It also traces the development of dialogue between historians interested in language and literary scholars concerned with political identity and the consequent formation of a canon of radical poetry from the Charti…
Socialism and Victorian Poetry
This article outlines the intimate relationship between socialism and poetry, politics and aesthetics during the revival of socialist activism in Britain from the early 1880s as exemplified in the work of, among others, William Morris. It also traces the development of dialogue between historians interested in language and literary scholars concerned with political identity and the consequent formation of a canon of radical poetry from the Charti…
Reading for Character
Reading for Character: Women Social Reformers and Narratives of the Urban Poor in Late Victorian and Edwardian London Ruth Livesey Ruth Livesey 1Royal Holloway, University of London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Victorian Culture, Volume 9, Issue 1, January 2004, Pages 43–67, https://doi.org/10.3366/jvc.2004.9.1.43 Published: 01 January 2004
Morris, Carpenter, Wilde, and the Political Aesthetics of Labor
I N JUNE 1885 a group of radical intellectual Londoners gathered for the evening at that hub of nineteenth-century free thought, the South Place Institute. The event was organized by the Socialist League, a revolutionary socialist organization which counted William Morris, Eleanor Marx, and Edward Aveling as its most prominent members at that point in time. But this was no ordinary meeting. There were no lectures and no debates, just popular song…
The politics of work
This article is a case study of the first women appointed as official government factory inspectors in Britain. It uses the diaries, memoirs and official documentation left by these women – most notably, Lucy Deane – to explore the tensions surrounding the meaning of ‘work’ and the shifting alignments within the women's movement in 1890s Britain. The article questions existing feminist interpretations of both the work of the women inspectors and …
Dollie Radford and the Ethical Aesthetics of Fin-De-Siècle Poetry
I got your poems, my dear Dollie. They made me sad. They make me think of the small birds in the twilight, whistling brief little tunes, but so clear, they seem almost like little lights in the twilight, such clear vivid sounds. I do think you make fine, exquisite verse...I hear your voice so plainly in these, so like a bird too, they are, the same detachment. —D. H. Lawrence to Dollie Radford, January 1916
Medievalism
Reviewed by: Medievalism: The Middle Ages in the Modern World, and: William Morriss Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality Ruth Livesey (bio) Medievalism: The Middle Ages in the Modern World, by Michael Alexander; pp. xxviii + 306. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007, $45.00, €25.00. William Morriss Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality, by Marcus Waithe; pp. xvi + 2…
JVC Online
We are pleased to announce that on 1 September 2010 our publisher, Taylor and Francis, launched ‘JVC Online’. This interactive website, which has been designed by David Burgoyne, gives readers access to a wealth of information relating to not only the contents of the Journal of Victorian Culture (JVC) but also current developments in Victorian studies, including links to conferences, notices of forthcoming publications, and relevant online resour…
Charles Dickens's Networks
Living through the transport developments of the nineteenth century seems to have been a pretty dizzying experience. In 1851, Charles Dickens celebrated the opening of the new railway line from Boulogne to Paris by the South-Eastern Railway in an article in Household Words. No longer would the French side of the journey be drawn out by travel in that throwback to an earlier age – a horse-drawn Diligence or public coach from the coast to the capit…
Aestheticism and the Politics of Pleasure
The late nineteenth-century Aesthetic movement challenged many aspects of Victorian literature and culture. This chapter explores how the emphasis on pleasure within Aestheticism was central to that challenge. The pursuit of ‘art for art’s sake’ might seem to imply a step away from the politics of the day, but the hedonism of the movement, the chapter suggests, subverted dominant arguments about culture and society in an age of democratization. T…
The American Experiment and the Idea of Democracy in British Culture, 1776–1914
On writing portable place
This article draws on work by Peter Adey, Peter Merriman, Kevin Hannam and others to counter a significant body of literary criticism that suggests nineteenth-century fiction is invested in representing place as static. In nineteenth-century Britain, realist fictions of provincial life were often cast – then and now – as nostalgic places, miniaturized and immobile. In a case study of the nineteenth-century realist writer George Eliot this article…
The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic
When Frederic Jameson demanded that his readers “always historicize,” to be an historicist in the academy – it almost went without saying back then in 1981 – was to be a critical theorist invested
George Eliot, Presentism, and Generational Thinking
George Eliot and Van Gogh
Vincent Van Gogh had a deep and abiding interest in the fiction of George Eliot and her mode of depicting the ordinary matter of ‘provincial life’ in luminous detail. This article argues that Eliot’s influence on Van Gogh can be seen in the formal, and not just thematic, radicalism shared by both. How might we read Van Gogh’s works as an ekphrastic reworking of Eliot’s insistence on the full colour spectrum of aesthetic experience lurking within …
Regenia Gagnier , Literatures of Liberalization
Restructuring with Anthony Trollope
This article examines the series of novels by Anthony Trollope, known as the Barsetshire Chronicles, in relation to the idea of living through infrastructural transition. It contends that the novels, set in and around the fictional cathedral city of Barchester, stage a macro-level experience of living through infrastructural transition for implied readers. While the narrator’s asides convey a sense of privileged early access to the informational …
Provincialism at Large
This introduction situates the contributions to the New Agenda in the context of an apparent resurgence of the term ‘provincial’ and ‘provincialism’ in Britain since the Brexit debates and the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum. It takes the resurgence of provincial thinking as an invitation to explore the cultural history of provincialism in Victorian Britain and the unexpected part it played in the formation of Empire. By …
Middleness
This article argues that the rise of the provincial novel in Britain during the 1860s set loose a radically democratizing aesthetic of everyday discriminations. The article suggests – through examples from the works of Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot – that provincial fiction embodies an aesthetics of what is termed ‘middleness’: a means of reading in which the social, cultural and geographical middle became an object of careful evaluative jud…
Right to Roam? Nineteenth-Century Commons and Caroline Lesjak's The Afterlives of Enclosure
It is August 2022, and I am sitting in the British Library completing a shamefully late review (this one) when I see the headline: “Trespassers Demand Right to Roam Minister's 12,000 Acre Estate.” One hundred fifty protesters led by activist Nadia Shaikh and complete with a Morris dancing troupe walked into the Englefield estate of Richard Benyon, the UK government minister responsible for access to nature, as part of a campaign around public acc…
Afterword
This Afterword argues that the history of literary languages in the long nineteenth century is one of conflict between a desire for local authenticity and the global extension of a standardizing anglophone culture. It suggests that the articles on literary languages in this issue of 19 foreground three key themes that each flourish within different literary genres. First, dialect literature is embodied in vernacular and dialect poetics during the…
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