Isobel Armstrong
Biographic Data
| ID | 3858243 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Isobel Armstrong |
| GIVEN NAMES | Isobel |
| FAMILY NAME | Armstrong |
| SIGNATURE | ARMSTRONG I |
| AFFILIATIONS | Birkbeck, University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6874-8080 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 25 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1981 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
An Attempt at a Reply
This essay responds to the contributors to “The Radical Aesthetic Revisited.” It begins by sketching a history of the predicament in literary studies to which The Radical Aesthetic eventually responded. It then proceeds to respond to each contributor in turn, addressing their questions, elaborations, and quarrels with the book's work on aesthetics, affect, feminism, and psychoanalysis. It ends with two meditations. One, on close reading and the p…
Laura's Virginia Woolf - a note
This essay charts the presence of Virginia Woolf in Laura’s work, not only in Virginia Woolf (1997) but in 12 articles and every critical study she wrote, from Auto/biographical Discourses (1994) to the posthumously published Rhythmical Subjects: The Measures of the Modern (2023). Throughout this work cinema and psychoanalysis (both of which Woolf knew and studied intimately) are discourses used with great subtlety to explore the structural and i…
Introduction to Laura Marcus, Rhythm
This Introduction to Laura Marcus's final monumental but unfinished work describes her wholly new understanding of the central importance of rhythm across the arts and sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The turn to rhythm was formative in many fields and comprehended poetry, music, dance, sculpture, painting, photography, film, gymnastics, physics, education, psychology, physiology, thinking about race, class and gender, the past…
Poetics of the Steel Plate Engraving
The central argument of this detailed reading of Landon’s editorship of Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book of 1832 turns on the technology of the (capitalist) steel plate and its composition through the accumulation of lines rather than through mimetic techniques. I suggest that Landon foregoes the mimetic contract in favour of a metonymic contract of juxtaposition deriving from her decision to prioritize the poetic line and the second-order poetic…
Alice Meynell and the Politics of an Image
The collaboration of William Hyde and Alice Meynell in London Impressions (1898) led to Hyde's photogravure image, “Utilitarian London,” which is a direct critique of Turner's Rain, Steam and Speed (1844), and to a companion essay by Meynell, “The Climate of Smoke,” that is an ecological poetics exploring the deep harms of pollution
Laura Marcus 7 March 1956–22 September 2021
George Eliot, Hegel, and Middlemarch
The Hegelian context of Middlemarch , prompted by Lewes’s ambivalent reading of the philosopher, allowed Eliot, through the aesthetics and the Phenomenology ’s reading of struggle to the death, to find a structure for exploring power and destruction in relationships
Stained Glass
In the afterword to this issue, Isobel Armstrong reflects on a phenomenology of nineteenth-century stained glass
‘Dear Professor’
Isobel Armstrong’s Novel Politics
The following Turning Point offers responses, from four leading critics, to Isobel Armstrong’s Novel Politics: Democratic Imaginations in Nineteenth Century Fiction. At a time when the meaning and
Post cards to Alan, with love
S teve C onnor's lightness of being
New Feminist Discourses
1. Introduction Isobel Armstrong Part 1: Knowledges 2. Feminist Aesthetics and the New Realism Laura Marcus 3. Walking, Women and Writing: Virginia Woolf as flaneuse Rachel Bowlby 4. Happy Families? Feminist Reproduction and Matrilinear Thought Linda R Williams 5. An Other Space: A Future for Feminism Jane Moore Part 2: Subjectivities 6. Releasing Possibility into Form: Cultural Choice and the Woman Writer Carol Watts 7. Fakes and Femininity: Vit…
The Burdens of Perfection
Journal Article The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature Get access The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, by Andrew H. Miller, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008, xiv + 260 pp., £21.95 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-8014-4661-0 Isobel Armstrong Isobel Armstrong 1University of London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Sch…
Epic
Maggie O’Sullivan
Keywords: languagelinguistically innovative poetryMaggie O’Sullivanopen fieldpain and verbalizationparallel traditionpoetrysubjectivity
The First Post
The First Post: Victorian Poetry and Post-War Criticism Get access Isobel Armstrong Isobel Armstrong 1Birkbeck, University of London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Victorian Culture, Volume 8, Issue 2, January 2003, Pages 292–304, https://doi.org/10.3366/jvc.2003.8.2.292 Published: 01 January 2003
Dreams by Day and Night
Armstrong questions the discrete separation of dream and waking life, originating with Freud, in current psychoanalytical thinking, and asks, accordingly, 'what is a dream?' Alternative accounts of the relation between dream and waking states can be derived from Ella Freeman Sharpe's poetics of the dream, understood through the workings of metaphor, and through Wilfred Bion's reversal of Freud's categories, as he explored what it would mean to dr…
When Is a Victorian Poet Not a Victorian Poet? Poetry and the Politics of Subjectivity in the Long Nineteenth Century
Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition, by Anne Janowitz; pp. xii + 278. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, $59.95
Victorian Studies and Cultural Studies
I WOULD RATHER not think of Victorian studies and cultural studies in antithesis because both terms are misleading and obstruct research. We should not be choosing between either, but trying to think of a way of working that dissolves this antithesis. The first point I would like to make is that Victorian studies came into being as an interdisciplinary project just after the second world war — the journal of that name started up in the fifties. S…
Writing from the Broken Middle
(1998). Writing from the Broken Middle: The post‐aesthetic. Women: A Cultural Review: Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 62-96
Undoing amnesia
Meaning and the Mother's Body
So what's all this about the mother's body
(1993). So what's all this about the mother's body?: The aesthetic, gender and the polis. Women: A Cultural Review: Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 172-187
Women and children last? Women under thatcherism
Victorian Studies and Cultural Studies
I WOULD RATHER not think of Victorian studies and cultural studies in antithesis because both terms are misleading and obstruct research. We should not be choosing between either, but trying to think of a way of working that dissolves this antithesis. The first point I would like to make is that Victorian studies came into being as an interdisciplinary project just after the second world war — the journal of that name started up in the fifties. S…
The Burdens of Perfection
Journal Article The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature Get access The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, by Andrew H. Miller, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008, xiv + 260 pp., £21.95 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-8014-4661-0 Isobel Armstrong Isobel Armstrong 1University of London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Sch…
When Is a Victorian Poet Not a Victorian Poet? Poetry and the Politics of Subjectivity in the Long Nineteenth Century
Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition, by Anne Janowitz; pp. xii + 278. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, $59.95
So what's all this about the mother's body
(1993). So what's all this about the mother's body?: The aesthetic, gender and the polis. Women: A Cultural Review: Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 172-187
Wordsworth's Complexity
Wordsworth's Complexity
Women and children last? Women under thatcherism
So what's all this about the mother's body
(1993). So what's all this about the mother's body?: The aesthetic, gender and the polis. Women: A Cultural Review: Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 172-187
Writing from the Broken Middle
(1998). Writing from the Broken Middle: The post‐aesthetic. Women: A Cultural Review: Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 62-96
Undoing amnesia
Meaning and the Mother's Body
Victorian Studies and Cultural Studies
I WOULD RATHER not think of Victorian studies and cultural studies in antithesis because both terms are misleading and obstruct research. We should not be choosing between either, but trying to think of a way of working that dissolves this antithesis. The first point I would like to make is that Victorian studies came into being as an interdisciplinary project just after the second world war — the journal of that name started up in the fifties. S…
Dreams by Day and Night
Armstrong questions the discrete separation of dream and waking life, originating with Freud, in current psychoanalytical thinking, and asks, accordingly, 'what is a dream?' Alternative accounts of the relation between dream and waking states can be derived from Ella Freeman Sharpe's poetics of the dream, understood through the workings of metaphor, and through Wilfred Bion's reversal of Freud's categories, as he explored what it would mean to dr…
When Is a Victorian Poet Not a Victorian Poet? Poetry and the Politics of Subjectivity in the Long Nineteenth Century
Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition, by Anne Janowitz; pp. xii + 278. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, $59.95
The First Post
The First Post: Victorian Poetry and Post-War Criticism Get access Isobel Armstrong Isobel Armstrong 1Birkbeck, University of London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Victorian Culture, Volume 8, Issue 2, January 2003, Pages 292–304, https://doi.org/10.3366/jvc.2003.8.2.292 Published: 01 January 2003
Maggie O’Sullivan
Keywords: languagelinguistically innovative poetryMaggie O’Sullivanopen fieldpain and verbalizationparallel traditionpoetrysubjectivity
Epic
The Burdens of Perfection
Journal Article The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature Get access The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, by Andrew H. Miller, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008, xiv + 260 pp., £21.95 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-8014-4661-0 Isobel Armstrong Isobel Armstrong 1University of London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Sch…
New Feminist Discourses
1. Introduction Isobel Armstrong Part 1: Knowledges 2. Feminist Aesthetics and the New Realism Laura Marcus 3. Walking, Women and Writing: Virginia Woolf as flaneuse Rachel Bowlby 4. Happy Families? Feminist Reproduction and Matrilinear Thought Linda R Williams 5. An Other Space: A Future for Feminism Jane Moore Part 2: Subjectivities 6. Releasing Possibility into Form: Cultural Choice and the Woman Writer Carol Watts 7. Fakes and Femininity: Vit…
S teve C onnor's lightness of being
Post cards to Alan, with love
Isobel Armstrong’s Novel Politics
The following Turning Point offers responses, from four leading critics, to Isobel Armstrong’s Novel Politics: Democratic Imaginations in Nineteenth Century Fiction. At a time when the meaning and
George Eliot, Hegel, and Middlemarch
The Hegelian context of Middlemarch , prompted by Lewes’s ambivalent reading of the philosopher, allowed Eliot, through the aesthetics and the Phenomenology ’s reading of struggle to the death, to find a structure for exploring power and destruction in relationships
Stained Glass
In the afterword to this issue, Isobel Armstrong reflects on a phenomenology of nineteenth-century stained glass
‘Dear Professor’
Laura Marcus 7 March 1956–22 September 2021
Poetics of the Steel Plate Engraving
The central argument of this detailed reading of Landon’s editorship of Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book of 1832 turns on the technology of the (capitalist) steel plate and its composition through the accumulation of lines rather than through mimetic techniques. I suggest that Landon foregoes the mimetic contract in favour of a metonymic contract of juxtaposition deriving from her decision to prioritize the poetic line and the second-order poetic…
Alice Meynell and the Politics of an Image
The collaboration of William Hyde and Alice Meynell in London Impressions (1898) led to Hyde's photogravure image, “Utilitarian London,” which is a direct critique of Turner's Rain, Steam and Speed (1844), and to a companion essay by Meynell, “The Climate of Smoke,” that is an ecological poetics exploring the deep harms of pollution
Laura's Virginia Woolf - a note
This essay charts the presence of Virginia Woolf in Laura’s work, not only in Virginia Woolf (1997) but in 12 articles and every critical study she wrote, from Auto/biographical Discourses (1994) to the posthumously published Rhythmical Subjects: The Measures of the Modern (2023). Throughout this work cinema and psychoanalysis (both of which Woolf knew and studied intimately) are discourses used with great subtlety to explore the structural and i…
Introduction to Laura Marcus, Rhythm
This Introduction to Laura Marcus's final monumental but unfinished work describes her wholly new understanding of the central importance of rhythm across the arts and sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The turn to rhythm was formative in many fields and comprehended poetry, music, dance, sculpture, painting, photography, film, gymnastics, physics, education, psychology, physiology, thinking about race, class and gender, the past…
Art (19 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Literature (13 works) · Art history (12 works) · History (12 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Aesthetics (9 works) · Psychoanalysis (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works)