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Set in Jamaica and London in the 1820s, Sara Collins’ debut novel The confessions of Frannie Langton (2019) is a neo-slave historical novel par excellence. In it, Collins shapes and reshapes several subgenres of historical fiction, such as gothic fiction, historical romance, and historical mystery. Facing a trial based on the accusation of killing her master and mistress, Frannie Langton narrates her life story in the form of confessions to her lawyer as she endeavors to remember what happened on the night of the murder. This paper attempts to answer the following questions: Is Frannie trying to remember or to forget what happened? Why does Collins add strong gothic shades to her historical novel? How does she manipulate the historical whodunits of the crime in relation to Frannie’s memory? Why does Collins choose a lesbian relationship to feature the historical romance in the novel? The paper examines how a post-2000 historical novel manipulates its conventional subgenres by adhering to some and changing others, starting with the gothic, then the murder story and, lastly, the lesbian romance in telling a neo-slave story.

Am I to turn me for this unto thee, great Chapel of Sixtus? (I: 197-201) Whereas the previous use of \"Stand\" incorporates repetition to arrest the listener in time, here anaphora calls attention to the display of the statues in relation to their audience and curator-that is, both the throngs of \"Christian pilgrims\" who come to study them and the \"mystic Christian pontiff\" whose authority they should solidify. The juxtaposition of these moments with the perspectives of other letters from Claude, his love interest Mary Trevellyn, and her sister Georgina create a narrative dialectic wherein the first-hand observations of recent counterrevolutionary events are thrown into relief against Claude's reflections on a much longer process of cultural and religious change. The dynamic temporal work of Claude's lyric interludes thus challenges Georg Lukács's belief that lyric lacked the novel's ability to channel the \"newlyawoken historical feeling\" of British and European literatures after the French Revolution into \"a broad, objective, epic form. Yet, Lukács did not consider the Victorian verse novel, a complex and historically neglected genre of poetry appearing between the 1840s and 1870s in England in response to the novel's growing hegemony.4 Recent assessments of the verse novel by Natasha Moore and Stefanie Markovits have called attention to the genre's unique affordances in (among other things) highlighting an experience of temporal duration, encompassing broad expanses of space, and responding to the rhythms and flows of modernity.5 These features are important because, as Lukács observes in The Historical Novel (1937), literature's historicity does not derive from truth claims related to the accuracy of the world depicted; rather, it involves the use of literary means to convey a sense of social movement and connection between periods.

The history of the novel must be re-thought in light of the emergence of the Anthropocene. The period associated with the “rise of the novel” in the eighteenth and nineteenth century dovetails with the emergence of industrial capitalism, the shift to fossil fuels, and European imperialism, all of which are now recognized as key elements in the scaling-up of human activity to planetary scale. It also aligns with the emergence of modern geology and the stratigraphic method currently being used to date the Anthropocene as a formal epoch on the geologic time scale (GTS). Thus, if the Anthropocene presents the work of the novel “after nature” it also represents the state of nature “after” the novel. This convergence suggests that the rise of the novel may also mark the birth of the Anthropocene. It also raises troubling questions about whether such coincidence may in fact reveal complicity. To what degree is the novel itself bound up in the forces responsible for drawing the Holocene to a close? What does it mean to re-visit the history of the novel as an “end-Holocene” genre, and what would that designation suggest about the genre’s viability in the epoch to come? This article takes up these questions through a reading of Richard Jefferies’s After London, or Wild England (1885) as a formative instance of “cli fi” that explicitly disavows the designation of “novel” in favor of “romance.” In the process, it argues for a more historically expansive conception of cli fi, and points to potential intersections between ecocriticism, textual studies, and book history.

IN 1856, WHEN MANY VICTORIAN PHYSICIANS WERE STRUGGLING TO DEFINE A MODEL OF CLINICAL MEDICINE, the reviewer of one collection of case histories voiced his dismay at the physician-author's preference for “dreadful incidents” and “cases exceptional and strange” (“Works” 473). Indeed, although physicians of the clinical era did not disguise their efforts to achieve a new kind of discourse, productive of a “realist” vision, few acknowledge how often the “clinical” case history of the nineteenth century also shares the romantic discourse of the Gothic, especially its interest in the supernatural and the unexplainable and its narrative aim of arousing suspense, horror, and astonishment in the reader. Literary critics have also focused primarily on the association of medical narrative with a realist literary discourse. Nineteenth-century physicians did campaign for the formal, objective, and professional clinical discourse that serves as their contribution to a realist aesthetic, in the process explicitly rejecting eighteenth-century medicine's fascination with “the curious” and its subterranean affiliation with the unknown, the unexplainable, and the subjective. But, as I show in this article, a discourse of “the curious,” allied with a Gothic literary aesthetic, stubbornly remained a critical element of many case histories, though it often presented under the mask of the more acceptable term, “interesting.” The discourse of Gothic romance in the case history provides a narrative frame that, unlike the essentially realist clinical discourse, could make sense of the physician's curious gaze, which had become nearly unrecognizable as a specifically medical vision. Indeed, a “curious” medical discourse haunts even case histories of the high clinical era, late in the century; and it energizes the nineteenth-century Gothic novel. Samuel Warren's novel Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician–deplored in the quotation above–illuminates this tradition of “Gothic medicine” as it plays out in the nineteenth-century novel. This tradition, I argue, provides the novel with a powerful model of cultural contamination and conflict in its yoking of disparate discourses. Gothic medicine demonstrates the importance of clinical medicine to literary romance, and it cannot help but reveal the ghost of “the curious” in the clinic.

One of the least studied episodes in the scope of Hispanic-Ameri- can literature is the one defined by Enrique Anderson Imbert as: \"parenthesis about pirate matter\". This is a series of writings, mainly historical novels, pub- lished along the 19th century. In them, those corsaries, buccaneers and fili- busters who domineered in the Caribbean Sea, are recreated as protagonists or deuteragonists in a novelistic action. In that text corpus, the narrators of this early Hispanic America are immersed in a stage of political reconstruction af- ter the processes of Independence. Because of this, they extol the seditious ac- tions of the pirates in order to construct metaphors regarding national des- tiny. Underlying them, a strong critic against the Spanish hegemony exerted in the continent during three centuries, may be noted. The exception con- firming the rule is: Los piratas en Cartagena by Colombian writer Soledad Acosta de Samper. This quintette of narrative pictures vindicates the Spanish civilizing undertaking in America. The romantic bond between piratic fiction and a patriotic project regarding the future, can be seen in Acosta under a sin- gular aspect: the resource of the apologue to transmit her exonerating mes- sage. This paper proposes the reading of Los piratas en Cartagena as a set of fa- bles (in the classical sense) converging into a master moral. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

The start of the school year might prompt a new reading plan, such as working through a series one has always wanted to try. For fans of mystery and romance, there are plenty of choices to be had. Deanna Raybourn nicely treads the lines among mystery, historical fiction, and romance in her \"Lady Julia Grey\" novels. The series begins with +Bold SILENT IN THE GRAVE -Bold (Mira: Harlequin. 2010. ISBN 9780778328179. pap. $13.95; ebk. ISBN 9781460393451), +Bold THE CATER STREET HANGMAN -Bold (Ballantine. 2008. ISBN 9780345513564. pap. $16; ebk. ISBN 9781453219089) launches Anne Perry's \"Thomas and Charlotte Pitt\" mysteries. +Bold THE BEEKEEPER'S APPRENTICE; OR, ON THE SEGREGATION OF THE QUEEN -Bold (Picador. 2014. ISBN 9781250055705. pap. $16; ebk. ISBN 9781250055712) by Laurie R. King is the first in the thus far 14-book run of the \"Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes\" mysteries.

This article reviews recent methodological interventions in the field of literary study, many of which take nineteenth-century critics, readers, or writers as models for their less interpretive reading practices. In seeking out nineteenth-century models for twenty-first-century critical practice, these critics imagine a world in which English literature never became a discipline. Some see these new methods as formalist, yet we argue that they actually emerge from historicist self-critique. Specifically, these contemporary critics view the historicist projects of the 1980s as overly influenced by disciplinary models of textual interpretation—models that first arose, we show through our reading of the Jolly Bargemen scene in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations (1860– 61), in the second half of the nineteenth century. In closing, we look more closely at the work of a few recent critics who sound out the metonymic, adjacent, and referential relations between readers, texts, and historical worlds in order sustain historicism's power to restore eroded meanings rather than reveal latent ones.