Frederik Van Dam

Radboud University | RU · Department of Modern Languages and Cultures

While the Risorgimento had a profound impact on the shape of English literature, this geopolitical crisis did not leave a similar imprint on Irish literature. Historical circumstances can explain why the nineteenth-century struggle for the unification of Italy did not lead to rapprochement between Italy and Ireland: support for the Italian cause pu...

Since the turn of the century, the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope has become a central figure in the critical understanding of Victorian literature. By bringing together leading Victorianists with a wide range of interests, this innovative collection of essays involves the reader in new approaches to Trollope's work. The contributors to this v...

Building on Walter Benjamin’s ideas about the mediation of experience in modern works of art, this essay argues that adaptations function as remediations: they are concerned with the original work’s expression of contemporary experience, as well as with its relation to a new present. Caught between two levels, an adaptation can position itself vis-...

Book review of Francis Mulhern, Figures of Catastrophe: The Condition of Culture Novel Verso: London and New York 2016

Although certain works published in the fin-de-siècle journal Cosmopolis: An International Review (1896–8) would have a lasting impact on twentieth-century literature, the principles behind its design have escaped critical attention. This article posits that Cosmopolis anticipated a form of modernism that Walter Benjamin would later conceptualise i...

Contributing to ongoing debates on the ethical and transnational aspects of Victorian cosmopolitanism, the present article examines the response to the struggle for Italian Unification, better known as the Risorgimento, in the work of Anthony Trollope. The Italian question is a hidden presence in particular novels, and three of Trollope's short sto...

This article presents a remediated transcript of The Pleasure of That Obstinacy, a documentary-interview in which J. Hillis Miller reflects on the place of Anthony Trollope in his thinking and writing. Miller first considers how his views on Trollope were shaped by the critics Georges Poulet and Paul de Man, and dwells on the way in which the study...

Building on the achievements of the New Economic Criticism, literary critics have continued to expand our understanding of the many points of contact and separation between literature and economics. This issue aims to push established scholarship into new directions. It seeks to explore new approaches and methodologies and thus to shed light on som...

The recent efflorescence of scholarship on Victorian liberalism was facilitated by the return of formalism as a methodological paradigm. The ‘new’ formalism is characterised by a focus on the literary adaptation of Enlightenment concepts and practices, which critics have analysed in two distinct ways: one movement seeks to explore literature’s pote...

Henry James famously dismissed the works which constitute Anthony Trollope's ultimate compositions for their 'fatal dryness of texture' and 'mechanical movement'. Taking its cue from James's observations while challenging his assessment, this study examines the full stylistic range of the novels and biographies which Trollope explored in his final...

This volume is a cross-disciplinary collection of essays in the fields of nineteenth-century history, adaptation, word/image and Victorianism. Featuring new writing by some of the most influential, respected and radical scholars in these fields, Transforming Anthony Trollope constitutes both a close companion to Simon Grennan’s 2015 graphic novel D...

Review of Reforming Trollope: Race, Gender, and Englishness in the Novels of Anthony Trollope by Deborah Denenholz Morse, and Tennyson and the Fabrication of Englishness by Marion Sherwood.

This article argues that the representation of love in Anthony Trollope’s Marion Fay (1882) is informed by the conceptualization of tact in Matthew Arnold’s essays. According to David Russell, Arnold conceives of tact as a certain reserve that allows one to find a middle ground between conflicting opinions. Tact thus differs from fixed rules of int...

This essay attempts to chart one of the ways in which the philosophy of law informed the Victorian novel by situating two of Anthony Trollope’s later novels in the context of contemporary jurisprudential debates. Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds (1873) and John Caldigate (1879) push the discourse of legal hermeneutics to its epistemological limits a...

Erinnerst du dich auch noch des Marsyas, den du lebendig geschunden? Es ist schon lange her, und ein ähnliches Beispiel tät wieder not … Du lächelst, o mein ewiger Vater! — Heinrich Heine “Correcting” Myths: Reinhard Jirgl’s Poetics Um Ein Publikum am Lesen von Büchern, die des Lesens wert sind, festzuhalten, dazu bedarf es wahrlich eines Stein-Kop...

In Victorian Britain, the consolidation of capitalism and the absence of bureaucracy had a huge and unsettling impact on politics and culture. This paper argues that the Victorian novelist, like the public moralist, provided a solution to this crisis by forming a construction of the individual as a rational and emotional citizen and of a state adeq...