victorian literature – High Theory

Oishani Sengupta talks about the felt experiences of racism, especially as they are represented in Victorian literature and its contemporary readership, which is the subject of her research. The conversation ranges from the novels of H. Rider Haggard and Charles Dickens to the felt experience of caste, as analyzed in the work of scholars like Junaid Shaikh.

Oishani Sengupta (@oishani on Twitter) is a PhD candidate at the University of Rochester exploring histories of racial affect and visual print culture in the nineteenth century British empire. Also the project coordinator of the William Blake Archive, she looks closely at racist illustration practices and their central role in colonial politics.

Image: Cover of the first French edition of H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines

Music used in promotional material: ‘Last Sigh’ by Holy Pain

William Ghosh talks to Saronik about Realism, and how it can both be subtly conservative and effectively radical, depending on its use. He takes us through realist tactics in texts ranging from V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River to Virginie Despentes’s Vernon Subutex.

William Ghosh teaches Victorian and Modern literature and Literary Theory at Jesus College, University of Oxford. His first book, V.S. Naipaul, Caribbean Writing, and Caribbean Thought was published by OUP in October 2020. At present he is working on a book on the British writer Penelope Fitzgerald, and on a multimedia project about Caribbean poetry and poetics.

Image: ‘Still Life with Corn’ by Charles Ethan Porter

Music used in promotional material: ‘Made in the City’ by Ed Askew

Tagged : realist novel / social realism / V.S. Naipaul / victorian literature

High Theory

Tag: victorian literature

Racial Affect