Victorian Male Body

Joanne Ella Parsons is Lecturer at Bath Spa University. She is the editor of the Wilkie Collins journal, and her publications include Muller, N and J. Parsons (eds.) Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Special Issue: The Male Body in Victorian Literature and Culture 36.4 (September 2014) and Parsons, Joanne Ella. ‘Surtees’ ‘Eating Englishness and Causing Chaos: Food and the Body of the Fat Man in R. S. Surtees’ Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities, Handley Cross and Hillingdon Hall’ Nineteenth-Century Contexts 36.4 (September 2014). Ruth Heholt is Senior Lecturer in English at Falmouth University. Her publications include edited scholarly edition of The Story of Lilly Dawson, by Catherine Crowe (Victorian Secrets Press, 2015), Haunted Landscapes: Super-Nature and the Environment Ruth Heholt and Niamh Downing (eds), (Rowman Littlefield), and Gothic Localities: Dark Places in the Provinces and Margins of the British Isles, Ruth Heholt and William Hughes (eds), (University of Wales Press).

• Introduction: Visible and Invisible Bodies, Ruth Heholt and Joanne Ella ParsonsI. Constructed Bodies Violent Play and Regular Discipline: The Abuses of the Schoolboy Body in Victorian Fiction, Alice CrossleyPunishing the unregulated manly body and emotions in early Victorian England, Joanne BegiatoThe New Man’s Body in Ménie Muriel Dowie’s Gallia, Tara MacDonaldII. Fractured and Fragmented BodiesPirates and Prosthetics: Manly Messages for Managing Limb Loss in Victorian and Edwardian Adventure Narratives, Ryan SweetTuberculosis and Visionary Sensibility: The Consumptive Body as Masculine Dissent in George Eliot and Henry James, Meredith MillerMonstrous Masculinities from the Macaroni to the Masher: Reading the Gothic ‘Gentleman’, Alison YoungerVisible Yet Immaterial: The Phantom and the Male Body in Ghost Stories by Three Victorian Women Writers, Ruth HeholtIII. Unruly BodiesAesthetics of Deviance: George du Maurier's Representations of the Artist's Body for Punch as Discourse on Manliness, 1870-1880, Françoise BailletSuffering, Asceticism and the Starving Male Body in Mary Barton, Charlotte BoyceFosco’s Fat: Transgressive Consumption and Bodily Control in Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, Joanne Ella ParsonsSensationalizing Otherness: The Italian Male Body in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s ‘Olivia’ and ‘Garibaldi’, Anne-Marie Beller

The Victorian Male Body provides a fascinating and erudite assessment of the white middle-class Victorian male body in all its complex diversity. Specific chapters explore bodies which are young, damaged, spectral, ill, and well-dressed. The range of coverage is excellent in what is a critically important collection of essays.