Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Subversive Literary Cultures by Kenneth Womack
I. Subversive Women
Chapter 1: The Mysterious Identity of Helen Dickens, Victorian Novelist by Troy J. Bassett
Chapter 2: Moonrise and the Ascent of Eve, the Woman Titan: Charlotte Brontë’s Epiphanies of the Fourfold Elemental Feminine by Martin Bidney
Chapter 3: Condoning Adultery: Problems of Marriage and Divorce in George Eliot’s Life and Writing by
Nancy Henry
II. Subversive Ideologies
Chapter 4: Unraveling Orientalism: Dawe’s “Yellow and White” by James M. Decker
Chapter 5: “A Familiar Kinde of Chastisement”: Fasting in the Nineteenth-Century by Joseph Lennon
Chapter 6: The Effect of Emerging New Media on Book Publishing: Lessons from the Origins of
Cross
Media Storytelling in the Early Twentieth Century for Contemporary Transmedia Researchers
by Alexis Weedon
Chapter 7: “And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth”: Reading Levinasian
Ethics and
Literary Impressionism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness by Kenneth Womack
III. Subversive Genres
Chapter 8: “Count Me In”: Comedy in Dracula by Ira B. Nadel
Chapter 9: “The Seasoned Spirit of the Cunning Reader”: The Textual Subversions of The Turn of the Screw by Ruth Robbins
Chapter 10: “Fallen” Clergymen: The Wages of Sin in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Charles Reade’s
The Cloister and the Hearth, and Henry Arthur Jones’s Michael and His Lost Angel
by Jeanette Shumaker
Chapter 11: Sherlock Holmes: The Criminal in the Detective by Joseph Wiesenfarth
Index
About the Editors and Contributors

About the Author

Kenneth Womack is professor of English and dean of the Wayne D. McMurray School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Monmouth University.

James M. Decker is Professor of English, Humanities, and Language Studies at Illinois Central College.

Reviews

This collection of essays opens with a strong introduction by Womack on the meanings of subversion... Subversiveness seems to be a wide net in which critics are sometimes subversive; at other times authors are subversive or they invoke genres that are already assumed to be subversive. The collection addresses biographical enigmas surrounding the public and private identities of individual writers—for example, Helen Dickens and George Eliot—and offers interpretations of major works by Charlotte Brontë, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, and Bram Stoker. Jeanette Shumaker contributes a cogent essay on the gender connotations of “fallen” ministers such as The Scarlet Letter’s Arthur Dimmesdale, and Womack extends critical interest in the literary impressionism of Heart of Darkness into a thought-provoking examination of ethics via Hans Jauss’s reception theory. Readers will likely appreciate Alexis Weedon’s efforts to link the “cross-media business practices” of early-20th-century publishing to the media convergence model of the 21st century... Summing Up: Recommended...Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.
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