Tag: affect

“Willows whiten, aspens shiver”: A Reading of Affects in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott”

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Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’1 creates an anachronistic medieval ambience by borrowing the mythical figures of Dame Elaine of Astolat and Lancelot, the feudal settings of Camelot, and the manorial island of Shalott. As a complex blend of medieval and Victorian motifs, it also creates an interesting intersection between medieval and Victorian affects. This essay brings to the fore the constructedness of affects as social artefacts in the poem, which become embedded in a network of material or

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Hard Times and radical collectivity in the era of COVID-19 

Teaching the Victorians

One of the most memorable – and puzzling – moments in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) occurs when the beleaguered factory worker Stephen Blackpool falls into an abandoned mineshaft.  Ostracized by his fellow mill “Hands” for his refusal to join the union, prevented by intractable Victorian divorce laws from marrying his true love Rachael, and framed for a bank robbery he did not commit, Stephen flees the grim, industrial city of Coketown but changes course when Rachael implores him to

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