Vulnerability and Resilience in English Literature of the Long 19th Century

The nineteenth-century was a time of accelerated change and stark contradictions. It was marked by stability, advancement and reform, but also by widening inequalities, spiritual crisis and social unrest. Identity and gender came under pressure, religious belief was called into question, and the condition of women and children seemed to belie the much-vaunted idea of progress.
Essays in this book explore how these contradictions and concerns are reflected in nineteenth-century literature. In discussing historical figures, characters and plots that are variously vulnerable and/or resilient, the essays reflect the breadth of nineteenth-century literature, from realist and sensational fiction to autobiography and poetry. Besides providing insights into the transfigurative role writing played, both as a means to express vulnerability and as a resilience process, the essays also foster further reflection on two timeless dimensions of the human condition.

Raffaella Antinucci is a professor of English literature at Parthenope University of Naples (Italy). Her research focuses on Victorian literature and on the Anglo-Italian cultural relations in the nineteenth century. Adrian Grafe is an English professor at Artois University in France. He has published broadly on poetry, fiction and popular music, and is a Fellow of the English Association.

Edited by Raffaella Antinucci and Adrian Grafe
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 240
Bibliographic Info: notes, bibliographies, index
Copyright Date: 2025
pISBN: 978-1-4766-9318-7
eISBN: 978-1-4766-5409-6
Imprint: McFarland

Acknowledgments vii
Foreword by Phillip Mallett 1
Introduction: Transfiguring the Unbearable
Raffaella Antinucci and Adrian Grafe 15
I. Heroic Vulnerability
The Resilience of the ­Anglo-Italian Heroine in Margaret Collier Galletti di Cadilhac’s Babel (1887)
Claudia Capancioni 25
Elephantine Resilience: The Case of Joseph Merrick
Franco Lonati 38
Ordinary Heroes: My Own Story by Emmeline Pankhurst and the Suffragette Movement
Francesca Orestano 49
The Creation of the Modern Superhero: The Vulnerability and Resilience of Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel
Agnes ­Strickland-Pajtok 61
II. Women Under Pressure
Resilient Women in Ellen Wood’s Mrs. Halliburton’s Troubles:Rethinking Feminine Vulnerability
Mariaconcetta Costantini 77
Journeying Towards Wholeness in the Novels of Charlotte M. Yonge
Julia Courtney 90
Nameless and Friendless: Art, Resilience and Catharsis in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)
Claudia Zilletti 102
George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894) as ­Self-Loss and Recovery
Raffaella Sciarra 114
III. Sensation, Deprivation and Opportunity
The Resilience and Vulnerability of Gemstones and Their Owners: Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Rajah’s Diamond”
Angelo Riccioni 129
Arnold Bennett and “the spectacle of existence”: The Battle Against Time in Anna of the Five Towns and
The Old Wives’ Tale
Francesca D’Alfonso 140
Split ­Self-Fashioning: Benjamin Disraeli and ­Working-Class Resilience in Sybil
Daniele Niedda 150
Life’s Threats and Opportunities: Little Dorrit, or Orphans’ Mazy Life
Carla Fusco 162
IV. The Endurance of Poetry
Suffering and the Necessity for Change in Keats’s Odes and Hyperion
­Laure-Hélène ­Anthony-Gerroldt 175
“Red is the strangest pain to bear”: Charlotte Mew’s Poetics of Creative Magdalenism
Christina Maria Mirza 187
Mourning Economy: Tennyson’s Poetry and the “Commerce with the Dead”
Saverio Tomaiuolo 199
An Unknown Coleridge: The Trauma of a Court Scandal, Patriarchal Control, and a Poet’s Response
Tom Zaniello 212
About the Contributors 225
Index 229