This thesis examines the witch imagery used during the nineteenth century in children’s literature, realist and gothic fiction, poetry and art, and by practitioners and critics of mesmerism, spiritualism and alternative spirituality. The thesis is based on close readings of nineteenth-century texts and detailed analysis of artwork, but also takes a long view of nineteenth-century witch imagery in relation to that of preceding and succeeding periods. I explore the means by which the image of the witch was introduced as an overt or covert figure into the work of nineteenth-century writers and artists during a period when the majority of literate people no longer believed in the existence of witchcraft; and I investigate the relationship between the metaphorical witch and the areas of social dissonance which she is used to symbolise. I demonstrate that the diversity of nineteenth-century witch imagery is very wide, but that there is a tendency for positive images to increase as the century progresses. Thereby the limited iconography of malevolent witches and powerless victims of witch-hunts, promulgated by seventeenth-century witch-hunters and eighteenth-century rationalist philosophers respectively, were joined by wise-women, fairy godmothers, sorceresses, and mythical immortals, all of whom were defined, directly or indirectly, as witches. Nonetheless I also reveal that every image of the witch I examine has a dark shadow, despite or because of the empathy between witch and creator which is evident in many of the works I have studied. In the Introduction I acknowledge the validity of theories put forward by historians regarding the influence of societal changes on the decline of witchcraft belief, but I argue that those changes also created the need for metaphorical witchery to address the anxieties created by those changes. I contend that the complexity of social change occurring during and prior to the nineteenth century resulted in an increase in the diversification of witch imagery. I argue that the use of diverse images in various cultural forms was facilitated by the growth of liberal individualism which allowed each writer or artist to articulate specific concerns through discrete images of the witch which were no longer coloured solely by the dictates of superstition or rationalism. I look at the peculiar ability of the witch as a symbolic outcast from society to view that society from an external perspective and to use the voice of the exile to say the unsayable. I also use definitions garnered from a wide spectrum of sources from cultural history to folklore and neo-paganism to justify my broad definition of the word ‘witch’. In Chapter One I explore children’s literature, on the assumption that images absorbed during childhood would influence both the conscious and unconscious witch imagery produced by the adult imagination. I find the templates for familiar imagery in collections of folklore and, primarily, in translations of ‘traditional’ fairy tales sanitised for the nursery by collectors such as Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. I then examine fantasies created for Victorian children by authors such as Mary de Morgan, William Makepeace Thackeray, George MacDonald and Charles Kingsley, where the image of witch and fairy godmother is conflated in fiction which elevates the didactic fairy tale to a level which in some cases is imbued with a neo-platonic religiosity, thereby transforming the witch into a powerful portal to the divine. In contrast the canonical novelists whose work I examine in Chapter Two generally project witch imagery obliquely onto foolish, misguided, doomed or defiant women whose witchery is both allusionary and illusionary. I begin with the work of Sir Walter Scott whose bad or sad witches touch his novels with the supernatural while he denies their magic. Scott’s witch imagery, like that of Perrault and Grimm, is reflected in the witches who represent women’s exclusion from autonomy, education and/or the literary establishment in the works of Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot. Traditional fairy-tale imagery is particularly evident in Charles Dickens’ use of the witch to represent negative aspects in the development of society or the individual. In contrast Scott’s impulse to distance himself from the pre-urban world represented by his witches contrasts with Thomas Hardy’s mourning of the female earth spirits of Wessex, thereby linking fluctuating and evolving images of nature with images of the nineteenth-century witch. In Chapter Three I explore poetry and art through Romantic verse, Tennyson’s Camelot, Rossetti and Burne-Jones’ Pre-Raphaelite classicism, Rosamund Marriot Watson and Mary Coleridge’s shape-shifting, mirrored women, and Yeats’ Celtic Twilight: in doing so I find representations of the witch as the destructive seductress, the muse, the dark ‘other’ of the suppressed poet, the symbol of spellbinding amoral nature, and the embodiment of the Celtic soul. In the final chapter witch imagery is attached to actual practitioners of so-called ‘New Witchcraft’, yet they also become part of a story which seeks to equate neo/quasi science with the supernatural. I demonstrate a gender realignment of occult power as the submissive mesmerist’s tool evolves into the powerful mother/priestess. I note the interconnectedness of fiction and fact via the novels of authors such as Wilkie Collins and Edward Bulwer-Lytton; and identify the role of the campaigning godmother figure as a precursor of the radical feminist Wiccan. I believe that my thesis offers a uniquely comprehensive view of the use of metaphorical witch imagery in the nineteenth century.

From South Park to Kathy Acker, and from Lars Von Trier to Sex and the City, women’s sexual organs are demonized. Rees traces the fascinating evolution of this demonization, considering how calling the ‘c-word’ obscene both legitimates and perpetuates the fractured identities of women globally. Rees demonstrates how writers, artists, and filmmakers contend with the dilemma of the vagina’s puzzlingly ‘covert visibility’. In our postmodern, porn-obsessed culture, vaginas appear to be everywhere, literally or symbolically but, crucially, they are as silenced as they are objectified. The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History examines the paradox of female genitalia through five fields of artistic expression: literature, film, TV, visual, and performance art. There is a peculiar paradox – unlike any other – regarding female genitalia. Rees focuses on this paradox of what is termed the ‘covert visibility’ of the vagina and on its monstrous manifestations. That is, what happens when the female body refuses to be pathologized, eroticized, or rendered subordinate to the will or intention of another? Common, and often offensive, slang terms for the vagina can be seen as an attempt to divert attention away from the reality of women’s lived sexual experiences such that we don’t ‘look’ at the vagina itself – slang offers a convenient distraction to something so taboo. The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History is an important contribution to the ongoing debate in understanding the feminine identity.

This short article summarises a preliminary study of the poetry and correspondence of the English poet Norman Nicholson (1914-1987), undertaken as part of Lancaster University’s Spatial Humanities: Texts, GIS, Places project. In addition to offering a concise explanation of the Spatial Humanities project and the methods it employs, the article explains how working with GIS, visualisation techniques, and distant reading enriches our understanding both of the geography of Nicholson’s poetry and of the spatial dimensions of the network of people with whom he exchanged letters throughout his career.

This book is about the relationship between the practice of mapping, the application of geospatial technologies and the interpretation of literary texts. The contributors have been selected from a range of disciplines and they approach this relationship from different perspectives. Yet, notwithstanding these differences, their contributions are collectively defined by a shared preoccupation with the possibilities afforded – and the problems presented – by the use of digital mapping tools and techniques in literary studies and cultural-geographical research. Each of the following chapters, that is to say, explores the dynamic ways that the creation of literary maps can confirm meaning and challenge critical assumptions.

This chapter will introduce the basics of geographical information systems (GIS) for humanities scholarship. It will provide a brief overview of how using GIS software can help researchers understand the geographies within their sources. It will briefly introduce how GIS models features and places on the Earth’s surface so that the reader is gets a basic understanding of the core terminology associated with GIS. It will then talk through the basics of how a researcher gets their sources into GIS software; how they can query, integrate and analyse data within GIS; and how they can disseminate their results using maps and electronic outputs such as KML files that can be disseminated using Google Earth. The conclusion will look briefly at what a researcher can and cannot expect to gain from using GIS and stress that mapping is only a part of the research process – good at identifying and describing patterns but limited in its ability to explain them. The chapter will be include several diagrams and will be extensively referenced.

Margaret Cavendish was the most extraordinary seventeenth-century Englishwoman, refusing to be silent when exiled by the Crowmellian regime, she fought to make her voice heard through her fascinating publications.

The Female Body in Medicine and Literature features essays that explore literary texts in relation to the history of gynaecology and women's surgery. Gender studies and feminist approaches to literature have become busy and enlightening fields of enquiry in recent times, yet there remains no single work that fully analyses the impact of women's surgery on literary production or, conversely, ways in which literary trends have shaped the course of gynaecology and other branches of women's medicine. This book will demonstrate how fiction and medicine have a long-established tradition of looking towards each other for inspiration and elucidation in questions of gender. Medical textbooks and pamphlets have consistently cited fictional plots and characterisations as a way of communicating complex or 'sensitive' ideas. Essays explore historical accounts of clinical procedures, the relationship between gynaecology and psychology, and cultural conceptions of motherhood, fertility, and the female organisation through a broad range of texts including Henry More's Pre-Existency of the Soul (1659), Charlotte Bronte's Villette (1855), and Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues (1998). The Female Body in Medicine and Literature raises important theoretical questions on the relationship between popular culture, literature, and the growth of women's medicine and will be required reading for scholars in gender studies, literary studies and the history of medicine. This collection explores the complex intersections between literature and the medical treatment of women between 1600 and 2000. Employing a range of methodologies, it furthers our understanding of the development of women's medicine and comments on its wider cultural ramifications. Although there has been an increase in critical studies of women's medicine in recent years, this collection is a key contributor to that field because it draws together essays on a wide range of new topics from varying disciplines. It features, for instance, studies of motherhood, fertility, clinical procedure, and the relationship between gynaecology and psychology. Besides offering essays on subjects that have received a lack of critical attention, the essays presented here are truly interdisciplinary; they explore the complex links between gynaecology, art, language, and philosophy, and underscore how popular art forms have served an important function in the formation of 'women's science' prior to the twenty-first century. This book also demonstrates how a number of high-profile controversies were taken up and reworked by novelists, philosophers, and historians. Focusing on the vexed and convoluted story of women's medicine, this volume offers new ways of thinking about gender, science, and the Western imagination. This chapter is an essay on Villette read through a gynaecological lens.

Résumé L’imaginaire collectif français a longtemps été marqué par un lien étroit entre la nation et la narration. Ce lien était étayé, entre autres, par l’histoire littéraire, celle-ci a pendant longtemps joué un rôle crucial dans la constitution d’une identité collective et de ce fait dans le système éducatif. Dans un monde globalisé toutefois, ce lien se fait de plus en plus précaire. Bien que la France fût, grâce au fait colonial, rapidement confronté à des textes littéraires provenant d’ailleurs, ceux-ci étaient rapidement intégrés dans un narratif marqué par le principe de l’universalité française. Or depuis les années 1980 avec la mondialisation et la migration, le lien entre nation et narration est de plus en plus menacé. Ce texte étudie les manières dont les instances académiques françaises réagissent à ces menaces mais envisage aussi les mécanismes par le biais desquels ces tendances sont intégrés dans le narratif français, comment le lien entre narration et nation est réactualisé dans l’imaginaire collectif. Abstract France’s cultural self-perception has always been clearly marked by a close link between the nation and a narration. This link was provided, amongst other factors, by literary history. The history of French literature played a crucial role in "making France" and hence in educating young Frenchmen. In a globalised world however this link becomes more and more precarious. Although France, through colonisation, became quickly a country confronted with literary texts written outside of homeland France, these texts were integrated into the narrative of French universality. With globalisation and hyphenisation in the 1980s this narrative is increasingly threatened. Our text shows ways in which France reacts to these threats and how France is trying to maintain the scheme on the one hand, on the other how it tries to incorporate new tendencies in literary history and to adapt them to France’s particular historical narrative.

The research collected in this volume consists of 18 chapters which explore a number of key areas of investigation in contemporary Iberian studies. As the title suggests, there is a strong emphasis on trans-national and trans-regional approaches to the subject area, reflecting current discourse and scholarship, but the contributions are not limited by these approaches and include an eclectic range of recent work by scholars of history, politics, literature, the visual arts and cultural and social studies, often working in transdisciplinary ways. The geographical scope of the transnational processes considered range from intra-Iberian interconnections to those with the UK, Italy and Morocco, as well as transatlantic influences between the Peninsula and Argentina, Cuba and Brazil. The book opens up some pioneering new directions in research in Iberian studies, as well as variety of fresh approaches to hitherto neglected aspects of more familiar issues.

In the 1841 census three-quarters of houses in Ireland were placed in the lowest two classes, one-roomed mud cabins and slightly larger mud cottages. What Harriet Martineau describes as ‘Irish cabin life’ was a matter of fascination for visitors to Ireland before and after the Famine, and the cabin became a key site of ethnographic exploration. Curious or philanthropic observers were either shocked by the poverty and wretchedness they saw, or puzzled or even offended by the seeming happiness and healthiness of cabin-dwellers. During the Famine, the cabin was a scene for tragedy and horror: the place from which the people were evicted, from which they emigrated, in which they were quarantined, where they were found dying or dead, where they were buried. The roofless cabin later eloquently attested to their suffering and absence, and has become one of the most significant visual icons in the commemoration of the Famine. This chapter examines the representation of the cabin in literature from the time of the Famine to the present day, in the works of authors such as William Carleton, Anthony Trollope, Margaret Brew, Carol Birch, Anne Enright, and Tana French, considering the ways in which social hierarchy and communal relations are mediated through its space in texts set during the Famine, and its spectral significance in modern and contemporary literature as a concrete or symbolic inheritance, a time-machine, a haunted house, a place to desecrate or take refuge in, and a crime scene.