Julia Chavez
Saint Martin's University, English, Faculty Member
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Introduction Alison L. LaCroix and Martha C. Nussbaum Preface Diane P. Wood I. Marriage and Sex The Moral and Legal Consequences of Wife-Selling in The Mayor of Casterbridge Julie C. Suk Jude the Obscure: The Irrelevance of Marriage Law... more
Introduction Alison L. LaCroix and Martha C. Nussbaum Preface Diane P. Wood I. Marriage and Sex The Moral and Legal Consequences of Wife-Selling in The Mayor of Casterbridge Julie C. Suk Jude the Obscure: The Irrelevance of Marriage Law Amanda Claybaugh The History of Obscenity, the British Novel, and the First Amendment Geoffrey R. Stone Jane Austen: Comedy and Social Structure Richard A. Posner II. Law, Social Norms, and Women's Agency Pious Perjury in Scott's The Heart of Midlothian Julia Simon-Kerr Rape, Seduction, Purity, and Shame in Tess of the d'Urbervilles Marcia Baron The Stain of Illegitimacy: Gender, Law, and Trollopian Subversion Martha C. Nussbaum Could He Forgive Her? Gender, Agency, and Women's Criminality in the Novels of Anthony Trollope Nicola Lacey III. Property, Commerce, Travel Law, Commerce, and Gender in Trollope's Framley Parsonage Douglas G. Baird Primogeniture, Legal Change, and Trollope Saul Levmore Defoe's Formal Laws Bernadette Meyler IV. Readers and Interpretation The Lawyer's Library in the Early American Republic Alison L. LaCroix Proposals and Performative Utterance in the 19th-Century Novel: the Professional Man's Plight Robert A. Ferguson A Comeuppance Theory of Narrative and the Emotions Blakey Vermeule
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Page 1. Wandering Readers and the Pedagogical Potential of Temple Bar JULIA M. CHAVEZ In December 1864, the final installment of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Doctor's Wife, featuring a young novel reader who successfully... more
Page 1. Wandering Readers and the Pedagogical Potential of Temple Bar JULIA M. CHAVEZ In December 1864, the final installment of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Doctor's Wife, featuring a young novel reader who successfully ...
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As we move from Mary Elizabeth Braddon's sensation novel The Doctor's Wife to Charles Dickens's massive, multiplot novel Our Mutual Friend, we move from a quiet, isolated countryside to an urban center bustling with all the... more
As we move from Mary Elizabeth Braddon's sensation novel The Doctor's Wife to Charles Dickens's massive, multiplot novel Our Mutual Friend, we move from a quiet, isolated countryside to an urban center bustling with all the frenzy of Victorian commodity culture. First published in ...
UMI, ProQuest ® Dissertations & Theses. The world's most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses. Learn more... ProQuest, From wandering writing to wandering reading: Productive digression in Victorian serial fiction. ...
This essay theorizes the productive potential of the Victorian serial as a form that fosters literary wandering. Anchoring the analysis in John Ruskin’s recuperative reading of Gothic irregularity, the essay argues that the open-endedness... more
This essay theorizes the productive potential of the Victorian serial as a form that fosters literary wandering. Anchoring the analysis in John Ruskin’s recuperative reading of Gothic irregularity, the essay argues that the open-endedness of the Victorian serial creates the conditions for productive nonlinear wandering by both writers and readers. Despite a surface rigidity in publication format that might prompt us to set the serial novel against the irregular Gothic, these texts produce surprisingly similar reading effects. Underneath the façade of regularity, the Victorian serial—even the comic Pickwick Papers or nostalgic Cranford—has a wandering, Gothic heart.
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On 6 July 1851, an essay by Elizabeth Gaskell bearing the simple title 'Disappearances' appeared in Household Words, a weekly family magazine conducted by Charles Dickens. Purportedly weighing the tools available to a mid-... more
On 6 July 1851, an essay by Elizabeth Gaskell bearing the simple title 'Disappearances' appeared in Household Words, a weekly family magazine conducted by Charles Dickens. Purportedly weighing the tools available to a mid- Victorian Scheherezade,1 but perhaps thinking as well of the disappearance at sea of her own brother John Stevenson in 1828, Gaskell writes:[Today] there could be no more romances written on the same kind of plot as Caleb Williams; the principal interest of which, to the superficial reader, consists in the alternation of hope and fear, that the hero may, or may not, escape his pursuer [...]. Now, in 1851, the offended master would set the Detective Police to work; there would be no doubt as to their success; the only question would be as to the time that would elapse before the hiding-place could be detected, and that could not be a question long [...]. But if the materials of pursuit and evasion, as long as the chase is confined to England, are taken away...
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Research Interests:
Serial publication revolutionized the Victorian publishing industry. For this reason, “writing by numbers” is an important concept for any student who is studying Victorian literature. This chapter will demonstrate the usefulness of... more
Serial publication revolutionized the Victorian publishing industry. For this reason, “writing by numbers” is an important concept for any student who is studying Victorian literature. This chapter will demonstrate the usefulness of working with Charles Dickens’s unfinished serialized novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, to introduce part-issue publication. By studying the existing chapters of the novel with an eye toward installment breaks, constructing “appropriate” endings to the novel, and memorializing those endings in Dickensian-style installment plans, students gain a deeper appreciation for the craft and nuance of Victorian serialization. The structure of the course, including a one hour, forty minutes class meeting once a week, further facilitates the deep, immersive learning that pedagogical research has found critical to student success.
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Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Serialization, a publication format that came to dominate the Victorian literary marketplace following its deft adoption by marketing master Charles Dickens in the 1830s, is a transcendent form. It moves across not only print formats and... more
Serialization, a publication format that came to dominate the Victorian literary marketplace following its deft adoption by marketing master Charles Dickens in the 1830s, is a transcendent form. It moves across not only print formats and their temporal cycles of distribution (daily or weekly installments in periodicals, monthly part-issue numbers, volumes), but also historical time and place. The number and varieties of serial publications multiplied during the middle of the 19th century due to the improved technology of printing, the cheaper cost of paper production, and the abolition of taxes on advertising. Moreover, serialization continues to be a staple in popular culture today; the long-form serial on television may be the most obvious descendent of the Victorian novel issued in parts. The history of the Victorian serial in its many forms spans from its roots in the 18th century to its reconfiguration following the advent of radio, television, and the internet. The most preval...
insofar as it ensures the non-reducibility of each part in toto (whether sovereign power or subject) to any whole (again, whether sovereign power or subject). For DeGabriele, then, we do not have “the construction of an increasingly... more
insofar as it ensures the non-reducibility of each part in toto (whether sovereign power or subject) to any whole (again, whether sovereign power or subject). For DeGabriele, then, we do not have “the construction of an increasingly transparent social and epistemological field that mediates particular interests.” We have “a constant confrontation between the insufficient authority of sovereign power or the law to constitute a field in which everything can be said, and a form of subjectivity that testifies to the fundamental opacity of the singular experience of the subject to the procedural rules that define the liberal public sphere” (142). As the unfortunately notso-singular string of prepositions in the last quoted passage suggests, the execution isn’t seamless. At times the argumentation is off, with some major conclusions following from some minor premises, and there is also a lot of repetition in what is a short book. But the thesis is compelling: it represents, without doubt, a valuable contribution to rethinking the political in ways often foreclosed by the long-dominant Brit. Lit. version of Habermas.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This essay theorizes the productive potential of the Victorian serial as a form that fosters literary wandering. Anchoring the analysis in John Ruskin’s recuperative reading of Gothic irregularity, the essay argues that the... more
This essay theorizes the productive potential of the Victorian serial as a form that fosters literary wandering. Anchoring the analysis in John Ruskin’s recuperative reading of Gothic irregularity, the essay argues that the open-endedness of the Victorian serial creates the conditions for productive nonlinear wandering by both writers and readers. Despite a surface rigidity in publication format that might prompt us to set the serial novel against the irregular Gothic, these texts produce surprisingly similar reading effects. Underneath the façade of regularity, the Victorian serial—even the comic Pickwick Papers or nostalgic Cranford—has a wandering, Gothic heart.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Course Description: Roughly two hundred years after Jesus of Nazareth's death, a movement began among select followers of the Christian religion that sought to pattern their lives more perfectly on the teachings and ministry of their Lord... more
Course Description: Roughly two hundred years after Jesus of Nazareth's death, a movement began among select followers of the Christian religion that sought to pattern their lives more perfectly on the teachings and ministry of their Lord and his apostles. Throughout the Mediterranean basin, but especially in the eastern half of the Roman Empire, hundreds of men and women, as solitaries (hermits) or as members of a community (cenobites) took to the " desert, " either literal or figurative, to free themselves from the temptations of idolatry, lust, envy, wealth, wrath, and, worst of all, pride, all of which they believed to be lurking in cities. Only voluntary poverty, prodigal charity, strict chastity, mortification of the flesh, obedience to spiritual elders, and, most important of all, humility, the complete death to self, were proven bulwarks against such temptations, as the recorded sayings and deeds of the desert fathers and mothers attest.
Sometime around the year 529 in Monte Cassino, Italy, this radical movement of Christoformic living found a unique expression in a rule, which was created to guide the practices of a group of Christian laymen, who wished to pray, work, and live together. Benedict of Nursia (c. 480-550) is most often credited with the composition of this rule, though this claim cannot be proven definitively. Questions of authorship aside, the lives of earlier desert fathers and mothers, and the guides for cenobites that they sometimes left behind, undoubtedly shaped the rule's construction, but in sharp contrast to previous guides, this new rule was not crafted to provide a definitive way to perfection, but to articulate a more moderate path for beginners to monasticism. Arguably the rule's commitment to moderation in all of its precepts is what made it the most popular guide to monastic practice for men and women in Western Christianity.
In this course, we will explore the rich tradition of thought and practice that the Benedictine rule established. First, we will read the rule itself and heed the opening words of its prologue, to " listen to the precepts of the Master " and discover what values are essential to the corporate prayer and work (or ora et labora) of the monastic way of life (or conversatio). Then we will explore these values in greater depth by reading, watching, and listening to the works of some of the most influential Benedictine monks, nuns, oblates, and admirers. We will remain attentive to how these thinkers and practitioners of the rule adapted it to meet the concerns of their present context. The rule itself permits the modification of certain precepts according to the needs of particular communities and, more significantly, leaves certain details and potential issues related to the monastics' daily routine unaddressed, thus necessitating further elaboration by later adherents. Ultimately in this class we seek to answer the question of whether the rule provides any guidance for the way we non-monastics should live today.
Sometime around the year 529 in Monte Cassino, Italy, this radical movement of Christoformic living found a unique expression in a rule, which was created to guide the practices of a group of Christian laymen, who wished to pray, work, and live together. Benedict of Nursia (c. 480-550) is most often credited with the composition of this rule, though this claim cannot be proven definitively. Questions of authorship aside, the lives of earlier desert fathers and mothers, and the guides for cenobites that they sometimes left behind, undoubtedly shaped the rule's construction, but in sharp contrast to previous guides, this new rule was not crafted to provide a definitive way to perfection, but to articulate a more moderate path for beginners to monasticism. Arguably the rule's commitment to moderation in all of its precepts is what made it the most popular guide to monastic practice for men and women in Western Christianity.
In this course, we will explore the rich tradition of thought and practice that the Benedictine rule established. First, we will read the rule itself and heed the opening words of its prologue, to " listen to the precepts of the Master " and discover what values are essential to the corporate prayer and work (or ora et labora) of the monastic way of life (or conversatio). Then we will explore these values in greater depth by reading, watching, and listening to the works of some of the most influential Benedictine monks, nuns, oblates, and admirers. We will remain attentive to how these thinkers and practitioners of the rule adapted it to meet the concerns of their present context. The rule itself permits the modification of certain precepts according to the needs of particular communities and, more significantly, leaves certain details and potential issues related to the monastics' daily routine unaddressed, thus necessitating further elaboration by later adherents. Ultimately in this class we seek to answer the question of whether the rule provides any guidance for the way we non-monastics should live today.