Comparing Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) with medical essays found in Carroll’s private library, this article argues that an examination of Alice’s Adventures “through the looking-glass” of Victorian psychology can generate new perspectives of the novel. It demonstrates that Carroll’s literary treatment of nonsense—illustrated by the characters’ linguistic and cognitive...
This article explores the extreme type of decadent eroticism that Aleister Crowley developed while an undergraduate at Cambridge in the later 1890s. The discussion focuses of Crowley's desire to appear as the main legatee of Algernon Charles Swinburne's poetry from the 1860s and 1870s. Especially significant here is Crowley's volume White Stains, which the maverick publisher Leonard Smithers...
In a letter that she wrote to her childhood governess and religious mentor Maria Lewis in 1839, George Eliot describes a pervading and distressful mental anxiety – one that would come to greatly influence both the constitution and development of her fiction. Still within the throes of her evangelical ardor, Eliot laments in this letter that the “disjointed specimens” of history, poetry,...