Centre for Studies in Literature (CSL)

Patricia PulhamDr Patricia Pulham

Reader in Victorian Literature
Deputy Director of the Centre for Studies in Literature
patricia.pulham@port.ac.uk

My research interests centre on nineteenth, and twentieth-century literature, art and culture, with a particular focus on Decadent writing (especially Vernon Lee), sensation and crime fiction, queer studies, and the neo-Victorian novel. I am author of Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Tales, (Ashgate Press, 2008) and have co-edited, with Catherine Maxwell, Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales (Broadview Press, 2006), the first annotated edition of selected short stories by Vernon Lee, and Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), the first collection of critical essays on Lee’s work.

In addition, I have published on a range of other nineteenth-century writers including Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde and Olive Custance in academic journals such as the Yearbook of English Studies and the Victorian Review. Most recently, I co-edited two collections of essays: with Rosario Arias, Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), and with Bran Nicol and Eugene McNulty, Crime Culture: Figuring Criminality in Fiction and Film (Continuum, 2011). 

Next year, I will be involved in co-organising ‘The Other Dickens’, a major international conference to be held at the University of Portsmouth to mark the bicentenary of Dickens’s birth. Future plans include a four-volume facsimile collection on Spiritualism, 1840-1930, due out with Routledge in 2013/14.

Publications

Monographs

  • Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Tales, (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2008).

Edited Books

  • Spiritualism, 1840–1930 (4 vols.), (forthcoming, Routledge, 2013/14).
  • Crime Cultures: Figuring Criminality in Literature, Media and Film, (contracted to Continuum, 2011)
  • Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past (forthcoming, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
  • Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales (co-edited with Dr Catherine Maxwell), (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2006)
  • Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics (co-edited with Dr Catherine Maxwell), (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)

Journal Articles

  • ‘“Of marble men and maidens”: Sin, Sculpture, and Perversion in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun' in Yearbook of English Studies (Special Issue), 40.1-2 (July 2010), 83-102.
  •  ‘From Pygmalion to Persephone: Love, Art, Myth, in Thomas Hardy’s The Well-Beloved’, Victorian Review (special issue in honour of Margot Louis), 34:2 (Fall 2008), 219-39.
  • “The Eroticism of Artificial Flesh in Villiers de L’Isle Adam’s L’Eve Future.” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 7 (2008).
  • ‘Tinted and Tainted Love in Olive Custance’s Sculptural Bodies’, Yearbook of English Studies (From Decadent to Modernist issue), 37: 1 (2007), 161-176.
  • ‘Colouring the Past: Death, Desire, and Homosexuality in Vernon Lee’s “A Wedding Chest”’ in ‘Historicising Sexual Politics: Victorian Engagements with the Past’, Critical Survey (Special Issue) 19:1 (2007), 5-16.
  • ‘Textual/Sexual Masquerades: Reading the Body in Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady’, Wilkie Collins Society Journal, ns. 5 (2003), 19-34.
  • ‘The Castrato and the Cry in Vernon Lee’s Wicked Voices’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 30: 2, 2002, 421-37.
  • ‘Vernon Lee A Forgotten Voice’ in The Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, (Spring 1999), 51-62.

Essays in Edited Collections

  • 'Swinburne's A Year's Letters, Masquerade and the English Epistolary Novel' in Algernon Charles Swinburne: Unofficial Laureate, eds. Catherine Maxwell, Stefano Evangelista and Patricia Pulham (forthcoming, Manchester University Press, 2012).
  • ‘ “Out of Venice at Last”: Vernon Lee’s Venice of the Imagination’ in This Strange Dream upon the Water’: Venice and the Cultural Imagination since 1800, eds. Michael O’Neill, Mark Shandy and Sarah Wootton (Pickering & Chatto, forthcoming 2012).
  • ‘New Pygmalions: William Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris and Vernon Lee’s Miss Brown’ in The Legacies of Romanticism: Literature, Aesthetics, Landscape (Routledge Studies in Romanticism), eds. Carmen Casaliggi and Paul March Russell (forthcoming 2012).
  • ‘Violence and the Body in Vernon Lee's The Ballet of the Nations’ in Conflict, Nationhood and Corporeality in Modern Literature: Bodies-at-War, ed. Petra Rau (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming in 2010.
  • ‘Mapping Histories: The Golem and the Serial Killer in White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings and Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem’ in Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2009, MS submitted).
  • ‘Doubling and Desire in Louis Norbert’ in Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics, eds. Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 123-42.
  • ‘The Arts’ in A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. Chris Williams (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 443-56.
  • ‘ “Jewels - delights - perfect loves”: The Woman Poet and the Annual’ in Victorian Women Poets, Essays and Studies Series, ed. Alison Chapman (London Boydell and Brewer, 2003), pp. 9-33.
  • ‘A Transatlantic Alliance: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Vernon Lee’, in Feminist Forerunners (New) Womanism and Feminism in the Early Twentieth Century, ed. Ann Heilmann (London Pandora Press, 2003), pp. 34-43.