Remaking Queen Victoria

Queen Victoria’s central importance to the era defined by her reign is self-evident, and yet it has been surprisingly overlooked in the study of Victorian culture. This collection of essays goes beyond the facts of biography and official history to explore the diverse, and sometimes conflicting, meanings she held for her subjects around the world and even for those outside her empire, who made of her a multifaceted icon serving their social and economic needs. In her paradoxical position as neither consort nor king, she baffled expectations throughout her reign. She was a model of wifely decorum and solid middle-class values, but she also became the focus of anxieties about powerful women, and - increasingly - of anger about Britain’s imperial aims. Each essay analyses a different aspect of this complex and fascinating figure. Contributors include noted scholars in the field of literature, cultural studies, art history, and women’s studies.

• Changes the way we see Queen Victoria both in herself and as an emblem of her own time • Explores the cultural significance of a unique political and social figure, across a wide range of topics and locations • First title in Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture to appear in paperback

List of illustrations; Notes on contributors; 1. Introduction Margaret Homans and Adrienne Munich; Part I. Nation-Making: 2. Nation and nationality: Queen Victoria in the developing narrative of Englishness Elizabeth Langland; 3. Crossing the Atlantic with Victoria: American receptions, 1837–1901 Mary Loeffelholz; Part II. Queen Victoria and Other Queens: 4. Illustrious company: Victoria among other women in Anglo-American role model anthologies Alison Booth; 5. Gloriana Victoriana: Victoria and the cultural memory of Elizabeth I Nicola J. Watson; 6. ‘Be no more housewives, but queens’: Queen Victoria and Ruskin’s domestic mythology Sharon Aronofsky Weltman; 7. How we lost the empire: retelling the stories of the Rani of Jansi and Queen Victoria Maria Jerinic; 8. ‘I know what is due to me’: self-fashioning and legitimization in Queen Liliuokalani’s Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen Robin Bott; Part III. Victoria’s Career, Early and Late: 9. Reading and writing Victoria: the conduct book and the legal constitution of female sovereignty Gail Turley Houston; 10. The wise child and her ‘offspring’: some changing faces of Queen Victoria Susan P. Casteras; ‘11. I never saw a man so frightened’: the young queen and the Parliamentary bedchamber Karen Chase and Michael Levenson; 12. The ‘Widdy’s’ empire: Queen Victoria as widow in Kipling’s soldier stories and in the Barrack-Room Ballads Dagni Bredeson; Part IV. Afterlife: 13. Queen Victoria in the Funnyhouse: Adrienne Kennedy and the rituals of colonial possession Janet Winston; Bibliography; Index.