This article provides an overview of the academic study of Victorian masculinity. It argues that the pioneering work of feminist and sexuality studies scholars in Victorian studies during the 1970s and 1980s made it possible to discuss manhood critically as a historical and cultural phenomenon. It then presents a reading of major works on Victorian masculinity from the 1990s, organized around two major themes: studies that brought to light and analyzed a suppressed history of masculinities that departed from cultural norms (especially homosexual masculinity), and studies devoted to the reassessment of mainstream Victorian manhood. It concludes by looking at a selection of work from the past decade in order to outline recent developments in the field. These studies, which have been able to take for granted that manhood is a valid and coherent subject of inquiry, have been able to integrate the study of masculinity into a variety of Victorian topics, even though there are now fewer works devoted exclusively to masculinity.

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This article develops a theory of postcolonial queer pedagogy through reflections on teaching nineteenth-century literature at the National University of Singapore. Students draw on their experiences living in a culture torn between liberal and illiberal tendencies and recognize that such contradictions exist in both the Western and non-Western world.

This essay focuses on Olive Schreiner's personal correspondence and the allegories collected in Dreams (1890) to explore her complicated relationship to late-Victorian Decadence. I argue that Schreiner modified Decadent writers' use of intersensoriality and synaesthesia to educate her readers into a new kind of common sense, one aligned with her own position as a progressive woman writer from the global periphery. While she rejected the exclusivity, individualism, and celebration of sensual indulgence for its own sake found in much canonical Decadent writing, she was nevertheless inspired by its deployment of the aesthetic to retrain the body to appreciate alternatives to a sensus communis of the kind described in Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790). She saw Decadence encouraging the discovery of new ways of perceiving reality beyond the apparent "common sense" of Victorian liberal humanism. Like the Decadents, but in her own way, Schreiner challenged the aesthetic norms that helped to secure the hegemony of bourgeois European culture, contributing to the late nineteenth century's broad eruption of interest in art's role in both producing and contesting the prevailing liberal order.

In this brief but ambitious book, Benjamin Kahan gives readers a slowmotion history of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick named the "Great Paradigm Shift," when a world of a "thousand aberrant sexualities" (to use Foucault's phrase) transformed into one where everyone gets sorted into the homosexual/heterosexual binary. 1 He describes his method as a "historical etiology " that looks back to dubious narratives of sexual causality to tell the story of modern erotic subjectivity's emergence. Kahan's point is that the "minor perverts" of his title did not simply disappear all at once, as Sedgwick's mocking phrase implies. Instead, he draws on a diverse archive of nineteenth-and twentieth-century sexological and literary texts to demonstrate that various sexual etiologies had surprisingly long afterlives, and that an understanding of sexual identity as congenital, interior to the psyche, and defined by the gender of the desired object has had a stunningly briefer moment of cultural dominance than typically assumed.Kahan's discussion is organized into an introduction that explains his etiological methodology and situates it among competing historical approaches, five short chapters each addressing a different etiology, and a remarkable final chapter reframing his thesis as a sort of Unified Field Theory for the history of the sexuality. Chapter 1 focuses on situational homosexuality in two contemporaneous lesbian-themed plays, the largely Modern Philology, volume 117, number 2.