Most scholars are both haunted, even undone, by the task of writing papers for peers and traveling to strange campuses to deliver them. Yet we keep it up--we inflict it on our peers, we inflict it on ourselves. Why?

To answer that question, Recall This Book assembled three (if you count John) scholars of Victorian literature asked to speak at the Spring 2025 Northeastern Victorian Studies Association conference. Their discussion began with the idea that agreeing to give papers is an act of “externalized self-promising” and ranged across the reasons that floating ideas before our peers is terrifying, exhilarating and ultimately necessary.

Kristin Mahoney's books include Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian

Mentioned in the episode

Theosophical Society in Chennai Annie Besant

Jiddu Krishnamurthi in his early life was a not-quite-orphan child guru for Besant. 

Eric Williams, British Historians and the West Indies on grand theorizations of race by folks like Acton

C L R James

Adorno’s Minima Moralia provides Nasser with an importantreminder of the importance of “hating tradition properly.”

H G Wells, The Time Machine and its modernist aftermath eg in the opening pages of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and in Ford Madox Ford’s The Inheritors and The Good Soldier, which is in its own peculiar way a time-travel novel. 

The three discuss Foucault’s notion of capillarity a form of productive constraint, which Nasser uses to characterize both early 20th century Orientalism, and the paradigms of postcolonialism that replaced it,  Paul Saint Amour’s chapter on Ford Madox Ford is in Tense Future.

John Guillory on the distinctions between criticism and scholarship in Professing Criticism; the rhizomatic appeal of B-Side Books.

The “hedgehog and the fox” as a distinction comes from a poem by Archilochus—and sparked  Isaiah Berlin’s celebrated essay of the same name.

Pamela Fletcher the Victorian Painting of Modern Life .

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