Professor of English Chris Foss has published a peer-reviewed article entitled “Ann Yearsley, Earl Goodwin, and the Politics of Romantic Discontent” in the most recent number of Romanticism on the Net.  RoN was one of the pioneering international open access journals when it was founded over thirty years ago now in 1996, and is by now one of the most established venues for scholarship on British Romantic literature. The few substantial critical studies of Ann Yearsley’s tragic drama Earl Goodwin leave unexplored the ways in which Yearsley simultaneously is clarifying and extending her anger at and frustration with the class- and gender-based discrimination she experienced firsthand in the fallout with her mentor Hannah More over the profits from her first book of poetry. This article aims to fill this gap by delineating the many ways in which Earl Goodwin represents, on one level, her ongoing response to the defamation she suffered in the wake of More’s public campaign to ruin her reputation. Documenting the inextricability of the play’s explicit social and political critiques with Yearsley’s ongoing response to the More fiasco reinforces the extent to which her more familiar initial protests about More’s treatment (as published in her second volume of poems) are as fundamentally politically as they are personally motivated.

Professor of English Chris Foss has published a book review of Nicholas Frankel’s critical biography Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years (Harvard University Press) in the most recent number of The Historian.  Foss endorses Frankel’s very readable book as an important revisionist take on Wilde’s life after prison, positing the longstanding insistence upon Wilde’s “decline and martyrdom” misrepresents his actual resilience.  Wilde undeniably struggled with social opprobrium and creative self-doubt, not to mention relative poverty and ill health, but his “frank and unapologetic attitude” toward the openly gay lifestyle he pursued during his final four years shows him to have understood “his erotic relations with other men as a matter of personal identity,” leading Frankel to insist that “Wilde’s greatest achievement in exile was himself.”  With over 13,000 subscribers, The Historian is one of the most widely circulated history journals worldwide.

Professor of English Chris Foss recently presented a paper at the “Hideous Progeny”: The Gothic in the Nineteenth Century conference hosted by the Loyola University-Chicago Victorian Society on October 27, 2018.  The talk, entitled “Gothic Mutations of Pity in Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Star-Child,’” aimed at a critical reconsideration of pity through a reading of Wilde’s fairy tale, explores the ways it replicates stereotypically pejorative assumptions about disability but also contains empowering possibilities as well.  Through the gothic mutation of its disability-aligned titular protagonist (initially the embodiment of physical perfection, but eventually transformed into a scaly toadfaced freak), this text requires one to grapple with the extent to which its employment of pity reinforces a hierarchical division between the fortunate and the unfortunate and/or encourages a more progressive conception founded upon love, reciprocity, and action.  The paper is part of the larger book manuscript project (The Importance of Being Different: Intersectional Disability and Emotional Response in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales) that is the focus of Foss’s 2018-20 Waple Professorship award.

John Andrén Foundation International Conference attendees

On June 9, Professor of English Chris Foss presented a paper (in partial fulfillment of his Summer 2018 Faculty Research Grant) entitled As he is no longer beautiful he is no longer useful: Reading Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Happy Prince’ through the Lens of Disability Studies at the inaugural John Andrén Foundation International Conference on Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, held in Ystad, Sweden.

Wilde’s representation of disability in “The Happy Prince” is not without its issues, particularly the possibility it ends up ascribing an exclusively pejorative status to disability if it can only be some sort of martyrdom rather than a valued form of difference that need not preclude one from leading a happy, fulfilling life.  Still, with his story’s divine endorsement of the shabby blind statue and the dead bird (the latter now arguably inscribed as an ugly, useless body in his own right after his decaying remains are discarded as worthless trash), Wilde also allows for readers to arrive at a decidedly different and fundamentally positive response to disability than the still-popular view of it as some sort of divine punishment or retribution.

In this alternative take, we are encouraged to value (indeed, to privilege), to love—not just a tolerance of love for bodies society traditionally has devalued as deviant and/or discarded as dangerous, but more profoundly a celebration of the love of and by bodies embraced precisely for, rather than in spite of, their difference and diversity.

On April 14, Professor of English Chris Foss presented a conference paper entitled “Locating the Monstrous Body in Monstress and My Favorite Thing Is Monsters through a Disability Studies Lens” at the 49th annual convention of the Northeast Modern Language Association in Pittsburgh.

His paper took for its focus the highly praised comics collections Monstress, Vols. 1 and 2, by Marjorie Liu/Sana Takeda (Image Comics 2016-17) and the much ballyhooed debut graphic novel My Favorite Thing is Monsters [Book One] by Emil Ferris (Fantagraphics Books 2016).

Foss explored how that the location of the monstrous body in this particular textual format, and in these two texts in particular, offers a range of diverse possibilities for both reinforcing and exploding the literary and the literal normative borders that have been constructed to define what is monstrous as defective and deformed and disabled and diseased.  Using an intersectional approach, he aimed to suggest how multiple other facets of the monstrous (including ethnic/racial, foreign, freakish, gothic, hybrid, perverse, political, and sexual aspects) overlap with disabled monstrosity and together blur, cross, deconstruct, and/or erase numerous inextricably interrelated borders within and around the human.

Professor of English Chris Foss has published a book review entitled “Mapping the Networks of India in Britain” in the most recent number of English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920.

His 1466-word review takes for its focus Elleke Boehmer’s recent monograph from Oxford University Press, Indian Arrivals 1870–1915: Networks of British Empire.

Now in its 61st year, ELT is one of the most established venues for scholarly work on literature from the late Victorian, Edwardian and early Modernist periods.

Professor of English Chris Foss has published an article titled “‘For the future let those who come to play with me have no hearts’: The Affect of Pity in Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’” in the Fall 2017 number of Journal of Narrative Theory, a special issue on Dis/Enabling Narratives edited by Essaka Joshua.   JNT is a refereed, international journal in its fifth decade that “showcases theoretically sophisticated essays that examine narrative in a host of critical, interdisciplinary, or cross-cultural contexts.”

In his article, Foss argues that Wilde’s fairy tale about the death of a performing Dwarf at the Spanish court may appear mired in damaging stereotype and maudlin melodrama, but it nonetheless suggests more progressive emotionally-based possibilities for sympathy, acceptance, and even identification rather than paternalistic pity.  Wilde’s text invites readers to recognize its seemingly simultaneous manipulation of the narrative toward a reliance upon and a critique of the consumption of pain necessary to the workings of the affect of pity.  It further forces readers to acknowledge their own complicity in this pity and pain, ultimately revealing crucial complexities inherent in such emotional responses to disability and difference.

On June 23, Professor of English Chris Foss presented a paper titled “Ann Yearsley, Earl Goodwin, and the Politics of Romantic Discontent” at the 25^th meeting of the British Women Writers Conference, held this year at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

There is a dearth of substantial critical studies of Earl Goodwin in general, and while the few out there have helpfully illuminated the play’s representation of the historical plight of women and the poor during Anglo-Saxon times, as well as its application to their predicaments in England and France during the end of the 18^th century, this important tack has left unexplored the ways in which Yearsley also is clarifying and extending her anger and frustration about the class- and gender-based discrimination she experienced firsthand in the fallout with her mentor Hannah More over the profits from her first book.

Foss’ paper fills this gap, explicating the many ways in which Earl Goodwin represents, on one level, her ongoing response to the defamation she suffered in the wake of More’s public campaign to ruin her reputation. The paper also encourages a re-visioning of the overtly personal rejoinders to More as already reflective of her discontent with economic, political and social injustice. That is, documenting the inextricability of the play’s explicit social and political critiques with Yearsley’s ongoing response to the More fiasco in fact reinforces the extent to which her more familiar initial reactions are as fundamentally politically as they are personally motivated.