[Special Journal Issue] The Male Body in Victorian Literature & Culture

The breadth and depth of scholarship on Victorian men and masculinities leaves much to be explored. This special issue is the result of a call for essays which aimed to bring together the work of scholars who seek to contribute to the filling this gap. The essays we have selected for this volume share a central concern for the exploration of the Victorian male body not only as a signifier of a variety of gendered identities, anxieties, and norms but also as a physical canvas on which we can trace masculinity’s inherent and complex intersections with a variety of nineteenth-century discourses. As such, they consider both the metaphorical and literal inscriptions with which writers and artists have endowed the Victorian male body and which reveal new perspectives on the period’s constructions of social class, empire, race, nationhood, war, disability, science, and religion, be it through consumption, appearance, or disembodiment. In doing so, the issue goes beyond representations of male physical deviance and discipline.