INTRODUCTION: VICTORIAN STUDIES AND CULTURAL STUDIES

THE IDEA FOR THIS CLUSTER of work had its origins in a session of the 1996 Modern Language Association Convention in Washington, D. C., where the editors of Victorian Literature and Culture organized a panel devoted to the topic at hand: “Victorian Studies and Cultural Studies.” The panel presentations and the post-panel discussion were extremely stimulating, and it was clear that the rich topic wanted further consideration. The following selection of essays, gathered together under this journal’s special feature, the “Editors’ Topic,” is the result. Here, then, are four articles representing a range of practice — though not, by any means, the entire range of practice — in the intersecting fields of Victorian studies and cultural studies. The articles are followed by fourteen forum essays presenting an array of pressing issues, arguments, and sharp opinions centering in the relations — past, present, and potential — between Victorian studies and cultural studies. Three of the following eighteen pieces were presented (and those in shorter, nascent form) at the MLA: Mary Ellis Gibson’s article on Henry Martyn, Jane Eyre, and Missionary Biography, Kristen Leaver’s consideration of Victorian melodrama, and my brief ruminations on the concepts of “discourse” and “genre.” All the rest were commissioned for this issue of Victorian Literature and Culture.