Expanding the Scope of Victorian Rape Studies
The majority of research on 19th-century literary representations of sexual violence variously restricts the field by 1) explicitly or implicitly treating rape as an exceptional crime; 2) limiting analyses to what Erin Spampinato has termed “adjudicative reading,” or legalistic approaches that evaluate rape stories as if they were real-life court cases; and 3) attending only to narratives about cisgender men’s violations of white cisgender women, especially within the middle-class home, to the exclusion of nonheterosexual, queer, and colonial contexts.