@article{may_2019, title={All the Reflected Light We Cannot See (Ghastly) Mirror Imagery in Victorian Fiction}, volume={54}, ISSN={["2326-067X"]}, DOI={10.5325/pacicoasphil.54.2.0273}, number={2}, journal={PACIFIC COAST PHILOLOGY}, author={May, Leila Silvana}, year={2019}, pages={273–297} }
 @article{may_2018, title={Conspicuous Silences: Implicature and Fictionality in the Victorian Novel}, volume={60}, ISSN={["1527-2052"]}, DOI={10.2979/victorianstudies.60.3.24}, abstractNote={Reviewed by: Conspicuous Silences: Implicature and Fictionality in the Victorian Novel by Ruth Rosaler Leila S. May (bio) Conspicuous Silences: Implicature and Fictionality in the Victorian Novel, by Ruth Rosaler; pp. viii + 184. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, £60.00, $95.00. In Conspicuous Silences: Implicature and Fictionality in the Victorian Novel, Ruth Rosaler defines “implicature” as “the aspect of an utterance that relies on the utterance’s relationship to its context, rather than on its semantic import, to communicate meaning” (2). The term was coined in 1975 by the ordinary language philosopher H. P. Grice, who defined the principles that he claims regulate all functional conversation and guarantee its rationality. Grice’s neologism, implicature, takes place when a speaker “flouts” one or more of these principles by “BLATANTLY” failing to fulfill it (Grice qtd. in Rosaler 17). Perhaps his most recognized example is that of a philosophy professor who has been asked by a graduate student to recommend him for a job teaching philosophy. The professor writes, “Dear Sir, Mr. X’s command of English is excellent, and his attendance at tutorials has been regular. Yours, etc.” (Grice qtd. in Rosaler 17). According to Grice, the writer of this letter thinks that the student does not excel at philosophy, and believes that the recipient will deduce that the professor is recommending against hiring him. It is clear that Rosaler’s use of the term implicature is less specific and much broader than Grice’s original meaning (and rarely as harsh). She claims that her book is about “the way in which . . . authors [and particularly Victorian authors] communicate narrative propositions without explicitly stating them” (2). Part of what Rosaler sets out to prove is that “sometimes what is implicated by an utterance (or, in other words, discernible only through hearer inference) far outweighs what is explicitly expressed through its semantic import” (2). Her task is to demonstrate how that happens and why it matters. It is obvious that authors or narrators can imply rather than state explicitly otherwise narratable information in order to leave hints, to foreshadow future events, to mislead [End Page 503] or deceive readers, to express ironic or derisive judgment of characters, or to voice derisive judgments about the readers themselves (for example, in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair [1847–48]). Implicature may also be used for its own sake, simply for the pleasure that it affords the author, narrator, or readers. (I think this is one of Rosaler’s best but underdeveloped ideas.) Rosaler is particularly interested in demonstrating that fictionality should be thought of as a context rather than as a genre. For her, fictionality itself is a primary generator of implicature. Even though implicature occurs any time language is employed, Rosaler finds that its most fertile field is in fiction, where it plays a significant role, and that Victorian fiction provides a particular proof of this idea. Rosaler maintains that part of her book’s originality is its contention that almost all literary critics have failed to take advantage of this insight. Critics tend not to recognize “how a reader’s assumption of a text’s fictionality may transform his or her perception of that text from an otherwise incoherent narrative into a display of ostensive-inferential communication” (23). Even though there has been work on the associations of fictionality with narration, much of it has only “addressed the fiction author’s ability to exploit readers’ expectations of narratorial omniscience in a limited way” (27). Literary critics dealing with fiction, says Rosaler, “have not discussed narrative indirection as a technique used for its own sake, and they have shied away from discussing how a narrative is affected by having its central action narrated through implicature” (29). Although it may seem that Rosaler has a great number of complaints here, one can discern a thread of commonality running through all of them: that of literary critics’ treating the creation and function of implied information (implicatures) as identical in fiction and nonfiction, failing to recognize that fiction is more of a context than a genre, and that that context lends itself to creative implicature. The main job of her book is to...}, number={3}, journal={VICTORIAN STUDIES}, author={May, Leila S.}, year={2018}, pages={503–505} }
 @article{may_2017, title={Who's to be master?: Humpty Dumpty, J. L. Austin, and J. Hillis Miller}, volume={19}, DOI={10.5325/intelitestud.19.1.0069}, abstractNote={Abstract}, number={1}, journal={Interdisciplinary Literary Studies}, author={May, L. S.}, year={2017}, pages={69–101} }
 @article{may_2013, title={LUCY SNOWE, A MATERIAL GIRL? PHRENOLOGY, SURVEILLANCE, AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF INTERIORITY}, volume={55}, ISSN={["0011-1589"]}, DOI={10.13110/criticism.55.1.0043}, abstractNote={Charlotte Bronte has long been considered one of the nineteenth century's foremost psychologists of inner spiritual being. Accordingly, she is viewed as a staunch defender of the need for privacy in the personal worlds in which she places her protagonists. Such a view of Bronte's metaphysics was attacked forcefully by Sally Shuttleworth in her influential work Charlotte Bronte and Victorian Psychology (1996), where Shuttleworth attributes to Bronte a materialistic psychology derived from Bronte's interest in new advancements in the psychology and physiology of her day, and especially from her commitment to phrenology. In this essay, I will defend a version of the more traditional view oi Villette (1853) and develop it by showing its philosophical similarity to the dualistic ontology generated by Cartesian metaphysics in the seventeenth century. Opposing Shuttleworth's provocative view, according to which Bronte is depicted as struggling toward a materialistic conception of the self, I will argue that Bronte is clearly a dualist, and that her dualism is both as radical as Descartes's and very similar to it, not only in content but functionally, each having as their goal the defense of inner selfhood against its occupation and erasure by the new sciences of their times. But to show that Bronte's view is not as antiquated as Descartes's in all respects, I will also discuss Villette in terms of the sociology of Georg Simmel and his erstwhile disciple, Erving Goffman,1 whose theories offer some surprising support for Lucy Snowe's otherwise solipsistic-seeming conception of selfhood.To establish my claim about Bronte's metaphysics, I will be obliged to formulate a refutation of Shuttleworth's argument as it applies to Villette. I will end my discussion with a rather radical reversal, however, arguing that Bronte herself not only fails to defend her dualism against monistic materialism but undermines her own philosophy of secrecy by bequeathing powerful detective skills to her heroine, Lucy Snowe, and to the other most important characters in the novel, Madame Modeste Beck and Monsieur Paul Emanuel, Lucy's superiors at the Pensionnat de Demoiselles. These Sherlockian powers dismantle the inner/outer distinction required for Bronte's kind of spiritualistic dualism - and do so with no help needed from phrenology. This is to say that Bronte's depiction of Lucy Snowe's inferiority makes a strong case for radical dualism, but this dualism nonetheless ultimately collapses due to Lucy's ambivalence about self-revelation, her curiosity about the interiority of others, and the powerful detective skills she shares with her colleagues, Mme Beck and M. Paul, at the Pensionnat.The aspect of Georg Simmel's (1858-1918) sociology that is most pertinent to my argument is found in his work The Secret and the Secret Society, written in 1908.2 The key idea is his claim that sociality and selfhood as we know them would be impossible without secrecy. All social relationships "presuppose ... a measure of mutual concealment."3 Simmel suggests that "under otherwise identical circumstances, human collective life requires a certain measure of secrecy which merely changes its topics: while leaving one of them, social life seizes upon another, and in all this alternation it preserves an unchanged quantity of secrecy."4 The idea here seems to be that secrecy is an ever-present protean cipher of absence - a zero or an X - in any social relation at any time. Secrecy's content is determined historically: "We simply cannot," says Simmel, "imagine any interaction or social arrangement or society which are not based on this teleologically determined non-knowledge of each other."5 In addition, subjectivity itself requires secrecy; without it, the individual would be open to ridicule and abuse; she would be at the mercy of the malevolence of others. One must be able to restrict the amount and kind of knowledge about oneself obtained by the other.6 Indeed, Simmel claims that secrecy is the precondition of the consciousness of selfhood, and that therefore "[t]he secret . …}, number={1}, journal={CRITICISM-A QUARTERLY FOR LITERATURE AND THE ARTS}, author={May, Leila S.}, year={2013}, pages={43–68} }
 @article{may_2009, title={How Lucy Snowe Became an Amnesiac}, volume={34}, ISSN={["1474-8932"]}, DOI={10.1179/147489309X12470507051904}, abstractNote={Abstract This essay is an attempt to refute the thesis of Nicholas Dames's book of 2001, Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810–1870, as it applies to Charlotte Brontë's Villette. Dames sees Lucy Snowe, the long-suffering narrator of the novel, as the victim — or the perpetrator — of an extreme case of amnesia that constitutes 'the death of memory'. I argue that Dames's thesis involves a misreading of the role of memory in Charlotte Brontë's novel, a novel that, perhaps more than any other Victorian novel, is about long-term memory in all its detail and painfulness. I further argue that Dames's error is partially motivated by an over-emphasis on his part of the role of phrenology in Villette.}, journal={BRONTE STUDIES}, author={May, Leila S.}, year={2009}, month={Nov}, pages={220–233} }
 @article{may_2007, title={Review of Carolyn Lesjak, Working Fictions: A Genealogy of the Victorian Novel.}, volume={35}, journal={Victorians Institute Journal}, publisher={Durham, NC: Duke University Press}, author={May, L. S.}, year={2007}, pages={294–299} }
 @article{may_2007, title={The sociology of Thackeray's howling wilderness: selfishness, secrecy and performance in Vanity Fair}, volume={37}, number={1}, journal={Modern Language Studies}, author={May, L. S.}, year={2007}, pages={18–41} }
 @article{may_2007, title={Wittgenstein's reflection in Lewis Carroll's looking-glass (Ludwig Wittgenstein)}, volume={31}, ISSN={["0190-0013"]}, DOI={10.1353/phl.2007.0011}, abstractNote={According to one tradition in the theory of fiction, there is a kind of fantasy whose function is to invite the reader to “acknowledge the possibility of a different reality.”1 In this essay I want to ask whether Lewis Carroll’s Alice books fit into this category; that is, I want to explore the possibility that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the LookingGlass are not the pure nonsense that many readers take them to be. In considering the Alice books as fantasy offering a view of a “different reality” I do not deny that there are in these stories some mimetic elements alongside the fantastic—representations of things going on somewhere, somehow, in Victorian society—in which case the “different reality” presented will not be so terribly different as to be unrecognizable. For example, the Mad Tea Party in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is not only an act of fantasy but also an act of mimesis. It certainly imitates the real tea parties often held throughout Victorian England—if caricature is a form of imitation—but it may also mime those mock tea parties held in English asylums whose goal was to model sane-like behavior to the inmates.2 An analogous question can be asked about Carroll’s books in general: In addition to the component of fantasy, are they mimetic of Victorian culture itself, or merely of the Victorian conception of madness? Michel Foucault has argued that, while the very idea of la folie is an historical construct, the dialectical relationship between reason and unreason, with each pole parasitic on the other, is a structural constant. Carroll’s Alice books produce images that are discharged in the confused nineteenth-century landscape where these two opposites meet. In that respect, his books are not so different from many of the more standard novels written in mid-century England. In this essay I}, number={1}, journal={PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE}, author={May, Leila S.}, year={2007}, month={Apr}, pages={79–94} }
 @article{may_2003, title={Monkeys, microcephalous idiots, and the barbarous races of mankind: Darwin's dangerous Victorianism}, number={Spring}, journal={Victorian Newsletter}, author={May, L. S.}, year={2003}, pages={20–27} }
 @article{may_2003, title={Review of Richard A. Kaye, The Flirt's Tragedy: Desire Without End in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction.}, volume={31}, journal={Victorians Institute Journal}, publisher={University of Virginia Press}, author={May, L. S.}, year={2003}, pages={219–225} }
 @misc{may_2003, title={The  brother-sister culture in nineteenth-century literature: From Austen to Woolf}, volume={45}, DOI={10.1353/vic.2004.0030}, number={4}, journal={Victorian Studies}, author={May, L. S.}, year={2003}, pages={738–740} }
 @article{may_2002, title={Jane Austen's "Schemes of sisterly happiness"}, volume={81}, number={3}, journal={Philological Quarterly}, author={May, L. S.}, year={2002}, pages={327–358} }
 @article{may_2002, title={Monkeys, microcephalous idiots, and the barbarous races of mankind: Darwin's dangerous Victorianism}, number={102}, journal={Victorian Newsletter}, author={May, L. S.}, year={2002}, pages={20–27} }
 @article{may_sanders_2002, title={The Brother-sister culture in Nineteenth-Century literature: from Austen to Woolf}, volume={44}, number={2002}, journal={Victorian Studies}, author={May, L. and Sanders, V.}, year={2002} }
 @book{may_2001, title={Disorderly sisters: Sibling relations and sororal resistance in nineteenth-century British literature}, ISBN={0838754597}, publisher={Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press}, author={May, L. S.}, year={2001} }
 @article{may_2001, title={The strong-arming of desire: A reconsideration of Nancy Armstrong's 'Desire and Domestic Fiction'}, volume={68}, ISSN={["0013-8304"]}, DOI={10.1353/elh.2001.0008}, abstractNote={Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction, a book heralded on its dust cover as "strikingly original," and in its advance publicity as one that requires us "to rethink many of the basic issues of the emerging novel in England."l Reviewers have tended to agree. Catherine Gallagher, in her mostly favorable assessment, called Armstrong's argument "a challenging revision of the history of the novel."2 In an even more laudatory commentary, Homer Obed Brown claimed that "the very possibility of Armstrong's theoretical paradigm (let alone the persuasive force of her}, number={1}, journal={ELH-ENGLISH LITERARY HISTORY}, author={May, LS}, year={2001}, pages={267–285} }
 @article{may_1998, title={'Foul things of the night': Dread in the Victorian body}, volume={93}, ISSN={["2222-4319"]}, DOI={10.2307/3733619}, journal={MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW}, author={May, LS}, year={1998}, month={Jan}, pages={16–22} }
 @article{may_1995, title={SIBLING REVELRY IN SHELLEY,MARY 'FRANKENSTEIN'}, volume={35}, ISSN={["1522-9270"]}, DOI={10.2307/450759}, number={4}, journal={STUDIES IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 1500-1900}, author={MAY, LS}, year={1995}, pages={669–685} }
 @article{may_1995, title={Sensational sisters: Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White}, volume={30}, number={1}, journal={Pacific Coast Philology}, author={May, L. S.}, year={1995}, pages={82–102} }
 @article{may_1995, title={The violence of the letter: Clarissa and familial bo(u)nds}, volume={32}, number={3}, journal={English Language Notes}, author={May, L. S.}, year={1995}, pages={24–32} }
 @inbook{may_1993, title={' Eat me, drink me, love me': orality, sexuality and the fruits of sororal desire in 'Gob(b)lin(g) Market' and Beloved}, ISBN={0879726121}, booktitle={The significance of sibling relationships in literature}, publisher={Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press}, author={May, L. S.}, year={1993}, pages={133–148} }
 @article{may_1993, title={' Sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature': the brother-sister bond in Poe's 'Fall of the House of Usher'}, volume={30}, number={3}, journal={Studies in Short Fiction}, author={May, L. S.}, year={1993}, pages={387–396} }