Simon Reader (University if Toronto) This post accompanies Simon Reader’s Journal of Victorian Culture article published (2013). It can be read in full here. “But I fall into the lace of the text, the vellum; caught there, I contemplate my masters.” Lisa Robertson, Nillings Manuscript collections may be usefully regarded as ornaments adorning the literary canon. They strike me as a kind of lace bordering otherwise functional clothing. For one thing, getting to the artifacts can be costly. Sitting with Oscar Wilde’s notebooks
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JVC
A Beautiful Fiction of Law
Kieran Dolin (University of Western Australia) This post accompanies Kieran Dolin’s Journal of Victorian Culture article published (2013). It can be read in full here. My article, ‘A Beautiful Fiction of Law: Rhetorical Engagements with Terra Nullius in the British Periodical Press in the 1840s,’ emerged out of an interest I have in the way legal ideals percolate throughout Victorian literature and culture. Many writers had legal training, and even without that, educated Victorians drew on the vocabulary of law and justice in
Read moreDomesticating the Cosmos: Plurality and Familiarity
Ben Carver (University of Exeter) This post accompanies Ben Carver’s Journal of Victorian Culture article published (2013). It can be read in full here. My article, ‘‘“A Gleaming and Glorious Star”: Rethinking History in the Plurality-of-Worlds Debate’ looks at how astronomical knowledge reframed debates about history in the nineteenth century. In 1817, Thomas Chalmers considered the possibility of other worlds and quoted from the Psalms for a modern age of astronomical knowledge in which orthodox Christian cosmogony seemed to be troubled in new
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Digital Forum: Open Access
Jim Mussell (University of Leeds) The British Government’s endorsement of the Finch Report (officially titled ‘Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand access to research publications: Report of the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings’) last year raised the profile of open access and it has remained on the agenda ever since. As the research ecosystem in the UK adapts, the underlying economics and politics of journal publication are under scrutiny as never before. While the Finch report’s
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