Regenia Gagnier is Professor of English at the University of Exeter and President of the British Association of Victorian Studies (BAVS). Her most recent book is Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: on the Relationship of Part to Whole 1859-1920 (Palgrave 2010) She is Editor in Chief of Literature Compass http://literature-compass.com and its Global Circulation Project http://literature-compass.com/global-circulationproject/ This post is one part of a four-part discussion on the value of Victorian studies. To read the other posts, visit http://myblogs.informa.com/jvc/2011/10/07/the-value-of-victorian-studies/. Before turning to
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The Future of Victorian Studies: The Postgraduate Perspective
Sarah Parker is a doctoral student at University of Birmingham. She recently submitted her PhD thesis, entitled ‘The Lesbian Muse: Homoeroticism, Contemporary Muse Figures and Female Poetic Identity’. Her article ‘A Girl’s Love’: Lord Alfred Douglas as Homoerotic Muse in the Poetry of Olive Custance’ is published Women: A Cultural Review (Vol 22, Issue 2-3). This post is one part of a four-part discussion on the value of Victorian studies. To read the other posts, visit http://myblogs.informa.com/jvc/2011/10/07/the-value-of-victorian-studies/. Firstly, I must
Read moreThe Value of Victorian Studies: View from the Publisher
Linda Bree is Editorial Director, Arts and Literature, at Cambridge University Press. Her own scholarly work is in the literature of the long eighteenth century, from Daniel Defoe to Jane Austen: among other projects she is editor of Defoe’s Moll Flanders (OUP, forthcoming) and Henry Fielding’s Amelia (Broadview, 2010), and co-editor of Jane Austen’s Later Manuscripts (CUP, 2008). This post is one part of a four-part discussion on the value of Victorian studies. To read the other posts, visit http://myblogs.informa.com/jvc/2011/10/07/the-value-of-victorian-studies/.
Read moreThe Public Value of Victorian Studies
This September the British Association of Victorian Studies gathered for its annual conference at the University of Birmingham to explore the theme ‘Composition and Decomposition’. In the final plenary, delegates met to debate ‘The Value of Victorian Studies’. Here, we present Shearer West’s paper on ‘The Public Value of Victorian Studies’ which opened discussion and in related posts we publish the plenary responses to Shearer’s paper by Linda Bree, Sarah Parker and Regenia Gagnier. With the rise of university tuition fees
Read moreEadweard Muybridge at Tate Britain
Exhibition of photographer Eadweard Muybridge, pioneer of the moving image Tate Britain 8 September 2010 – 16 January 2011 Find out about Muybridge in Kingston here Post a review for one or both exhibitions for JVC Online
Read moreWhere Angels Fear to Tread
In JVC 15.2, Julie-Marie Strange discusses the relationship between academic and popular history with Andrew Davies whose book on the scuttlers, The Gangs of Manchester (2008), was adapted for stage by MaD Theatre Company. Mixing music-hall humour and the Madchester sound, Angels with Manky Faces was acclaimed by audiences in Manchester and Liverpool. Read Andrew Davies and Julie-Marie Strange in conversation: http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=2&spage=268. Watch Director Rob Lees on the making of Angels with Manky Faces [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkwzfUicehc[/youtube]
Read moreEllen Ross, ‘Missionaries and Jews in Soho: “Strangers within Our Gates”‘
In JVC 15.2, Ellen Ross explores evidence about everyday life and social practices in Soho to reconstruct the extent and mode of religious conflict in a neighbourhood which historians have seen as an area of relative religious tolerance. It focuses on a weekly children’s prayer meeting conducted by Methodist missionaries in the summer of 1900 at the epicentre of the Soho Jewish community. For the Jews the meeting was an intrusion but nonetheless epitomized the tacit negotiations between Soho Jews
Read moreNew Agenda – Katharina Boehm and Josephine McDonagh, ‘Urban Mobility: New Maps of Victorian London’
‘The Uncommercial Traveller, whose urban explorations by foot, coach and train lead him from genteel Bond Street to the muddy thoroughfares of the East End, and from London’s ‘shy neighbourhoods’ to the docks by the Thames, reminds us of the mobility of Victorian city dwellers. Like Dickens’s compulsive traveller, countless fictional and historical Londoners experienced the city and its material cultures on the move.’ Introducing the New Agenda on ‘Urban Mobility’, Katharina Boehm and Josephine McDonagh survey the scholarship on the
Read moreNew Agenda – Fragments of the Modern City: Material Culture and the Rhythms of Everyday Life in Victorian London
Lining the shelves of a Museum of London warehouse are thousands of boxes of the broken and fragmented belongings of Victorian Londoners. In JVC 15.2 Alastair Owens, Nigel Jeffries, Karen Wehner and Rupert Featherby consider how such evidence can contribute to our understanding of the social and cultural worlds of Victorian Londoners. Does it allow us to grasp the ‘actualities’ of life in the modern metropolis, obscured by a pervasive bourgeois gaze that saturates other historical sources? This article is
Read moreDigital Forum: Processing the Past
In JVC 15.2., the three contributors to this Digital Forum discuss the exciting new opportunities for quantitative research. Richard Deswarte focuses on the holdings of the History Data Service and considers what makes a useful quantitative data source. Alexis Weedon assesses the production of resources suitable for quantitative research and the use of geographical information to argue for greater convergence between types of data. Michaela Mahlberg offers an introduction to corpus linguistics, exploring what corpus approaches can offer existing research
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