By Benjamin Poore, University of York Eckart Voigts (Braunschweig) then presented the second keynote, on Nell Leyshon and her first-person tale of murder The Colour of Milk, which has been widely compared with Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Via a live Skype link with the author in the department’s Holbeck Cinema, Professor Voigts was able to interview Leyshon, and she was able to take questions from the floor. One of the questions that arose from this session, and from the
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Peter J. Katz, ‘Dickens, the Digital, and The Doctor’
By Peter J. Katz, Syracuse University In the latest Doctor Who Christmas Special (watch from 53:41 to 54:30), the Great Intelligence, a disembodied and purely intellectual power, threatens to take over Victorian London with an army of snowmen. At the last moment, The Doctor stumbles upon the secret weapon to use against the horde: a family crying on Christmas Eve. To be more particular, though: a Victorian family crying on a Victorian Christmas Eve. Doctor Who taps into a nostalgia
Read moreDickens, the Digital, and The Doctor
By Peter J. Katz, Syracuse University In the latest Doctor Who Christmas Special (watch from 53:41 to 54:30), the Great Intelligence, a disembodied and purely intellectual power, threatens to take over Victorian London with an army of snowmen. At the last moment, The Doctor stumbles upon the secret weapon to use against the horde: a family crying on Christmas Eve. To be more particular, though: a Victorian family crying on a Victorian Christmas Eve. Doctor Who taps into a nostalgia
Read moreDigital Continuations of Victorian Classics
By Carrie Sickmann Han, Indiana University Charles Dickens’s novels might actually go on forever, not only as immortal works of literature, but as infinitely continuable fictions, thanks in part to tweets like the one above. It’s a familiar fact that the digital humanities supply us with new methodological tools and reading platforms, but these technologies also produce a seemingly inexhaustible, living archive of neo-Victorian fictions that reposition us as co-authors of beloved Victorian novels. Twitter isn’t only “like” a Dickens
Read moreSteampunk, Technological Time & Beyond Victoriana: Advocacy and the Archive
By Diana Pho Steampunk studies is an outlier in Victorian scholarship. In fact, steampunk subculture can arguably be called “neo-Victorian” or even “non-Victorian” in the way that it defies strict adherence to a certain periodization or topic relevance. Steampunk is an aesthetic movement inspired by nineteenth-century science fiction and fantasy. Over the years, however, that umbrella phrase has expanded to include speculation outside of an established time-frame (such as post-apocalyptic or futuristic), outside of the established geography of the Western
Read moreWhat We Know about What Maisie Knew: A Critical Conversation
By Ryan D. Fong, Kalamazoo College, & Victoria Ford Smith, University of Connecticut The following conversation took place via e-mail in July and August 2013, after we each viewed the most recent film adaptation of Henry James’s 1897 novel, What Maisie Knew. In the collaborative spirit of the film’s directors, Scott McGehee and David Siegel, we decided to write a joint review, analyzing the film from our respective areas of expertise. What Maisie Knew is still playing in select theatres,
Read moreTeaching Cultural History Through National Song
By Karen E. McAulay, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland This post suggests a collaboration between teaching faculty and specialist subject librarians by teaching book and cultural history in the context of national song and fiddle tune-books. I’ve noticed, when giving undergraduate lectures on Scottish music history, that students are more engaged when encouraged to perform the music being talked about; to participate in discussion; or examine historic sources at first hand. I decided to experiment with the idea of a template
Read moreGuidelines for JVC Online Contributors
The Journal of Victorian Culture (JVC) Online welcomes proposals addressing issues of pedagogy, contemporary popular culture, and the academy as they relate to Victorian studies. JVC Online asks that all contributors be conscious of the online medium in which their work will appear. For text-based pieces, contributors should be careful to limit paragraph length for readability, and posts should be no more than 1500 words in length. We also invite contributors to be a little bit less formal that traditional
Read moreFree Access to the JVC Graduate Prize Essay Published Articles
In honor of the June 30th deadline for this year’s JVC Graduate Prize Essay, we are offering free access to the published articles of several previous winners. Take a look at the exciting and innovative work done by these up and coming scholars! 2011 (17.3) Bob Nicholson “You Kick the Bucket; We Do the Rest!’: Jokes and the Culture of Reprinting in the Transatlantic Press’ 2009 (15.1) Tiffany Watt-Smith ‘Darwin’s Flinch: Sensation Theatre and Scientific Looking in 1872 2007 (13.1)
Read moreSarah Parker, ‘Dressed to Impress: Fashioning the Woman Poet’
By Sarah Parker The idea for my recent article ‘Fashioning Michael Field: Michael Field and Late-Victorian Dress Culture’ originated with a trip to ‘The Cult of Beauty’ exhibition at the V&A in Spring 2011. Among the walls crowded with Pre-Raphaelite paintings and cabinets filled with intricate, hand-bound volumes, visitors were also able to view numerous examples of male and female aesthetic dress, including a sunflower-print robe and puffed-sleeve artistic tea gowns, many of which originated from Liberty & Co. Viewing
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