By Daniel Grey My article, “Liable to Very Gross Abuse’: Murder, Moral Panic and Cultural Fears over Infant Life Insurance, 1875–1914′, examines the late nineteenth century belief that working-class parents were liable to neglect and ultimately kill their children in hopes of receiving a life insurance payout from a friendly society. This idea was not only widely and repeatedly debated in the Victorian press and in Parliament, but the desire to eradicate this supposedly widespread practice became a cornerstone of
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Call for Proposals: JVC Online’s Neo-Victorian Studies & Digital Humanities Week
This fall, JVC Online will feature a week of posts devoted to the connections between Neo-Victorian studies and digital humanities. The goal of this week is to consider the ways in which we are mobilizing the tools, concepts, and methodologies of digital humanities research and pedagogy to re-contextualize, revise, and re-envision Victorian culture in terms of our age. Just as JVC Online’s digital form enables it to have broad reach, so too do the digital and technological elements of how
Read moreSelected Papers from, Strange New Today (Exeter, 17 September 2011)
JVC Online is delighted to have the opportunity to provide our readers with access to a selection of seven of the twenty-two papers that graduate students delivered at a conference specifically aimed at showcasing their research. In the past decade, there has been a welcome growth in the number of symposia that provide specific opportunities for doctoral students to share their work not only with their peers but also with established scholars who can offer supportive feedback. Such events can
Read moreAmanda Paxton, ‘Husbands and Wives: Nineteenth-Century Contours of Power’
By Amanda Paxton One of the most rewarding opportunities I had while researching my doctoral dissertation was working with the manuscripts of the clergyman, novelist, and social reformer Charles Kingsley in the British Library, particularly the uncompleted prose text “Elizabeth of Hungary.” Begun in 1842 but never completed, the breathtaking oversize volume was intended to provide a retelling of the life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, whose biography served as the subject of Kingsley’s later verse closet drama, The Saint’s
Read moreDownton Abbey & Jane Austen; Or, in Praise of Lady Mary
By Alice Villaseñor (Medaille College, Buffalo, NY) References to and parodies of Downton Abbey on popular US television shows such as The Big Bang Theory, The Colbert Report, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, and Sesame Street testify to the widespread popularity of the series on this side of the pond. Because Jane Austen’s legacy as an emblem of nineteenth-century British costume drama is so engrained in our cultural consciousness (as a result of the
Read moreJVC Online Editors & Contributors
JVC Online Editor & Contributors Lucinda Matthews-Jones, Editor Lucinda Matthews-Jones is a lecturer in Modern British History at Liverpool John Moores. She completed her PhD, ‘Centres of Brightness: The Spiritual Imagination of Toynbee Hall and Oxford House, 1883-1914’, in 2009. Lucie is currently expanding this research for her first book. Her publications include ‘Lessons in Seeing: Art, Religion and Class in the East End of London, 1881–1898’, Journal of Victorian Culture (2011) and ‘St Francis and the Making of Settlement
Read more‘CSI: Whitechapel’: Ripper Street and the evidential body
By Jessica Hindes (Royal Holloway) Though I understand the desire to dissect a period drama on the basis of its historical authenticity, I’ve never thought it a particularly profitable approach. Guy Woolnough may be right to criticise Ripper Street for condemning a 14 year old to an implausibly expedited hanging; but cataloguing this kind of historical inaccuracy contributes little to a critical understanding of the show. In this article, therefore, I set such questions aside in order to think more
Read more‘What is a Journal? Towards a Theory of Periodical Studies,’ MLA 2013 Special Session
MLA Convention 2013, Special Session 384 Friday, 4 January 2013, 5.15pm Participants Presider: James Murphy Discussants: Ann Ardis (Professor of English, University of Delaware), Sean Latham (Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Tulsa), Dallas Liddle (Associate Professor of English, Augsburg University), James Mussell (Lecturer in English, University of Birmingham), and Matthew Philpotts (Senior Lecturer in German Studies, University of Manchester) Position Papers Ann Ardis, ‘Towards a Theory of Periodical Studies’ Sean Latham, ‘Affordance and Emergence: Magazine as New
Read moreRoundtable on Paul St George’s Telectroscope
As part of JVC‘s ongoing commitment to exploring the continually evolving intersections Victorian culture with contemporary literature, arts, and popular culture, we have convened a virtual roundtable discussion on Paul St George’s Telectroscope. This roundtable is also being simultaneously published in the print edition of JVC 17.4 : http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rjvc20/17/4. From May until June of 2008, New York City and London were visually connected in real time via the Telectroscope’s tubes and tunnels, to the amazement and delight of residents and
Read moreRoundtable on Paul St George’s Telectroscope – David L. Pike
The post below is David L. Pike’s initial response to the questions posed in the JVC Online roundtable on Paul St George’s Telectroscope. David Pike is Professor of Literature at the American University. To view the questions and ongoing conversation, as well as the other participants’ initial responses, use the links below. Questions & Ongoing Conversation || Jay Clayton || David L. Pike || Paul St George There are a number of possible factors in the popularity of the Telectroscope.
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