In his essay forthcoming in JVC issue 16.3, Martin Dubois challenges recent interpretations of Dickens’s final and unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood, arguing that these have neglected the variability in Dickens’s representation of traditional religion. Dickens’s novel centres on the town of Cloisterham, where a spreading moral torpor extends to the heart of community life: the choral worship offered in its cathedral. Fuelled by opium-induced fantasies, the cathedral’s obsessive and unstable choirmaster appears to engineer the disappearance and
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Susan Schuyler, ‘Crowds, Fenianism, and the Victorian Stage’
In her essay forthcoming in JVC issue 16.2, Susan Schuyler analyzes two Irish rebellion-themed plays in context of the growth of Fenianism in the months preceding the Clerkenwell explosion. The melodramatic dramas Oonagh; or the Lovers of Lisnamona (Her Majesty’s, 1866) and Achora Machree; or Gems of Ould Ireland (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1867) reveal the ways that popular theatre participated in a wider public discussion about what was seen as the modern phenomenon of the crowd. Produced on the eve of one
Read more‘Roundtable: Old Age and the Victorians,’ Issue 16.1 (April 2011)
Karen Chase’s The Victorians and Old Age (2009) and Devoney Looser’s Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750-1850 (2008) are the first major expressions within Victorian studies of the scholarly interest in old age that began with Simone de Beauvoir’s La Vieillesse (1970) and has greatly increased in prominence over the past two decades, thanks to the growth of cross-disciplinary interest in all life stages. The responses to these two books in this roundtable discussion recognize the importance
Read moreDigital Forum On Pedagogy, Issue 16.1 (April 2011)
Digital resources transform the terms on which we can teach the various disciplines that constitute nineteenth-century studies. No longer restricted to the teaching edition or to brief visits to Special Collections, students can engage with a far richer repertoire of nineteenth-century artefacts. However, working with this material demands that students are comfortable encountering such strange objects free of the usual apparatus that accompanies them. They also need to be comfortable using various digital technologies, both to locate material and to
Read moreBook Reviews (15.3)
Helen Brookman on Gail Marshall’s Shakespeare and Victorian Women (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2009) and Clare Broome Saunders’sWomen Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). To read the full review, visit http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=3&spage=402. Gavin Budge on Mary Poovey’s Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, IL: Chicago UP, 2008). To read the full review, visit http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=3&spage=406. Grace Moore on Radhika Mohanram’s Imperial White: Race, Diaspora and the British Empire (Minneapolis, MN: University
Read moreJournal Announcement and CFP: Upstage, a journal of turn-of-the-century dramatic literature, theatre, and theatrical culture
UPSTAGE, a peer-reviewed online publication dedicated to research in turn-of-the-century dramatic literature, theatre, and theatrical culture, seeks submissions for its second issue scheduled for the spring or summer of 2011. This is a development of the pages published under this name as part of THE OSCHOLARS, and will henceforth be an independently edited journal in the oscholars group published at www.oscholars.com, as part of our expanding coverage of the different cultural manifestations of the fin de siècle. Topics may include,
Read moreVictorian Print and Popular Culture Seminar Series at Liverpool John Moores University
Victorian Print and Popular Culture Seminar Series at Liverpool John Moores University February 9th 2011 – Dr Andrew King (Canterbury Christchurch University, Kent) “What Betsy Read: Sentiment and Sensation in the Kitchen 1840 – 1860”. March 16th 2011 – Professor Brian Maidment (University of Salford) ”A Jobbing Engraver in the Regency Print World – Robert Seymour 1825 – 1836”. April 20th 2011 – Dr Juliet John (University of Liverpool) “Dickens and Mass Culture”. May 18th 2011 – Margaret Beetham (MMU)
Read moreJVC now included in the Thomson Reuters Social Sciences and Arts & Humanities Citation Indexes®
We are pleased to announce that the Journal of Victorian Culture has been accepted for inclusion in the Thomson Reuters Social Sciences and Arts & Humanities Citation Indexes®. Index entries will begin with volume 13 (issue 1) 2008 and JVC will receive its first Impact Factor later this year. The news has been welcomed by the Journal’s editorial team. Helen Rogers commented, “We are delighted that the quality of articles and diversity of scholarship being published in JVC have been
Read moreKathryn Hughes, ‘Dickens World and Dickens’s World’
Dickens World opened at Chatham Maritime Docks in May 2007 and it almost immediately met with widespread criticism. Dickens World, emphasize its owners, is an ‘attraction’ and not a theme park. Given that once-aloof museums are increasingly employing the interactive strategies of the theme park, it seems entirely reasonable that a commercial ‘attraction’ such as Dickens World might in turn wish to annex some of the curatorial rigour of the museum. For what strikes you as you walk through Dickens
Read moreSarah Wah, ”The Most Churlish of Celebrities’: George Eliot, John Cross and the Question of High Status’
Published in 1885, John Cross’s biography of his late wife, George Eliot’s Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals, was written with the intention to ‘make known the woman as well as the author’. Yet, ironically, the biography is renowned precisely for the lack of insight it affords readers into the private life of George Eliot. Why did Cross make a promise that he could not keep? In JVC 15.3, Sarah Wah seeks to answer this question by examining
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