Susan E. Cook, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of English Southern New Hampshire University In Part 1 and Part 2 of this post I described Nicholas Carr’s argument about digital vs. print reading, and described my own experience reading East Lynne using a nineteenth-century print edition rather than a more contemporary edition. It is my sense that Carr flattens out the print/digital reading question by treating each more or less monolithically, describing print reading as “deep” reading and digital as “shallow.”
Read moreAuthor: lucinda matthews-jones
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At JVC Online we are looking to expand our team. If you have an interest and passion for any area of Victorian Studies then why not join us in developing the site further! We are especially keen to encourage people from all career stages and from a wide geographical scope to apply. JVC bloggers We are looking for a team of bloggers who would be able to write regularly for the site. You will be asked to contribute 8 posts
Read moreSusan E. Cook: Deep Reading the Victorians (Part 2 of 3)
In Part 1 of this post I described Nicholas Carr’s thesis about the cognitive differences between digital and print reading, and suggested that it would be worth troubling the category of “print reading” a bit further by considering the ways print has changed over time. Below I detail the first part of my print reading experiment. For my own nineteenth-century reading experiment text I selected Mrs. Henry Wood’s East Lynne. I selected it because I had never read it before
Read moreSusan E. Cook: Deep Reading the Victorians (Part 1 of 3)
Susan E. Cook, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of English Southern New Hampshire University What is it like to read in the 21st century? How does technology impact our reading practices? How does the shift from print to digital impact the way we read—and how does the shift from older printing techniques to contemporary ones also impact our reading? In his 2010 book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, science and technology writer Nicholas Carr employs cultural critique
Read moreGuy Woolnough – Blood Sports in Victorian Cumbria
Guy Woolnough – Keele University This post accompanies Guy Woolnough’s JVC article ‘Blood Sports in Victorian Cumbria: Policing Cultural Change’, which can be downloaded here. Cumbria is different and special. This is an opinion that most present-day visitors today will share with the great and good of the 19th century: the Wordsworths, John Ruskin, Harriet Martineau, Matthew Arnold, Beatrix Potter and many more expressed their appreciation of Cumbria’s uniqueness. Sport is just one area of culture where Cumbria has long differed
Read moreVicky Holmes – Lodger in the Bedroom
Vicky Holmes – University of Essex This post accompanies Vicky Holmes JVC 2014 article ‘Accommodating the Lodger: The Domestic Arrangements of Lodgers in Working-Class Dwellings in a Victorian Provincial Town’, which can be downloaded here. In my article, ‘Accommodating the Lodger: The Domestic Arrangements of Lodgers in Working-Class Dwellings in a Victorian Provincial Town’, I attempt to locate the lodger and reappraise our understanding of their position in working-class homes, including their place in the family’s bedroom.Despite the idea that the
Read morePeter Stoneley – ‘Looking at the Others’: Oscar Wilde and the Reading Goal Archive
Oscar Wilde’s two-year imprisonment. in solitary confinement caused him profound moral, emotional and physical shock. He nonetheless claimed to have been saved by his fellow prisoners. He told André Gide that for the first six months in gaol, he was ‘terribly unhappy’, and had wanted to kill himself. What prevented him was ‘looking at the others ’. Seeing them, and seeing that they were as unhappy as he was, made him feel pity, and it was this that broke his
Read moreLara Rutherford-Morrison – A Book to Sink One’s Teeth Into: Part Two
Lara Rutherford-Morrison – University of California, Santa Barbara Part Two: Bringing the Body into the Digital Book. You can read part two here. When people talk about the downsides of e-books, they often complain that e-books lack a connection between reader and body—without the physical texture, weight, and smell of the book and its pages, the e-book can seem (forgive the pun) rather bloodless. Interactive e-book apps, like PadWorx’s Dracula: The Official Stoker Family Edition (2010), attempt to draw the body back into
Read moreLara Rutherford-Morrison – A Book to Sink One’s Teeth Into: Part One
Lara Rutherford-Morrison-University of California, Santa Barbara Part One: Re-Vamping Dracula as an Interactive E-Book Since the iPad first arrived on the scene in 2010, a variety of e-book apps have attempted to take advantage of the uniquely interactive possibilities of the tablet computer. Many of these apps are designed for educational purposes. For example, Cambridge’s Shakespeare apps and Touch Press’s edition of Eliot’s The Wasteland include supplementary materials like audio-recordings of the texts, critical commentary, performance videos, and images—all aimed at
Read moreTosh Warwick – Cities Revisited: Heritage, History and Regeneration of the ‘Infant Hercules’
Tosh Warwick (Tees Transporter Bridge / University of Huddersfield) In 1862 Middlesbrough was heralded by future Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone as a ‘remarkable place, the youngest child of England’s enterprise…an infant Hercules’.[i] In under a century the town expanded from a tiny hamlet of only 25 inhabitants in 1801 to one exceeding 90,000 by 1901 and approaching 140,000 thirty years later, becoming one of the manufacturing centres of Britain and dubbed ‘Ironopolis’. Such is Middlesbrough’s importance in Victorian urban
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