Translating Louise Rosenblatt’s PhD (1931) on ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ Richard Whitney Richard Whitney’s current research is on the work of Louise Rosenblatt and the poet H.D., and looks at the humanistic nature of literary experience and those who pursue this as a form of wisdom-knowledge inquiry. He has presented papers on Rosenblatt and Ottoline Morrell, and has a forthcoming publication on Ottoline’s presence in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out. In 2014 he was awarded an AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership
Read moreAuthor: lucinda matthews-jones
Barbara Barrow, ‘Bodies, Politic and Social: Language-Origins Controversies in Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution’
Barbara Barrow is Assistant Professor of British Literature at Point Park University. She will receive her Ph.D. in English Literature from Washington University in St. Louis in August 2014. Her research focuses the interchange between liberalism and the science of language in Victorian literature and culture. Yous can find her academia profile here. This post accompanies Barbara Burrow’s JVC 2014 article ‘Speaking the Social Body: Language-Origins and Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution’, which can be downloaded here. Images of bodies
Read moreHair: Discovering the Delights of the Archive
Daisy Hay is a Lecturer in English Literature and Archival Studies at the University of Exeter, and the author of Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives. She is a practicing biographer with particular interests in the intersection of private and public life in nineteenth-century Britain, and in current developments in life-writing and biographical form. Her new book, Mr and Mrs Disraeli: A Strange Romance, will be published by Chatto & Windus and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in January
Read moreConference Report: Cosmopolitanism, Aestheticism, and Decadence, 1860-1920
Cosmopolitanism, Aestheticism, and Decadence, 1860-1920, University of Oxford, 17-18 June 2014 Report by Katharina Herold (University of Oxford) and Eleanor Reeds (University of Connecticut) Speakers from an international range of institutions came together for a lively intellectual investigation into the agents of these movements, the means by which they achieved cultural significance, and their current relevance in times of globalized literary exchange. In his opening keynote address, Jonathan Freedman (University of Michigan) outlined the vital influence of Jewish intellectual and
Read moreSuburban Identity in Paul Maitland’s Paintings of Cheyne Walk
by Simon Knowles This post accompanies Simon Knowles 2014 Journal of Victorian Culture article ‘Suburban Identity in Paul Maitland’s Paintings of Cheyne Walk’. You can download a copy of this article here. The rapid growth of London’s suburbs during the latter half of the nineteenth century was viewed by the Victorians as an extremely mixed blessing. As a signifier of the entrepreneurial spirit of the middle class, coupled to the high moral value placed upon domestic privacy and family life,
Read moreA Digital Reader: 19th Century Disability—Cultures & Contexts
By Jaipreet Virdi-Dhesi (University of Toronto) Based on an idea jestingly put forth in The Spectator, Ugly Face Clubs were gentleman’s clubs whose members prided themselves on their facial eccentricities and pledged their theoretical allegiance to physiognomy.[1] Spanning throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these clubs provide us with a compelling case study of deformity as a paradoxical practice of social exclusion and aesthetic inclusion. Ugly Clubs also offer us a window into the relationship between culture and disability. While
Read moreReading Serially: The Digital Resurrection of a Victorian Experience?
By Eleanor Reeds Eleanor Reeds is a PhD student and instructor in the Department of English at the University of Connecticut. Her research focuses on issues of genre and form in the transatlantic nineteenth century, and she blogs from The Ivory Tower. Exactly 150 years after Charles Dickens first published Our Mutual Friend, readers around the world are taking part in an online reading project led by Birkbeck, University of London that attempts to recreate the original experience of encountering
Read moreThinking about Francesca Wilson and the Victorian imaginary that surrounded her philanthropic work
Ellen Ross is Professor of History and Women’s Studies at Ramapo College of New Jersey. She has written about motherhood and London poverty in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Victorian and Edwardian women’s urban philanthropy, missions and social work in London, and Christian conversion efforts aimed at London Jews. Francesca Wilson’s story is part of a study of post-suffrage women’s voluntarism–which increasingly had a European or even global scope. Contact at: eross@ramapo.edu Francesca M. Wilson (1888-1981), a Birmingham-born Quaker
Read moreDiscovering the British Library’s Discovering Literature
By Susan Cook Susan Cook is Assistant Professor of English at Southern New Hampshire University, where she teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature. She writes about Victorian literature and visual culture. Follow Susan @Susan_E_Cook. This spring the British Library launched Discovering Literature, a project designed to bring together on the web digitizations from original manuscripts, first editions, and contemporaneous contextual materials, along with critical articles, documentary films, and teaching materials designed specifically for the site. The project will eventually cover
Read more“As far away from England as any man could be”: The Luminaries as sensation sequel?
By Kirby-Jane Hallum Kirby-Jane Hallum teaches English Literature at the University of Otago in New Zealand. Her research interests lie in the long 19th century in Britain and New Zealand, with particular focus on women’s and popular literature. Kirby-Jane’s monograph, Aestheticism and the Marriage Market in Victorian Popular Fiction: The Art of Female Beauty, is forthcoming from Pickering & Chatto in 2015, and she is currently embarking on a new project regarding Britain’s influence on colonial New Woman writing. Follow
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