Kathryn Huie Harrison is a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research investigates Victorian treatment of the female body and the ramifications of Victorian ideology on the contemporary conceptions of women’s bodies. Her current research focuses on the Victorian breast, breastfeeding, and miscarriage. Although it premiered in the UK months ago, Julian Fellowes’s 4-part adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s 1858 novel Doctor Thorne only recently became available in the U.S. As reviews and blog posts began appearing from UK viewers, I carefully
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Kathryn Ferry, The hidden histories cast in iron
Kathryn Ferry studied for her PhD at Cambridge University, researching the influence of Islamic design upon the career of architect Owen Jones. She subsequently worked as Senior Architectural Adviser to the Victorian Society in London and is now an independent scholar specialising in seaside history. Her next book, on eighty years of Butlin’s, will be published by Penguin in November. Iron, Ornament and Architecture in Victorian Britain; Myth and Modernity, Excess and Enchantment, by Paul Dobraszczyk, Farnham: Ashgate, 2014,
Read moreBenjamin Poore, ‘For our pleasure in the darkness’: Refashioning the fin de siècle in Penny Dreadful
Benjamin Poore, University of York, UK. SPOILERS: This post contains plot details for seasons 1-3 of Penny Dreadful, so please read on at your own discretion. In a surprising move, just as season 3 of Penny Dreadful was finishing, it was announced that the series would not be renewed for a fourth season. Instead, the show would conclude with the death of central character Vanessa Ives. It was surprising news because the series has enough viewers and fans to make
Read moreScott Brewster, Review of The Living and the Dead (dir. Alice Troughton and Sam Donovan, writers Ashley Pharoah, Simon Tyrell and Robert Murphy, BBC, 2016)
Scott Brewster is Reader in Modern English Literature at University of Lincoln. He is co-editor (with Luke Thurston) of The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story (Routledge, 2017). Ashley Pharoah is perhaps best known for Life on Mars (2006-7) and Ashes to Ashes (2008-10). The shows gradually disclosed traumatic experience through a startling mix of police procedural, psychological disturbance, time travel, and highly self-aware recreations of the recent past that happily accommodated anachronisms. His new six-part series, The Living and
Read moreSteven McLean, The Future as a Punchline: H. G. Wells’s Comic Celebrity
Steven McLean is author of The Early Fiction of H. G. Wells: Fantasies of Science (2009) and the editor of H. G. Wells: Interdisciplinary Essays (2008). As well as a number of articles on Wells, Steven has written on Emile Zola and edited George Griffith’s scientific romance The Angel of the Revolution (2012) for Victorian Secrets. His most recent work is on literature and aeronautics, an area he has published on in the Journal of Literature and Science and in
Read moreJonathan Potter, Looking at Victorians looking at photographs: Decoding nineteenth-century stereoscopic experience
Jonathan Potter tutors and lectures at Coventry University. He recently graduated with a PhD from the University of Leicester and is currently working on a monograph provisionally entitled Discourses of Vision: Seeing, Thinking, Writing in the Nineteenth Century. This blog post accompanies his recent JVC article, which can be downloaded here. In the world of gothic television and film, the phonograph –essentially a box of eerie dead voices – makes a frequent appearance. So too Victorian photographs – especially spirit
Read moreAnna West, Thomas Hardy’s Sheep
Anna West is an early career researcher in English literature. She recently completed her doctorate at the University of St Andrews, where she was a recipient of a Macpherson scholarship and the Rutherford prize. Her first monograph, Thomas Hardy and Animals, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in 2017. Follow her on twitter: @a_west19. This post accompanies her JVC article ‘“Rot the Genuine”: Moral Responsibility and Far from the Madding Crowd’s Cancelled Fragment’, which can be downloaded here.
Read morePeter K. Andersson, Victorian Diversity: A Response to Responses
I am delighted and humbled by the fact that so many fellow Victorian scholars felt called upon to respond to my article in JVC. I have read all of the responses here on the blog with much interest and am pleased to see how so many have an understanding of my opinions and how the criticisms of some of my finer points are presented with sensitivity and sympathy. The last thing I wanted to do with my article was to
Read moreRosalind White, Dietary Didacticism In Wonderland, or Female Growth Through the Looking Glass
Rosalind White is a first-year PhD student at Royal Holloway, University of London looking at gender and emotions in the science and literature of the nineteenth century. She is part of the Techne doctoral training partnership which is funded by the Arts Humanities Research Council and is assistant director of the Centre for Victorian Studies at Royal Holloway. Her research traces how natural history in many ways dwelt within the feminine sphere of Victorian culture and charts a more intimate, personal
Read moreSteven McLean, Hurtling into Futurity: H. G. Wells at 150
Steven McLean is author of The Early Fiction of H. G. Wells: Fantasies of Science (2009) and the editor of H. G. Wells: Interdisciplinary Essays (2008). As well as a number of articles on Wells, Steven has written on Emile Zola and edited George Griffith’s scientific romance The Angel of the Revolution (2012) for Victorian Secrets. His most recent work is on literature and aeronautics, an area he has published on in the Journal of Literature and Science and in
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