All Things Blogging

We’ve been really excited by the level and range of blogs that formed May’s bloggers fair, which ended with Lucie being invited to chair the ‘Transforming Objects’ conference roundtable on this subject. A summary of the round table can be found here. We would like to thank everyone that participated and we hoped you enjoyed discovering what was out there! You can now download, through IFirst, two articles by Amber J. Regis (Early Career Victorianists and Social Media) and Rohan Maitzen (Scholarship 2.0) that also consider the way

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Conference Report: Transforming Objects, 28-29 May 2012, Northumbria University

Nicole Bush (Northumbria) This two-day conference hosted papers that addressed the transformation of objects and the transformations effected by objects from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Object theory and discourses of materiality largely engage with objects as stable items of a permanent nature; as the conference co-organiser, I was keen to attract papers which sought to address those moments which slip through the gaps of such readings and explore the process of transformation and the between-ness or not fully

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Lee Jackson Q&A session on his ‘The Diary of a Murder’

Lee Jackson‘s ‘Diary of a Murder’ kick started our book club. Here he answers our questions. Thanks to Kylie Mirmohamadi and Lucinda Matthews-Jones for providing questions. 1) What sparked your creative juices into writing in ‘The Diary of a Murder’? i.e. was it a particular novel/s, event/s or primary source? It’s an idea that I’ve had for a long time – a diary as murder mystery – that arose from reading Arthur Munby’s peculiar diaries and the anonymous sex marathon

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Conference Report: W. T. Stead: Centenary Conference for a Newspaper Revolutionary

Paul Horn, University of Birmingham On 16 and 17 April 2012, early career researchers, established academics, media and law professionals met at the British Library to exchange their perspectives on the life and work of the pioneering journalist and editor, W. T. Stead.  With Stead’s discursive career as a focal point, multiple routes were developed into knowledge of his time and ours. Day One The conference was opened with a keynote from Laurel Brake (Birkbeck), whose paper ‘W. T. Stead

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Book Review: Bloody Victorians: Violence and Historical Narrative

Violent Victorians: Popular Entertainment in Nineteenth-Century London, by Rosalind Crone, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012, xv + 304 pages, illustrated, £16.99 (paperback), ISBN 978 0 7190 8685 4 Reviewed by Sara Hackenberg, San Francisco State University shackenb@sfsu.edu Sweeny Todd refuses to die. Ever since his 1846 debut in Lloyd’s sensational serial, The String of Pearls, the murderous barber of Fleet Street has been adapted countless times into literary, dramatic, cinematic, musical, and even balletic forms, most recently in Tim Burton’s

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Book review: Never Such Innocence

Visions of England, by Roy Strong. London: Bodley Head, 2011, viii + 229, illustrated, £17.99 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-847-92160-4 Reviewed by Mark Storey, University of Nottingham       Among the many figures, institutions and traditions admitted to Roy Strong’s pantheon in Visions of England, one surprising omission is Philip Larkin. He would seem at first glance a perfect candidate: the pastoral impulse which Strong locates as the binding force throughout English cultural history finds a distinctly twentieth-century articulation in much of

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