I began Girls’ Literature and Culture in 2008, not long after completing my PhD at the University of Melbourne. While my scholarly work focuses on gender in nineteenth-century print culture, the freedom of writing a blog, where academic conventions can be flagrantly violated, has helped me to think more about how girls are situated in contemporary popular culture as well. The blog is therefore a melange of all things relating to girlhood from Victorian magazines and novels to recent debates
Read moreAuthor: lucinda matthews-jones
Bloggers Fair: Louisa Yates ‘Neo-Victorian Thought’ blog
Having completed a thesis on neo-Victorian fiction – specifically, the three neo-Victorian novels of Sarah Waters – I am left with a hopeless and seemingly ineradicable ‘gift’: identifying the many and varied ways in which Victorians and Victoriana reveal themselves within contemporary culture. Many of these moments are fleeting, transient, or otherwise unsuited to extended academic examination (at this point in time, at least). They are, however, often entertaining, inspiring, and eminently suitable for life outside the academy; as the
Read moreBloggers Fair: Charlotte E. Mathieson’s research and teaching blogs
My Research Blog draws together reflections, reviews and discussion relating to my research on travel and place in mid-19th century literature. I write about recent reading, events and talks I’ve attended, and ideas that I’ve been working on in my research, as well as reflecting on contemporary cultural news and events relating to the Victorian period – the Dickens bicentenary has provided a lot of material this year, but I also write about film adaptations, radio and tv series, and
Read moreBloggers Fair: Jolette Roodt ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’
My name is Jolette Roodt and I am currently an MA student at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. My research interests are Victorian literature and the scholarship of teaching and learning, and I am combining the two in my MA thesis, which will look at interventions in the teaching of Jane Eyre (a component of the first-year English Studies course here) in 21st-century South Africa. As part of my research project I have started a (voluntary) reading group for first-year
Read moreBloggers Fair: Gaby Malcolm’s blog on Mary Braddon
Mary Braddon’s centenary is fast approaching (2015) and as the new Visiting Research Fellow at Canterbury Christ Church University my remit is to develop and publish on the Braddon Archive Collection now held at the university’s Augustine Library – with the landmark date in mind. I am joining colleagues Adrienne Gavin (biographer of Anna Sewell) and Carolyn Oulton (biographer of Mary Cholmondeley) of the English and Language Studies department, as they begin their directorships of the new International Centre for
Read moreBloggers Fair: Christina Bradstreet’s ‘Art and Perfume’
Art and Perfume is a new blog about smell in nineteenth-century art and culture. It is written by Dr. Christina Bradstreet and is a record of her journey towards transforming her doctoral research into an academic book. Recent posts have explored the theme of scent and decadence – including the idea of perfume injection in the 1890s, fragrance asphyxiation in a little known painting by John Collier as well as perfume in the work of Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons.
Read moreBloggers Fair: Novel Readings
At Novel Readings I write about my reading, teaching, and research, much but not all of which is Victorian. Blogging is a way to make my academic work more transparent and accessible, and an opportunity to experiment with different kinds of critical writing. Novel Readings has become an indispensable part of my intellectual life, not only for the intrinsic challenges and rewards of writing for it, but because of the community of other readers and writers it has brought me
Read moreBloggers Fair: Mark Blacklock’s ‘The Fairyland of Geometry’
All-too-infrequently updated, The Fairyland of Geometry is a blog on which I post material surrounding my PhD research into the late-nineteenth-century engagement with the idea of higher-dimensioned space. The thesis aims to understand and describe how this engagement altered the spatial imaginary of the period by examining the passage of the idea across disparate cultural terrains, departing from August Mobius’s 1827 paper on barycentric calculus, in which he tentatively speculated a fourth dimension of space as a useful idea in
Read moreBloggers Fair: Amber Regis’ ‘Looking Glasses at Odd Corners’
I started my blog, Looking Glasses at Odd Corners, in October 2011. Its title is an obscure reference to a Virginia Woolf essay on ‘The Art of Biography’ (1939), a phrase that encapsulates my approach to life-writing: ‘Biography will enlarge its scope by hanging up looking glasses at odd corners.’ [1] As a Victorianist, my research is concerned with the recovery and recognition of playfulness, experiment and diversity in nineteenth-century auto/biography. I delve into the ‘odd corners’, shining a light
Read moreArt vs Industry Conference Report
Rebecca Wade, University of Leeds On the 23 and 24 March 2012, early career researchers, museum professionals and established academics gathered at Leeds City Museum to offer their perspectives on the intersections between art and industry during the long nineteenth century. Day One The conference began with a keynote by Lara Kriegel (Indiana), whose paper Lace, Ladies and Labours Lost: A Meditation on Art, Industry and Craft offered an apposite introduction through the historical narratives associated with the perceived loss
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