Alison Moulds is a third-year DPhil candidate at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford working on the construction of professional identities and the doctor-patient relationship in nineteenth-century medical writing and fiction by doctors. She is part of the AHRC-funded project Constructing Scientific Communities. For a conference to get me out of bed and into central London for 9am registration on a Saturday, the theme has to be good. To get me up and out less than 24 hours after moving
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JVC
Rohan McWilliam, On Reviewing
Rohan McWilliam is Professor of Modern British History at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, and reviews editor of the Journal of Victorian Culture. He is a past president of the British Association for Victorian Studies. His comments are made in a personal capacity and do not necessarily reflect the views of the JVC editorial board. My thanks to the editors of JVC and my colleagues in the History pathway at Anglia Ruskin for feedback on this blog. Reviewing, it’s fair to
Read moreHannah Field, Tennyson Fan Art: Some Deviations
Hannah Field is a lecturer in Victorian literature at the University of Sussex, where her research spans book history, material culture, and children’s literature. Her first monograph, provisionally titled Novelty Value: The Child Reader and the Victorian Material Book, grows out of her doctoral work with the Opie Collection of Children’s Literature at the Bodleian Library, and will be published by the University of Minnesota Press. Her Twitter handle is @arcane_project. Fan art: ‘art of any form, usually electronic or
Read moreHelen Kingstone, ‘Noiseless revolutions? The Victorian roots of Theresa May’s rhetoric’
Helen Kingstone is co-Deputy Director of the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies, and Postdoctoral Research Associate at Leeds Trinity University. Her book Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past: memory, history, fiction is forthcoming with Palgrave If you were tuning in to the UK news in early October, you would probably have heard snippets from Theresa May’s first Conservative Party conference speech as leader and Prime Minister. What might – or might not – have surprised you was how steeped it was
Read moreMichael Nott, Developing Photopoetry
Michael Nott received his PhD from the University of St Andrews. He provides commentaries for the Developing Photopoetry project, and is currently working on his first monograph, a critical history of photopoetry. He tweets, occasionally, @michaeljnott Among the treasures of the Photographically Illustrated Poetry Collection at the University of St Andrews is Eleanora (1860), an anonymous poem about the courtship of the titular heroine by a knight called Raymond during the Hundred Years’ War. The St Andrews copy is
Read moreChristine Ferguson, Pickwikiana and the Occult Revival
The 1890s has long been recognized as a revolutionary period in British publishing history, ushering in the collapse of the triple-decker novel and the circulating library syndicate on which it was based and instating the single-volume bestseller that remains a staple of the popular fiction market today.[i]But alongside these significant innovations, the period’s literary market was also punctuated by a curious revivalism and celebratory nostalgia for the popular literary forms and canons of the past. There are few better
Read moreEllen O’Brien, Manuscripts to Media Platforms: New Media and Victorian Pedagogy
Ellen O’Brien is a second year PhD student at the University of Notre Dame, in Perth, Australia. Her research focuses on the representation of servants in English country house literature from the late Victorian period up to the Second World War. An MA graduate from Royal Holloway, University of London, Ellen frequently relies on social media to pretend that she is not, in fact, 14,000 km away from the nearest English Country House. Ellen can be found on Twitter @kindlecapers
Read moreKathryn Huie Harrison, Review of Julian Fellowes’s Doctor Thorne
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
Read moreKathryn 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
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