JVC

Scott 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

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Steven 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

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Jonathan 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

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Peter 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

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Rosalind 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

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Steven 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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Jessica Cox, “[T]he bounden duty of every woman”[1]: “Mansplaining” Breastfeeding in Victorian Advice Books

Jessica Cox, Brunel University London Mansplain v. ‘(Of a man) explain (something) to someone, typically a woman, in a manner regarded as condescending or patronizing’ (Oxford Dictionaries) Earlier this year, celebrity chef and nutritional campaigner Jamie Oliver provoked controversy with his comments on breastfeeding.  Suggesting he may turn his campaigning eye to increasing the rates of breastfeeding in Britain, he commented: ‘We have the worst breastfeeding in the world […] It’s easy, its more convenient, it’s more nutritious, it’s better,

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Kristin Hussey, Looking for the Victorian Eye in London’s Medical Museums

Kristin Hussey (kristin.hussey@qmul.ac.uk) is a PhD researcher int he School of Geography at Queen Mary University of London. Her doctoral research focuses on the influence of the British Empire on the development of medical practice and culture in late nineteenth century London.  “It has been designated “the queen of the senses,” “the index of the mind,” “the window of the soul;” nay, it has even been esteemed “in itself a soul;” and ” He who spake as never man spake”

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Douglas Small, Cream and Cocaine: Hallucination, Obsession, and Sexuality in Victorian Cocaine Addiction

This post accompanies Douglas Small’s Journal of Victorian article ‘Masters of Healing: Cocaine and the Ideal of the Victorian Medical Man’ which can be downloaded here. Painless Surgery Cocaine occupied something of a contradictory position in the late-Victorian cultural imagination. Albert Niemann had isolated the cocaine alkaloid from raw coca leaves as early as 1860, but it was not until 1884 that cocaine truly entered the popular consciousness. In September of that year, a Viennese Ophthalmologist (and friend of Sigmund

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Billie-Gina Thomason, Female Husband or the Man-Woman of Manchester? Review of Mister Stokes’s premier at the LGBT History Festival Launch

Billie-Gina Thomason is currently undertaking an MRes in Modern History in Liverpool John Moores University and is beginning the historicisation of trans* identity. Billie-Gina’s research focusses on nineteenth century female husbands. By using newspapers her interests lie in how female cross-dressers lived in their communities despite living in a time of such gender and sexual rigidity. Mister Stokes: The Man-Woman of Manchester was written by Abi Hynes. The play was directed by Helen Parry and produced by Pagelight Productions and

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