Victorians in Film – Journal of Victorian Culture Online

The Shadow of Mal: Gothic Romance and Victorian Ghosts in ‘Inception’

December 14, 2022 Julian S. Whitney Other, Victorians Beyond the Academy, Victorians in Film

Christopher Nolan is acclaimed for his cinematic hybridization of multiple genres, ranging from thriller and science fiction to heist drama and superhero narratives. His use of literary themes in movie-making is especially prominent given that Nolan often writes character-driven stories with psychological depth and moral complexity. In his 2010 heist film, Inception, Nolan experiments with the narrative mechanics of Gothic romance through the story of Dom Cobb, a professional thief who extracts information by infiltrating his subjects’ dreams. Cobb’s inability

The Virtuosa is the Villain: How Hulu’s ‘Only Murders in the Building’ Rehearses Victorian Ideas About Female Musicians

March 11, 2022 Shannon Draucker Other, Victorians in Film

Alert: this piece contains spoilers for Hulu’s 2021 show Only Murders in the Building. Scroll down to read! I should have known it was the bassoonist. As a scholar of classical music and gender and a clarinetist myself, I can’t believe it took me until the second-to-last episode of Hulu’s 2021 murder mystery/comedy series Only Murders in the Building (OMITB) to realize that the serial killer at the core

‘[T]he Dickensesque run mad’: Continuities and Ruptures in the History of the ‘Dickensian’

September 25, 2020 Emily Bell Book Reviews, Other, Television Shows, Victorians Beyond the Academy, Victorians in Film

This blog post reflects on Dickens’s legacy as captured in the term ‘Dickensian’, from early uses of the term to what the events of 2020 might mean for study of his afterlife. It also introduces a new open access edited collection, Dickens After Dickens (White Rose UP, 2020), which explores some of the forms in which Dickens’s influence has manifested from the nineteenth century to the present, from his influence on writers including Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, William Faulkner and Donna Tartt

Costumes in the Limelight

July 2, 2020 Veronica Isaac Other, Victorians Beyond the Academy, Victorians in Film, Victorians on Display

Costumes are powerful objects, which carry multiple meanings and memories in their fibres. Through three connected blog posts, I will highlight the importance of costume for performance: revealing the insights costumes offer into the lives of the people who designed, made, wore and saw them. Commencing with Ellen Terry’s ‘Beetlewing Dress’, moving on to Edwin Moxon’s embroidered ‘shorts’, and concluding with Kitty Lord’s carefully padded ‘Symmetricals’, I will showcase the information which these unique garments offer about the performer, performance,

The Case of the Extraordinary Sidekick

April 24, 2020 Dominique Gracia Other, Television Shows, Victorians Beyond the Academy, Victorians in Film

“I am not retained by the police to supply their deficiencies” [1] Sherlock Holmes to Dr John Watson, ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’ Policing remains, today, a highly contested activity of the state.[2] It has professionalised—and bureaucratised—a great deal since its nineteenth-century inception, but it remains plagued by a fundamental anxiety that the police, not Lady Justice, are blind. This post explores the underlying mistrust of the professional police that flows from Conan Doyle’s Sherlock stories through to the

Cotton Famine Poetry as Affective Commentary in Lancashire and Beyond

January 31, 2020 Simon Rennie Published in JVC, Victorians in Film

Apart from short journalistic pieces and the material produced for the database [1] associated with the AHRC-funded project, ‘The Poetry of the Lancashire Cotton Famine 1861-65’, my article which appears in Journal of Victorian Culture 25.1 is the first of probably several publications on the literary-historical-cultural subject to which I have devoted the last few years of my research. The article’s title, “This ’Merikay War’: Poetic Responses in Lancashire to the American Civil War’, with its reference to provincial Lancashire

Vicky Nagy, Video games, the Victorian Era and Sherlock Holmes

December 7, 2015 lucinda matthews-jones Digitizing the Victorians, Victorians Beyond the Academy, Victorians in Film

Although a huge Sherlock Holmes fan, Victoria M Nagy researched female criminality during the mid-nineteenth century in Essex for her PhD which she graduated with in 2012 from Monash University. She is currently an Honorary Associate with La Trobe University and is working on a new project focusing on female criminality in the colony of Victoria from 1860 to 1900. Her book Nineteenth-Century Female Poisoners: Three English Women Who Used Arsenic to Kill is now available from Palgrave MacMillan. Her

Lara Rutherford-Morrison, Film Review: Crimson Peak

November 6, 2015 lucinda matthews-jones Victorians Beyond the Academy, Victorians in Film

Lara Rutherford-Morrison has a PhD in Victorian literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is currently an Affiliated Scholar at Concordia University in Montreal and blogs daily for Bustle. Her research considers the ways that contemporary culture reimagines and plays with Victorian literature and history, in contexts ranging from adaptations of Victorian novels in film and fiction to heritage tourism in the U.K. She can be found at her website and on Twitter @LaraRMorrison. [youtube]https://youtu.be/oquZifON8Eg[/youtube] There’s a lot

Laura Fox Gill, Review: The Hardy Way: A 19th-Century Pilgrimage, Margaret Marande

October 23, 2015 lucinda matthews-jones Book Reviews, Published in JVC, Victorians Beyond the Academy, Victorians in Film, Victorians on Display

Laura Fox Gill, University of Sussex Laura Fox Gill is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Sussex. Her research investigates the influence of John Milton on nineteenth-century culture (painting, poetry, and prose) and she is soon to begin work on connections between the thought and writing of Milton and Thomas Hardy. She tweets at @kitsunetsukiki. Walking for Thomas Hardy was a complicated matter; never simply a way of getting from A to B . Though his novels

Karen Laird, Film Review: Far From the Madding Crowd

July 20, 2015 lucinda matthews-jones Published in JVC, Victorians in Film

Karen Laird’s book The Art of Adapting Victorian Literature, 1849–1920 will be published in August 2015 by Ashgate Press. Follow her latest updates on Twitter @drkarenlaird. Far from the Madding Crowd was first adapted for film in 1915 by the British studio Turner Pictures. Reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic saw it as a lukewarm effort save for the lead performance by Florence Turner (known early in her phenomenal career as simply “The Vitagraph Girl”). One critic praised Turner’s