By Jessica Hindes (Royal Holloway) Though I understand the desire to dissect a period drama on the basis of its historical authenticity, I’ve never thought it a particularly profitable approach. Guy Woolnough may be right to criticise Ripper Street for condemning a 14 year old to an implausibly expedited hanging; but cataloguing this kind of historical inaccuracy contributes little to a critical understanding of the show. In this article, therefore, I set such questions aside in order to think more
Read moreCategory: Victorians Beyond the Academy
A Conversational Review: Great Expectations 2012, dir. Mike Newell
by Emma Curry (Birckbeck, University of London) and Beatrice Bazell (Birckbeck, University of London) Emma Curry (EC): Arriving less than a year after the BBC’s highly-acclaimed Christmas TV adaptation of Great Expectations was always going to be a problem for Mike Newell’s new version of Dickens’s masterpiece, starring Ralph Fiennes as Magwitch and Jeremy Irvine as Pip. Adaptations don’t usually need to justify themselves, but in much of the press surrounding this film it seemed the writer, actors and director
Read moreImagining the Ripper
Jenny Pyke (Mount Holyoke College) As the new “Ripper Street” series begins on BBC, the many other versions from books, tv, film, and stage echo like footsteps in a dark alley. “Crime present,” says David Taylor “has a fascination, in part at least, rooted in fear; crime past has a fascination rooted in curiosity.”[i] Figure One: Front cover of the Police Illustrated News found here Teaching Victorian detective fiction, I am reminded regularly that the sensation of Jack the Ripper
Read moreLucinda Matthews-Jones, ‘Doctor Who-ing the Victorians’
Half way through this year’s Doctor Who Christmas special, I exclaimed, ‘Ooooh the new assistant is going to be a Victorian!’ Little did I release that Victorian Clara was going to die just as Dalek Clara had before her. However, Doctor Who fans needn’t fear. The trailer at the end this episode suggests that the next season will be built around the deaths and resurrections of Clara Oswin. I should probably state now that I’m not a big Doctor Who
Read moreDoctor Who-ing the Victorians
Half way through this year’s Doctor Who Christmas special, I exclaimed, ‘Ooooh the new assistant is going to be a Victorian!’ Little did I release that Victorian Clara was going to die just as Dalek Clara had before her. However, Doctor Who fans needn’t fear. The trailer at the end this episode suggests that the next season will be built around the deaths and resurrections of Clara Oswin. I should probably state now that I’m not a big Doctor Who
Read moreEmma Curry, ‘A blue furry Charles Dickens who hangs out with a rat?’: A Muppets Chritsmas Carol
Emma Curry is a PhD candidate at Birkbeck, University of London and recently submitted her thesis, titled ‘Language and the Fragmented Body in the Novels of Charles Dickens’. Over the past eighteen months Emma has also been coordinating the ‘Our Mutual Friend Tweets’ project, a Twitter-based adaption of Dickens’s final completed novel. You can follow her on Twitter here: @EmmaLCurry 2012 has been a fascinating year for Dickens on screen. From Gwyneth Hughes’s Mystery of Edwin Drood (carried on from
Read more‘What is a Journal? Towards a Theory of Periodical Studies,’ MLA 2013 Special Session
MLA Convention 2013, Special Session 384 Friday, 4 January 2013, 5.15pm Participants Presider: James Murphy Discussants: Ann Ardis (Professor of English, University of Delaware), Sean Latham (Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Tulsa), Dallas Liddle (Associate Professor of English, Augsburg University), James Mussell (Lecturer in English, University of Birmingham), and Matthew Philpotts (Senior Lecturer in German Studies, University of Manchester) Position Papers Ann Ardis, ‘Towards a Theory of Periodical Studies’ Sean Latham, ‘Affordance and Emergence: Magazine as New
Read moreRoundtable on Paul St George’s Telectroscope
As part of JVC‘s ongoing commitment to exploring the continually evolving intersections Victorian culture with contemporary literature, arts, and popular culture, we have convened a virtual roundtable discussion on Paul St George’s Telectroscope. This roundtable is also being simultaneously published in the print edition of JVC 17.4 : http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rjvc20/17/4. From May until June of 2008, New York City and London were visually connected in real time via the Telectroscope’s tubes and tunnels, to the amazement and delight of residents and
Read moreRoundtable on Paul St George’s Telectroscope – David L. Pike
The post below is David L. Pike’s initial response to the questions posed in the JVC Online roundtable on Paul St George’s Telectroscope. David Pike is Professor of Literature at the American University. To view the questions and ongoing conversation, as well as the other participants’ initial responses, use the links below. Questions & Ongoing Conversation || Jay Clayton || David L. Pike || Paul St George There are a number of possible factors in the popularity of the Telectroscope.
Read moreRoundtable on Paul St George’s Telectroscope – Paul St George
The post below is Paul St George’s initial response to the questions posed in the JVC Online roundtable on Paul St George’s Telectroscope. Paul St George is an artist and the creator of the Telectroscope. To view the questions and ongoing conversation, as well as the other participants’ initial responses, use the links below. Questions & Ongoing Conversation || Jay Clayton || David L. Pike || Paul St George I thought I would join this conversation by answering one of
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