The post below is Jay Clayton’s initial response to the questions posed in the JVC Online roundtable on Paul St George’s Telectroscope. Jay Clayton is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English at Vanderbilt 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 In May, 2008, two enormous drills burst upward through piers on
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Let’s talk Open Access
Lucinda Matthews-Jones (LJMU) These are the views of the author. Overview We need to start talking about Open Access. If the Academy of Social Sciences conference that I attended last week reinforced anything to me, it is the speed with which open access is already being implemented. Many of us are unaware of what is happening. I have been surprised by the lack of conversation surrounding the implications of the Finch Report. We should not assume that open access is
Read moreYou Say You Want a Revolution: ‘Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde’, Tate Britain
Beatrice Bazell (Birkbeck College, University of London) Figure One: John Everett Millais,The Blind Girl (1856) My mother stood in front of Millais’ The Blind Girl and marvelled: ‘You think you know these paintings, but actually you don’t.’ This will always be the major stumbling block, as well as the major strength of any exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite work: in being so familiar with these beautiful, fascinating works we risk thinking of them as kitsch souvenirs of a bygone age, when in
Read moreMen, Sex, and a Selfish Giant – Review of Wilde (1997)
by Fern Riddell, (King’s College, London) [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Y7NGglgjCU[/youtube] “You shocked them. But the more frivolous you seem, the more serious you are, aren’t you?” -Bosie to Oscar Wilde Now, Oscar Wilde has been a love of mine since I read ‘A Picture of Dorian Grey’ during my A Levels. His style of writing, and his observations on the frailty of human interaction, is so delicate in its understanding that it will always be timeless. Wilde has often divided critics; there are those
Read moreOpen Access and the Future of Academic Journals
By Helen Rogers (Liverpool John Moores University) on behalf of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Victorian Culture A downloadable copy of this statement is available here: Open Access and the Future of Academic Journals November 2012 For those unfamiliar with the Finch Report, the full report and executive summary can be read here: http://www.researchinfonet.org/publish/finch/ History UK’s summary and responce to the Finch Report: History UK- Open Access Publishing Briefing and Strategy, 22 Nov 2012 Introduction On 16 July
Read moreJVC Article Reflection: Tom Crook, ‘Putting matter in its right place’
JVC Article Reflection: Tom Crook, ‘Putting matter in its right place: Dirt, time and regeneration in mid-Victorian Britain’, Journal of Victorian Culture 13 (2) (2008), pp. 200–222. This article is presently free to download. ‘Nature’ was a key term of reference for the Victorians. It still is today of course, featuring in debates about environmental ruin as much as the naturalness or not of various practices (same-sex marriage, for instance). But what, precisely, did the Victorians understand by the term
Read moreWho the Dickens is Nick Nickleby?
Emma Curry (Birkbeck College, University of London) You could be forgiven for being a little tired of hearing Dickens’s name in this bicentenary year. Since the BBC’s new adaptation of Great Expectations last Christmas, there has been a veritable explosion of Dickens-related events jostling for attention throughout the year, including new biographies, documentaries, radio programmes, tours, walks, lectures, conferences, exhibitions, read-a-thons and much, much more. As a Dickens researcher (and particularly one who has received an almost daily phone call
Read moreMapping the Victorian Novel
This week in my research I came across Maps of the Classics, a website where a selection of novels – mostly English, European, and American nineteenth-century novels – have been plotted onto interactive maps. Texts featured include Mansfield Park, Bleak House, The Mill on the Floss, and Anna Karenina. On each map, locations are helpfully marked with short explanations of their appearance in the text, and fictional locations have been mapped onto the real locations on which they are thought
Read moreWhat Would Jesus Do? The “Occupation” of St Paul’s Cathedral, February 1887.
By Peter Yeandle, (University of Manchester) On 15 October 2012, the anniversary of Occupy London, four women chained themselves together within St Paul’s Cathedral. Occupy, concerned to contest the malevolent association of politics and finance, targeted not the Cathedral but casino capitalism: a camp was only established at St Paul’s once private security guards had prevented access to the Stock Exchange. One of the most intriguing debates set in train, however, related to the relationship between the Cathedral itself and
Read moreJubilee Tribulations in Two Victorian Ports: Swansea and Liverpool
by Mike Benbough-Jackson (Liverpool John Moores University) In the celebration-packed year of 2012, I mustn’t say this too loudly: celebrations and jubliees are not all about jollity and communitas; they also evoke despondency and division, or, even worse, apathy. The celebrations that marked Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887 were widely held as having been a triumph. Of course no one denied that there was opposition, mainly from Republicans and Irish Nationalists. Yet the very fact that dissent came from
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