Susan E. Cook Southern New Hampshire University If I take out a loan now, I’ll have enough money to build a coal mine. The coal I produce will enable me to build rail to my cotton mill and eventually sell the cotton I produce to the distant market. Or I can build a foundry, use the iron I produce to build another cotton mill, and then produce and sell cotton through other people’s ports, capitalizing on their infrastructure. It’s Friday
Read moreCategory: Victorians Beyond the Academy
The Value of Victorian Studies and the Future of the University
Regenia Gagnier is Professor of English at the University of Exeter and President of the British Association of Victorian Studies (BAVS). Her most recent book is Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: on the Relationship of Part to Whole 1859-1920 (Palgrave 2010) She is Editor in Chief of Literature Compass http://literature-compass.com and its Global Circulation Project http://literature-compass.com/global-circulationproject/ This post is one part of a four-part discussion on the value of Victorian studies. To read the other posts, visit http://myblogs.informa.com/jvc/2011/10/07/the-value-of-victorian-studies/. Before turning to
Read moreThe Future of Victorian Studies: The Postgraduate Perspective
Sarah Parker is a doctoral student at University of Birmingham. She recently submitted her PhD thesis, entitled ‘The Lesbian Muse: Homoeroticism, Contemporary Muse Figures and Female Poetic Identity’. Her article ‘A Girl’s Love’: Lord Alfred Douglas as Homoerotic Muse in the Poetry of Olive Custance’ is published Women: A Cultural Review (Vol 22, Issue 2-3). This post is one part of a four-part discussion on the value of Victorian studies. To read the other posts, visit http://myblogs.informa.com/jvc/2011/10/07/the-value-of-victorian-studies/. Firstly, I must
Read moreThe Value of Victorian Studies: View from the Publisher
Linda Bree is Editorial Director, Arts and Literature, at Cambridge University Press. Her own scholarly work is in the literature of the long eighteenth century, from Daniel Defoe to Jane Austen: among other projects she is editor of Defoe’s Moll Flanders (OUP, forthcoming) and Henry Fielding’s Amelia (Broadview, 2010), and co-editor of Jane Austen’s Later Manuscripts (CUP, 2008). This post is one part of a four-part discussion on the value of Victorian studies. To read the other posts, visit http://myblogs.informa.com/jvc/2011/10/07/the-value-of-victorian-studies/.
Read moreThe Public Value of Victorian Studies
This September the British Association of Victorian Studies gathered for its annual conference at the University of Birmingham to explore the theme ‘Composition and Decomposition’. In the final plenary, delegates met to debate ‘The Value of Victorian Studies’. Here, we present Shearer West’s paper on ‘The Public Value of Victorian Studies’ which opened discussion and in related posts we publish the plenary responses to Shearer’s paper by Linda Bree, Sarah Parker and Regenia Gagnier. With the rise of university tuition fees
Read moreMuddy, Foggy Papers: SCOTUS and/as Chancery?
Ryan D. Fong University of California, Davis Despite her untimely passing in 2007, Anna Nicole Smith is still making headlines. But then again, so is Charles Dickens. In a decision against her estate’s case against the family of her late husband, the Supreme Court ruled against her claim and announced its decision yesterday. When Chief Justice John Roberts read his majority decision aloud, he alluded to the past, but reached back much further than four years. In fact, it was
Read more‘The line, the mark, the blot and the scribble’: exploring Pre-Raphaelite drawing
The Poetry of Drawing: Pre-Raphaelite Designs, Studies & Watercolours, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, 29 January–15 May 2011; The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 17 June–4 September 2011. http://www.bmag.org.uk/events?id=1038 Pre-Raphaelite Drawing [Catalogue], by Colin Cruise, London: Thames & Hudson, 2011, 248 pp., illustrated, £29.95 (hardback), ISBN 9780500238813, £19.95 (paperback), ISBN 9780709302643 The Poetry of Drawing: Pre-Raphaelite Designs, Studies & Watercolours, on display at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (BMAG), provides the most comprehensive survey of Pre-Raphaelite works on
Read moreVictorian madness and financial crises: some modern parallels
Financial crises, stock market crashes, and bankers’ nervous breakdowns are not new to this latest recession, nor were they new in the Great Depression of the 1920s. Stockbrokers’ suicides and money madness were even more familiar to the pages of Victorian newspapers than ours today. The public’s fascination with these kinds of crises both fed and was fed by an enormous volume of publication on the subject, spilling out of financial papers and journals, into mainstream newspapers, popular periodicals and
Read moreVictorians and ‘the Big Society’: Some reimaginings and reflections
by Lucinda Matthews-Jones The Victorians are everywhere. They are on our TV screens, bookshelves and DVD cabinets. Our appetite for Victorian culture is even fuelled, now, by newly-written ‘neo-Victorian’ novels and their TV adaptations, including Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith, Affinity and Tipping the Velvet and Michael Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White. More recently, though I hardly dare mention it, the Victorians have even been re-imagined in the corridors of Westminster. Type David Cameron into Google and one of the
Read moreThe Framework Knitters’ Museum: See how the Victorian lived and worked
Image One and Image Two showing the road sign directing visitors to the Framework Knitters’ Museum in Ruddington. I have recently moved from Manchester to a small Nottinghamshire village called Ruddington. Here is a corner of Englishness that still sees the shops close on Wednesday afternoon and where couples descend to the picturesque Anglican church to get married in summer. The nearby Great Central Heritage Railway provides the occasional ‘choo-chooing’ of visiting steam trains. The opening of
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