By Roger Whitson, Washington State University Paolo Bacigalupi’s steampunk novel The Wind-Up Girl imagines a world where the loss of fossil fuels and electricity has completely transformed the politics of our planet and brought about a second industrial age.[i] The strange new Victorian-styled machines populating this world rely on human and animal caloric expenditure enhanced by a complicated system of springs to maximize the output. Technology is completely redesigned to function appropriately, with combustion-engines reserved for the extremely rich. Bacigalupi’s
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You Already Know How to Do This: Natively Digital Victorian Studies
By Shawna Ross, Arizona State University Are you a Victorianist for the texture? For the alterity of antiquation, the distance from cell phones and computer screens, the grainy look of moveable type, the strange dimensionality of lithographs? If the charm of analog transfixes you, it may seem that the the digital may be not just alien but positively antagonistic to the values and preferences that drew you to the field. Or you may also draw back from the digital humanities
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The Pinteresting Broken-Doll Aesthetic of Neo-Victorian Alices
By Amanda Lastoria, Simon Fraser University Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) endures as one of ‘the most popular children’s classics in the English language’[i], thanks to the creative vision and commercial savvy of Lewis Carroll and his contemporary publishers. Carroll created not just the Alice text, but the Alice books. Carroll was an art director. He oversaw the illustration, design and production of the first edition of Alice, and he (re)published the text in multiple editions that strategically segmented the
Read moreEthics and the Digital Archive: The Case for Visualizing H. Rider Haggard
By Kate Holterhoff, Carnegie Mellon University Over the past fifteen years, digitization has completely revised archival work. Digital texts introduce novel means of encountering the past because they simultaneously exist materially and ideally; everywhere and nowhere; in the past and the present. As NINEs and BRANCH founder Dino Felluga argues, ‘our current postmodern age tends toward dematerialization’ (308), or what Alan Liu of RoSE and Transliteracies calls ‘unit-detail atomism’ (84), suggesting that online archives are postmodern by virtue of their
Read more‘Neo-Victorian Villainy: Adaptation and Reinvention on Page, Stage and Screen’ Conference Report
By Benjamin Poore, University of York Eckart Voigts (Braunschweig) then presented the second keynote, on Nell Leyshon and her first-person tale of murder The Colour of Milk, which has been widely compared with Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Via a live Skype link with the author in the department’s Holbeck Cinema, Professor Voigts was able to interview Leyshon, and she was able to take questions from the floor. One of the questions that arose from this session, and from the
Read morePeter J. Katz, ‘Dickens, the Digital, and The Doctor’
By Peter J. Katz, Syracuse University In the latest Doctor Who Christmas Special (watch from 53:41 to 54:30), the Great Intelligence, a disembodied and purely intellectual power, threatens to take over Victorian London with an army of snowmen. At the last moment, The Doctor stumbles upon the secret weapon to use against the horde: a family crying on Christmas Eve. To be more particular, though: a Victorian family crying on a Victorian Christmas Eve. Doctor Who taps into a nostalgia
Read moreDickens, the Digital, and The Doctor
By Peter J. Katz, Syracuse University In the latest Doctor Who Christmas Special (watch from 53:41 to 54:30), the Great Intelligence, a disembodied and purely intellectual power, threatens to take over Victorian London with an army of snowmen. At the last moment, The Doctor stumbles upon the secret weapon to use against the horde: a family crying on Christmas Eve. To be more particular, though: a Victorian family crying on a Victorian Christmas Eve. Doctor Who taps into a nostalgia
Read moreDigital Continuations of Victorian Classics
By Carrie Sickmann Han, Indiana University Charles Dickens’s novels might actually go on forever, not only as immortal works of literature, but as infinitely continuable fictions, thanks in part to tweets like the one above. It’s a familiar fact that the digital humanities supply us with new methodological tools and reading platforms, but these technologies also produce a seemingly inexhaustible, living archive of neo-Victorian fictions that reposition us as co-authors of beloved Victorian novels. Twitter isn’t only “like” a Dickens
Read moreSteampunk, Technological Time & Beyond Victoriana: Advocacy and the Archive
By Diana Pho Steampunk studies is an outlier in Victorian scholarship. In fact, steampunk subculture can arguably be called “neo-Victorian” or even “non-Victorian” in the way that it defies strict adherence to a certain periodization or topic relevance. Steampunk is an aesthetic movement inspired by nineteenth-century science fiction and fantasy. Over the years, however, that umbrella phrase has expanded to include speculation outside of an established time-frame (such as post-apocalyptic or futuristic), outside of the established geography of the Western
Read moreBuilding a Special Collections Resource: A Few Reflections
The Punch and the Victorian Periodical Press Resource at Liverpool John Moores University was first established in 2008 by Dr Clare Horrocks (Senior Lecturer in Media, Culture, Communication) to provide a repository for the research she conducted on Punch and its contributors for a Curran Fellowship from the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP). The Resource not only includes a physical collection of the magazine Punch but also samples of many other popular Victorian periodicals and magazines. Perhaps the most
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