By Lindsay Lawrence In Fall 2012, I proposed and taught a 4000-level major authors class on Charles Dickens at the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith. Using the wealth of online materials that have become available in the last five years, particularly the Dickens Journals Online in this class, we explored Dickens’s legacy as a serial novelist, journalist, and literary magazine editor. The class also focused on Dickens’s cultural impact and his shrewd reading of the publication industry, including serialization. Inherently, this
Read moreTag: Literary Culture
The Archive and Ornament
Simon Reader (University if Toronto) This post accompanies Simon Reader’s Journal of Victorian Culture article published (2013). It can be read in full here. “But I fall into the lace of the text, the vellum; caught there, I contemplate my masters.” Lisa Robertson, Nillings Manuscript collections may be usefully regarded as ornaments adorning the literary canon. They strike me as a kind of lace bordering otherwise functional clothing. For one thing, getting to the artifacts can be costly. Sitting with Oscar Wilde’s notebooks
Read moreA Beautiful Fiction of Law
Kieran Dolin (University of Western Australia) This post accompanies Kieran Dolin’s Journal of Victorian Culture article published (2013). It can be read in full here. My article, ‘A Beautiful Fiction of Law: Rhetorical Engagements with Terra Nullius in the British Periodical Press in the 1840s,’ emerged out of an interest I have in the way legal ideals percolate throughout Victorian literature and culture. Many writers had legal training, and even without that, educated Victorians drew on the vocabulary of law and justice in
Read moreThe Victorian Tactile Imagination: Reappraising touch in nineteenth-century culture
THE VICTORIAN TACTILE IMAGINATION: Reappraising touch in the nineteenth-century culture Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, Birkbeck, London 19-20 July, 2013 It is always exciting when you feel part of something big, and when Professor David Howes (Concordia University) asserts that there are some ‘stirrings’ in the academy then you know it’s special. Many claims are made for the impact of a conference’s scope, and they do establish new ideas and contribute to the wider scholarship as well as create new networks
Read moreVictorian Literature and the History and Philosophy of Psychology
Serena Trowbridge, Birmingham City University In March I had the opportunity to participate in a symposium at the British Psychological Society’s History and Philosophy of Psychology (HPP) Conference at the University of Surrey. This session was convened by Gregory Tate (Surrey), and included four papers: ‘Definitions of sanity and insanity in sensation novels by Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’ by Helena Ifill (Sheffield), ‘Diagnosis and mental trauma in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette’ by Alexandra Lewis (Aberdeen), ‘The self-diagnosis of Sydney
Read moreLes Misérables: Or, When Will Someone Set The Industrial Revolution To Song?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmvHzCLP6ug[/youtube] With today’s nationwide release of Les Misérables I booked my ticket and hurried off to my local cinema, excited to catch ‘The Best Film Of The Year’ – which is high praise indeed as it is only January. The film adaptation of the world’s longest running musical has a lot to live up to: a dedicated fan base more judgmental than any twihard, and reputation for having attracted some of the biggest names of stage and screen to its
Read moreBloggers Fair: Michelle Smith and her blog ‘Girls’ Literature’
I began Girls’ Literature and Culture in 2008, not long after completing my PhD at the University of Melbourne. While my scholarly work focuses on gender in nineteenth-century print culture, the freedom of writing a blog, where academic conventions can be flagrantly violated, has helped me to think more about how girls are situated in contemporary popular culture as well. The blog is therefore a melange of all things relating to girlhood from Victorian magazines and novels to recent debates
Read moreBloggers Fair: Louisa Yates ‘Neo-Victorian Thought’ blog
Having completed a thesis on neo-Victorian fiction – specifically, the three neo-Victorian novels of Sarah Waters – I am left with a hopeless and seemingly ineradicable ‘gift’: identifying the many and varied ways in which Victorians and Victoriana reveal themselves within contemporary culture. Many of these moments are fleeting, transient, or otherwise unsuited to extended academic examination (at this point in time, at least). They are, however, often entertaining, inspiring, and eminently suitable for life outside the academy; as the
Read moreBloggers Fair: Charlotte E. Mathieson’s research and teaching blogs
My Research Blog draws together reflections, reviews and discussion relating to my research on travel and place in mid-19th century literature. I write about recent reading, events and talks I’ve attended, and ideas that I’ve been working on in my research, as well as reflecting on contemporary cultural news and events relating to the Victorian period – the Dickens bicentenary has provided a lot of material this year, but I also write about film adaptations, radio and tv series, and
Read moreBloggers Fair: Jolette Roodt ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’
My name is Jolette Roodt and I am currently an MA student at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. My research interests are Victorian literature and the scholarship of teaching and learning, and I am combining the two in my MA thesis, which will look at interventions in the teaching of Jane Eyre (a component of the first-year English Studies course here) in 21st-century South Africa. As part of my research project I have started a (voluntary) reading group for first-year
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