Michael Slater’s recent work, The Great Charles Dickens Scandal, brilliantly opens with a selection of the various headlines that Dickens-based news stories have run in recent years. Predictably, they mostly relate to his relationship with Ellen Ternan, and range from the dramatic (‘THE DARK SIDE OF DICKENS AND THE LOVE THAT DESTROYED HIS MARRIAGE’) to the salacious (‘DICKENS’S ROMPS WITH NAUGHTY NELLY’) to the somewhat bizarre and creepy (‘DICKENS KEPT A KEEN EYE ON FALLEN WOMEN’).[1] With the approaching release
Read moreTag: Neo-Victorian
What We Know about What Maisie Knew: A Critical Conversation
By Ryan D. Fong, Kalamazoo College, & Victoria Ford Smith, University of Connecticut The following conversation took place via e-mail in July and August 2013, after we each viewed the most recent film adaptation of Henry James’s 1897 novel, What Maisie Knew. In the collaborative spirit of the film’s directors, Scott McGehee and David Siegel, we decided to write a joint review, analyzing the film from our respective areas of expertise. What Maisie Knew is still playing in select theatres,
Read moreCall for Proposals: JVC Online’s Neo-Victorian Studies & Digital Humanities Week
This fall, JVC Online will feature a week of posts devoted to the connections between Neo-Victorian studies and digital humanities. The goal of this week is to consider the ways in which we are mobilizing the tools, concepts, and methodologies of digital humanities research and pedagogy to re-contextualize, revise, and re-envision Victorian culture in terms of our age. Just as JVC Online’s digital form enables it to have broad reach, so too do the digital and technological elements of how
Read moreAvoiding those Madding Crowds: Date Night with Thomas Hardy
Ryan D. Fong Kalamazoo College For most of our readership across the United States and in the UK, April is proving to be a very cruel month indeed—with severe weather patterns and cold fronts marching across the North America and Atlantic. In these frigid days and dank nights, in which we grow ever wearier of these lingering and intemperate climes, what is a good Victorianist to do? The options would seem (at least to this Victorianist) to either sink into
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 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 moreReview: Girl in a Blue Dress by Gaynor Arnold
Girl in a Blue Dress, by Gaynor Arnold. Birmingham, Tindal Street Press: 2011 (2008), 438 pages, £7.99 paperback, ISBN 978-1-906994-15-0 “My husband’s funeral is today. And I’m sitting here alone in my upstairs room while half London followed him to his grave.” So begins Gaynor Arnold’s Girl in a Blue Dress, a novel which traces the story of Dorothea Gibson following the death of her estranged husband, famous author Alfred Gibson. Narrated from Dorothea’s perspective, the novel sees her look
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: Amber Regis’ ‘Looking Glasses at Odd Corners’
I started my blog, Looking Glasses at Odd Corners, in October 2011. Its title is an obscure reference to a Virginia Woolf essay on ‘The Art of Biography’ (1939), a phrase that encapsulates my approach to life-writing: ‘Biography will enlarge its scope by hanging up looking glasses at odd corners.’ [1] As a Victorianist, my research is concerned with the recovery and recognition of playfulness, experiment and diversity in nineteenth-century auto/biography. I delve into the ‘odd corners’, shining a light
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