Dr Charlotte Mathieson (University of Warwick) Context The English Nineteenth-Century Novel is an honours-level undergraduate module in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, on which I teach 3 classes of 15 students in weekly 1.5 hour lecture-seminars. I set up a teaching blog for this module at the start of the 2011-12 academic year, having previously experimented with using a teaching blog for a first-year literary theory module. There are many ways in
Read moreTag: Novels
T. D. Griggs: Historical Fiction and Story Telling
T. D. Griggs Research. It’s the first thing readers ask me about. How much did I do? How long did it take? Am I an expert on the period? I’m always flattered by such questions. They mean I’ve got away with it. Because I am not an historian. History is not my business. Storytelling is. My latest novel, DISTANT THUNDER (T.D.Griggs Orion Books), is set in the 1890s. I’m attracted by the huge confidence of Victorian Britain, in contrast to
Read moreBloggers Fair: Gaby Malcolm’s blog on Mary Braddon
Mary Braddon’s centenary is fast approaching (2015) and as the new Visiting Research Fellow at Canterbury Christ Church University my remit is to develop and publish on the Braddon Archive Collection now held at the university’s Augustine Library – with the landmark date in mind. I am joining colleagues Adrienne Gavin (biographer of Anna Sewell) and Carolyn Oulton (biographer of Mary Cholmondeley) of the English and Language Studies department, as they begin their directorships of the new International Centre for
Read moreBloggers Fair: Novel Readings
At Novel Readings I write about my reading, teaching, and research, much but not all of which is Victorian. Blogging is a way to make my academic work more transparent and accessible, and an opportunity to experiment with different kinds of critical writing. Novel Readings has become an indispensable part of my intellectual life, not only for the intrinsic challenges and rewards of writing for it, but because of the community of other readers and writers it has brought me
Read moreFiction, Feeling, and Social Change
Feeling for the Poor: Bourgeois Compassion, Social Action, and the Victorian Novel, by Carolyn Betensky, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010, 224 pp., £33.95 (hardback), ISBN 0813930618 Victorian Social Activists’ Novels edited by Oliver Lovesay, London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011, 4 Volume Set, 1456 pages, £350.00 (hardback), ISBN 978 1 85196 629 5 Is there inherent ethical value in feeling for, or with, the suffering of others? In Feeling for the Poor, Carolyn Betensky argues that Victorian novels about poverty
Read moreBook Reviews (15.1)
Jacky Bratton on Jennifer Hall-Wit’s Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780-1880 (Durham, New Hampshire: University of New Hampshire Press, 2007). To read the full review, visit http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=1&spage=164. Charlotte Mitchell on Gavin Budge’s Charlotte M. Yonge: Religion, Feminism and Realism in the Victorian Novel (Oxford, Bern & Peter Lang, 2007). To read the full review, visit http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=1&spage=158. Donna Loftus on James Taylor’s Creating Capitalism. Joint-Stock Enterprise in British Politics and Culture 1800-1870 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Royal Historical Society
Read moreSupriya Chaudhuri, ‘Phantasmagorias of the Interior: Furniture, Modernity, and Early Bengali Fiction’
The Bengali novel, Supriya Chaudhuri finds in JVC 15.1, housed suspicion and distrust of European furnishings and the bourgeois individual that collected them. In the fiction of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), this distrust manifests itself in a rejection of the bourgeois interior and a questioning of the very tools of realist representation. Yet Chaudhuri finds similarities as well as differences between the early Bengali novel and the classic realist experiment, for both shared a horror of fussy, over-stuffed apartments and the
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