Sophie Cooper is a second year PhD student and William McFarlane Scholar at the University of Edinburgh. She is studying Irish communities in Melbourne and Chicago between 1850 and 1890, specifically in relation to situational influences on identity formation and nationalist thought. Sophie tweets using the handle @SophcoCooper and more information can be found on her academia page. The growing popularity of Amazon Prime’s recent Starz acquisition ‘Outlander’, an adaptation of Diana Gabaldon’s 1991 book, will undoubtedly lead to a surge
Read moreTag: Period Dramas
Ripper Street: The Historian’s Dilemma
Guy Woolnough (Keele University) I have watched Ripper Street with interest. There is an unpleasant interest in ‘Ripperology’ which distorts the popular view of Victorian crime and policing, and I feared that a series with this title might be focussed too narrowly. There are stories far more worthy of investigation by historians and programme makers than the unsolved Whitechapel murders. The first episode dispelled my fears, for although ‘The Ripper’ was the hook to catch the audience, the message to
Read moreReview: The Paradise and Zola’s The Ladies Paradise
Ben Moore (University of Manchester) Ben.moore@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk The current BBC television series The Paradise, based on Émile Zola’s 1883 novel Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies’ Paradise), arrives in the wake of a number of successful British television period dramas, most conspicuously Downton Abbey, whose popularity and critical acclaim suggests that the appetite of UK and US audiences for class-based dramas combining buttoned-up propriety with a hint of sexual and political transgression continues to provide a lucrative market for programme-makers. The
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