Tag: Slavery

Literary responses to the Cotton Famine in Lancashire

Other, Victorians Beyond the Academy

The Cotton Famine (1861-65) was a significant era of poverty and unemployment resulting from a blockade on raw cotton during the American Civil War, which hit Lancashire’s textile communities particularly hard. It produced a wide variety of contemporary literary responses, many of which have been under-discussed in scholarship on Victorian industrial literature. In the past decade, however, more effort has been put into archiving and analysing these responses. This is primarily seen in the University of Exeter’s open access digital

Read more

Ann Gagné, “Race, Place, and Perspective in the Victorian Period”: VSAO Conference

Published in JVC

Ann Gagné is College Instructor at Seneca College in Toronto, Canada. Her current research explores how touch and ethics relate to education as well as the spatial framing of learning in the nineteenth century which is an extension of themes found in her doctoral dissertation. She is very active on Twitter @AnnGagne and also writes a blog that relates to teaching and pedagogical strategies at www.allthingspedagogical.blogspot.ca The end of the term at Ontario colleges and universities usually means instructors spending quality time with essays

Read more

Film Review of ‘Django: Unchained’ (2013)

Victorians Beyond the Academy

by Tom Steward Django: Unchained, the latest film from director Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill), is jointly a western and Southern melodrama delivered in the Blaxploitation and Spaghetti Western traditions dealing with slaveholding in a pre-Civil War American South. The director’s intervention into nineteenth-century African-American historiography in such a fashion was potentially problematic. Tarantino’s only previous attempt at historical filmmaking had been the counterfactual World War Two film Inglorious Basterds and both the western and Southern melodrama are film

Read more

Robert Burroughs, ‘Sailors and Slaves: The ‘Poor Enslaved Tar’ in Naval Reform and Nautical Melodrama’

Other

Recent studies have demonstrated how, far from being confined to the theatre, ‘the melodramatic mode’ permeated various fields of nineteenth-century discourse, including politics and the law. Whereas most of the research in this area to date has concentrated upon domestic melodrama, in this article Robert Burroughs extends the discussion to the ‘tar drama’, or nautical melodrama. Burroughs examines how one example of this sub-genre, J.T. Haines’s My Poll and My Partner Joe (first performed 1835), engages in the political, legal

Read more

Elaine Freedgood, ‘What Objects Know: Circulation, Omniscience and the Comedy of Dispossession in Victorian It-Narratives’

Other

In JVC 15.1, Elaine Freedgood examines Victorian it-narratives – stories related by talking umbrellas, feathers, and dolls. What lessons did these speaking objects impart to readers, and what do these stories tell us about how Victorians imagined what it meant to be a narrator, a person, a possession and a subject? To read the full article, visit http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=1&spage=83. Click here to enjoy it as a narrative  – Richard H. Horne’s Memoirs of a London Doll (1855)

Read more