All-too-infrequently updated, The Fairyland of Geometry is a blog on which I post material surrounding my PhD research into the late-nineteenth-century engagement with the idea of higher-dimensioned space. The thesis aims to understand and describe how this engagement altered the spatial imaginary of the period by examining the passage of the idea across disparate cultural terrains, departing from August Mobius’s 1827 paper on barycentric calculus, in which he tentatively speculated a fourth dimension of space as a useful idea in
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Bloggers 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
Read moreI Believe in Sherlock Holmes: Sherlockian Fandom Then & Now
By Jeanette Laredo “You really do, don’t you?” Sherlock’s voice was quiet, not a whisper but more like he was talking to himself than to John, “Even after everything. You still… believe in me.” —from “I Believe in Sherlock Holmes,” a Sherlockian fanfic by Cennis I was on my way to a job talk, weaving through the crowd of students that poured out from the corridors leading to the lecture hall, when my eye caught a flash of that unmistakable
Read moreBloggers’ Fair
I’m not sure about you but I would love to know more about Victorian blogs for teaching and for my own research. We’ve decided that it would be great to showcase blogs written by Victorianists on any area of nineteenth-century studies. If you are a blogger, you can contribute by sending a short description of your blog to Lucie at l.m.matthew-jones@ljmu.ac.uk throughout April and May. You can also send images (as jpegs) and a hyperlink to your blog. We would
Read moreSTOP PRESS: Lee Jackson’s ‘The Diary of a Murder’ to kick start our online book club
We’re excited to report that Lee Jackson’s Diary of a Murder will kick start our online book club. We hope that that the JVC book club will provide followers with a virtual platform to discover or rediscover books on the Victorian period, whether they are from the period or Neo-Victorian. Lee describes his book as follows: “The Diary of a Murder revolves around the death of a middle-class housewife, Dora Jones, brutally killed in her own home. Her missing husband,
Read morePeter Ackroyd’s brief account of Wilkie Collins
I have recently left one university (Swansea) for another (Liverpool John Moores). Before I departed, I decided to offer some final pearls of wisdom to my personal tutees, along the lines of ‘Try thinking about how you might engage with your module outside the classroom; why not read a novel from the period, watch a film or documentary, or maybe find a blogger who frequently comments on some area of historical interest?’ Whether or not they have taken up my
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