Les Misérables: Or, When Will Someone Set The Industrial Revolution To Song?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmvHzCLP6ug[/youtube] With today’s nationwide release of Les Misérables I booked my ticket and hurried off to my local cinema, excited to catch ‘The Best Film Of The Year’ – which is high praise indeed as it is only January. The film adaptation of the world’s longest running musical has a lot to live up to: a dedicated fan base more judgmental than any twihard, and reputation for having attracted some of the biggest names of stage and screen to its

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Teaching and Learning Showcase

Many of us often use the summer months to create new courses and revise existing ones for the new academic year. To facilitate this work and encourage productive conversations around the teaching of nineteenth-century culture, the Journal of Victorian Culture Online (JVC) will be hosting a Teaching and Learning Showcase to feature this work.  In August and September, we would like to showcase posts that explore the imaginative and innovative ways we teach Victorian studies. Blog topics could include: Digital

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Bloggers 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

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The Value of Victorian Studies: View from the Publisher

Linda Bree is Editorial Director, Arts and Literature, at Cambridge University Press. Her own scholarly work is in the literature of the long eighteenth century, from Daniel Defoe to Jane Austen: among other projects she is editor of Defoe’s Moll Flanders (OUP, forthcoming) and Henry Fielding’s Amelia (Broadview, 2010), and co-editor of Jane Austen’s Later Manuscripts (CUP, 2008). This post is one part of a four-part discussion on the value of Victorian studies. To read the other posts, visit http://myblogs.informa.com/jvc/2011/10/07/the-value-of-victorian-studies/.

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The Public Value of Victorian Studies

This September the British Association of Victorian Studies gathered for its annual conference at the University of Birmingham to explore the theme ‘Composition and Decomposition’. In the final plenary, delegates met to debate ‘The Value of Victorian Studies’. Here, we present Shearer West’s paper on ‘The Public Value of Victorian Studies’ which opened discussion and in related posts we publish the plenary responses to Shearer’s paper by Linda Bree, Sarah Parker and Regenia Gagnier. With the rise of university tuition fees

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The Importance of Being Earnest Live in HD

On 2 June 2011, the Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of Wilde’s masterpiece will be broadcast live in HD at cinemas throughout the United States and internationally, with repeat performances being shown periodically until 28 June. To complete the experience, the Playgoer’s Guide to the production is available online, offering a brief sketch of the play’s original cultural context. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcTmJHsbOXQ&feature=player_embedded[/youtube] It is interesting that the information in the guide, as well as some of the trailers and videos on the theatre

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‘Roundtable: Old Age and the Victorians,’ Issue 16.1 (April 2011)

Karen Chase’s The Victorians and Old Age (2009) and Devoney Looser’s Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750-1850 (2008) are the first major expressions within Victorian studies of the scholarly interest in old age that began with Simone de Beauvoir’s La Vieillesse (1970) and has greatly increased in prominence over the past two decades, thanks to the growth of cross-disciplinary interest in all life stages. The responses to these two books in this roundtable discussion recognize the importance

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New Agenda – Katharina Boehm and Josephine McDonagh, ‘Urban Mobility: New Maps of Victorian London’

‘The Uncommercial Traveller, whose urban explorations by foot, coach and train lead him from genteel Bond Street to the muddy thoroughfares of the East End, and from London’s ‘shy neighbourhoods’ to the docks by the Thames, reminds us of the mobility of Victorian city dwellers. Like Dickens’s compulsive traveller, countless fictional and historical Londoners experienced the city and its material cultures on the move.’  Introducing the New Agenda on ‘Urban Mobility’, Katharina Boehm and Josephine McDonagh survey the scholarship on the

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Digital Forum: Processing the Past

In JVC 15.2., the three contributors to this Digital Forum discuss the exciting new opportunities for quantitative research.  Richard Deswarte focuses on the holdings of the History Data Service and considers what makes a useful quantitative data source.  Alexis Weedon assesses the production of resources suitable for quantitative research and the use of geographical information to argue for greater convergence between types of data.  Michaela Mahlberg offers an introduction to corpus linguistics, exploring what corpus approaches can offer existing research

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