#victorian studies

[acswinburne]

29 July 2023- my abstract got accepted! i'm now working to turn it into a communicable paper, which involves going back and re-reading my sources on dramatic monologues and taking walks to locate pretty buildings as motivation (:

[notallsandmen]

You pdhing in history? Could you tell me something weird about your field of expertise? I'm stressed because three days to finish two papers. Thanks!

AAH, this is so much fun.

Okay, one of my favourite anecdotes about late-19th century Scandinavian literature

August Strindberg writing to Verner von Heidenstam and asking whether he would like to order condoms from the pharmacy together, to save on shipping costs

Now get off tumblr and write! I find it helps to write by hand on paper, then I can’t erase everything or start to edit midway through a paragraph

[this-thing-of-darkness]

Stoker maps his story not simply onto the Gothic but also onto a second, equally popular late-Victorian genre, the travel narrative. By examining how and to what extent 'Dracula' participates in these two genres, we can illuminate the underlying fear and guilt characteristic of reverse colonization narratives. Like late-century Gothic, the travel narrative clearly displays aspects of imperial ideology. Like Gothic, too, the travel narrative concerns itself with boundaries -- both with maintaining and with trasgressing them. The blurring of psychic and sexual boundaries that occurs in Gothic is certainly evident in 'Dracula' (and is one reason the novel is so accessible to psychoanalytic interpretation), but for Stoker the collapse of boundaries resonates culturally and politically as well. The Count's transgressions and aggressions are placed in the context, provided by innumerable travel narratives, of late-Victorian forays into the 'East'. For Stoker, the Gothic and the travel narrative problematize, separately and together, the very boundaries on which British imperial hegemony depended: between civilized and primitive, colonizer and colonized, victimizer (either imperialist or vampire) and victim. By problematizing those boundaries, Stoker probes the heart of the culture's sense of itself, its ways of defining and distinguishing itself from other peoples, other cultures, in its hour of perceived decline.

Stephen D. Arata, The Occidental Tourist: “Dracula” and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization

[emmasfieldnotes]

In my dream I was hanging out with a dapper Victorian gentleman who had been researching for his PhD since 1870 and I'm not sure if my subconscious is making fun of me for being mortal or if my academic brain is just stressed out that I don't have 148 years of research experience.

[phdbff]

ATTN women/LGBT+ folx in Academia!!! <3

Would you like to be on a podcast? Particularly, a female/queer-powered podcast that analyzes science fiction television?

I’m currently booking interviewees for my Warehouse 13 Podcast, Podcast 13!

I have a co-host already, but each episode will have a brief segment called “Cataloging the artifacts,” where we discuss the show’s representation of a given historical object. You do not need to be an expert on the TV show itself (you don’t even have to have seen it before!) if you have relevant historical knowledge for this particular segment.

This segment requires me to find academic experts in EACH of these disparate things: Rheticus; The Crusades; Alessandro Volta and/or Tycho Brahe; Sylvia Plath; Timothy Leary; Harriet Tubman. 

The commitment is fairly small: watch a 40 minute episode of TV, and participate in a Skype interview of 20-30 minutes about the object/historical person.

Interested, but unsure if you’re “technically” qualified? You probably are! We’re not gatekeepers, and it’s MORE than possible to be a historical expert without a PhD. DM me for more info!

[victoriannetwork]

The new issue of Victorian Network, Forgery and Imitation, is online!

Available here on VN’s website!

[lufairchild]

Although my fingertips have longed to touch the beaten hems of their skirts, the netting of their headdresses, the wires of their crinolines, the silkiness of their tights, the scented pages of their tattered and clutched books, the roundness of their pearls, the soft bits of their always new hair that cavorts about their lovely ears in joyful escape from their hairpins, their velvet cummerbunds, the lift of their closed but smiling lips, the warmness of their eyelids shut off in pretend sleep, their bodies and all that has touched them, I have only touched the precious edges of their pictures. To touch inside, to reach within the borders is forbidden; they are just photographs, to be preserved, protected from the oils, the dirt, the smirches of my fingertips. My fingers are bound…bound with words.

Carol Mavor, Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden (p. xxv)

[acswinburne]

2 July, 2023- I have officially been working as a research assistant for a month now! It's been so engaging to work on a book project for a faculty member of mine, and the fact that I get my own office for the summer is just the cherry on top <3.