Sorry to have been absent of late but I do have that silly dissertation to think about. While I’m hard at work, be sure to check out all of the links I’ve provided for your convenience. Looking for a conference? A good Victorian novel? Information on Women’s Suffrage? Well, it’s all available here. Check out my fellow bloggers, the Internet Archive, and a number of professional and fan based websites. An evening of the Victorians and Edwardians awaits you.
I will return very soon with lots more to share (check out my recent reads thanks to Goodreads!) and more links to the world of Vicky and Eddie.
As a graduate student, I see myself as on an adventure. I choose, as a mature, experienced adult, to walk away from the outside world of employment where I was unhappy. I did not have a goal and I felt like I was floating. I worked hard and enjoyed many moments and colleagues in the past but I did not feel I was leading the life I wanted to lead.
Then I returned to University. I took two or three classes in English Lit. while working full time. I graduated after several years and found myself wanting more. I wanted grad school. I could taste an academic career. I found my adventure.
I moved across the country to a place that was completely alien to me. I was a blue collar boy in a white collar world and I did not know what to do with myself. Yet, I found myself.
Everything that I have earned as a graduate student, just like anything else I earned in the past, has come from hard work and personal investment. I am thriving. I am so happy to be where I am today.
I am about to end the period of funding support from my program and I am entering that year where I need some more time to finish my dissertation. I have a project that I love and I am determined to finish it. This means more personal investment. More hard work.
That hard work and investment will pay off. I do not feel as if it is my manifest destiny to be employed as a Professor so please do not look at my words that way. I do not believe in manifest destiny. Rather, I am looking at the beginning of a new chapter in my life and I have no clue what will happen. That could be frightening. I assure you, there have been moments of terror involved in my dream. However, I refuse today to be afraid. The sun is shining. I have students to meet. I have supportive friends and colleagues. I have a supervisor and second reader who truly support my work. I have the opportunity to create my next adventure now. That is the power of a PhD. I can live for my work. I can take ownership and pride in my work. I can share my work with others in order to help them find their next adventure.
I do not usually make personal posts here and I do not want you to see that as a personal mantra or anything. No, I do not think my outlook is very different from any other Graduate Student. This is not an attempt at universalising the graduate student experience either. Instead, this is a personal choice to be adventurous and to embrace the values of the arts and humanities. I have decided to enjoy the uncertainty. I have decided to reject the negativity that swirls in all departments about the terrible job market or the desperate financial situation.
The humanities began as a site of scholarly study. A community not based on market value but on cultural archiving. A community based on passion for ideas, books, and the preservation of human endeavour. As a critic of the Victorian and Edwardian ages, I see myself as one such dedicatee. I have every confidence I will lead the life I want.
So, if you are also a graduate student you must also learn to enjoy the adventure of the unknown. The arts and humanities are not a place to turn to for job security or financial success. This is a place for people who see work as knowledge as their own rewards. We have to start looking at graduate school this way again. The money is slipping and it will take a lot of determination to maintain our passions in the face of time pressures, money pressures, and interpersonal pressures. Embrace it and thrive.
Enjoy your adventure today this lovely Monday morning. I will.
Again, thank you to everyone who has visited Victorians and Edwardians: A Resource Page. I enjoy posting and I hope that you enjoy my informal posts. What I really hope is that you find the links on this site useful.
I set up this page initially as a way to organize resources for myself. I continue to use this site for that purpose: blogs, conferences, academic journals, and online texts abound and I find it useful to be able to access these things from a single location. I think that everyone deserves equal, open access and I hope that this site makes access and discovery easier for visitors.
More links, posts, and ideas to come. I have discovered so much about the online world of Victorian and Edwardian Studies and I hope that my readers and the creators of the links on my page continue to help me better understand this rich, complex, and diverse period of literature, art, and culture.
All the best for research and for reading in 2013,
I want to recommend a beautiful book that I just finished called The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber. There is a BBC 2 adaptation of the novel and I offer you a link to a trailer from the original promotion, but I would like to suggest reading the novel.
If you were not lovers of Victorian novels, I would not suggest reading. After all, Faber’s novel is nine-hundred pages long at a small, but still reasonable font in the Harper Perennial Canada edition that I have been reading. However, you are Victorian and Edwardian fans and enjoy the challenge of a big fat novel, right?
This novel offers you a sensational plot about a Victorian prostitute who manages to become in indispensible member of her middle-class client’s household. There is a crazy mad-women/wife, a sullen child with strange outlooks on the world, a number of fascinating prostitutes who show more wisdom than the people who come to preach at them, and the dark character of Mrs. Castaway, Sugar’s madam/mother!
On top of a riveting plot, the novel pays homage to many great novels and writers of the Victorian age – I can see Eliot, Trollope, Braddon, and Charlotte Brontë to name a few. However, this is not an exclusively “Victorian” novel. Remember, the “neo” in neo-Victorian because this novel play fascinating narrative tricks, lacks any moral centre, and ends in media res (yes, very Browning, but still…). I would not say that Crimson Petal and the White is a postmodern text; however, it is certainly a product of a twenty-first century reading of the 1870s.
I thoroughly enjoyed the book. I am saving my critical analysis for a project I have in mind so in order to get a thorough reading of Faber’s novel, I suggest you pick it up and try it.
As a fan of A.S. Byatt’s Possession (1990), I enjoy the neo-Victorian genre because of the intellectual exercises that intersect with the fun of historical fiction. I have not yet found that love for Steampunk (but I have not given up, I promise), but I will certainly be looking at the list of neo-Victorian texts that take up space in my home library.
I suggest that perhaps you do the same. The Crimson Petal and the White goes lovely with a bottle of red wine, a snowstorm outside the window, and a Saturday night without plans.
I want everyone to link to the blog operated by the Journal of Victorian Culture Online. The title directly above the YouTube video is a link to the article I want to discuss. Read my entry after you read Fern Riddell’s.
Fern Riddell, a PhD Candidate at King’s College, London. Posted an entry and an interview with social historian Kate Colquhoun. The basis of the interview is to promote a film adaptation of Colquhoun’s book called Murder on The Victorian Railway. While this program sounds fascinating and I will be hunting for it over here in North America, what I’m more interested in is the conversation these two share on the writing process.
Riddell claims that she is having a “writing crisis” as a graduate student and I can relate to that as a fellow grad student preparing my own dissertation project. I think what Riddell appreciates in Colquhoun’s writing, and what Colquhoun encourages in the interview, is the vital element in all academic writing: honesty.
There is much debate about the nature of academic writing and its exclusivity. I have had this debate with my own graduate colleagues here in Canada. However, whenever I speak with an experienced, well published, scholar in my field or in other fields, the advice I receive is to speak using my own words. To be concise. To be clear and to simplify my language. This is not to say I should dumb down what I say. Colquhoun is absolutely right and I think she offers Riddell advice similar to that of my own supervisor and second reader. There is no need to insincerely attach a theoretical language to one’s work if that language does not communicate what you are trying to say.
I have this habit of speaking in a very colloquial fashion. The way I speak always made me feel incredibly self-conscious in graduate seminars because I didn’t speak in the language of poststructural, semiotic deconstruction about the disembodied trancendence of some dialectic of blah, blah, blah….. I find myself rejecting books that try too hard to impress me with their theoretical vocabulary. I won’t name names but these books are just badly written. Remember that when you write.
Of course, my colleagues were practicing the language of criticism that we were learning. That is important. I also try to understand what these unfamiliar terms mean. How would I communicate these complex ideas to the nonprofessional, to the undergraduates I am teaching in first year surveys, to my partner and my non-academic friends. I have also realised over time that each academic field, period, theory, has its own language and terminology. As we progress in our fields we must learn the language of our field; however, an important part of that process is to forget much of that terminology. What I love about Victorianist scholarship is that it places history, literature, and culture in the forefront and theory is placed in conversation with these fields. A conversation happens where theory is not front-and-centre but available for the sake of clarity. Theory and its complexity can have the power to simplify one’s writing if we make economical use of its terminology. In other words, a little goes a long way.
The academy is changing. I have heard the digital revolution referred to as equivalent to the theory revolution of the 70s and 80s. How we do what we do must continually change in order to be culturally valuable and viable. The basis of what a Victorianist scholar does, I believe, is to keep the archive of knowledge alive. No, I’m not referencing Foucault or Derrida’s vision of the archive (they are both still waiting to be read), I am referring to an archive in the sense of a library’s archive. A store of knowledge available to be read but, more often than not, is allowed to be forgotten. I see my job as bringing this archive out of its dusty box from an obscure shelf where it has been locked away from contemporary society: forgotten, but saved in case someone may be interested in it once again. As a Victorianist, my job is to bring these boxes into the open, to show their contents to students, to critically analyse these contents for my colleaugues in articles and books, to write those articles and books in a way that will allow for both scholarly rigour and encourage wide-spread interest in the past.
I think everyone should know what we do as academics. We are specialists in our various fields and if we want the wider world to care we have to find a way to teach our archive of the nineteenth century to as many people as possible.
Accessibility = simplicity. We (i.e. Grad Students) need to stop writing with the intention of impressing our professors. We are graduate students and mimicry is not flattering; usually, it is painfully awkward. Let’s try something new and remember why we began this journey into Graduate School and further into the academy. We are passionate about the history, politics, art, or literature of the Victorians and the language of our writing must convey that passion.
I want to thank both Fern Riddell and Kate Colquhoun for this interview and article. You’ve inspired me as I face a day of dissertation editing. Honesty, passion, simplicity. These are the keys to writing that is powerful, scholarly rigorous, and accessible.
The above image is the logo for a wonderful website I found called The Oscar Wilde Collection. Perhaps I’m behind the times, but this seems like a new resource. The online edition (and the image I borrowed above) are the copyrighted property of a kindle publisher called Planet Monk.
First, the Wilde site. I’ve set up a permanent link to the right under Literature online. These are wonderful and beautiful online editions. Instead of the flip-book design, a strange reference to paper books that makes little sense in an online medium, these editions simply require you to scroll down as you read and click on the next chapter or section when you reach the bottom. Elaborate backgrounds that suggest the decadence of the 1890s, and decorative initials to give character to the presentation make for a legible and enjoyable textual experience. The fairy tales, the plays, Mr. W.H., Dorian Gray, and Lord Saville are all present here. The only works missing are his essays, reviews, and journalism work. I think this would be a great resource for the classroom. Why not assign a free edition? Why not read a free edition for pleasure?
Now, Planet Monk. If you click on that name at the bottom of the website it brings you to a list of all of their publications. One section takes you to their list of kindle editions that they have created and are selling for low prices. Varney the Vampire, for example is available on amazon.com for $0.99. Pretty good deal.
I still prefer reading a paper book but the reality is that the next generation of Wilde fans will discover him in a digital reading environment. It’s nice to see that publishers like Planet Monk are bringing Wilde to the digital reader.
Check out the Oscar Wilde Collection and then go buy one of their kindle editions! And if anyone at Planet Monk would prefer that I not use their lovely caricature of Wilde in this post, please let me know and I can always remove the image. Otherwise, thank you for the Wilde Collection.
Here is the details on what NAVSA is looking for this year.
The North American Victorian Studies Association Conference for 2013, in Pasadena, California, October 23rd-27th, invites papers on the theme of evidence. Evidence is central to all our work: we use texts, images, objects, the built environment to support our arguments. We also interpret, select, arrange, and juxtapose such evidentiary material. The Victorians strenuously looked for evidence to support their assumptions, beliefs, and investigation. Our program will include optional workshops at the Getty Research Institute and material culture sessions at the Huntington. Conference attendees will be able to enter the Huntington and its wonderful gardens free of charge.
Proposals for individual papers or panels should be submitted electronically by March 1, 2013. Proposals for individual papers should be no more than 500 words; panel proposals should include 500-word abstracts for each paper and a 250-word panel description. Applicants should submit a one-page cv. Please submit your proposals here.
Conference threads might include:
•What is evidence? How do different disciplines identify and use evidence? How does the use of evidence draw boundaries and bridges between disciplines? How does interdisciplinary work deal with evidence?
•How has the use of evidence changed (new evidence and new ways to use old evidence)?
•Evidence and the humanities: interpretation, analysis, scientific and historical method, supporting arguments
•Digitization and the changing nature of the archive, museum and library
•Teaching and evidence: sources, assessment, pedagogies
•Lost evidence: wars and other research inconveniences
•Imagined evidence and historical fictions
•Science: method, demonstration, essentialism/Social Darwinism
•Religion: belief, faith and intuition
•Personal evidence: autobiographies, letters and diaries
•Visual evidence: photography, painting, theater, film and other displays
•The building, the city and the village: architecture, urban planning and historic preservation
•Archaelogy, fossils, bone, tracks, spoor
•The body as evidence
•Material culture: clothes, pottery, and other everyday objects
•Crime and Justice: police, detectives, witnesses and the press
•Politics: parliamentary inquiries, select committees
•Ghosts and revenants: evidence of the supernatural and of the afterlife
•The press: scandal and public opinion
•Evidence and the colonial project
culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world; and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits (Matthew Arnold, Culture & Anarchy, 1869)
