RSVP

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

Graduate News

CFP: Special Issue of VPR for Summer 2022

Guest editors Laurel Brake, Fionnuala Dillane, and Mark Turner invite essays of 5,000-7,000 words in length (including notes and bibliography) for Victorian Periodical Review‘s next special issue, “The Book Review in the Long Nineteenth Century,” to be published Summer 2022.

Book reviews, reviewing, and reviewers pervade the nineteenth-century press, but scholarly attention to the genre, the practice, and to reviewer networks is disproportionately sparse. The genre of reviews filled the early nineteenth-century quarterlies to the extent that they were known generically as Reviews. While retaining their name, Reviews transformed their frequency and contents, surviving as monthly miscellanies, without losing their claim to superior status among magazines, newspapers, and weeklies that also published reviews in profusion and in diverse forms. Although unheralded as a form, they occupied a significant space in weeklies such as the Athenaeum, Spectator, Literary Gazette, and Saturday Review and monthlies such as the Review of Reviews. Many dailies developed literary supplements that functioned as review spaces. The book review, this defining feature of our objects of study, has yet to receive sustained critical attention.

Topics To Consider

This special issue seeks to invite scrutiny of reviews across the press in the long nineteenth century as cultural objects and cultural practices, alive to questions of class, gender, race, and nationality. Submissions might address any of the following:

    • The Review and book reviews
    • Taxonomies, forms, and genres (e.g., occasional notes; causeries; notices; essays-like-review; review-like-essay)
    • Exclusions and/or inclusions
    • Hierarchies of print
    • Critical language of book reviews
    • Conventions of book reviewing
    • Book review as dialogue
    • Cultural value of the book review
    • Repurposing, remediating, recycling book reviews
    • Uses of anonymity and/or signature (including pseudonyms)
    • Affects of the book review
    • The book review in regional, national, and/or transnational contexts
    • Economics of the book review
    • Book review networks/Networks of print
    • The book review in relation to other reviewing practices/forms (e.g., of performances; art exhibitions; concerts)
    • Editing review pages
    • Politics of the book review
    • The book review and the development of disciplines

.

Submit Your Abstract by 15 January 2021

Please signal your interest by 15 January 2021 with a 200-word abstract and brief (50-word) biography. Responses will be sent by 15 February 2021.

Submission deadline for final draft of selected articles of 5,000-7,000 words in length (including notes and bibliography) is 15 August 2021 for publication in 2022.

Both abstracts and final essays should be submitted to Laurel, Mark and Fionnuala by emailing 19cReviewing@gmail.com. You may download a PDF of these guidelines here for reference.

We Want Your Input on Future Digital Events!

Tell Us What You Think

In addition to the RSVP Digital Salon, we’d like to gauge RSVP members’ interest in attending any other virtual event(s) this upcoming academic year (Fall 2020-Spring 2021). To that end, we’ve created a brief survey to collect your thoughts. Your input will drive our efforts to help us stay connected during this time, so thank you in advance!

Please take a moment to fill out the survey here: https://forms.gle/ECRfYZKSWTaAi4fh8. It shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes or so of your time to fill out.

Congratulations to Our 2020 Curran Fellowship Winners

Last week we announced our Curran Fellowship winners for 2020 via our monthly newsletter. Curran Fellowships are awarded annually to help scholars defray the costs of travel to and research on primary sources and archives in the 19th-century periodical press. Applicants’ projected research may involve study of any aspects of the periodical press in any of its manifold forms, and may range from within Britain itself to the many countries, within and outside of the Empire, where British magazines and newspapers were bought, sold, and read during “the long nineteenth century” (ca. 1780-1914). Awards are made possible through the generosity of the late Eileen Curran, Professor Emerita of English, Colby College and long-time RSVP member.

This year our Curran Fellowship winners embark on a diverse variety of projects, from exploring global interactions to shifting temporal boundaries to uncovering understudied areas of periodical interest. The winning projects are as follows (full abstracts available here):

    • Diana Muriel Cooper-Richet (Centre d’histoire culturelle des sociétés contemporaines, Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines), English-Language Periodicals Published in French Provincial Towns (1818-1912) 
    • Lydia Craig (Loyola University Chicago), Female Philanthropic Knitting:  Lady Harriet Scott’s “Grandmother” Patterns in The Queen    
    • Laura Diaz-Esteve (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), The Southeast Asia British Press and the Philippine-American War (1898-1902)
    • Beth Gaskell, The History of Early Regimental Journals
    • Erica Haugtvedt (South Dakota School of Mines & Technology), Transfictional Character and Transmedia Storyworlds in the British Long Nineteenth Century         
    • Sofia Huggins (Texas Christian University), Blank Spaces: Global Geographies of Moral Capitalism in the Anti-Slavery Reporter, 1831-1833      
    • Haejoo Kim (Syracuse University), Anti-Vaccination Periodicals and the Rise of Lay Medical Agency in Nineteenth-Century Britain
    • Carole O’Reilly (University of Salford), Satirising the City: Civic Humour, Place and Accountability in the Later Nineteenth Century Satirical Press       
    • Neil Ramsey (University of New South Wales Canberra), Romantic Era Military Periodicals and the Emotions of War
    • Maryam Sikander (SOAS University of London),  Punch in India: The Transcultural Life of a British Institution     
    • Matthew Wale, The Natural History Periodicals of Edward Newman (1801-1876)

Thank you to all who applied and congratulations to this year’s winners. We look forward to seeing how you advance our understanding of the Victorian periodical press!

RSVP 2019 Annual Conference CFP Announced

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals is pleased to announce the call for papers for our next annual conference.

The conference, entitled ‘Work/Leisure, Duty/Pleasure’, will be hosted by the University of Brighton, UK, and will take place 25-27 July 2019. 

Proposals are invited for 20 minute papers or panels of three or four related papers that address any aspect of the Victorian periodical or newspaper press. Proposals relevant to the Conference theme of Work/Leisure, Duty/Pleasure would be particularly welcome. For more information about the conference theme and how to submit a proposal please visit our conference page.

All those giving a paper at the RSVP conference are required to be members of the Society.

The Curran Index – update

The ongoing effort to identify the writers of articles, stories, and poems in the Victorian press that is the Curran Index is getting a new look, and new super-powers!  With the support of RSVP, our intrepid editor, Gary Simons, is working with a team to convert the old set of pages, which are made up of blocks of text that have had to be scrolled through, into a fully functional online database that can be searched in a variety of ways.  Please visit this new and improved work in progress here (http://curranindex.org/) and read about all the latest additions to this rapidly expanding resource.

PhD Studentship: The People’s Friend? Recovering Scottish Popular Magazine Culture

PhD Studentship: The People’s Friend? Recovering Scottish Popular Magazine Culture – with National Library of Scotland and the University of Strathclyde.

Deadline for applications 17 May 2018

Applications are invited for an AHRC-funded collaborative PhD to research Scottish popular magazine culture, with a particular focus on the period from the founding of the People’s Friend (1869) to the 1930s. The studentship is a fully-funded award under the AHRC’s Collaborative Doctoral Partnership scheme made through the Scottish Cultural Heritage Consortium (of which the National Library of Scotland is a member).

The studentship will commence on 1 October 2018 and last for three years. Student Development Funding (equivalent to an additional 6 months funding) will also be available to allow time for further training and skills development opportunities that are agreed as part of the PhD programme. It is expected that this will take the form of a six month placement at the Library in the relevant curatorial teams in the Department of Collections & Research.

The project will be supervised by Professor Kirstie Blair and Dr David Goldie (University of Strathclyde) and Dr Graham Hogg (National Library of Scotland). The student would be based both at the Library and in the School of Humanities at the University of Strathclyde, as part of a strong cohort of students working in Scottish studies, periodical and magazine culture, and nineteenth/early twentieth -century studies.

The Library has a very significant and under-researched archive of Scottish popular magazines from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Investigating how these magazines constructed a specifically Scottish sense of identity and culture, the project will explore their lasting influence and significance within wider British and international publishing contexts. Through this partnership, the student will also investigate and develop expertise in the issues involved in digitisation, and act as an adviser on the Library’s periodical digitisation programme through a built-in six month placement at the Library. Besides reconsidering a vital aspect of Scotland’s literary heritage, then, the PhD will also include reflection on questions of ‘recovery’ and digitization, considering how this archive connects to reading communities today. D. C. Thomson of Dundee are additional partners on this studentship, and the student will also have the opportunity to work with the D. C. Thomson archivist on events centred on Dundee’s popular magazine culture, including celebrations of the People’s Friend 150th anniversary in 2019.

More about the project and how to apply can be found here.