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.
Members News
Nineteenth-Century Synergies: Ventures at Home and (Ad)Ventures Abroad
Nineteenth-Century Synergies: Ventures at Home and (Ad)Ventures Abroad hosted by the Department of English, at Presidency University, Kolkata, West Bengal, India took place on the 22nd and 23rd of February, 2018.
Professors Joanne Shattock and Linda Hughes, gave papers entitled “Journalism and Literature: Contested Professions” and “Tennyson, The Princess, and Tennyson’s Global Women Readers” respectively.
More about the conference can be found here.
VPR/DNCJ promotion
RSVP is giving away copies of the Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism (DNCJ) free to new and renewing subscribers to the Victorian Periodicals Review! (If you renewed recently, just add another year to your renewal and you’re good to go.) You don’t need to put in a promotion code, just sign up and this essential reference book will be mailed to you, while supplies last.
These copies are already going fast, and there’s a limited number of them, so best to act quickly if you want a copy. And of course with your subscription (which only costs $35) comes membership in RSVP. It’s a win-win!
Women in Punch 1841 – 1920, 02 Nov 2017, Senate House, London
Registration is now open for ‘Women in Punch 1841 – 1920’, 02 Nov 2017, Senate House, London.
Punch: or the London Charivari first appeared in 1841, published as a weekly magazine with a strong political agenda. Although some work has been done on the social reform agenda of Punch, very little is known about women in the magazine. Were there any women contributors? What representations of women appeared in the magazine, both in images and text? Women were certainly a subject for humour and caricature in Punch, but what were the political implications of those comic illustrations? What was the role played by verse in the depiction of women? Did representations of women change significantly between 1841 and 1910, and if so, how and why? How do the caricatures and/or depictions of women in Punch differ or resemble those in other illustrated papers, such as the Comic Almanack (1835 – 1853), The Illustrated London News (1842 – 1989), the Man in the Moon (1847 – 1849), andFun (1861 – 1901)? Queen Victoria subscribed to Punch; did it have many women subscribers and/or readers? How was the ‘New Women’ reported in the pages of the magazine? Was Punch interested in female education or the entry of women into the professions?
These are some of the questions to be explored by this one-day conference, which will look at some of the below themes:
- Women in the literary marketplace
- Education
- ‘New Women’ and ‘cartoons’
- Domesticity
- Punch and the Intellectual Woman
- Women and sports
- Representations of Political Women
- Punch and female readership
- Sex, body, and Punch caricatures.
The programme for the day can be found here.
Conference organiser: Mariam Zarif, mariam.zarif@kcl.ac.uk.
Dr. Paul Fyfe wins Prestigious Donald Gray Prize
Congratulations to RSVP member Dr. Paul Fyfe winner of this year’s Donald Gray Prize for the best essay published in the field of Victorian studies.
Dr. Fyfe’s article ‘An Archaeology of Victorian Newspapers‘ was published in the Winter 2016 edition of Victorian Periodicals Review.
The NAVSA judging committee – Deborah Denenholz Morse (Chair), Mary Jean Corbett, Martin Danahay, and Peter Hoffenberg – commented:
Paul Fyfe’s ‘An Archaeology of Victorian Newspapers’ excavates a portion of “the largely hidden history of how Victorian data gets to now” by filling in some of the gaps between then and now. This fascinating essay, which draws on the methods of book history and media archaeology, as well as practicing a form of “investigative scholarly journalism,” explores the occluded material histories of one large-scale digitization project: the British Library’s massive collection of nineteenth-century newspapers. He establishes its complex relations to a range of mid-twentieth-century agents, technologies, and institutions, from the preservation efforts undertaken in the aftermath of the second world war to the emergence of (and continuing role played by) microfilm in the collaboration between libraries, micropublishers, and the forerunners of the CIA. Victorian media became digital, Fyfe argues, both by subordinating the provinces to the metropole and by having the techno-labor of its production outsourced to India and Cambodia. In a timely investigation of what now constitute “the enabling conditions of our scholarship,” the essay charts a path forward for thinking about—and critically reflecting on—the digital tools we all use.
CFP: Special issue of Victorian Periodicals Review: The Strand Magazine
CFP: Special issue of Victorian Periodicals Review: The Strand Magazine
Described by Reginald Pound as a ‘national institution’, the Strand Magazine (1891–1950) was the foremost British New Journalistic fiction paper of the 1890s. This heavily illustrated monthly promised its readers ‘cheap, healthful literature’, including short and serial fiction, factual articles, human-interest features and celebrity items, by some of the best-known authors of the time. Yet, in spite of its popularity, the Strand has attracted limited scholarly attention and is often dismissed as a prime example of the Victorian middlebrow. This special issue of Victorian Periodicals Review seeks to elicit original essays assessing the nature, role and significance of the Strand in the period 1891–1918. Possible contributions might address, but are not limited to, topics such as:
- The Strand and the short story
- The Strand and genre fiction
- The topical Strand
- The Strand and popular science
- The Strand and celebrity culture
- The Strand and the New Journalism
- The Strand’s editorial policies
- The Strand and periodical design
- The Strand and illustration
- The Strand and its readers
- The Strand and the middlebrow
- The Strand and British identity
- The Strand abroad
- The Strand and the ‘Victorian’
- The Strand and the modern
- The Strand in the digital age
Please send a 300-word abstract and a one-page CV to our guest editors Emma Liggins (e.liggins@mmu.ac.uk) and Minna Vuohelainen (minna.vuohelainen@city.ac.uk) by 1 December, 2017. Final essays of 5000-9000 words (including notes and bibliography) will be due by 1 May, 2018 and should be prepared in MS Word according to the Chicago Manual of Style. The special issue will be published in summer 2019.