---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: VICTORIA Digest - 24 Aug 2004 to 25 Aug 2004 (#2004-78)
From: "Automatic digest processor" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, August 26, 2004 6:03 am
To: "Recipients of VICTORIA digests" <[log in to unmask]>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
There are 14 messages totalling 410 lines in this issue.
Topics of the day:
1. CFP: Imprisonment in Victorian Fiction
2. Gothic anti Catholic
3. Learning to read (2)
4. Thackeray (4)
5. learning to read (2)
6. Victorian Studies, 46.2
7. beekeeping and gender
8. kelly's directories (2)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 07:21:58 +0200
From: Frank Lauterbach <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: CFP: Imprisonment in Victorian Fiction
CALL FOR PAPERS
Edited Volume: IMPRISONMENT IN VICTORIAN FICTION
Submissions are invited for a collection of original essays exploring
the representation of prisons and imprisonment in British fiction of the
Victorian period. This volume intends to explore new ways of
investigating how imprisonment is textualized in and through narrative
fiction and how prison literature supports, complicates, or questions
the construction of discursive subject positions. Prison fiction is here
understood to encompass both the literary expression of a prisoner's own
inside experience and any depiction of incarceration by outside
observers. While any approach is welcome, contributions that engage
theoretical or historical issues or re-assess existing (Foucauldian or
post-Foucauldian) paradigms are particularly encouraged.
Possible topics could include, but are not limited to:
-- Literary representations or classifications of prisoners, e.g. of
their bodies, psychological states of mind, imaginative faculties, etc.
-- Portrayals of prisoners' identities in terms of class, ethnic,
national, gender, queer, denominational, religious, etc. discourses.
-- Specific functions of carceral discourse and prison imagery for women
and minorities (as victims, narrators, commentators, critics).
-- Depictions of physical space (cells, hallways, courtyards, etc.) and
liminal areas (walls, gates, windows, etc.), or of moments in a
prisoner's life (arrest, daily routine, boredom, violence, release, etc.).
-- Perceptions of the prison staff (wardens, officers, doctors,
chaplains, etc.) and their role within the penal system, or of the
administrative regime and prison economy at large.
-- Explorations of the possibilities and limitations of "transcending"
imprisonment.
-- Connections between narrative techniques or the novel as genre and
the (re)presentation of imprisonment, esp. the possibility or
impossibility of panoptic narrative structures (e.g. in form of an
application, extension, or critique of John Bender, D.A. Miller, and
others).
-- Possible relationships, if any, between literary conceptions of
imprisonment, the realities of incarceration, and Victorian penal
reforms (in theory or practice) or between inside and outside
perceptions of the prison.
-- Metaphorical treatments of imprisonment (and their potential affinity
with or difference from the representation of actual penal institutions).
-- Factors that contributed to the importance of prison literature and
carceral imagery during the nineteenth century (as opposed to earlier or
later periods).
-- Comparative readings (such as comparisons with contemporaneous texts
from the British Empire, Europe, or the Americas; the later reception of
Victorian prison literature; re-writings of metropolitan Victorian works
from the (former) colonial periphery; or the relationship between prison
fiction and the depiction of imprisonment in other genres or media).
-- The significance of Victorian prisons and their literary
representations for a 21st-century audience and present penological debates.
Papers should be approximately 6,000-9,000 words in length.
Please send all inquiries, abstracts, or final papers by April 30, 2005 to:
Frank Lauterbach
Georg-August-University, Goettingen
[log in to unmask]
Jan Alber
Albert-Ludwigs-University, Freiburg
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 01:20:23 -0500
From: Michael Flowers <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Gothic anti Catholic
Angela,
Ellen [Mrs Henry] Wood wrote in the Gothic mode, and some of her very early
anonymous stories are strongly anti-Catholic. The first version of her
ghost story 'Gina Montoni' displays both of these qualities. It was
published in the Nov & Dec issues of the "New Monthly Magazine" for 1851.
However, when it was republished in the "Argosy" 1875 most of the anti-
Catholic propaganda had been excised. Nearly all of her stories from 1851
are strongly anti-Catholic, but the Gothic element is not as strong in the
others.
Hope this is of some use
best wishes
Michael Flowers
www.mrshenrywood.co.uk
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 08:10:42 -0400
From: Victoria Olsen <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Learning to read
Thanks for this, Jordanna. I'll look that up.
It did occur to me that working-class autobiographies might be the best
sources for documentation of the process of learning to read, since becoming
literate was so important in those narratives. Those accounts won't
necessarily be applicable to the upper-middle-class, professionalized
Stephen family, but I'll look them up anyway.
So far my best source on the Victorian history of reading problems is
actually Sally Shaywitz's recent book Overcoming Dyslexia, which has a
historical chapter in the beginning: it referred me to articles in The
Lancet from 1895-6 by James Hinshelwood and W. Pringle Morgan, both eye
doctors, on word blindness. They provide case studies, though mostly of
adults who lose the ability to read rather than children who struggle to
acquire it.
I'll definitely post anything else I find out if people seem interested.
Best, Victoria
Postscript: thanks to Dino Felluga and Ellen Jordan as well for the helpful
sources and apologies to Patrick for formatting slips.
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 05:54:22 -0500
From: Gary Scharnhorst <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Thackeray
I am preparing a complete edition of the interviews with Mark Twain. In an
interview in August 1895, an interviewer refers to "the story gold by
Thackeray of the great French comedian who consulted a physician, who,
observing his melancholy and not knowing who he was, advised him to go and
hear himself and laugh away his fit of blues." Can anyone help me with the
allusion? Gary Scharnhorst, Professor of English, U of New Mexico
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 13:33:20 +0100
From: Chris Baggs <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Learning to read
There are two collections of selected autobiographical statement from
the 19th century edited by John Burnett which might be of some help.
They are:
'Useful toil', London: John Lane 1974 and
'Destiny Obscure', London: John Lane, 1982.
The latter, which concentrates on children and education (I think!)
may be of more use.
Chris Baggs
************************
Dr Chris Baggs,
Department of Information Studies,
University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Llanbadarn Fawr
ABERYSTWYTH SY23 3AS
WALES
UK
Tel: 01970 622183 (direct)
Fax: 01970 622190 (department)
Email: [log in to unmask]
************************
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 10:14:15 -0400
From: "Deborah D. Morse" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: learning to read
Another source you might look at is Religious Tract Society fiction, in
which there are many scenes of street arab children learning to read. A
pretty far cry from Laura Stephen, but perhaps still useful!
With good wishes,
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 10:02:11 -0500
From: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Victorian Studies, 46.2
SPECIAL ISSUE:
Papers from the Inaugural Conference of the North American Victorian Studies
Association
READER'S BLOCK
On Not Paying Attention
Stephen Arata
Wave-Theories and Affective Physiologies: The Cognitive Strain in Victorian
Novel Theories
Nicholas Dames
The Mind's Sigh: Pictured Reading in Nineteenth-Century Painting
Garrett Stewart
Response
Leah Price
EVIDENCES AND THE IMPERIAL ARCHIVE
Were Victorian Nonconformists the Worst Imperialists of All?
Jeffrey Cox
"Empire, What Empire?" Or, Why 80% of Early- and Mid-Victorians Were
Deliberately Kept in Ignorance of It
Bernard Porter
Queen Victoria and India, 1837-61
Miles Taylor
Response
Lee Sterrenburg
DISCIPLINE AND PLEASURE
Agencies of the Letter: The Foreign Office and the Ruins of Central America
Robert Aguirre
Outside Looking In: Colonials, Immigrants, and the Pleasure of the Archive
Joseph Childers
Blue Books and the Victorian Reader
Oz Frankel
Response
Philippa Levine
BOOK REVIEWS, including
Victorian Afterlives: The Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth-Century
Literature, by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
James Eli Adams
Dead from the Waist Down: Scholars and Scholarship in Literature and the
Popular Imagination, by A. D. Nuttall
Sheldon Rothblatt
Policing the Victorian Town: The Development of the Police in
Middlesbrough c.
1840-1914, by David Taylor
The Making of a Policeman: A Social History of a Labour Force in Metropolitan
London, 1829-1914, by Haia Shpayer-Makov
Roger Swift
Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870-1930,
edited by Mark S. Micale and Paul Lerner
Jenny Bourne Taylor
Watching Hannah: Sexuality, Horror and Bodily De-formation in Victorian
England, by Barry Reay
Love & Dirt: The Marriage of Arthur Munby & Hannah Cullwick, by Diane
Atkinson
Martha Vicinus
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 08:58:12 -0700
From: Sheldon Goldfarb <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Thackeray
The story rings a faint bell, but no specific reference comes to mind.
If no one else on Victoria can pin it down, a good place to consult for Mark
Twain allusions would be the Mark Twain Project at Berkeley, headed by
Robert Hirst (and featured in the Smithsonian magazine last September).
Sheldon Goldfarb
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 07:29:41 -1000
From: William Howes <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Thackeray
As I recall, this story appears at the beginning of Thackeray's Lectures on
the English Humorists. I think the story has been told with reference to
Grimaldi, but I seem to remember that according to James Hannay's note, the
clown Thackeray referred to was Rich--as in "made Gay Rich and Rich
Gay." At any rate, the story itself gets told by a number of people over
the years, about a variety of clowns.
Best,
Craig Howes
Director, Center for Biographical Research
Editor, _Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly_
Professor of English
1733 Donaghho Road
University of Hawai'i at Manoa
Honolulu, Hawai'i 96822
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Phone: 808-956-3774
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 09:28:28 -0700
From: Ruth Hoffman <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: learning to read
I haven't been following this thread very closely, but in Flora Thompson's
Lark Rise there is a passage in "A Hamlet Childhood" that describes how
Laura (the main character) learned to read. Since the Lark Rise to
Candleford trilogy is based on Thompson's life, it suggests one way
parents might have taught their children to read at home.
In this novel, Laura's father starts to teach her at home using Mavor's
First Reader. After Laura's father is sent away on a job far from their
home, Laura must fend for herself. This passage describes how Laura moves
being mystified by the printed page to the moment when "quite suddenly, as
it seemed to her, the printed characters took on a meaning."
Ruth C. Hoffman
Department of English
Northern Illinois University
DeKalb, Il
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 20:29:37 +0100
From: Gillian Kemp <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: beekeeping and gender
25 August 2004
Many thanks to Kerryn Goldsworthy, Lee Jackson, Sally Mitchell, Jack Kolb
and Michael Wolff for their helpful suggestions and comments on beekeeping.
Thanks too, to Ellen Jordan for some background relating to Army
veterinarians.
Very much appreciated.
Gillian
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 22:01:48 +0100
From: Christine Donovan <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: kelly's directories
About six months ago I thought I saw a cd rom for sale of Kelly's
Directories for central London for 1896. I'm not sure whether this was a
trade, commercial or post office directory. After repeated looking again
for this, I can find no trace of it at all; has anyone else seen this or was
it just a figment of my imagination? I am aware there are copies of the
1896 trade directory in various libraries, but I am severely limited in
accessing them. If such a cd rom exists, does anyone know where I could buy
one?
Christine Donovan [log in to unmask]
avgxmacgbh --- This message has been thoroughly scanned and is certified
virus free by MacAce.net. ---avgxmacgbh
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 23:41:43 +0100
From: Paul Lewis <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: kelly's directories
www.archivecdbooks.org or [log in to unmask] do several
Kelly's. I have 1856 and 1902. You can go direct to the London
directories page at
http://www.rod-neep.co.uk/acatalog/lnd-directories.html
best wishes
Paul
Paul Lewis
Mobile 07836 217 311
Web www.paullewis.co.uk
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 20:59:23 -0700
From: Sheldon Goldfarb <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Thackeray
Following the hint given by Craig Howes, I checked the opening paragraph of
Thackeray's _English Humourists_, and there indeed is the sought after
anecdote, in the lecture on Swift:
"Harlequin without his mask is known to present a very sober countenance,
and was himself, the story goes, the melancholy patient whom the Doctor
advised to go and see Harlequin ..."
As Craig Howes also says, there is a footnote adding the following gloss:
"The anecdote is frequently told of our performer, Rich."
Sheldon Goldfarb
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
End of VICTORIA Digest - 24 Aug 2004 to 25 Aug 2004 (#2004-78)
**************************************************************
|
