---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: VICTORIA Digest - 21 Nov 2004 to 22 Nov 2004 (#2004-166)
From: "Automatic digest processor" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, November 23, 2004 5:02 am
To: "Recipients of VICTORIA digests" <[log in to unmask]>
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There are 13 messages totalling 433 lines in this issue.
Topics of the day:
1. Blackwood's bibliography updated
2. googled (2)
3. etext - The Business of Pleasure
4. NAVSA CFP: 1 Feb 2005
5. Rethinking empathy (2)
6. Edward Dowden
7. empathy (and sympathy) for literary characters
8. reminder re: googled
9. Wilkie Collins
10. New collection of Arnold essays
11. Water Pipe Query
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Date: Mon, 22 Nov 2004 12:35:24 -0000
From: "Finkelstein, David" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Blackwood's bibliography updated
Dear Colleagues,
This is just to inform people that after a long hiatus, I have finally
managed to update the bibliography of articles relevant to Blackwood's and
Blackwood's Magazine, part of my Blackwood's Magazine online page at
http://mcdept.qmuc.ac.uk/Blackwoods/blackwoods.HTML
<http://mcdept.qmuc.ac.uk/Blackwoods/blackwoods.HTML> .
The bibliography can be found at
http://mcdept.qmuc.ac.uk/Blackwoods/blackbib.html#BM1990
<http://mcdept.qmuc.ac.uk/Blackwoods/blackbib.html#BM1990>
If there are any additions, amendments or corrections, do please let me
know, and I'll try and get them done faster than has been the case
recently....
Best wishes,
David
David Finkelstein
Professor of Media and Print Culture
Social Sciences, Media and Communication
Queen Margaret University College
Clerwood Terrace
Edinburgh EH12 8TS
tel. and fax: 0131-317-3603
email: [log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 22 Nov 2004 14:33:06 -0000
From: Lee Jackson <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: googled
An article in the Guardian today highlights Google's latest attempt to
conquer the world: "Scholar Google" (I kid you not)
http://www.scholar.google.com/
To quote their site:-
"Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature,
including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and
technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to
find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional
societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly
articles available across the web."
It's only in beta testing and looks to throw up a mish-mash of abstracts
from commercial journals, doubtless willingly supplied by publishers looking
for purchases of individual articles, plus items published on university web
sites, book titles et al. - it seems to lack anything from
http://victorianresearch.org/ for instance, although I may be wrong.
It certainly seems to filter out some of the junk (esp. indexes of sites,
books etc. built to get indexed themselves, and sell ad space) that's
increasingly choking up google searches BUT there's no indication of what it
IS searching, especially the relationship with commercial publishers'
abstracts, where it's getting information on theses etc etc. ... basically
anything I'd need as a librarian (yes, my secret life is revealed!) to
evaluate the resource.
I'd be curious to know from anyone actually doing research at the moment
whether they would/will find this useful.
Lee
www.victorianlondon.org
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 22 Nov 2004 10:15:12 -0500
From: Terry Meyers <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: googled
My son, a molecular geneticist, brought Google Scholar to my =
attention =20
as being perhaps of more interest to scientists than to humanists or =20
social scientists. And in just a quick check, I agree.
Though it did churn up one of my Swinburne articles, I was =
astonished =20
to discover a download available for $25.19 from IngentaConnect--no =20
doubt a good value given the quality of the article, but as far as I =20
know none of that money would flow into my pocket. It looks like =20
IngentaConnect has a commercial relationship with Oxford University =20
Press. Indeed, Ingenta says of itself that its "technology and =20
services=A0manipulate the printed publication to create new revenue =20
streams and services for over 270=A0publishers."
Oh that that stream could be manipulated (at least part of it) =
to =20
those who produce what publishers publish....
On Nov 22, 2004, at 9:33 AM, Lee Jackson wrote:
> willingly supplied by publishers looking
> for purchases of individual articles,
> , especially the relationship with commercial publishers'
> abstracts,
> =
-----------------------------------------------------------------------=20=
> ----------------------------
Terry L. Meyers Phone: 757-221-3932
English Department Fax: 757-221-1844
College of William and Mary
Williamsburg VA 23187-8795
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Date: Mon, 22 Nov 2004 18:04:00 -0000
From: Lee Jackson <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: etext - The Business of Pleasure
I am pleased to announce a new rare-ish etext:
Edmund Yates, The Business of Pleasure, 1865 [this edition 1879]
http://www.victorianlondon.org/publications5/business.htm
Principally articles that appeared in All the Year Round, I think. Some are
absolutely fascinating, and all pretty much mark Yates as a skilful imitator
of Dickens's journalism, if nothing else!
regards,
Lee
www.victorianlondon.org
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Date: Mon, 22 Nov 2004 11:17:23 -0500
From: North American Victorian Studies Association <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: NAVSA CFP: 1 Feb 2005
The third annual conference of the North American Victorian Studies
Association
will be held 30 September - 2 October 2005 at the University of Virginia in
Charlottesville, site of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello in the foothills of
the
Blue Ridge. The conference will feature plenary addresses by George
Levine and
by Mary Poovey. Seminars on work in progress will be offered by Jay Clayton,
Linda Colley, Helena Michie, and Anthony Wohl. In addition, and as a new
conference development, Isobel Armstrong, Neil Hertz, and U. C. Knoepflmacher
will each conduct a master class on an assigned Victorian text. To
participate
in the conference, one must be a member of NAVSA.
NAVSA 2005 welcomes submission of paper proposals, for delivery as 20-minute
conference talks, on any topic in Victorian literature, history, and culture,
with a view to showcasing the best of current work in the intersecting fields
that make up Victorian studies. Rather than prescribe a theme, the
organizers
will braid the accepted papers into panels and weave some of these panels
into
strands spanning the three conference days. The following list of set
strands
and likely threads is intended to stimulate ideas, not hem them in; and the
program will include sessions that are unattached to these strands. Any
topic of
interest within the NAVSA compass is eligible.
CROSSINGS
* transatlantic nineteenth century
* conflicts: war, dueling, insurrection
* border, migration, exchange
* Victorian & contemporary disciplinarity
* the Bar
GENERATIONS
* epochs, strata, phases, species
* utopia, dystopia, social engineering, genetics, prophecy
* ancestors, offspring, lines of descent / lines of dissent
* governess & pupil, master & disciple, initiate & acolyte
* families
INNOVATION / RESTORATION
* science & religion
* reform: parliament, education, fashion
* rear guard & avant garde
* Pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism, Arts & Crafts
* new women & old boys
INSIDES / OUTSIDES
* thresholds & limits: roads, walls, clothes, skin
* house, pub, suburb, city
* architecture of the psyche, the inner body, faces & skulls
* empire, colony, nation
COLLECTIONS
* museum, library, shop, cabinet
* hoarding, sharing, display
* kings’ treasuries, queens’ gardens, trash
* anthology, syllabus, curriculum, conference
TEXTUALITIES
* modes of production, modes of reception
* texts, graphics, typographics, metrics
* periodical press, part issue, seriality
* the sociology of the text
* propaganda & censorship
* prestidigital: the Victorians on-line
Proposals, 2 pages in length (500 words) with a 1-page curriculum vitae,
should
be submitted electronically in attachment form to
[log in to unmask] by 1
FEBRUARY 2005.
Further information about NAVSA and the 2005 conference may be found at
http://www.sla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/navsa/
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 21 Nov 2004 14:47:16 EST
From: Robert Lapides <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Rethinking empathy
Despite the confidence I expressed myself with, I've begun
to think my take on empathy was misguided. Isn't the
whole point of empathy to find it in ourselves to feel for
others we wouldn't ordinarily identify with? In other words,
isn't the capacity for empathy something that not everyone
possesses, primarily because lots of people feel for only
those other people who are like themselves?
Isn't it our empathy for fools, villains and other unattractive
types that deepens our understanding, in that, against our
inclinations, we identify certain aspects of their humanity
with our own? In war, e.g., we sympathize with the victims
in our enemy's camp, but if we want to understand our
enemy's motivations we may have to empathize with these,
at least momentarily.
If this way of understanding empathy makes sense, then
which Victorian novels most encouraged this kind of
unexpected, deeper understanding? I'm not sure.
Bob Lapides
CUNY
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Date: Sun, 21 Nov 2004 06:33:33 -0800
From: Lisa Brocklebank <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Edward Dowden
Dear Members,
Could anyone suggest where/how I might locate information on Edward Dowden
-- a reviewer for _The Contemporary Review_?
Many thanks,
Lisa Brocklebank
PhD candidate
Dept of English
Brown University
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 20 Nov 2004 21:29:54 -0500
From: Kathleen O'Neill Sims <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: empathy (and sympathy) for literary characters
Like Simon Poe, I have thought about responding to this thread, and then
did not.
I guess there are two issues at hand. Margot K. Louis pinpointed one.
Where does empathy stray into narcissism? When does the mirror cease to be
a magic portal into another life, another dimmension, another view, and
become merely a self-serving portrait of our own desires and aspirations?
Like many of you, I entered this profession in the belief that reading
could make us better people, more humane, vis a vis the act of entering and
understanding a different consciousness, or writerly facsimile thereof,
from my own.
Heather Morton noted the very real difference between sympathy and empathy.
Jerome McGann pointed this same distinction out to me by contrasting
Browning's aesthetic distance in his dramatic monologues with the "inner-
standing point" of Rossetti's lyric poetry. I'm not sure that this
distinction doesn't apply wholesale to the lyric as opposed to the
dramatic. And yet this distinction breaks down, too, between the
inescapable confrontation of solipsism with empathy. Alastor is alive in
well in *The House of Life.*
Jack Kolb notes that there are no memorable male characters. Look to the
poems. I love Caponsacchi. Adonais, Tithonus, and Saul break my heart.
Fra Lippo Lippi gives me hope. What woman (or man) does not want to be
kissed by the poet (who cares if he was a tad on the narcissistic side?)
who wrote "Nuptial Sleep?" Who does not weep for the forsaken merman?
It's so very hard to tell where we begin and text leaves off, where desire
and perception part ways, is it not? We all take after Menippus Lycius.
But what a beautiful dream he was granted if only for a short space of time.
The cold, clear light of Apollonian reason ruins everything.
Best,
Kathleen O'Neill Sims
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 22 Nov 2004 12:45:57 -0600
From: Patrick Leary <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: reminder re: googled
Just a quick reminder that VICTORIA is not the place to discuss online
resources like this (or anything else, for that matter) except as they
pertain *specifically* to Victorian research.
-- Patrick
____________
Patrick Leary
listowner, VICTORIA
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 22 Nov 2004 18:50:21 -0000
From: Andrew Mangham <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Wilkie Collins
pfcp
This is just an update on the Wilkie Collins Conference. I'd like to =
remind list members that the deadline for abstracts is in a week's time =
- 30th November.
I'll look forward to hearing from some of you
Andrew
____________________________
Andrew Mangham
Department of English Literature
University of Sheffield
Western Bank
Sheffield
S10 2TN
[log in to unmask]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sensation_novel
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 22 Nov 2004 13:59:45 -0500
From: Pat and Govind Menon <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: New collection of Arnold essays
A few months ago, list members expressed regret that there was not an easily
accessible and inexpensive collection of Arnold essays available. Edgeways
Books has now published <The Literary Criticism of Matthew Arnold> Selected
and Introduced by Brian Crick and Michael DiSanto (pp. xxiv + 292,
paperback, 9.96 pounds)
More detailed information may be found at
http://www.edgewaysbooks.com/acatalog/Arnold.html
Pat Menon
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 22 Nov 2004 19:35:56 -0000
From: Jill Grey <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Rethinking empathy
Robert Lapides wrote -
> Isn't it our empathy for fools, villains and other
> unattractive types that deepens our understanding, in that,
> against our inclinations, we identify certain aspects of
> their humanity with our own?
Looking more closely at the characters for whom I've felt some empathy (I
mentioned Maggie Tulliver and my childhood 'encounter' with Heathcliffe) I
realise that what they have in common is an experience of personal conflict.
I didn't pile them on in my earlier post, but another that comes to mind is
Silas Marner who is as different from myself as could imaginably be, yet
whose entire life and place in the community was turned inside out by
finding a baby. I empathise with him. Is this the 'disgusting'
indentification that Byatt's Nanson speaks of or is it a just engagement
with characters - not mis-treated or misunderstood, but who are forced by
circumstances to undergo some deeply painful 'rite of passage' ?
Jill
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 22 Nov 2004 15:49:40 -0800
From: natalie schroeder <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Water Pipe Query
Hi,
In Ouida's Syrlin, a novelist invites a young man to his rooms and offers
"a whiff or two from a water pipe." What was a water pipe? Could opium be
connected? Thanks.
Natalie Schroeder
University of Mississippi
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End of VICTORIA Digest - 21 Nov 2004 to 22 Nov 2004 (#2004-166)
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