Victorian Novel Seminar Review Essay
From Commonplace Book
Contents
Idea A: Vic Print Culture post-2012
Structure
Contemporary methodological approaches to print culture
Use approach of review abstracts - articulate: thesis, methodology (inc. archive and specific period covered), evidence/argument, relevance/stakes
- reception history toward(?) book history
- start with Price (referring back to Secord)
- Secord 2000
- book history
- periodicals studies
- edge cases
- Gidal 2015 -- eco-book history
- Shannon 2015 -- spatial print culture (connection to Houston's network graphs)
- Imperial print culture
- Hofmeyr & Burton 2014
- McDonald Jane Eyre chapter(?)
- media theory/studies (cut?)
- Gitelman
- Parikka
Notes
- Approaches to print culture post-Leah Price
- book history
- media theory/studies
- periodicals studies
- eco-book history (Gidal)
- information/library history
- history of reading
- Liz Miller, Leah Price — maybe not so narrow time-wise
- Priya Joshi, In Another Country
- How those fields meet and how a book history approach intersects with and is different from reception history
- Joshi and Gidal are reception history
- James Seacord Victorian Sensation
- Price 2012 as "anti-reception history"?
- Distinct from binding and wood pulp —> literal material history is not so much done (ecological/industrial underpinnings)
- Wooden Os
- acid, hazardousness in print industry
- Use this to build an exam list
- Reception history is important but I (am/am not) doing that —> where you want to go and what you want to find
---
- Notes from seminar
- field-mapping, finding gaps
- helpful for mapping directions groups of scholars are going in
- lay out a question not so much a question
- discrete, localizable question/field/problem
- relatively narrow: "what are people saying in the last 5 years about political economy in the Vic novel"
- with classic works referenced - what everyone cites
- 10-15 books/articles, or 10-15 critics
- payoff: what are people doing and why does that mater? stakes: what kind of research is persuasive to you?
- doesn't need to be evaluative unless you really back it up (gap is one thing but "doing it wrong" needs more explication)
- strategies:
- constellation of articles around major text
- read intros of books and say "these are the claims they're making" - take them at their word
- "this person says x about her argument and that says y about the state of the field"
- or substantial discussion of 3 books - more evaluative, same for say 5 articles
Knowledge Gaps
- Labor
- Straight up material history
- Reprint culture (Shakespeare, other "classics")
- More granular periodization (cf. Miller 2013 and Leckie 2015)
Reading List
- Price 2012 - Price, Leah. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain.
- Gidal 2015 - Gidal, Eric. Ossianic Unconformities: Bardic Poetry in the Industrial Age. University of Virginia Press, 2015. Print.
- Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire (which chapters?)
Potential Sources
- Leckie 2015 - Leckie, Barbara. “ON PRINT CULTURE: MEDIATION, PRACTICE, POLITICS, KNOWLEDGE.” Victorian Literature and Culture 43.4 (2015): 895–907. Web.
- Miller, Slow Print
- Mussell, C19 Press in Digital Age
- Worth, Imperial Media
- Shannon, Dickens Reynolds Mayhew on Wellington St
- Toni Weller(?), Victorians and Information
- Hughes, Linda K. “SIDEWAYS!: Navigating the Material (Ity) of Print Culture.” Victorian Periodicals Review 47.1 (2014): 1–30. Print.
- Stauffer, Andrew M. “Victorian Paperwork.” Victorian Poetry 41.4 (2003): 526–531. Print.
- John, Juliet, and Matthew Bradley. Reading and the Victorians. Ed. Juliet John. Farnham: Farnham : Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2015. Web.
- Gitelman, Lisa, and Geoffrey B Pingree. New Media, 1740-1915. MIT Press, 2004. Print.
- Hack, Daniel. The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel. University of Virginia Press, 2005. Print.
- King, Andrew, Alexis Easley, and John (John S.) Morton. The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers. Ed. Andrew King, Alexis Easley, and John (John S.) *Morton. Abingdon, Oxon : Abingdon, Oxon , 2016. Print.
- Krajewski, Marcus. Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929. MIT Press, 2011. Print.
- Lee, Maurice S. “Searching the Archives with Dickens and Hawthorne: Databases and Aesthetic Judgment after the New Historicism.” ELH 79.3 (2012): 747–771. Print.
- Mussell, James. “‘Scarers in Print’: Media Literacy from Our Mutual Friend to Friend Me on Facebook.” Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism 21 (2015): 163–179. Print.
- Mussell, James. “THE PASSING OF PRINT: Digitising Ephemera and the Ephemerality of the Digital.” Media History 18.1 (2012): 77–92. Web. 15 Jan. 2015.
- Parikka, Jussi. The Anthrobscene. University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Print.
- Parikka Media Archaeology
- Rigney, Ann. “Things and the Archive: Scott’s Materialist Legacy.” Scottish Literary Review 7.2 (2015): 13–34. Print.
- Stauffer, Andrew M. “Ruins of Paper: Dickens and the Necropolitan Library.” Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net: 47 (2007): n. pag. Web. 15 Jan. 2015.
- Young, Alan R. “John Dicks’s Illustrated Edition of ‘Shakspere for the Millions.’” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 106.3 (2012): 285–310. Print.
- Brake, "On Print Culture: The State We're In." Journal of Victorian Culture (2001)
- Gitelman, Lisa. Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents
- Guillory, John. "On Genesis of the Media Concept." Critical Inquiry (2010)
- Howsam, Leslie. Old Books and New Histories. Toronto UP, 2006.
- Palmer and Buckland, eds. A Return to the Common Reader: Print Culture and the Novel.
- Rubery, Matthew. The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction after the Invention of the News.
- Stiphas, Theodore. The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control.
Idea B: Victorian Thing Culture
Notes
- Work responding to or in the orbit of Freedgood 2006
- constellation of articles around a major text (per JOT)
- or read intros of books and say "these are the claims they're making" - taking them at their word
- "this person says x about her argument and that says y about the state of the field"
Knowledge Gaps
- how to connect the narrative unconscious and the textual unconscious? A McLeodian and Freedgoodian reading?
- it's striking that both use the metaphor of the subconscious and of memory
- what about anachronistic things like old books?
Reading List
Potential Sources
- Freedgood, "Ghostly Reference"
- Barthes, "Reality Effect"
- Stallybrass, "Marx's Coat"
- Price 2012
- Marcus (?) new description/literalism
- Sedgwick Reparative Reading
- Asa Briggs, Victorian Things
- Andrew H Miller, Novels Behind the Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative
- Emily Apter, Feminizing the Fetish (about france)
- Apter and Pietz, eds, Fetishism as a Cultural Discourse
- Bill Brown, The Material Unconscious
- ibid., A Sense of Things
- ibid., "Thing Theory"
- Jones and Stallybrass, Ren Clothing and the Materials of Memory
- Spyer, ed, Border Fetishisms (Stallybrass's "Marx's Coat" is in it)
- Schor, Reading in Detail
- McLeod, FIAT fLUX
- Leighton and Surridge, Object Lessons: Victorians and the Material Text, Cahiers victoriens et eduoardiens (that whole issue)
- Cynthia Wall, "The Rhetoric of Description and the Spaces of Things," C18 Genre and Culture, ed. Dennis Todd and Cynthia Wall
- Michael Taussig, My Cocaine Museum
- Bizup, Manufacturing Culture: Vindications of Early Victorian Industry
- Goldhill, The Buried Life of Things
From Google Scholar:
- Ketabgian, Lives of Machines
- Plotz, Portable Property
- Wynne, Women and Personal Property in the Victorian Novel
- Buurma, "Anonymity, corporate authority, and the archive: The production of authorship in late-Victorian England" (VS 2007)
- Rappaport, "Imperial possessions, cultural histories, and the material turn: Response" (VS 2008)
- Kucich, "The Unfinished Historicist Project: In Praise of Suspicion" (counterargument??)
- The Storied Lives of Non-Human Narrators Lars Bernaerts, Marco Caracciolo, Luc Herman, Bart Vervaeck
- Brown, Textual Materialism, PMLA
