Victorian Novel Seminar Review Essay

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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

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

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  • 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