Transatlanticism’s “radical claims”

I also attended the fascinating NAVSA session that Connie writes about: a conversation on “New Directions in Victoran Studies” between Amanda Claybaugh, Elaine Freedgood, Caroline Levine, John Plotz, and Andrew Stauffer.  I wanted to respond to Connie’s post here because, like Connie, I have also been considering Amanda Claybaugh’s claim that adhering to national boundaries in our study of literature is, at best, arbitrary, and, at worst, misleading. 

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The Victorian Atlantic

I’ve been musing about transatlanticism since last year’s NAVSA conference. At one of the concluding panel discussions Amanda Claybaugh suggested that the Victorians’ orientation towards the United States is hard for us to grasp if we only focus on the literature of the United Kingdom.

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Archive Fever, Part Two

One question I get from friends and family a lot when they hear I’m travelling to look at the diaries and letters of a little known woman writer is, “Why don’t they just put it all up on the internet?” I try to explain how much you get from seeing the physical manuscript—that ink colours,watermarks, and the type of stationery can all be clues as to the date and circumstances of composition.

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Heritage Tours

In the comments section to Gregory’s post on the phonograph, I promised that my next entry would be on Dickens…

Then, however, I saw this. A William Morris vacation? Awesome. Led by Peter Cormack? Even more awesome. The tour’s highlight is a visit to Kelmscott Manor, Morris’s beloved country home. Total cost? 300 pounds. Now if only I could find a way to Britain…

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Character-Building: Disraeli and the “Physiognomy of Writing”

Emily’s fascinating post on Sublime Penmanship works hand in glove with research I’ve been conducting on graphology in Victorian Britain, as part of a chapter on the role of handwriting in R. L. Stevenson’s Jekyll & Hyde. The first book-length study of handwriting analysis was published in 1622 by Camillo Baldi, an Italian doctor of medicine and philosophy. However, the most broadly read text within England upon the subject was most likely the Swiss pastor Johann Kaspar Lavater’s Physiognomy. (Published in German in 1775, this study had gone through fifty-five editions by 1810, at least twenty of which were available in England.)

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Community-building through Victorian Deaf Periodicals (and Victorianist Blogs?)

As we begin this blogging journey, I am looking forward to participating in new networks of thinkers, writers, and readers with my fellow Floaters here at the Floating Academy and other bloggers and commenters in the academic blogosphere. This formation of an online network among those who share common interests, and how that network contributes to the formation of new communities has many historical precursors, of course, but the resemblance I keep coming back to is one that is related to my research in Victorian Deaf and Disability Studies.

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Sublime Penmanship

A guest post by Emily Simmons

This week my research has taken me on a brief foray into the cultural history of handwriting. I’d like to think about the forms and functions of handwriting in a print culture.  How, for example, might penmanship education and practice have changed in an age where print was prevalent, but hand-written letters were still the main form of daily correspondence? Or, how might would-be authors have viewed handwriting (or been judged by it) as they composed with an eye to ‘getting into print’?

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The Mystery of Life and the Science of Heredity in The Heavenly Twins

“Now don’t say a word if you’ve read it… I owe everyone a grudge who tells me the plot of a story that I’m interested in” (The Heavenly Twins 1893, 527)

While making my way through New Woman novels this year, I’ve been musing on the New Woman and the problem of heredity. I’ll save my thoughts on Neo-Lamarkian and Darwinian theories for another post – for the nonce, I’d like to open up a discussion about heredity’s relationship to mystery novels in Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893).

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Archive Fever, Part I

Archival work is tough. On scholars as people I mean. I’m a fellow at the Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin this month, doing some research on Dinah Mulock Craik. Texas is great so far—the people really are that friendly, Austin really is that weird, and the outdoors really is that hot! And, even though Craik was born in Stoke-on-Trent, Texas may be one of the most appropriate places in the world for the diaries of an author whose bestseller, John Halifax, Gentleman (1856) is the original rags-to-riches story of the self-made man.

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Going the distance

The 2009 spring ascent season on Mount Everest has just drawn to a close, with what may be more than 330 climbers managing to reach the summit of the mountain in this record-setting year. The march to the top of Everest is a fascinating phenomenon, not least for the entanglements of cultural values, political exigencies, and psychological contouring that are revealed in each individual bid to stand on the highest spot on earth.

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ACCUTE Roundtable on Academic Blogging

Two weeks ago, along with Floating Academy members Eddy Kent and Emily Simmons, I attended a roundtable on academic blogging at ACCUTE hosted by Rohan Maitzen, Victorian professor at Dalhousie University and academic blogger. I had the good fortune to take one of Prof. Maitzen’s classes as an undergraduate, so it was a real pleasure to see her again and hear her thoughts on this burgeoning forum for literary critics.

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On Railways and the Aesthetics of Floating

I was very pleased when we first decided to call this blog “The Floating Academy” because I’ve been interested in the metaphorics of floating for a few years now. The Victorians were fascinated, as well as irritated, by floating things.

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High Fidelity: Throwing Voices, Throwing Kisses

THE phonograph, the phonograph,
‘Tis a wonderful thing, the phonograph;
But what happened to me will make you laugh,
When I brought home a new phonograph.
I felt rather gay,
So I thought I’d essay
How a kiss would come out
In a phonograph way.

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