Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada 2012 Conference

The following call for papers seems ideal for all of us here at the Floating Academy, and to many of our readers as well. I hope to see you all there next April. CFP: VSAWC Conference, “Victorian Media,” (Victoria, British Columbia, April 2012) The Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada invites proposals for a conference [...]

Read Full Post »

“Novel Forms of Immanent Death”

“Novel Forms of Immanent Death” My thoughts on accidental phenomena in Victorian material culture have been a long time coming, so I apologize for my inability to sit my butt down and write. Having done so, finally, I want to focus on a peculiar, but actually quite commonsense, aspect of Victorian social theories of accidents [...]

Read Full Post »

Accidents in Victorian Visual and Material Culture

For the next month or so, the Floating Academy has decided to focus our collective blogging efforts on the topic of the Accident in Victorian visual and material culture. I’ve volunteered to write the opening rationale for our upcoming explorations of this topic because I’ve been thinking and writing about Victorian narratives of accidental phenomena for [...]

Read Full Post »

Steampunk and Neo-Victorian Month

May is Steampunk and Neo-Victorian Month here at the Floating Academy. We’ve been a little behind in our posts, but we are all collectively interested in putting together some ideas about the phenomenon, which seems to be gathering steam – pun intended, of course! – in academic circles of late.

Read Full Post »

New Illustrated London News Archive

These are exciting times for Victorian scholars with interests in the Illustrated London News. Check out this new database by Gale. Nothing satisfies my inner nerd more than these kinds of searchable archives.

Read Full Post »

The Melancholy Problem of Sweeney Todd

I was thinking about ways to improve the traffic on this thing we call the Floating Academy, and it struck me that I might write something about Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street. Maybe we’ll get a little Johnny Depp action on here. If not Depp fans, then we might reasonably expect to [...]

Read Full Post »

Green Thinking circa 1888?

I came across an interesting article in a volume of All the Year Round from 1888 that got me thinking about Victorian fascinations with the future. One particular passage about energy technologies in the year 1988 struck me as curious, especially considering our own green movement,  so I thought I would post it here for [...]

Read Full Post »

Just a little late for Eliot month…

I’ve been reading too much Wilkie Collins lately, and not even the good stuff such as The Woman in White and The Moonstone, but also the lesser-known works from the 1850s through to his last published novel in the late 1880s. I’ve now read, I think, every Collins novel, in addition to much of his [...]

Read Full Post »

Grace and the “Material Media” of Hardy’s Desperate Remedies

Thomas Hardy likes graceful women, but none are as deliberately graceful as Cytherea Graye in his first published novel, Desperate Remedies (1871). In a scene rife with small-town prying eyes and the unconscious self-caricaturizing of town locals displaying their cultivation through the organization of a Shakespeare reading, the beautiful Cytherea enters a room – her [...]

Read Full Post »

Has Steampunk finally arrived?

This is just a short note to a link for the current Steampunk exhibition at the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford. I’ve never really been sure what to make of Steampunk fiction, illustrations, and culture — the genre has always seemed marginal and lacking in scholarly rigor. Yet, I’m fascinated by Steampunk [...]

Read Full Post »

Lost in Google Books

I haven’t posted in a while because I’ve been lost in Google Books. Okay, not literally. We don’t have the technology yet to physically enter into a virtual geography of Google Books, but I can say that I’ve been overwhelmed lately by the sheer volume of materials available to my eyes and fingers.

Read Full Post »

I Dream of Luggage

Since the end of April, I’ve been houseless and thus not as productive as I was hoping I would be this summer. I won’t bore you with all of the details or complaints, but suffice it to say that my seemingly perpetual state of transition over the last few months (which has now come to [...]

Read Full Post »

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.

Read Full Post »