Sunday 24 August 2014

New Resource: Popular History in Victorian Magazines Database (PHVM)



Periodicals were an essential part of, and reflected all aspects of Victorian culture, including the Victorians'
interest in the past. The Popular History in Victorian Magazines Database (PHVM) derives from a project on popularpresentations of history in Victorian magazines:

"Histories for the Many: Historical Lifeworlds in Victorian Family, Women's and Children's Periodicals" – "Geschichte(n) für viele: Historische Lebenswelten in Familien-, Frauen- und Kinderzeitschriften des viktorianischen England" (KO 1195/15-1) in the context of the Research Group DFG FOR 875 "History in Popular Cultures of Knowledge" – "Historische Lebenswelten in populären Wissenskulturen derGegenwart".

The database presents results from a content analysis of five Victorian magazines from different sectors of the periodicals market – All the Year Round, The Leisure Hour, The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, The Ladies' Treasury, and The Boy's Own Magazine – for the years 1860, 1865 and 1870. It makes visible some of their common trends and significant differences. It thus indicates that mid-Victorian popular historical culture was marked by both mainstream interests and significant internal
diversification.

Korte, Barbara and Doris Lechner. Popular History in Victorian Magazines Database. University Library at University of Freiburg, 2014.


Sunday 3 August 2014

Call for Papers: AVSA 2015, Auckland, 'The Victorians and Memory' (Deadline 6 Oct 2014)

CALL FOR PAPERS
‘The Victorians and Memory’
Australasian Victorian Studies Association Annual Conference
3 – 5 February, 2015
University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

The keynote speaker will be Dr Robert Douglas-Fairhurst of Magdalen College, Oxford, whose recent publications include Becoming Dickens (Harvard UP, 2011) and Tennyson Among the Poets (ed., OUP, 2009).

From Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam A.H.H’ to Freud’s theory of repressed memory, the discourse of memory abounds in the literature and culture of the Victorian period. Meanwhile the cultural legacy of the era has been remembered in very different ways. In 1918 Ezra Pound claimed that ‘the odour of Victoriana is so unpleasant ... that we are content to leave the past where we find it’ - but in the contemporary world, the memory of the period has been re-energised and continues to capture our imagination.

Offers of 20-minute papers related to the conference theme are invited from scholars in any discipline. Topics covered may include, but are not restricted to:
•       Post-Victorian memories of the Victorians - in literature, art, architecture, history, and on screen
•       Victorians’ memories of earlier periods – in their literature, art, architecture, history
•       Memory in biography and autobiography
•       Memory and forgetting
•       The political deployment of memory
•       The poetry of memory and memorialisation
•       Memory and colonialism / post-colonialism
•       Memories of war
•       Neo-Victorian fiction and memory
•       The anxiety of influence


Abstracts of up to 300 words should be sent to AVSA2015@auckland.ac.nz  by Monday 6 October.