Virtual Victorians:
the digital annex
Table of Contents
Andrew Stauffer, Introduction
Part 1. Navigating Networks
1) Catherine Robson, “How We Search Now: New and Old Ways of Digging Up Wolfe's ‘Sir John Moore’”
2) Ryan Cordell, “Viral Textuality in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Newspaper Exchanges”
3) Susan Brown, “Networking Feminist Literary History: Recovering Eliza Meteyard’s Web”
4) Alison Booth, “Frances Trollope in a Victorian Network of Women’s Biographies”
5) Michael Eberle-Sinatra, “Representing Leigh Hunt’s Autobiography”
6) Natalie M. Houston, “Visualizing the Cultural Field of Victorian Poetry”
Part 2. Virtual Imaginings
7) Alison Chapman, “Virtual Victorian Poetry”
8) Peter Otto, “Artificial Environments, Virtual Realities, and the Cultivation of Propensity in the London Colosseum”
9) Ruth Brimacombe, “The Imperial Avatar in the Imagined Landscape: the Virtual Dynamics of the Prince of Wales’s Tour of India in 1875-6”
10) Lisa Hager, “Steampunk Technologies of Gender: Deryn Sharp’s Non-Binary Gender Identity in Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan Series
11) Christopher Keep, “Strange Fascination: Kipling, Benjamin, and Early Cinema”
Virtual Victorians seeks to re-examine the networks of remediation that allow contemporary researchers to reconstruct the distant nineteenth century, which has at this point necessarily become an artificial simulation. Our own virtual Victorians come to us out of the archives, which are increasingly available to computational analysis via digital surrogates; the first half of this volume considers the distinctive opportunities for literary scholarship that online research tools create. What's more, our mediated distance from the Victorian era allows us to see that it too is immersed in virtuality – both optical and textual – as a result of its own novel technologies and networks. The second half of Virtual Victorians outlines a prehistory of digital virtuality by exploring specific Victorian cultural forms and their imaginative legacies – from the "Panorama of London" of the late 1820s to early cinema around the turn of the century. In this way, the volume addresses pivotal issues in the digital humanities from a historical perspective.
Supplementary images and content for essays published in the hardcover volume.
Virtual Victorians
Networks, Connections, Technologies
Veronica Alfano and Andrew Stauffer, editors
Palgrave Macmillan, 2015