Mariaconcetta Costantini and Andrew King launched Victorian Popular Fictions (the VPFJ) in Spring 2019 to publish the new research of the organisation on an Open Access online platform to a wider audience.
Focussing on popular narrative in all its forms, VPFJ solicits articles which help us re-evaluate our view of Victorian culture as a whole and how that might be considered, including debates about canonicity and hybridity, digitisation, and the identification of pedagogical issues in the teaching of Victorian popular fictions. We also invite critical annotated editions of short nineteenth-century texts that will be of interest to our readers.
VPFJ comes out twice a year, in Spring and Autumn.
General Editors: Janine Hatter and Helena Ifill | Publisher: Edward Everett Root Publishers
This innovative new series delivers original and transformative feminist research into the work of leading women writers who were widely read in their time, but who have been under-represented in the canon.
General Editors: Janine Hatter and Helena Ifill | Publisher: Edward Everett Root Publishers
A new series of edited collections based on innovative or under-researched perspectives on Victorian literature and culture. The aim of the series is to create conversations across popular and canonical literature; literature, art and culture; and literature’s connections to wider contexts and theories
Other Publications Curated by VPFA Members
Cluster: ‘Popular Victorian Fictions: Where Form Meets Function’
Edited by Janine Hatter and Julia Kuehn
Contents
Janine Hatter and Julia Kuehn, ‘Introduction’ p. 80
Jonathan Potter, ‘Drawn from Life: Categorical Specificity and Popular Sketch Writing from Mary Russell Mitford to Charles Dickens’ p. 87
Arthur Charlesworth, ‘Fake News: Fictions in a Newspaper Frame in Renton Nicholson’s Town‘ p. 103
Janine Hatter and Craig Johnson, ‘A Stylometric Analysis of the Ghost-Writing of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Bound to John Company in Belgravia: A London Magazine‘ p. 121
Helena Ifill, ‘Charlotte Riddell’s Varying Forms: Volumes, Reprints and Serials’ p. 145
Helena Esser, ‘“In revolt against reason”: The Politics of Romance in Ouida’s Popular Fiction’ p. 163
[Link to journal’s page to follow]
‘Victorian Popular Journalism’ (Special Issue)
Guest Editors: Drs Janine Hatter and Helena Ifill
I hope nobody will be shocked, but it is only proper that I should confess, before writing another line, that I am about to disclose the existence of a Disreputable Society […] Our object is to waste our time, misemploy our intellects, and ruin our morals; or, in other words, to enjoy the prohibited luxury of novel-reading. (Wilkie Collins, ‘A Petition to the Novel-Writers’, Household Words, 1856)
These tongue-in-cheek words came from the pen of Wilkie Collins at a time when he was producing numerous articles, many of them for Charles Dickens’ popular periodical, Household Words. With a healthy dash of irony, Collins (in his role as a writer of non-fiction) casts aspersions on the value of fiction (the field in which he was hoping to make a lasting name for himself, and indeed soon would with the publication of The Woman in White). In doing so, Collins raises implicit questions about the relationship between journalism and fiction and about hierarchies of literary form. While Collins’s move into fiction suggests he prized one genre over the other, his journalism demonstrates his versatility – a trait that can be seen in the work of many authors (such as Margaret Oliphant, not to mention Dickens) who also supported themselves through their journalist outputs. His journalism covers travel writing, social commentary and satire, art and history, personal anecdotes, biographical sketches, and much more. As with his novels, Collins aimed to make his journalism both entertaining and socially-engaged. This element of his body of work remains largely untouched by modern critics, as do the journalistic works of many Victorian popular authors. This special issue seeks to explore the journalism of Wilkie Collins and other Victorian popular authors, and more broadly to review the role of popular journalism in Victorian society.
Further information is available at the journal site: http://wilkiecollinssociety.org/journal/
The Wilkie Collins Journal is an online, peer-reviewed academic journal committed to publishing innovative and rigorous research into one of the most successful and important authors of the nineteenth century, as well as his related authors, periodicals and genres broadly defined.
Contents
Janine Hatter and Helena Ifill, ‘Introduction: Victorian Popular Journalism’
Samuel Saunders, ‘”To get to the very bottom of the social fabric”: Mid-Victorian Journalism and the Police Officer, c. 1856-1877’
A. Luxx Mishou, ‘Murder for a Penny: Jack the Ripper and the Structural Impact of Sensational Reporting’
Carole O’Reilly, ‘Professional Identity and Social Capital: the Personal Networks of Victorian Popular Journalists’
Kaari Newman, ‘Temple Bar’s New Portrait of Femininity: Active Domesticity in Mary Braddon’s Aurora Floyd‘
Julia Podziewska, ‘The Woman in White‘s Vestry Episodes: Reworking Journalism as Novelistic Discourse’
Ellen Stockstill, ‘Teaching Wilkie Collins and the Periodical Press’
‘Gender in Victorian Popular Fiction, Art and Culture’ (Special Issue)
Special Issue edited by Janine Hatter and Helena Ifill
Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies is a peer-reviewed, online journal committed to publishing insightful and innovative scholarship on gender studies and nineteenth-century British literature, art and culture.
This special issue examines all aspects of the relationship between gender and the “popular”. Popular fiction in the nineteenth century was repeatedly, and often negatively, associated with women and femininity, perceived as a mass of “silly novels by lady novelists” (George Eliot). Existing scholarship (by critics such as Solveig R. Robinson and Jennifer Phegley) has already done much to challenge the old Victorian notion that popular fiction was second-rate literature produced by a second-class gender. This issue reassesses and reinvigorates the relationship between popular fiction and the feminine, but also goes beyond this in order to interrogate the interactions between gender and popular genres more broadly.
Contents
Janine Hatter and Helena Ifill, ‘Gender in Victorian Popular Fiction and Culture’
Philippa Abbot, ‘Popular Fictions of Gender in the Newgate Novels’
Brooke Fortune, ‘Jack Sheppard and the Eternal Boy’
Mary Clai Jones, ‘Refashioning Spaces of Play in Victorian Doll Stories’
Flore Janssen, ‘”Common Rules of Street Politeness”? The Clash of Gender and Social Class in Representations of Street Harassement by Elizabeth Gaskell and Eliza Lynn Linton’
Erin Loutitt, ‘”not men’s playthings and slaves”: Popular Fiction, Gender Inequality, and Women’s Education in Alice Mangold Diehl’s Dr Paull’s Theory‘
Susan Hroncek, ‘”They would Take Me for a Witch or Poisoner”: Marginalization and the Woman Scientist in Fin-de-Siècle Speculative Fiction’
