Baker Street Irregulars discussion

19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century

This issue, guest edited by Emma Francis and Nadia Valman, revisits the Victorian East End, examining its distinctive spaces including docks, libraries, music halls, medical missions, and asylums. These essays explore fiction, photographs, street dances, diaries, investigative journalism, and texts of social investigation: they cumulatively demonstrate how the East End continues to provoke sharp questions about urban life and social progress.

I like the "City of Others: Photographs from the City of London Asylum Archive" by Caroline Bressey. Pictures! Of Victorian minorities and poor people. Which you don't often see.

Neo-Victorian Studies
Neo-Victorian Studies is a inter-disciplinary, peer-reviewed, peer reviewed e-journal dedicated to contemporary re-imaginings of the nineteenth century in Literature, the Arts and Humanities.

I really wanted to read the article on Vesta Tilley because I am so into her right now but the link doesn't work. Oh well I sent an email. Lots of interesting stuff.

VICTORIA
"A discussion list founded and managed since 1993 by Patrick Leary and hosted at Indiana University, Bloomington, VICTORIA is dedicated to supporting research into Victorian Britain and providing a collaborative forum for researchers, teachers, and students to debate and exchange ideas and information about this period."

LISTSERV! So interesting to see Victorian history scholars (geeks?) talk about their interests from 15 years ago. Still going!

I've also been using Google Scholar to plumb the darkest depths of the internet. One interesting article I have found is "The case study of Sherlock Holmes (2009): an ethnographic investigation into the systematic cultivation of a fan"

From the abstract:
"The scope of this study encompasses the commercialisation of storytelling's social functions, the media's ability to manipulate both viewers and scholars, and an examination into the practice of cultivation theory and its relationship with culture. Within this study, the definition and application of the term "fan" is questioned, and both the theoretical and commercial value of studying this particular part of the audience is examined.... Abercrombie and Longhurst (1998) place fans along a five-stage continuum, which includes the consumer, the cultist, enthusiast, and petty producer. Bourdieu, from a cultural studies perspective, defines fandom as a working class interaction with a text, and places them last on his own scale after the dominant bourgeoisie, the dominated bourgeoisie and the petit bourgeoisie... In terms of methodology, this study is an instrumental and collective case study about a consumer's cultivated response to the movie Sherlock Holmes (2009)."

juicy