Publication: Early Career Victorianists and Social Media (JVC 17.3 -- iFirst release)

Just a quick post to announce the publication of my article on academic blogging and tweeting:

‘Early career Victorianists and social media: impact, audience and online identities’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 17:3 (2012)

It will appear in the autumn issue of the journal, but has been released early via iFirst alongside Rohan Maitzen’s article on ‘Scholarship 2.0: Blogging and/as Academic Practice’.

My article was written with the help of fellow bloggers Charlotte Mathieson, Bob Nicholson and Paul Dobraszczyk. It also owes a heavy debt to the various online communities fostered by social media and brought together via Twitter hastags: #phdchat #phdadvice #acwri #academia #highered #loveHE #twitterstorians #twitcrit #twitterature to name but a few!

Book Chapter: Contradictory Woolf

Just a quick post to announce the publication of my book chapter on Virginia Woolf’s Roger Fry (1940), the Omega Workshops and her contradictory theorising of biography:

‘"But something betwixt and between": Roger Fry and the contradictions of biography’, in Contradictory Woolf, ed. by Derek Ryan and Stella Bolaki (Clemson: Clemson University Digital Press, 2012), pp. 82-7

This chapter forms part of an edited collection emerging from the 21^st Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, held at the University of Glasgow in June 2011. Print copies are available to order, but I’m very happy to see the online version is open access. [The series back catalogue is also available online, and I have a chapter on Orlando (1928) and the ‘limits’ of biographical representation in Woolfian Boundaries (2007).]

Although the paper evolved during the writing process, becoming increasingly concerned with the relationship between Woolf's theories of biography and Fry's theories of art and craft, I thought I would whet your appetite with a glimpse of my original abstract:

"But something betwixt and between": Roger Fry and the contradictions of biography

He chooses; he synthesises; in short, he has ceased to be the chronicler; he has become an artist. (‘The New Biography’, 1927)

And thus we come to the conclusion, that he is a craftsman, not an artist; and his work is not a work of art, but something betwixt and between. (‘The Art of Biography’, 1939) 

Virginia Woolf’s Roger Fry (1940) remains the black sheep of the Woolfian canon. No critical edition is currently in print. It is conspicuously absent from the Penguin and Oxford ‘Classics’ lists, and though Vintage reproduces the text as part of its ‘Lives’ series, there is no scholarly introduction or editorial apparatus. It seems that Roger (to appropriate Woolf’s nickname for the work) has a bad reputation. This is due, in large part, to Woolf’s own response. In her diaries and letters, Roger becomes ‘donkey work & […] sober drudgery’, or nothing more than ‘a piece of cabinet making’. But it is the connection between Roger and ‘The Art of Biography’ that strikes the fatal blow.

This paper will explore Woolf’s contradictory theorising of biography, from the optimism of ‘The New Biography’ to the seeming retractions of ‘The Art of Biography’. Woolf bestows and then strips biography of its claim to art, with the result that Roger (contemporaneous with ‘The Art of Biography’) has been read as an embodiment of its conservative aesthetic. I will argue, however, that Woolf’s later writing on biography, far from enacting a volte face, serves to develop and adapt her earlier position. As such, I will offer a reassessment of Roger, using its method and practice to demonstrate an ongoing Woolfian experiment. In Roger, as in her earlier biographical works, Woolf exploits the productiveness of paradox and contradiction—that ‘something betwixt and between’ at the heart of ‘The Art of Biography’.

Review Essay on Victorian Life-Writing (JVC 17.1)

A quick post to announce the publication of my review essay on recent studies of Victorian life-writing in the Journal of Victorian Culture.

I was asked to review Max Saunders’ Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford: OUP, 2010) and Juliette Atkinson’s Victorian Biography Reconsidered: A Study of Nineteenth-Century ‘Hidden’ Lives (Oxford: OUP, 2010).

  

Both are ambitious and important studies. They help to redress a long-standing critical tradition that 'jumps over' the nineteenth century when constructing an account of innovation, dismissing the Victorian period as a time of reactionary conservatism in the writing of lives. These works are highly recommended!

TLS, 20 January 2012

Just a quick note to announce the publication of my ‘In Brief’ review of Richard Locke’s Critical Children: The Use of Childhood in Ten Great Novels (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011) in this week’s Times Literary Supplement (20 January 2012).

Source: Columbia University Press

Locke’s study accomplishes that difficult task of balancing astute criticism with readability; his chapters perform elegant and absorbing close readings, and will no doubt captivate both academic and popular audiences. Highly recommended!

TLS, 4 November 2011

Just a quick note to announce the publication of my review of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies in this week's Times Literary Supplement (4 November 2011).

Source: a/b: Auto/Biography Studies

I really enjoyed the experience of writing this review. It was a real treat to explore the pages of a/b -- pages filled with an impressive range of articles, from a variety of different disciplines, all of which explore the field of life-writing in its broadest sense. A must-read for life-writing researchers!