@article{fyfe_2022, title={How to cheat on your final paper: Assigning AI for student writing}, volume={3}, ISSN={["1435-5655"]}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00146-022-01397-z}, DOI={10.1007/s00146-022-01397-z}, journal={AI & SOCIETY}, publisher={Springer Science and Business Media LLC}, author={Fyfe, Paul}, year={2022}, month={Mar} } @article{keck_oiva_fyfe_2022, title={LAJOS KOSSUTH AND THETRANSNATIONAL NEWS: ACOMPUTATIONAL AND MULTILINGUALAPPROACH TO DIGITIZED NEWSPAPERCOLLECTIONS}, volume={11}, ISSN={["1469-9729"]}, DOI={10.1080/13688804.2022.2146905}, abstractNote={The scale of newspaper digitization and emergence of computational research methods has opened new opportunities for scholarship on the history of the press–as well as a new set of problems. Those problems compound for research that spans national as well as linguistic contexts. This article offers a novel methodological approach for confronting these challenges by synthesizing computational with conventional methods and working across a collaborative multilingual team. We present a case study studying the transnational and multilingual news event of Hungarian revolutionary Lajos Kossuth’s journey to the United States in 1851–52. Our approach helps to demonstrate some of the characteristic patterns and complexities in transatlantic news circulation, including the pathways, reach, temporality, vagaries, and silences of this system. These patterns, in turn, offer some insights into how we understand the significance of this era for histories of the press.}, journal={MEDIA HISTORY}, author={Keck, Jana and Oiva, Mila and Fyfe, Paul}, year={2022}, month={Nov} } @article{fyfe_2021, title={LITERATURE, PRINT CULTURE, AND MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES, 1880-1900: MANY INVENTIONS}, volume={27}, ISSN={["1469-9729"]}, DOI={10.1080/13688804.2020.1845488}, abstractNote={Interdisciplinary scholarship on media is a tricky thing. If media means ‘middle,’ media scholarship can offer both the meeting ground for and the boundary between its disciplinary participants. Wh...}, number={1}, journal={MEDIA HISTORY}, author={Fyfe, Paul}, year={2021}, month={Jan}, pages={121–123} } @article{fyfe_2018, title={Access, Computational Analysis, and Fair Use in the Digitized Nineteenth-Century Press}, volume={51}, ISSN={1712-526X}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/vpr.2018.0051}, DOI={10.1353/vpr.2018.0051}, abstractNote={Abstract:This essay pivots from a discussion of copyright in nineteenth-century periodical discourse to the near history of copyright, commercially licensed resources, and fair use that shapes digital periodicals scholarship today. Using the digitization of British Library newspapers as a case study, I demonstrate how arguments about access to public domain materials do not fully account for the complex international landscape of rights and exceptions for digital periodicals resources. This landscape is also changing with the emergence of legal exceptions for computational research methods like text and data mining. These methods may point to new forms of scholarly communication, particularly "transformative uses" that work around the restrictive vestiges of copyright law. Ultimately, this essay claims that scholars need to understand the changing parameters of copyright, not simply as a set of rules that affects their day-to-day work but as an opportunity to shape the law and advocate for creative forms of research and scholarly communication.}, number={4}, journal={Victorian Periodicals Review}, publisher={Project Muse}, author={Fyfe, Paul}, year={2018}, pages={716–737} } @article{fyfe_ge_2018, title={Image Analytics and the Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Newspaper}, volume={10}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.22148/16.026}, DOI={10.22148/16.026}, abstractNote={The nineteenth-century British periodical press took textual production to a scalethat, for many commentators then and now, summoned the sublime. It was a"flood" which was "too vast to be dealt with as a whole," in the words of theBritish Quarterly Reviewin 1859.}, journal={Journal of Cultural Analytics}, publisher={CA: Journal of Cultural Analytics}, author={Fyfe, Paul and Ge, Qian}, year={2018}, month={Oct} } @article{fyfe_2018, title={Reading, Making, and Metacognition: Teaching Digital Humanities for Transfer}, volume={12}, url={http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/12/2/000394/000394.html}, number={2}, journal={Digital Humanities Quarterly}, author={Fyfe, Paul}, year={2018} } @article{fyfe_2018, title={Scale}, volume={46}, ISSN={["1470-1553"]}, url={https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:20733/}, DOI={10.1017/S1060150318001006}, abstractNote={- 611 Effectiveness The present paper aims to investigate the effectiveness of a behavioral therapy program for reducing the severity of the behaviors of aggression, oppositional defiant, and social withdrawal in a sample of children with autism spectrum disorder. The main sample consisted of (24) children (14 males and 10 females) of those who frequently visit the Centre of Special Needs at South Valley University and diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. The participants were distributed to an experimental group of 12 children and a control group of 12 children. The authors developed a scale for the behaviors of aggression, oppositional defiant, and social withdrawal. Then, they prepared a behavioral therapy program to reduce the severity of the behaviors of aggression, oppositional defiant, and social withdrawal. The findings indicated statistically significant differences between the experimental group and the control group in the post-test of the scale for the behaviors of aggression, oppositional defiant and social withdrawal in favor of the experimental group. There were statistically significant differences in the experimental group between the pre-test and post-test of scale for the behaviors of aggression, oppositional defiant and social withdrawal in favor of the post-test. Finally, there were no statistically significant differences in the experimental group in the pre-test and post-test of the scale, indicating the effectiveness of the prepared program used for reducing the severity of d of the behaviors of aggression, oppositional defiant, and social withdrawal among the sample of children with autism spectrum disorder.}, number={3-4}, journal={VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE}, author={Fyfe, Paul}, year={2018}, pages={848–851} } @article{fyfe_2017, title={Radiant Virtuality}, DOI={10.1057/978-1-349-95195-6_6}, abstractNote={This chapter situates Victoria's Lost Pavilion amid related work in virtual modeling and their interpretive problematics. Drawing from a tradition in textual criticism, this chapter renovates Jerome McGann's notion of "radiant textuality" to extended virtual objects and built environments in digital space. It argues that projects like Victoria's Lost Pavilion must emphasize their work as interpretive models over their appeal as experiential time machines. These models should expose their sources and critical conjectures as much as they appeal to the historical imagination with immersive representational fidelity. What results is "radiant virtuality," linking innovative work in immersive environments to our scholarly legacy of curating and interpreting the cultural past.}, journal={Victoria's Lost Pavilion}, publisher={Palgrave Macmillan US}, author={Fyfe, Paul}, year={2017}, pages={97–115} } @book{fyfe_harrison_hill_joffe_setzer_2017, title={Victoria's Lost Pavilion}, ISBN={9781349951949 9781349951956}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95195-6}, DOI={10.1057/978-1-349-95195-6}, abstractNote={This book explores the significance of the now-lost pavilion built in the Buckingham Palace Gardens in the time of Queen Victoria for understanding experiments in British art and architecture at the o}, publisher={Palgrave Macmillan US}, author={Fyfe, Paul and Harrison, Antony and Hill, David B. and Joffe, Sharon L. and Setzer, Sharon M.}, year={2017} } @article{fyfe_2016, title={A Great Exhibition of Printing: The Illustrated London News Supplement Sheet (1851)}, volume={11}, ISSN={0220-5610 2271-6149}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.4000/cve.2928}, DOI={10.4000/cve.2928}, abstractNote={The Illustrated London News a abondamment couvert l’Exposition Universelle de 1851 et y a meme expose l’une de ses presses typographiques dans le stand « Machines en mouvement ». La presse de l’ILN a contribue a imprimer ses supplements illustres pour l’Exposition Universelle et a alimente la curiosite des visiteurs pour la presse a vapeur exposee, a savoir une machine a imprimer Applegath disposant de quatre alimentations papier simultanees et fonctionnant a l’aide d’un tambour rotatif vertical. Cette machine avait la particularite d’imprimer essentiellement des pages de texte d’un seul cote. Les illustrations caracteristiques du periodique devaient etre imprimees sur une presse differente dans les bureaux de l’ILN sur le Strand. Cet article recree les origines jumelees d’une feuille de papier tiree du supplement de l’ILN date du 31 mai 1851 et consacree a l’Exposition Universelle pour mieux montrer les changements qui se sont operes dans la nature meme des documents imprimes industriellement au milieu du siecle. Cette feuille demontre l’evolution technologique des periodiques illustres ainsi que leur statut conceptuel hybride, melant texte et image dans un genre qui revendiquait l’immediatete d’un bulletin d’information. En fin de compte, l’ILN celebrait ses procedes industriels comme gage de fidelite visuelle, en offrant ses illustrations non seulement pour ce qu’elles representaient visuellement mais aussi comme artefacts materiels de sa propre production.}, number={84 Automne}, journal={Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens}, publisher={OpenEdition}, author={Fyfe, Paul}, year={2016}, month={Nov} } @article{fyfe_2016, title={An Archaeology of Victorian Newspapers}, volume={49}, ISSN={["1712-526X"]}, DOI={10.1353/vpr.2016.0039}, abstractNote={This article tracks the transmission history of British newspapers from their nineteenth-century printing and library accession through microfilming and eventual digitization. It argues that scholarly use of digitized historical resources has overlooked a largely hidden history of how Victorian data gets to now. Studying Victorian periodicals against the longue durée of their mediation not only encompasses technological processes but also the discursive contexts in which those practices took shape, including twentieth-century political economies of global conflict, the intelligence community’s alliances with scholarly associations and research libraries, gendered and outsourced labor, and commercial techno-futurism. I follow the lead of several scholars in media studies and critical bibliography to outline—and then pursue—a method for investigating these material histories, an “archaeology” that enables us to better grasp the historiography of our research objects, which have arrived, for the moment, as digital. Such an approach is crucial not only for understanding the mediated conditions of scholarly materials but also for facilitating informed critique of the how they are created, sold, accessed, and used by casual users as well as scholars interested in computational techniques.}, number={4}, journal={VICTORIAN PERIODICALS REVIEW}, publisher={Johns Hopkins University Press}, author={Fyfe, Paul}, year={2016}, pages={546–577} } @article{fyfe_menke_2016, title={Data Copperfield: A Pedagogical Experiment in Distributed Collaboration}, volume={21}, ISSN={["1750-0133"]}, DOI={10.1080/13555502.2016.1233907}, abstractNote={This essay reports on a pedagogical experiment that used web-based collaboration tools to coordinate a collaborative module on David Copperfield for two undergraduate classes at different universities in autumn 2014. Comprising third-and fourth-year English majors in a ‘History and Theory of the Novel’ course at the University of Georgia (UGA) and first-year interdisciplinary students in an honours seminar on ‘Reading in the Digital Age’ at North Carolina State University (NC State), the experiment attempted to connect two classes building very different domains of knowledge for the benefit of both. 1 This module, which became known among the students as ‘Data Copperfield’, was inspired by other recent experiments to coordinate classes across institutions in shared learning projects. Discussions of online learning beyond the single classroom are often steered by administrative drives for teaching efficiency, using lecture capture tools and distance learning platforms to reach more students with fewer resources. However, approaching ‘distributed collaboration’ as a pedagogical practice aims instead to broaden students’ sense of intellectual engagement, drawing upon the expertise of distributed participants to develop communities of humanistic practice. What might we gain by reading literature collectively; by augmenting the classroom’s interpretive community; by using networked and multimodal platforms to discuss, analyse, and collaborate? This essay offers context for these experiments, describes the module we undertook, and reports on the opportunities and challenges we discovered in the process and through formal assessment.}, number={4}, journal={JOURNAL OF VICTORIAN CULTURE}, author={Fyfe, Paul and Menke, Richard}, year={2016}, month={Dec}, pages={559–566} } @inbook{fyfe_2016, place={Minneapolis, MN}, title={Mid-Sized Digital Pedagogy}, ISBN={9781452951485 1452951489 9780816699544}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.5749/j.ctt1cn6thb.14}, DOI={10.5749/j.ctt1cn6thb.14}, booktitle={Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016}, publisher={University of Minnesota Press}, author={Fyfe, Paul}, editor={Gold, Matthew K. and Klein, Lauren F.Editors}, year={2016}, month={May}, pages={104–117} } @misc{fyfe_2016, title={Virtual Victorians: Networks, connections, technologies}, volume={58}, number={4}, journal={Victorian Studies}, author={Fyfe, P.}, year={2016}, pages={775–777} } @book{fyfe_2015, title={By Accident or Design}, DOI={10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198732334.001.0001}, abstractNote={Introduction 1. Accidents in the News 2. Dickens and the Traffic of Accidents 3. Industrial Accidents and Novel Insurances 4. Street Literature and the Remediation of Accident 5. Chaos and Connections on the Victorian Railway Afterword: An Accidental Excursion}, publisher={Oxford University Press (OUP)}, author={Fyfe, Paul}, year={2015}, month={Apr} } @book{fyfe_2015, place={Oxford}, title={By Accident or Design: Writing the Victorian Metropolis}, publisher={Oxford University Press}, author={Fyfe, Paul}, year={2015} } @article{fyfe_2015, title={Technologies of Serendipity}, volume={48}, ISSN={["1712-526X"]}, DOI={10.1353/vpr.2015.0014}, abstractNote={In reckoning with the digital restructuring of the scholarly discourse network circa 2004, Patrick Leary begins with a story. It is a story about how, thanks to web discovery and email contacts, scholarship on Letitia Elizabeth Landon took a major turn. This happened because of the “fortuitous electronic connections” of people and documents facilitated by the internet. 1 And making sense of this experience, rather than detailing specific resources for digital scholarship, becomes Leary’s abiding concern in “Googling the Victorians.” His essay ponders a “profound shift” towards casual discovery, “a serendipity of unexpected connections to both information and people that is becoming increasingly central to the progress of Victorian research.” 2 If, in the subtitle to their 1982 volume The Victorian Periodical Press, Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff nominate “Samplings and Soundings” as our only reasonable approach, Leary begins to clarify how such casual discoveries should not merely be viewed as symptoms of trying to find specifics amid superabundance, whether in terms of the Victorian archive or networked digital information. 3 Instead, that characteristic research experience has been absorbed into the technological routines of how we work now. In other words, chance discovery is not a bug; it is a feature. It is the very condition of “Googling the Victorians,” as Leary calls it. A decade later, we find ourselves deeper in the networked experience of such unexpected connections, with more perspective that allows us to acknowledge, critique, and perhaps even credit serendipity as scholarly technique. “Googling the Victorians” also reveals the scholar’s reflex to enfold fortuitous discoveries within descriptive explanation. The essay shows a consistent dynamic between the item of scholarly interest, serendipitously found, and the narrative in which the researcher governs the unexpected. In drawing this connection, Leary makes a crucial distinction between serendipity and randomness. If we all have random encounters all the time, serendipity requires recognizing such an encounter for its meaning, requir}, number={2}, journal={VICTORIAN PERIODICALS REVIEW}, publisher={Johns Hopkins University Press}, author={Fyfe, Paul}, year={2015}, pages={261–266} } @misc{fyfe_2015, title={Victorian time: Technologies, standardizations, catastrophes}, volume={57}, number={2}, journal={Victorian Studies}, author={Fyfe, P.}, year={2015}, pages={316–318} } @article{fyfe_2014, title={Accidental Death: Lizzie Siddal and the Poetics of the Coroner’s Inquest}, volume={40}, ISSN={1923-3280}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/vcr.2014.0049}, DOI={10.1353/vcr.2014.0049}, abstractNote={Accidental Death:Lizzie Siddal and the Poetics of the Coroner’s Inquest Paul Fyfe (bio) “Accidentally and casually and by misfortune.” Such was the verdict of an inquest on the death of “Elizabeth Eleanor Rossetti” (née Elizabeth Siddall, later Siddal) held on 13 February 1862, two days after she died, having “accidentally [taken] an overdose of Laudanum.”1 On 14 February, the Daily News reported the “Death of a Lady from an Overdose of Laudanum,” including most of the testimonies from the inquest and closing with a succinct verdict: “The jury returned a verdict of Accidental Death.” A newspaper in Sheffield printed a similar notice. The coroner and the press seemed to dispose of all doubts about the cause of Siddal’s death (Hunt 312). The inquest had been brief and uncomplicated; the case was closed. On 17 February, Siddal was buried—along with a notebook of unpublished manuscript poems by her widower, a bereft Dante Gabriel Rossetti (DGR). In 1869, her coffin was famously unclosed, exhumed to recover DGR’s manuscript. So had, in the intervening years, the inquest’s verdict of “accidental death” been reopened for scrutiny. Rumours circulated about Lizzie’s death as a possible suicide, whether to end her misery after a recent stillborn daughter, to lash out at DGR for emotional abuse and philandering, or to make a desperate cry for help. Oscar Wilde suggested that an exasperated DGR had murdered Lizzie by pushing a bottle of laudanum into her hands (Hawksley 205). On the title page of the early biography The Wife of Rossetti, Violet Hunt quotes from an alleged suicide note that Lizzie had pinned to her nightgown: “My life is so miserable I wish no more of it.”2 The note was supposedly destroyed, the evidence suppressed to avoid the scandal of Lizzie’s self-murder and its implications for her family.3 Jan Marsh has thoroughly discredited these rumours and instead historicized to whom they mattered and why.4 Nonetheless, the legend endures that Lizzie’s death was not an accident but a tragic and exemplary Victorian suicide, a fulfillment of her role in John Everett Millais’s iconic painting Ophelia (1851–52). I do not intend to settle the case but rather to argue that such cases were never settled. The question of Lizzie’s death—like all fatalities in which causes were either suspicious or not immediately clear—received a hearing at an [End Page 17] inquest, during which the coroner (in this case William Payne, Coroner of the City of London) and a jury of twenty-four men from his district were charged with viewing the body and, at a public trial, discovering causes and motives. Their reports became public record and a source of ready-made content for newspapers. Inquest reports were ubiquitous at the time but largely overlooked in criticism and literary history concerned with the inquest’s very contexts, including the public sphere, the gaze and the body, crime, suicide, sensationalism, and the periodical press, to name only a few. Accidents present an opportunity for reconsidering inquests; indeed, inquests may have been the most conspicuous public forum for adjudicating what accident meant. What does a verdict of accidental death decide?5 In Lizzie’s case, jurors worked on the thresholds of casual tragedy and premeditation, with material consequences following their verdict’s certainty. I return to Siddall’s inquest not to suggest the verdict was wrong but instead to suggest how inquest verdicts were always statements of doubt, leaving open possibilities for their historical and imaginative reconsideration. The coroner’s inquest was the site of significant debates about what professions and standards of evidence would govern the emerging biopolitics of nineteenth-century Britain (Burney). Those debates revealed dissatisfaction with, among other things, the failure of coroners’ verdicts to deliver hard facts. Conservative legal scholars and records keepers complained that inquest verdicts such as “natural causes” or “visitation of God” or “accidentally, casually, and by misfortune” were not causal statements but simply phrases whose variance made them difficult to establish as precedent or to normalize as data (Burney 68). In Lizzie’s case, it was only after her death that mortality statistics for laudanum...}, number={2}, journal={Victorian Review}, publisher={Project Muse}, author={Fyfe, Paul}, year={2014}, pages={17–22} } @article{fyfe_2013, title={Illustrating the Accident: Railways and the Catastrophic Picturesque in The Illustrated London News}, volume={46}, DOI={10.1353/vpr.2013.0005}, abstractNote={Illustrating the Accident: Railways and the Catastrophic Picturesque in The Illustrated London News Paul Fyfe (bio) In his frontispiece to The History and Description of the Great Western Railway (1846), John Cooke Bourne depicts a steam railway engine emerging from the well-sculpted mouth of a tunnel (figure 1). Intentionally left unfinished and ornamented with planted ivy, this tunnel had been styled as a gothic gateway by the hero-engineer of the Great Western, Isambard Kingdom Brunel.1 The ivy made the structure look aged and integrated with its green surroundings. Bourne tried for similar effects in his lithographs, blending the marvel of industrial engineering with the charm of natural disarray. His frontispiece—with its contrasts of light and dark, its chiseled stonework and weathered mountain blocks, and its central cloud of the engine's steam—is a classic example of the "industrial picturesque." Beginning in the late eighteenth century, artists adapted the picturesque to represent industrial sites, including collieries, factories, and railways. As an aesthetic category, the picturesque emphasized landscape irregularities, which, in the hands of artists like Bourne, could be made to accommodate industrial forms newly present on the landscape as well as in Britain's social consciousness. Art historians and cultural critics have shown how the industrial picturesque reimagines the political, material, and ideological disruptions of industry in terms of pictorial harmony. As a contemporary review noted, Bourne's prints aim to "gratify both the lover of the picturesque and the man of science: the former, by variety of lines and combinations; and the latter, by different modes of application of machinery, mechanism, and manual labor."2 These images harmoniously integrated the railway into its natural surroundings to convey the tranquility of the picturesque. Bourne's work was commissioned by the Great Western as part of a campaign to assuage public anxiety about the early railway and to directly [End Page 61] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. J. C. Bourne, frontispiece to The History and Description of the Great Western Railway (London: David Bogue, 1846). counter representations of the railway's dangers in the press. According to F. D. Klingender, the press featured a "flow of caricatures . . . designed deliberately to shake confidence by introducing the public to a feast of explosions and sudden death."3 Picturesque railway prints, often commissioned during the construction of new lines and available for sale soon afterwards, focused on the railway's most placid moments and idealized visual features. It is ironic, then, that the picturesque would also eventually be used in press coverage of the railway's most sensational disasters, portraying the very dangers that railway companies hoped to downplay. A wood engraving for the Illustrated London News report "Damage to the South Devon Railway, Near Dawlish" (1855) draws its pictorial elements directly from the tradition of the industrial picturesque (figure 2). It is one [End Page 62] of many such images published in the Victorian illustrated newspapers that developed alongside the railway and capitalized on its spectacular disasters. The stylistic coincidences are uncanny, revealing how the Illustrated London News redeployed the pictorial conventions of eighteenth-century aesthetics to illustrate accident reportage. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. "Damage to the South Devon Railway, Near Dawlish," Illustrated London News, March 3, 1855, 196. This essay argues that the aesthetic category of the industrial picturesque was paradoxically reinvigorated in depictions of industrial catastrophe, especially those circulated by illustrated newspapers. The picturesque aesthetic provides one of the more curious linkages between the railway and popular illustrated journalism.4 It proves particularly useful for studying the material production and the developing ideological concerns of the Illustrated London News. Between 1850 and 1890, the Illustrated London News published numerous illustrations of railway accidents in this style that disclosed the newspaper's complex attitudes towards industrial modernity and its unique uses of the wood-engraved medium. These illustrations do not simply rehearse the industrial picturesque; they create a different category, a hybrid of picturesque repose and industrial rupture that I call the "catastrophic picturesque." The catastrophic picturesque shows the Illustrated London News engaged in covering up the disturbances of [End Page 63] industrial modernity with an aesthetic that paradoxically...}, number={1}, journal={Victorian Periodicals Review}, publisher={Muse - Johns Hopkins University Press}, author={Fyfe, Paul}, year={2013}, pages={61–91} } @article{illustrating the accident: railways and the catastrophic picturesque in the illustrated london news_2013, year={2013} } @article{fyfe_2013, title={The Scholarly Monograph Unbound}, volume={10}, ISSN={["1741-4113"]}, DOI={10.1111/lic3.12075}, abstractNote={AbstractParticularly in humanities disciplines, the scholarly monograph has held a privileged place within an ecology of prestige. But systemic changes in the economics of academic publishing and the technical affordances of digital, networked scholarship raise many questions about the “book” and its futures. This essay enters debates about the future of the book to illustrate the institutional pressures, technological shifts, and intellectual opportunities that are reshaping the scholarly monograph.}, number={8}, journal={LITERATURE COMPASS}, publisher={Wiley Blackwell (Blackwell Publishing)}, author={Fyfe, Paul}, year={2013}, month={Aug}, pages={643–654} } @article{fyfe_2013, title={Victorian Transformations: Genre, Nationalism and Desire in Nineteenth-Century Literature}, volume={55}, ISSN={["1527-2052"]}, DOI={10.2979/victorianstudies.55.2.331}, abstractNote={Reviewed by: Victorian Transformations: Genre, Nationalism and Desire in Nineteenth-Century Literature ed. by Bianca Tredennick Paul Fyfe (bio) Victorian Transformations: Genre, Nationalism and Desire in Nineteenth-Century Literature, edited by Bianca Tredennick; pp. xiii + 197. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2011, £55.00, $99.95. Heraclitus was right when it comes to Victorian studies: the only constant is transition. Opening with Walter Houghton’s classic nomination of the Victorian as “the age of transition,” Victorian Transformations asks a useful question: how might we change how we talk about change (1)? This edited collection stakes its claim with the keyword “transformations,” inflecting transition with a concern for form. It is a good time to be talking about form and change as Victorian studies finds itself amid methodological and material transitions, including the critical efforts of new formalism and the implications of digital, networked resources. While Victorian Transformations is not concerned with the digital, it does insist on literary transformations as integral to the era’s sweeping changes and proposes to rethink and elucidate them with “a sort of transformed, reformed formalism” (3). It is surprising that the introduction mentions no recent work on that subject, such as the groundswell of scholarly interest that Caroline Levine cites in her Victorian Studies essay “Strategic Formalism: Toward a New Method in Cultural Studies” (48.4 [2006]). The introduction encourages “a return to the text” but does not clarify how this differs from close reading or what notions of textuality it involves (3). Editorially, [End Page 331] the book misses a great opportunity to engage with transformations in contemporary Victorian studies. The too-short introduction is symptomatic: of its five citations, only two, from Houghton and Michel Foucault, were published in the last hundred years. The introduction instead declares the book’s business as the continuing study of the age of transitions. But without a more precise or polemical definition of its keyword “transformations,” the theme is omnibus for Victorian studies at large. The contributors were asked to offer snapshots of the ways we work now, and for the most part they creditably deliver, providing chapters on the novel, poetry, the Victorian theater, and neo-Victorian fiction. In the well-placed first chapter, Ian Duncan plots an ambitious sweep of the novel’s genre history against theories of the mutability of species and the relative uniqueness of human beings. This lets Duncan track a counter-tradition of the sublime novel rooted in notions of monstrosity and responding to “changing demographies of readership and modes of literary production” (17). Deborah Denenholz Morse offers a related study of generic transformation in her brilliant reading of Anthony Trollope’s The Small House at Allington (1864), arguing that this novel transforms “the pastoral into a tale of encroaching modernity” and “marks Trollope’s own transformation from the chronicler of pastoral Barsetshire to the novelist of the metropole” (45). Siobhan Carroll contributes a chapter which deserves to become a frequent reference in Dracula (1897) studies, relocating Bram Stoker’s novel within the Celtic fringe. According to Carroll, Stoker gothicizes Walter Scott’s resurrection of Celtic history, harnessing its political nationalism as well as threats of uncontrolled violence. Julianne Smith continues to renovate studies of the Victorian theater by proposing that highly wrought scenes of transformation, especially in Charles Kean’s productions of the 1850s, focus Victorian critical reactions that alternately derided and celebrated visual spectacle as the era’s signature theatrical accomplishment. These chapters succeed in tracking the book’s subtitle, “Genre, Nationalism and Desire in Nineteenth-Century Literature,” but those keywords could be observed more coherently throughout the volume as a whole, especially with the goal of triangulating the book’s central term. The categories of genre, nationalism, and desire were drawn from accepted submissions rather than having guided the volume from its outset. Edited collections may always face such problems, but collecting essays on “transformation,” broadly defined, invites challenges to internal coherence from the start. Lest everything be in flux, some variables need to be kept constant when hypothesizing about change. A single- or jointly-authored book on Victorian transformations might have had the advantage of pursuing its mutable subject from relatively stable grounds. In this book, the...}, number={2}, journal={VICTORIAN STUDIES}, author={Fyfe, Paul}, year={2013}, pages={331–333} } @article{fyfe_2012, title={Electronic Errata: Digital Publishing, Open Review, and the Futures of Correction}, DOI={10.5749/minnesota/9780816677948.003.0027}, abstractNote={This chapter takes on the issues of digital publishing and publishing errors. It looks into the history of printing errors and the labor of correction, which offers valuable perspectives on the proliferating effects of “accidentals” and error within the automation, syndication, and algorithmic relations of the web. This history informs how scholarly publishing’s digital futures might (or might not) deal with the issue, including open review, crowd-sourced or distributed corrections, automated redundancy systems in libraries, and intelligent computing agents. The history of error also opens some theoretical perspectives, suggesting that, even if we do not dedicate technology or labor to these issues, the digital humanities needs to reckon conceptually with “the importance of failure.” Scholarly publishing will inevitably change, but before its print-based model totters into the grave we need clearer commitments about the error proofing it has traditionally undertaken as well as the consequences of reinventing or abandoning such functions altogether as we move to new formats.}, journal={Debates in the Digital Humanities}, publisher={University of Minnesota Press}, author={Fyfe, Paul}, year={2012}, month={Jan}, pages={259–280} } @article{fyfe_2012, title={On the Opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, 1830}, url={http://bit.ly/1830railway}, journal={BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History}, author={Fyfe, Paul}, editor={Felluga, Dino FrancoEditor}, year={2012} } @article{fyfe_2011, title={Digital Pedagogy Unplugged}, volume={5}, url={http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/3/000106/000106.html}, number={3}, journal={Digital Humanities Quarterly}, author={Fyfe, Paul}, year={2011} } @article{fyfe_2011, title={How to Not Read a Victorian Novel}, volume={16}, ISSN={1355-5502 1750-0133}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13555502.2011.554678}, DOI={10.1080/13555502.2011.554678}, abstractNote={In the humanities, we do not teach the answers. Rather, we teach students how to ask good questions. This simple goal has been so ubiquitous that it has become an article of pedagogical faith. Call it the ‘interrogative stance’ of our discipline, or the legacy of constructivism, or just a proven way of getting students to explore the plurality of interpretive possibilities of texts and contexts. For any discipline that guides students toward generating their own arguments, it makes sense to start with questions, but it is also hard to do. How do you teach questions? If many students anticipate learning answers from their instruction, how do you convey the satisfaction in critical questioning? How do you teach students not only to accept a condition of not knowing, but also to embrace it as the most generative grounds of inquiry? A cynic might call this professing ignorance and that is exactly right. You could take this back to Socrates. Start from a position of informed ignorance, ask questions and have a discussion. It happens all the time in seminars; in-class discussion continues to be one of our primary tools in a pedagogy of questioning, but new tools have emerged that can reintroduce us to ignorance in surprising ways. These tools are built from digital technologies and they facilitate thinking about digital pedagogy in all the generative ways scholars have considered the digital humanities (realms which are never so distinct). As Jerome McGann has described the Rossetti Archive, it is a tool for ‘imagining what we don’t know’. The archive puts us in a different relation to knowledge, which McGann and others have extrapolated as the most promising opportunity of the digital humanities – it makes us ask new questions. The digital thus offers a terrific platform for pursuing a familiar pedagogical goal, but it takes the ‘interrogative stance’ one step further: in this domain, instructors}, number={1}, journal={Journal of Victorian Culture}, publisher={Oxford University Press (OUP)}, author={Fyfe, Paul}, year={2011}, month={Apr}, pages={84–88} } @article{how to not read a victorian novel_2011, year={2011} } @article{accidents of a novel trade: industrial catastrophe, fire insurance, and mary barton_2010, year={2010} } @article{fyfe_2010, title={Accidents of a Novel Trade: Industrial Catastrophe, Fire Insurance, andMary Barton}, volume={65}, DOI={10.1525/ncl.2010.65.3.315}, abstractNote={Paul Fyfe, "Accidents of a Novel Trade: Industrial Catastrophe, Fire Insurance, and Mary Barton"(pp. 315–347) This essay argues for the industrial novel as a form of risk management, in dialog with the insurance business and its particular problems with fire. elizabeth Gaskell's abiding concerns for workplace accidents and compensation in Mary Barton (1848), focused by a spectacular mill fire, contests the definition and "writing"of risk on commercial terrain. At the same time, various fire insurers, scrambling to manage a risk that seemed beyond control, invented hybrid strategies of description that impinged on the domain of novelists. I demonstrate how changing concepts of accident and risk characterize the unstable political landscape of England's industrial north, measure the increasingly material pressures on property and life, and inform diverse practices of writing, particularly those that novelists shared with the insurance industry. ultimately, the "queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary"for which Henry James denigrates the Victorian novel may derive from such historical circumstances in which writers like Gaskell absorb accidents as a practice of the genre.}, number={3}, journal={Nineteenth-Century Literature}, author={Fyfe, Paul}, year={2010}, pages={315–347} } @article{fyfe_2009, title={2008 VanArsdel Prize Graduate Student Essay: The Random Selection of Victorian New Media}, volume={42}, DOI={10.1353/vpr.0.0066}, abstractNote={ Faced with floods of what was variously called “cheap literature,” “popular literature,” and “reading for the million,” a cohort of Victorian commentators adopted a surprisingly consistent response to examining such printed materials: random selection. This preferred mode of arbitrariness resonates with contemporary concerns about the profusion and access of electronic materials. By noting recent praise for random access and the serendipity of the database, we see in reactions to Victorian popular literature a compelling attention to such contingencies. These writings offer critical analogs for the study of Victorian new media in the new media of our own. }, number={1}, journal={Victorian Periodicals Review}, author={Fyfe, Paul}, year={2009}, pages={1–23} } @book{rossetti_1996, place={Charlotteville, VA}, edition={Online edition}, title={Mrs. Holmes Grey}, url={http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/wmrossetti014.raw.html}, publisher={Rossetti Archive, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia}, author={Rossetti, William Michael}, editor={Fyfe, PaulEditor}, year={1996} }