This episode discusses Jacqueline Roy's 2000 debut novel The Fat Lady Sings and themes such as race, gender and sexuality, and mental health. It turns out this is an incredibly apt novel to wrap up an exceptionally heavy semester on a note of hope and joy.

CW: sexual assault, loss of a loved one

In this student-led episode, Kath, Addison, and Brooke discuss the Theatre of the Absurd in relation to Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape and Enda Walsh’s play Penelope. 

Bibliography 

In this student-led episode, Jamey, Alexis, and Emma discuss Christopher Isherwood’s novel Prater Violet in connection with film and propaganda.

Bibliography

In this student-led episode, Darian, Robby, Alicia, Jessica, and Ashley walk us through the concepts of stream of consciousness and how this narrative style became a trademark of modernist works such as Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway.

In this episode our guest scholar, Jonathon Patterson, explores poetry from World War One. He explains why poetry was one of the primary media outlets for soldiers and citizens during this era and how it was politicized. He also discusses broadening representations in our definition of  WWI poets and why these works remain relevant over 100 years later.

Jonathan Patterson is a doctoral candidate at Kansas University and plans to defend his dissertation on spatiality in the experiences of World War One combat poets later this semester. He has published work on this theme in several peer-reviewed journals including Alicante Journal of English Studies and The Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies.

This episode we welcome guest scholar Dr. Ashley Nadeau as she examines Dracula as a novel that draws from popular Victorian genre fiction, and detective fiction in particular. She also uses examples of material culture within the novel—railways, blood, nightdresses, and typewriters—as objects that help us better understand Dracula’s narrative.

Dr. Nadeau received her doctorate from University of Massachusetts Amherst where she studied Victorian fiction in relation to architecture and form. She has been faculty here at UVU for the past three years. She has recently begun a new study exploring the impact of audiobooks on 19th century studies, making her insights into new media particularly exciting.

In this student-led episode, Braydon, JoAnne, and Kialey discuss six different forms of Victorian new media as they appear in Bram Stoker's Dracula, posing questions about new media's reliability in constructing larger narratives.

Bibliography

Fava-Verde, Jean-François. “Victorian Telegrams: The Early Development of the Telegraphic Despatch and Its Interplay with the Letter Post.” Notes and Records: the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, vol. 72, no. 3, 2018, pp. 275–292., doi:10.1098/rsnr.2017.0031. 

Bellis, Mary. “The History of Typewriters, Typing, and Qwerty Keyboards.” ThoughtCo, 2019, www.thoughtco.com/typewriters-1992539#:~:text=Christopher%20Sholes&text=He%20invented%20the%20first%20practical,model%20similar%20to%20today's%20typewriters. 

History.com Editors. “Morse Code & the Telegraph.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 9 Nov. 2009, www.history.com/topics/inventions/telegraph.

Today we are joined by guest scholar Dr. Ellen Campbell who discusses women’s rights under marriage contract law in the 19th century and the New Woman figure in Dracula.

Dr. Campbell received her doctorate from Southern Illinois University Carbondale where her dissertation discussed marriage trauma narratives in transatlantic 19th-century fiction. She is currently a lecturer at Auburn University and has a forthcoming chapter in the edited collection #MeToo Modernism from Clemson University Press.

Content Warning: this episode discusses themes related to domestic abuse and sexual assault. If these are triggers for you, please forego this episode join us for next week’s episode on Victorian New Media. Also, I’m offering you a giant virtual hug.

In this student-led episode Aubree, Sage, Melanie, and Emily lead us through a conversation about Victorian print culture and serialized fiction especially in relation to Wilkie Collins' novel The Moonstone.

In this episode, we welcome Dr. Trent Olsen as our guest scholar. He will be discussing the impact Charles Darwin’s discoveries and published work in The Origin of Species had on the wider 19th century. He discusses points of literary connection between Darwin, William Wordsworth, Robert Louis Stevenson, Emily Pfeiffer, H.G. Wells, and Thomas Hardy as a spectrum of the shifting world views on humankind’s role in nature.

Dr. Olsen earned his doctorate at the University of Minnesota and is currently an associate professor at Brigham Young University-Idaho. In 2018 he published his book Wordsworth and Evolution in Victorian Literature: Entangled Influence with Routledge and  a forthcoming book, The Complete Personal Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson (also with Routledge) due for publication in May 2021. 

Bibliography

Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species

Emily Pfeiffer's "To Nature"

H.G. Wells The Island of Doctor Moreau

Robert Louis Stevenson's "Pulvis et Umbra"

Thomas Hardy's "Hap"

Trenton B. Olsen's Wordsworth and Evolution in Victorian Literature: Entangled Influence

William Wordsworth "The Tables Turned"