A Portrait of the Project: our official website is announced!

I’m delighted to announce that the Nation, Genre and Gender Project’s official website is now up and running! We created this site (in association with Vermillion Design) in order to showcase some of what we do here at Nation, Genre and Gender, when we’re not overthinking Jane Austen’s novels or identifying weird gender tropes in…

Insult of the Week: inferior poets are absolutely fascinating

Ah, poetry.  One of the great literary forms, with a history stretching back as far as the earliest written word!  Beloved genre of such giants as Sappho, Homer, Chaucer, and the anonymous author of The Poetic Works of a Weird (1827).  Being writers themselves, surely our novelists must have a healthy respect for the poetical…

A Net of Influence: interreference between 18th and 19th-century novels

As a taster of the content that’s going up on our shiny new website, here’s an image that I put together earlier: This, as you can probably tell, is a draft version, but what it shows is a map of interreference between novels and novelists in our corpus. Writers, unsurprisingly, are generally people who enjoy…

A Workshop is Announced: Thurs July 28th, IASIL (Cork)

  Apologies to our readers for the sporadic blogging schedule of late – myself and the team have been working flat out on the project’s fancy new website for the last few weeks! Our new site goes live next week, when we take this show on the road to the 2016 IASIL conference, at University…

Image of the Week: A beautiful fiend

This week’s image is inspired by an early scene in M.E Braddon’s huge sensational hit Lady Audley’s Secret 1862. While the duplicitous Lady Audley is out and about, George Talboys and Robert Audley enter her private boudoir to look at the impressive collection of paintings stored there. The lads take a look around the “glittering toilette”…

DISRUPTIONS TO OUR USUAL BLOGGING SERVICE

Please accept our apologies for this last week’s complete lack of blogging!  We haven’t run out of vintage insults or strange images, we’ve just been frantically working on a Big Project Thing.  (Edited to add: this is the thing!) Normal blogging will resume as soon as possible – and once we’ve met our deadline we…