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…
Author: Karen Wade
Dr. Karen Wade is a researcher and lecturer at the School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin.
5 Mega-Bestsellers from the 19th Century (That You’ve Probably Never Heard Of)
Pssst: If you’re here because you’re interested in nineteenth-century bestsellers, you may like our more recent post series on the subject! I started putting together the figures for this post more than two years ago, when we were in the early stages of compiling our list of works that we wanted to look at on…
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…
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…
A little light political commentary
“How very suddenly you all quitted the European Union in June! It must have been a most agreeable surprise to Mr. Farage to see you all join him so unexpectedly; for, if I recollect right, he has been at odds with the EU for many a year. He and Mr. Johnson, and his fellows…
Visual Tropes Gallery of the Week: Men falling off of things
Men. Now, I don’t want to come across as sexist or anything, but it’s time someone came out and said it: the problem with men is, that they are always – and I mean, CONSTANTLY – falling off of things. You literally can’t take them anywhere. Especially not anywhere that involves a moderately elevanted surface,…
Dowries and Dowagers; or, Conjectures on Why Lady Catherine de Bourgh is So Rude
It’s one of Pride and Prejudice‘s pivotal and iconic scenes. Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who’s incensed at “an alarming report” about her nephew’s likelihood of marrying “a young woman without family, connections, or fortune”, travels to Longbourn to confront Elizabeth, confident of being able to persuade or bully her into dropping any matrimonial ambitions in…
Caturday, vol. III: the cattening
Today’s Caturday collection has been compiled with the assistance of my own two felines, who have been industriously wrecking the place while I work. Thank you, Kaylee and River! Previous Caturday posts can be found here.
“Well imagined and happily represented”: a review of Pride and Prejudice from 1813
****WARNING: READERS SHOULD BE ADVISED THAT THE REVIEW BELOW CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, AND ALSO LOTS OF THOSE ANNOYING Ss THAT LOOK LIKE Fs**** The author of a review of Pride and Prejudice which appeared in The British Critic in 1813, the year that the novel was first published, gives a very positive…
Insult of the week: a crop-eared English Whig
In chapter 11, we find young Englishman Edward Waverley enjoying – or trying to enjoy – a convivial evening with his host, Baron Bradwardine, and three other Scottish companions: bailiff Duncan MacWheeble, and the pugnacious young lairds of Balmawhapple and Killancureit. Prodigious quantities of drink are consumed, and Waverley manfully does his best to keep…
The Sea of Books 