Today’s feature is a guest post on social networks in the Sherlock Holmes novella The Sign of the Four, by former student Helen Kirrane. Helen studied English at University College Dublin. Her research interests are late Victorian gothic fiction, the literature of the fin de siècle, and the aesthetic movement. First published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine…
Category: About the project
Fun with Search Terms
Today, out of curiosity, I decided to take a peek at the search terms that people have found The Sea of Books with, over the year that our blog has been in existence. The results were intriguing, but suggest to me that I may want to think about doing some kind of search engine optimisation……
Jane Austen’s Social Networks
On July 18th two hundred years ago, at a house in Winchester, Jane Austen died at the relatively young age of 41. She had laid down her pen twelve chapters into her final novel (The Brothers, later published as Sanditon) in March of 1817, due to her worsening health, and it would remain unfinished. Her…
Celebrating a century of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Hello again to all of our readers – we hope you’ve had a very merry Christmas, and wish you all the best in 2017! Once again, we find ourselves apologising for a lack of posting over the past week or two – as usual, it means we’ve been cooking something up. And today, on the…
Nightmares, Ghosts and Ghouls: a spooky October on the blog
Happy 1st of October to all of our readers! This month, we’ll be digging into the dusty digital vaults of the British Library Labs, in order to bring you some of the finest in obscure and forgotten spooky fiction, folklore, poetry, and pictures. And believe me, there’s tons to be getting with – the Victorians…
Literature, Lyrics and Lexical Diversity: What Do James Joyce, Sir Walter Scott and the Wu-Tang Clan Have in Common?
Inspired by this fascinating study of vocabulary in rap lyrics, by Matt Daniels at Polygraph, my colleague Derek Greene decided to take a similar dive into our own data. Which of our 46 novels includes the widest selection of unique words? I’ll let Derek explain this chart in his own words: I looked at the…
Works in Progress: our collection
This year’s IASIL conference was fascinating and thought-provoking, as well as being a whole lot of fun, and I think we’re all still processing the excellent feedback we received! Many things to think about! One specific request we received was for there to be a list of the works that we’ve analysed so far. Which…
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…
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…
When is Elizabeth Bennet’s Birthday?
In Breihan and Caplan’s excellent 1990 article Jane Austen and the Militia, which throws a considerable amount of light on the historical underpinnings of Pride and Prejudice, the authors argue persuasively that the book is set in the years 1794 and 1795, by picking up on the many small military-historical hints that Jane Austen dropped…
The Sea of Books 