Is Domestic Noir the New Sensation Fiction?
by Karen Bourrier I’ve been listening to a lot of the bestselling (contemporary!) author Liane Moriarty on audiobook over the last year. She’s the one who wrote Big Little Lies. If you haven’t read the book, maybe you’ve had a chance to watch the HBO series? At the same time, I’ve been teaching an upper […]
Janeites
This past semester, I taught a class that I originally envisioned as a “Jane Austen from Book to Film” class. But as I was planning the syllabus, something changed. I realized that just doing filmic Austen adaptations (Bridget Jones, Clueless, and of course, the BBC Pride and Prejudice) felt dated in the era of Instagram […]
Short Sibling Sets in the Long Victorian Novel
For the past two and a half years, my co-author Kelly Hager and I, along with our amazing research assistants Kailey Fukushima and Emily Anderson, have been working on a big project. This project comes from our shared love of Charlotte Yonge. On a long train ride back to Boston from the 2014 CUNY Victorian […]
Teaching the Dramatic Monologue
[Reposted from the Floating Academy] If your syllabus looks anything like mine, at least once a semester you’re dusting off your Tennyson and Browning skills and teaching the dramatic monologue. My personal favourites to teach are “My Last Duchess” and “Porphyria’s Lover” (Day One) and then “Tithonous,” “Ulysses,” and “St Simeon Stylites” (Day Two). This […]
The Transatlantic Digital Moonstone
[Reposted from the Floating Academy] In my senior seminar on “The Victorian Bestseller,” we’ve just finished a big class project. When I found out that our Special Collections at the University of Calgary holds both of the periodicals in which Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) was originally serialized–Harper’s Weekly in the U.S. and All the Year Round […]