The CLiC blog showcases research and impact activities from the AHRC-funded CLiC Dickens project. We write posts summarising our research output, reporting on impact events and explaining new features of the CLiC web app.
Nat Reeve is a novelist and AHRC-funded PhD candidate at Royal Holloway, University of London. Their debut novel, Nettleblack, is out June 23rd 2022 with Cipher Press, with a sequel forthcoming in 2023. Nat’s PhD project is a queer reading of Elizabeth Siddal’s art and poetry, featuring unruly Books of Hours, tree-person hybrids, sapphic musicians … Continue reading “‘The Gumption I Write With’: The Chaotic Journals of (Neo)Victorian Characters”
Dr Rosalind White, (@DrRosalindWhite on Twitter) research associate at the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Corpus Research and on #FindingMiddlemarch at Royal Holloway, University of London, proposes a way into George Eliot’s Middlemarch using corpus linguistics. In this blog post, I’d like to explore how corpus linguistic tools can be used to illuminate the semantic texture of George … Continue reading “‘I know no speck so troublesome as self’: Finding Middlemarch through Corpus Linguistics”
Today we have a big announcement to make. After five years as editor of the CLiC blog, Dr Viola Wiegand is handing over the reins to Dr Rosalind White. So this blog post is to say thank you, Viola, for all your brilliant work over the years. You made a massive contribution to introducing people … Continue reading “CLiC Blog News”
The students appeared interested with what the CLiC app had to offer – that’s where I began to think about how I could incorporate the app into their research project. During their next session via Microsoft teams, I showed them the framework of the app and how to navigate the website to begin their research projects.
In this guest post, Katherine Jackson (Royal Holloway) demonstrates how searching for items of cutlery in the CLiC corpora can shed a light on the cultural context of 19th century Britain and the gender conventions of the time. If you enjoy this post, also make sure to check out her recent Technecast podcast on her … Continue reading “The Decline and Fall of Cutlery and the Domestic Man”
A Christmas Carol is a popular text choice for students in GCSE English Literature Section B (see the AQA Lead Examiner’s Report 2017). No wonder then, that it is also one of the top texts in our CLiC 2.0 web app for which teachers request activities. In fact, two teachers have previously written guest blog … Continue reading “Finding links between the structure and themes of A Christmas Carol”
In this guest post, Colette Ramuz (Royal Holloway) explores textual patterns related to the mouth in a subsection of the CLiC corpus of Dickens’s Novels. She argues that the use of digital tools can help advance our understanding of Dickens’s representations of embodiment and sexuality. It is a commonplace that sexuality was considered a taboo topic … Continue reading “Finding the biting point: Desire and biting males in Dickens’s ‘The Pickwick Papers’ and ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’”
In this guest post teacher Claire Stoneman shares her passion for Victorian literature with a case study of servants and agency in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. She emphasises the role of doors in this context – reiterating the importance of doors in this novella, which our Blog readers may remember from Lorraine … Continue reading “Signposting and gatekeeping the supernatural: Servants and doors in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”
Beth Kemp (@BethKemp on Twitter) is an English teacher, A Level examiner, teacher trainer and writer of textbooks and study guides for A Level, GCSE and KS3. She is also passionate about reading for pleasure and contemporary YA literature, finding that language and books of various kinds tend to dominate her work and her leisure. Looking … Continue reading “Revising Frankenstein with CLiC Dickens”
Lorenzo Mastropierro (@Lo_Mastropierro on Twitter) is a Teaching Associate in Literary Linguistics at the University of Nottingham. Lorenzo is the Assistant Editor for the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics. He has recently published his monograph Corpus Stylistics in Heart of Darkness and its Italian Translations. Now Heart of Darkness is also available in CLiC and … Continue reading “Is there light in the heart of darkness?”
