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.
Tiffany Olgun is a PhD student at Royal Holloway, University of London, researching the Dickensian dandy. In this post, she explores the language surrounding nineteenth-century English dandyism and the progression of the dandy from his Regency incarnation to his decadent form. The nineteenth-century English dandy is often portrayed as a man of pure surface and … Continue reading “Decadence and Debauchery: Undressing the Dandy Using 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”
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”
In this guest post, Sophie Phelps explores ‘liminal’ Dickensian characters who are not quite children and not quite adults, as she shows with a case study of David Copperfield’s “child-wife” Dora. We think this topic is a fantastic fit for us: questions of characterisation in Dickens’s writing are very dear to the CLiC project. Childhood is … Continue reading “Liminality in David Copperfield”
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’”
Pablo Ruano San Segundo (@pablo_uex on Twitter) is a Lecturer at the University of Extremadura, Spain. He is a member of the CLiC Dickens Advisory Board and is an expert on reporting verbs in Dickens’s novels. In this post Pablo shares how he uses CLiC in his research. The creation of Dickens’s most memorable characters … Continue reading “CLiC and Dickens’s not-so-conspicuous techniques of characterisation: Reporting verbs”
The AHRC-funded CLiC Dickens project has officially come to an end. We celebrated the successful conclusion of the project with our CLiC Dickens Day, at the Birmingham and Midland Institute (BMI), on 1 December. As Charles Dickens was one of the early presidents of the BMI, the venue was particularly suitable for our event. The … Continue reading “CLiC Dickens Day: our end-of-project celebration at the BMI”
Anna Čermáková is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow on the EU-funded GLARE Project [“Exploring Gender in Children’s Literature from a Cognitive Corpus Stylistic Perspective”] at the University of Birmingham. She is a member of the CLiC Dickens advisory board and her main research interests are in corpus linguistics and particularly in corpus stylistics. She is also interested in literary … Continue reading “The GLARE 19th Century Children’s Literature Corpus in CLiC”
