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.
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”
