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European Migrants in the British Imagination: Victorian and Neo-Victorian Culture

Project description

A literary look at migration’s impact on cultural representations

What is the role of migration and migrants in the dynamics of cultural development as regards gender, ethnicity and demography? To answer this question, the EU-funded VICTEUR project will review large-scale data sets (35 918 volumes of fiction in the British Library Nineteenth Century Corpus). Specifically, it will study intra-European migration in the Victorian period through the ‘macroscope’ of text mining and the microscope of literary scholarship. The focus will be on how the intra-European cultural exchange triggered by this population movement is embedded in Victorian fiction. The project aims to uncover the residual impact of cultural representations in neo-Victorian fiction, film and television, focusing on the period 2011-2016, combining methodologies from text mining, transmedia and cultural memory studies.

Objective

What can the large scale literary datasets now available tell us about the ways in which national cultures develop and the role of migration in that development? This project seeks to push beyond the frontiers of current understanding of the role of migration and migrants in the dynamics of cultural change and continuity, examining intra-European migration in the Victorian period through the ‘macroscope' of text mining and the microscopes of literary scholarship. During the Victorian period Britain was the target destination for large numbers of migrants from across Europe fleeing war, political turmoil and/or economic deprivation. While this period and process has attracted considerable attention from historians, literary studies have primarily focussed on colonial racist and imperialist attitudes or representations of single ethnic groups. VICTEUR will focus on how the intra-European cultural exchange triggered by this movement of population is embedded in Victorian fiction. It will identify persistent and residual narratives and attitudes to a cross-section of European migrants by members of the host community and the cultural output of these migrants across a very large literary data set, the 35,918 volumes of fiction in the British Library Nineteenth Century Corpus operationalised for text mining via UCD’s Curatr data interface. VICTEUR will trace the residual impact of these cultural representations in neo-Victorian fiction, film and television, focussing on the period 2011-2016, combining methodologies from text mining, transmedia and cultural memory studies. The project will examine in detail the relationship between gender and national and ethnic identities within the texts and the impact of authorial gender on representations of migrants by British and migrant writers. It will develop a new transhistorical and intra-national model for understanding migration as a key driver of cultural development at the interface of gender, ethnicity and demography.

Host institution

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN, NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, DUBLIN
Net EU contribution
€ 2 498 126,00
Address
BELFIELD
4 Dublin
Ireland

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Region
Ireland Eastern and Midland Dublin
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost
€ 2 498 126,00

Beneficiaries (1)