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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 UCDs 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.

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Keywords

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Programme(s)

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

ERC-ADG - Advanced Grant

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) ERC-2019-ADG

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Host institution

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN, NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, DUBLIN
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 2 498 126,00
Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 2 498 126,00

Beneficiaries (1)

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