Periodic Reporting for period 2 - VICTEUR (European Migrants in the British Imagination: Victorian and Neo-Victorian Culture)
Période du rapport: 2022-03-01 au 2023-08-31
Victorian Britain was much more diverse than we assume today. It was the target destination for large numbers of migrants from across Europe fleeing war, political turmoil and economic deprivation. 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 intranational model for understanding migration as a key driver of cultural development at the interface of gender, ethnicity and demography. By understanding twenty-first century adaptations and appropriations of nineteenth century texts and thematics as forms of cultural memory, this project will also illuminate the influence of the historical experience of migration on a national identity perceived as territorial, innate and unchanging.
All of the research work packages have been progressing well with a number of key tasks for each work package completed, such as archival research and the development of a digital platform and an online digital catalogue.
International research conference panels and a number of conference papers have been accepted.
A project website has been designed and built. There have been a number of key dissemination activities and stakeholder engagements, such as podcast, online presentations and workshops, more details can be found on the project website. A social media presence is growing through the project's Twitter account.
This project will progressively share its data, methods, and findings over the course of its lifespan. In the process, we will also make an unprecedentedly large dataset available to other researchers, alongside embedded tools for conducting enhanced searches, creating lexicons, generating data visualisations, and creating and exporting customised textual corpora ranging in size from single works to the dataset's entire complement of fiction.