The VICTEUR study will combine data analytics and literary criticism to investigate representations of migrants and by migrants in Victorian and Neo-Victorian culture. 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. The study will use big data to address a key unanswered societal question, how does migration impact on the cultural identity of both migrant and host communities in the historical long-term.
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.
