Reading Like a Victorian
Reading Like a Victorian: How to Experience Serial Novels Synchronically Online
Dr. Robyn Warhol will demonstrate her recently upgraded website, Reading Like a Victorian, to show how one can experience serial novels online as their original readers might have done. Just as we follow multiple serial TV programmes in real time, Victorians would have read monthly or weekly installments of other novels while waiting for the next installment of their favorites to appear in print. Dr. Warhol will discuss the implications of reading 19th-century novels in their “serial moments.”
Robyn Warhol is an Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of English at The Ohio State University. A specialist in narrative theory and 19th-century British literature, she is the co-editor (with Susan S. Lanser) of Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Narratologies and co-author (with Helena Michie) of Love Among the Archives: Writing the Lives of Sir George Scharf, Victorian Bachelor, both winners of international scholarly awards.
Resources
Reading Like a Victorian
When you read a Victorian serial novel in paperback form, you are “bingeing” it as you would a completed TV series. Nineteenth-century audiences used to read novels in instalments, following many plots at the same time while they waited for the next issue to appear.