Wolff Lecture

“Whizzical whirligig queer”:

Charting the Serial Rhythms of Periodical Print at Scale

Dr Alison Chapman, University of Victoria, Canada

How can large scale digital projects help us chart the myriad currents of Victorian periodical print? And how can we rethink our navigation through degrees of scale within this flow of information, from single contributions to quantitative patterns? This talk focuses on Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry (https://dvpp.uvic.ca/), a SSHRC-funded digital open access site which offers three inter-operable and fully searchable projects: an index of all poetry in full runs of 21 Victorian periodicals (with metadata and page scans, including attributions, and totalling 15,600 poems), an encoded poetry sample (13% of the corpus, tagged for poetic and material features), and a personography of 4,000 poets, translators, and illustrators. DVPP makes available a large sample of the overwhelming “golden stream” of filler poems, the much lamented proliferating magazine verse that, according to Victorian critics, everyone publishes but no one reads. What happens if we reconsider this denigrated genre of light verse en masse, in terms of the ephemeral rhythms of seriality? What function does filler poetry serve in periodical print culture, and what can it disclose about our literary categories? (The quotation in my title is taken from “To My Two-Wheeled Steed,” Chambers’s Journal 4 June 1870).

Dr. Alison Chapman (University of Victoria) has been selected as this year's Wolff Lecturer and is the keynote speaker of the 2023 conference.

Dr. Alison Chapman studied at the Universities of Oxford and Glasgow, and before her appointment at UVic in 2005 she taught at the Universities of Sheffield Hallam, Dundee, and Glasgow. She specialises in nineteenth-century literature and culture (especially Victorian poetry and women’s writing) as well as digital studies, and is currently PI of the SSHRC-funded project Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry