Dr Beth Palmer
About
Biography
Beth Palmer has published widely on Victorian literature and culture. Her publications include Women's Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture: Sensational Strategies, (Oxford University Press, 2011) A Return to the Common Reader: Print Culture and the Novel, 1850-1900 (co-ed with Adelene Buckland, Ashgate, 2011), Sensation Drama, 1860-1880: An Anthology (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) and Picturing the Reader: Reading and Representation in the Long Nineteenth Century (Peter Lang, 2021). She has also written an undergraduate guide entitled Victorian Literature: Texts, Contexts, Connections (York Press, 2010) and numerous articles on aspects of nineteenth-century print culture, drama, and Victorian and Neo-Victorian women's writing.
Beth is currently working on a project entitled Sensational Genres which examines the relationship between the sensation novel and the theatre in Victorian Britain.
Areas of specialism
University roles and responsibilities
- Impact Lead for the School of Literature and Languages
- Director of Postgraduate Research for the School of Literature and Languages
My qualifications
Previous roles
Affiliations and memberships
News
In the media
ResearchResearch interests
My research interests include:
- Victorian fiction
- The periodical press
- Nineteenth-century popular culture
- The nineteenth and twentieth-century theatre
- Readership
- The Neo-Victorian novel
- Women's writing
- Contemporary fiction
- Postcolonial writing
I welcome enquiries from doctoral students interested in working in any of these areas.
Research collaborations
I have collaborated with colleagues across theatre studies, art history and literary studies on a number of projects including:
A Return to the Common Reader: Print Culture and the Novel, 1850-1900 (Ashgate, 2011) co-edited with Dr Adelene Buckland
Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies (2016) - special issue on 'Performing the Victorian' co-edited with Dr Benjamin Poore.
Sensation Drama, 1860-1880: An Anthology (2019) co-edited with Dr Joanna Hofer-Robinson
Picturing the Reader: Reading and Representation in the Long Nineteenth Century (forthcoming) co-edited with Dr Amelia Yeates.
Indicators of esteem
Reader for: Victorian Review, Review of English Studies, Journal of British Studies, Edinburgh University Press, RAVON (Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net), Women’s Writing, LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, Studies in the Novel, Cambridge University Press, Palgrave.
Editorial board: Victorian Popular Fiction, Key Popular Women Writers and New Paths in Victorian Popular Literature and Culture
Reviewer for Irish Research Council's postdoctoral award scheme
Research interests
My research interests include:
- Victorian fiction
- The periodical press
- Nineteenth-century popular culture
- The nineteenth and twentieth-century theatre
- Readership
- The Neo-Victorian novel
- Women's writing
- Contemporary fiction
- Postcolonial writing
I welcome enquiries from doctoral students interested in working in any of these areas.
Research collaborations
I have collaborated with colleagues across theatre studies, art history and literary studies on a number of projects including:
A Return to the Common Reader: Print Culture and the Novel, 1850-1900 (Ashgate, 2011) co-edited with Dr Adelene Buckland
Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies (2016) - special issue on 'Performing the Victorian' co-edited with Dr Benjamin Poore.
Sensation Drama, 1860-1880: An Anthology (2019) co-edited with Dr Joanna Hofer-Robinson
Picturing the Reader: Reading and Representation in the Long Nineteenth Century (forthcoming) co-edited with Dr Amelia Yeates.
Indicators of esteem
Reader for: Victorian Review, Review of English Studies, Journal of British Studies, Edinburgh University Press, RAVON (Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net), Women’s Writing, LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, Studies in the Novel, Cambridge University Press, Palgrave.
Editorial board: Victorian Popular Fiction, Key Popular Women Writers and New Paths in Victorian Popular Literature and Culture
Reviewer for Irish Research Council's postdoctoral award scheme
Supervision
Postgraduate research supervision
Eleanor March, (2018-2021) 'From margin to centre: Prisoner writing as an act of translation' (principal supervisor)
Kate Johnson, (part time, 2016-) 'Necessary Vanity: Historicising Contemporary Constructions of Performative Feminine Beauty in British Female-Authored Advisory Literature' (principal supervisor)
Danielle Dove, (2017-2020), 'Sartorial Spectres: Re-Fashioning the Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel' (co-supervisor)
Garth Wenman-James, (2018-2022) 'Poverty Porn in Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Spectacle, Space, Surveillance and the Victorian Imagination' TECHNE funded (co-supervisor)
Heather Ballantyne, (2018-) 'Eating disorders in contemporary women's literature' TECHNE funded (co-supervisor)
Postgraduate research supervision
Leah Fryer, (Expectations for Women in the Nineteenth Century: Usage in Historical Fiction and Effects in Camille Doncieux as Wife to an Aspiring Painter
Teaching
I convene the undergraduate modules: Victorian Literature and Culture, Understanding Stage and Screen and Life Writing. I also guest lecture across several other BA and MA modules.
Publications
The long nineteenth century saw a prolific increase in the number of books being produced and read and, consequently, in the number of visual and textual discourses about reading. This collection examines a range of visual and textual iconographies of readers produced during this period and maps the ways in which such representations engaged with crucial issues of the time, including literary value, gender formation, familial relationships, the pursuit of leisure and the understanding of new technologies.
Gauging the ways in which Victorians conceptualized reading has often relied on textual sources, but here we recognize and elaborate the importance of visual culture – often in dialogue with textual evidence – in shaping the way people read and thought about reading. This book brings together historians, literary scholars and art historians using a range of methodologies and theoretical approaches to address ideas of readership found in fine art, photography, arts and craft, illustration, novels, diaries and essays. The volume shows how the field of readership studies can be enriched and furthered through an interdisciplinary approach and, in particular, through an exploration of the visual iconography of readers and reading.
This article seeks to add to the conversation around transmedia practices in Victorian culture and to suggest that sensation, a particular type of storytelling that sought to affect its audiences physically and emotionally with its extreme events in contemporary settings, was significant to the development of transmedia practices in the ease with which sensationalists moved their stories across boundaries and the highly self-reflexive way in which they did so. Whilst contemporary reviewers expressed anxiety about the fractured and multiple means by which sensation could be consumed, sensation writers like novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon and playwright Dion Boucicault highlighted their sensational productions as transmedia, often in the face of critical opprobrium. Examining both writers’ versions of The Octoroon (1861–2), a story about racial inequality set in antebellum Louisiana, we can see how offering readers and audiences sensational stories that continued, expanded or re-told other sensational stories kept Victorian consumers coming back for more. Sensation, this article suggests, was at the forefront of stimulating its audiences in new ways: bodily, intellectually, and emotionally, and that the transmedia connectedness of sensationalists’ work increased their capacity to create new sensations.