VICTEUR European Migrants in the British Imagination: Victorian and Neo-Victorian Culture

Summary

What can the large scale literary datasets now available tell us about the ways in which national cultures develop and the role of migration in that development? 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. During the Victorian period Britain was the target destination for large numbers of migrants from across Europe fleeing war, political turmoil and/or economic deprivation. While this period and process has attracted considerable attention from historians, literary studies have primarily focussed on colonial racist and imperialist attitudes or representations of single ethnic groups. VICTEUR will focus on how the intra-European cultural exchange triggered by this movement of population is embedded in Victorian fiction. It will identify persistent and residual narratives and attitudes to a cross-section of European migrants by members of the host community and the cultural output of these migrants across a very large literary data set, the 35,918 volumes of fiction in the British Library Nineteenth Century Corpus operationalised for text mining via UCD’s Curatr data interface. 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 intra-national model for understanding migration as a key driver of cultural development at the interface of gender, ethnicity and demography.

Resources

Show all and search (6)

Unfold all

Fold all

More information & hyperlinks

Web resources:	https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/884951
Start date:	01-09-2020
End date:	28-02-2027
Total budget - Public funding:	2 498 126,00 Euro - 2 498 126,00 Euro

Cordis data

Original description

What can the large scale literary datasets now available tell us about the ways in which national cultures develop and the role of migration in that development? 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. During the Victorian period Britain was the target destination for large numbers of migrants from across Europe fleeing war, political turmoil and/or economic deprivation. While this period and process has attracted considerable attention from historians, literary studies have primarily focussed on colonial racist and imperialist attitudes or representations of single ethnic groups. VICTEUR will focus on how the intra-European cultural exchange triggered by this movement of population is embedded in Victorian fiction. It will identify persistent and residual narratives and attitudes to a cross-section of European migrants by members of the host community and the cultural output of these migrants across a very large literary data set, the 35,918 volumes of fiction in the British Library Nineteenth Century Corpus operationalised for text mining via UCDs Curatr data interface. 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 intra-national model for understanding migration as a key driver of cultural development at the interface of gender, ethnicity and demography.