Neil McCaw is Professor of Victorian Literature and Cuture at the University of Winchester, where he teaches Victorian fiction and crime culture, with a particular interest in Sherlock Holmes.
The rapid extension of what has become known as the Digital Humanities has resulted in an array o... more The rapid extension of what has become known as the Digital Humanities has resulted in an array of online resources for researchers within the subdiscipline of Victorian Studies. But the increasingly acquisitive nature of these digital projects poses the question as to what happens once all the information and material we have related to the Victorians has been archived? This paper is an attempt to anticipate this question with specific reference to future digital resources for the study of 'Victorian murder culture', and in particular, the essentially textual nature of the nineteenth-century experience of crime. It will argue that there is potential for new forms of digital-humanities archive that offer a more participatory user experience, one that nurtures a cognitively empathic understanding of the complex intertextuality of Victorian crime culture.
An analysis of the popular-cultural depiction of psychopathy, with particular reference to Alfred... more An analysis of the popular-cultural depiction of psychopathy, with particular reference to Alfred Hitchcock's 'Frenzy'.
Historically 'the Gothic' has embodied ideas of Otherness and repression, and a dialectic of attr... more Historically 'the Gothic' has embodied ideas of Otherness and repression, and a dialectic of attraction and repulsion. Gothic narratives reside in the space of what is known and what cannot (or will not) be known, with writers capitalising on the creative imaginations of their audiences through suggestion and implication. The contemporary fetishisation of forensic science challenges the ethos of such a narrative strategy by insisting upon a world that can always be definitively understood, through the lens of detailed genetic, biological, and psychological examination. And yet the Gothic sensibility remains, articulated in popular-cultural forms that resituate and redefine Gothic archetypes of villainy and Outsider-ness within the context of a broader interest in clinical human personality disorders. These clinical disorders serve as the new Other that postmodern audiences are attracted to and repelled by. Modern TV series such as Dexter embody such a concern with a contemporary version of the dark Gothic underside of human experience. In the UK this new criminal-Gothic landscape of the human mind is inextricably woven into the work of Lynda La Plante and Val McDermid, for just two examples, with criminal subjects lurking on the margins of society as peculiarly contemporary versions of the monstrous, part of an overarching fixation with the intricacies of psychological Otherness.
An analysis of the narrative significance of canines in the handwritten manuscript of the Sherloc... more An analysis of the narrative significance of canines in the handwritten manuscript of the Sherlock Holmes story 'The Adventure of the Creeping Man'.
An analysis of the inconsistences of narrative dating between the handwritten manuscript and the ... more An analysis of the inconsistences of narrative dating between the handwritten manuscript and the published editions of the Sherlock Holmes story 'The Adventure of the Creeping Man'.
An examination of the status and impact of close reading practice within the discipline of Creati... more An examination of the status and impact of close reading practice within the discipline of Creative Writing, arguing that the overly narrow, practice-based form of textual interpretation that dominates in the writing workshop is limiting and unhelpful within the context of a broader sense of student writing and learning development. What is required instead is for reading to be broadened to take into account a much wider sense of culture and knowledge, and for other subject domains to be brought into the Creative Writing classroom in order to bring to life the words on the page far beyond the implications of the process of learning the writing 'craft'. The history of close reading theories in the twentieth century is referenced as a means of identifying a potentially more symbiotic relationship between 'close' and 'cultural' reading methods. It is only when such cultural knowledges are taken into account that the texts students are expected to read and learn from can truly become useful, encouraging writing students with a much sharper awareness of the cultural and ideological implications of language and text, within a discipline that much more readily acknowledges its wider role as communication in praxis.
The rapid extension of what has become known as the Digital Humanities has resulted in an array o... more The rapid extension of what has become known as the Digital Humanities has resulted in an array of online resources for researchers within the subdiscipline of Victorian Studies. But the increasingly acquisitive nature of these digital projects poses the question as to what happens once all the information and material we have related to the Victorians has been archived? This paper is an attempt to anticipate this question with specific reference to future digital resources for the study of 'Victorian murder culture', and in particular, the essentially textual nature of the nineteenth-century experience of crime. It will argue that there is potential for new forms of digital-humanities archive that offer a more participatory user experience, one that nurtures a cognitively empathic understanding of the complex intertextuality of Victorian crime culture.
An analysis of the popular-cultural depiction of psychopathy, with particular reference to Alfred... more An analysis of the popular-cultural depiction of psychopathy, with particular reference to Alfred Hitchcock's 'Frenzy'.
Historically 'the Gothic' has embodied ideas of Otherness and repression, and a dialectic of attr... more Historically 'the Gothic' has embodied ideas of Otherness and repression, and a dialectic of attraction and repulsion. Gothic narratives reside in the space of what is known and what cannot (or will not) be known, with writers capitalising on the creative imaginations of their audiences through suggestion and implication. The contemporary fetishisation of forensic science challenges the ethos of such a narrative strategy by insisting upon a world that can always be definitively understood, through the lens of detailed genetic, biological, and psychological examination. And yet the Gothic sensibility remains, articulated in popular-cultural forms that resituate and redefine Gothic archetypes of villainy and Outsider-ness within the context of a broader interest in clinical human personality disorders. These clinical disorders serve as the new Other that postmodern audiences are attracted to and repelled by. Modern TV series such as Dexter embody such a concern with a contemporary version of the dark Gothic underside of human experience. In the UK this new criminal-Gothic landscape of the human mind is inextricably woven into the work of Lynda La Plante and Val McDermid, for just two examples, with criminal subjects lurking on the margins of society as peculiarly contemporary versions of the monstrous, part of an overarching fixation with the intricacies of psychological Otherness.
An analysis of the narrative significance of canines in the handwritten manuscript of the Sherloc... more An analysis of the narrative significance of canines in the handwritten manuscript of the Sherlock Holmes story 'The Adventure of the Creeping Man'.
An analysis of the inconsistences of narrative dating between the handwritten manuscript and the ... more An analysis of the inconsistences of narrative dating between the handwritten manuscript and the published editions of the Sherlock Holmes story 'The Adventure of the Creeping Man'.
An examination of the status and impact of close reading practice within the discipline of Creati... more An examination of the status and impact of close reading practice within the discipline of Creative Writing, arguing that the overly narrow, practice-based form of textual interpretation that dominates in the writing workshop is limiting and unhelpful within the context of a broader sense of student writing and learning development. What is required instead is for reading to be broadened to take into account a much wider sense of culture and knowledge, and for other subject domains to be brought into the Creative Writing classroom in order to bring to life the words on the page far beyond the implications of the process of learning the writing 'craft'. The history of close reading theories in the twentieth century is referenced as a means of identifying a potentially more symbiotic relationship between 'close' and 'cultural' reading methods. It is only when such cultural knowledges are taken into account that the texts students are expected to read and learn from can truly become useful, encouraging writing students with a much sharper awareness of the cultural and ideological implications of language and text, within a discipline that much more readily acknowledges its wider role as communication in praxis.
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