Journals
- Andre gasson's Wilkie Collins Information Pages s(last updated May 2015)
- The Wilkie Collins Journal (link)
- Updated information about the Wilkie Collins Society, its renamed journal, and online versions of The Collected Letters of Wilkie Collins. (link)
- Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science (1883) and/or any of Collins’s work
- The Body: As a scientific subject, as a site of emotion, bodily representations, and the body in forensics, news reportage and the home.
- The Victorian origin of disciplines: Collins as an interdisciplinary figure, the divide (or not) of “heart” and “science”, the definition of sensation in literature and/or science.
- Medicine and anatomical science: vivisection, taxidermy, anatomical atlases and the nineteenth-century doctor and/or scientist.
- Psychology and psychiatry: the physicality of mental illness, hysteria, the asylum, treatment and therapeutics.
- Gender: the gendered body, representations of gender, the gendered connotations of “heart” and/or “science”.
- Sensation: As genre, as sense or emotion, as subjective.
- Detection: forensics, interrogation, the body as clue, the science of detection, and crimes of the heart.
- Relationships: Romantic, familial, or otherwise.
- Neo-Victorian Approaches to “Heart” and “Science”
- Work by other contemporary sensation writers
This academic, peer-reviewed resource dedicated to the life and works of Collins is the new web-based home of the publication known previously as The Wilkie Collins Society Journal. Sponsored by the Wilkie Collins Society, the journal supports and promotes innovative and rigorous research into one of the most successful and important authors of the nineteenth century. Established in 1981, The Journal is dedicated to furthering our understanding of the life and works of Collins with the particular aim promoting new methodological approaches to Collins’s writings as well as to broaden our understanding of the larger context from which those works emerged. The editorial team is particularly eager to publish works on the lesser-known texts of the author, although articles offering fresh approaches to the better-known novels of the 1860s will be considered. The Journal, which is also interested in related authors and sensation fiction broadly defined, will consider articles on authors such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Reade, Charles Dickens, Ellen Wood, and Florence Marryat.
Joanne Parsons of Bath Spa and Falmouth Universities announced on Victoria a special issue of the Journal devoted to “the “Heart” and “Science” of Wilkie Collins and his Contemporaries” appropriately quoting the protagonist of Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science (1883), the surgeon Ovid de Vere, who asks, ‘“Why can’t I look into your heart, and see what secrets it is keeping from me?”’ Parsons points out that de Vere
laments the difficulty in deciphering hidden emotions and secrets. Yet the language suggests his medical background, striking a note with the novel’s supposedly anti-vivisection message and highlighting contemporary debates into the nature of experimental medicine, observation and epistemology. What is the best way of uncovering secrets, and what part does knowledge of the body play in this? Can medical training benefit from a thorough understanding of emotion? And does gender play a part in this? Issues of ‘heart’ and ‘science’ reverberate across Collins’s work, from the Major’s collection of women’s hair in The Law and the Lady (1875) to Ezra Jenning’s solution to the crime of The Moonstone (1868). This conference takes as its focus the proliferation of “heart” and “science” throughout Collins’s work.
Suggested topics for the special issue:
Submissions are not limited to papers on Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science (1883) but to “heart” and “science” at work in the full range of Collins’s fiction. The WCJ are also interested in related authors and sensation fiction more broadly, hence papers on authors such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon,Charles Reade, Charles Dickens, Ellen Wood, Florence Marryat and other sensation writers will also be considered. Interdisciplinary perspectives are welcome. Email abstracts to jo.parsons@falmouth.ac.uk and V.Burke@pgr.reading.ac.uk by 28th February 2017.
Web Resources
Last modified 28 September 2021