The Long, Wide Nineteenth Century

John Jordan
The Dickens Project
UC Santa Cruz

“The Long, Wide Nineteenth Century” explicitly called into question the term “Victorian” as conventionally used to characterize the cultural production and historical periodization of nineteenth-century Britain. It aimed to push the boundaries, spatial as well as temporal, of this term and to ask what other models, paradigms, approaches, or structures of feeling might complement it and better serve students and scholars of the period. The conference brought together participants at different career levels and from different disciplines within and outside the UC system with the goal of identifying and trying out new chronotopes, large and small, for analyzing the history and culture of nineteenth-century Britain.