Dear readers and contributors of Victorian Network,

You will have noticed that this journal has been on a hiatus of about a year since our last issue on the "Victorian Brain" was published in 2016.

This was due to a number of changes in staff that took longer than anticipated to resolve. We are now back to operating as usual, with the one change that Victorian Network will henceforth publish annually, instead of bi-annually.

We are excited to be working on our next issue on the theme of "Forgery and Imitation" and look forward to receiving your submissions.

We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience that our unannounced hiatus may have caused.

The Victorian Network editorial team

Victorian Network is an open-access, MLA-indexed, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to publishing and promoting the best work across the broad field of Victorian Studies by postgraduate students and early career academics. We are delighted to announce that our twelfth issue (Summer 2018) will be guest edited by Aviva Briefel (Bowdoin College) on the theme of "Forgery and Imitation". 

The Summer 2016 issue of Victorian Network, entitled "Victorian Brain" and guest edited by Professor Sally Shuttleworth (University of Oxford), is now available (see below). Our previous editions: 

• Victorian Dirt
• Victorian Bodies and Body Parts
• Victorians and the Law: Literature and Legal Culture
• Victorian Other Worlds
• Sex, Courtship and Marriage in Victorian Literature and Culture
• Production and Consumption in Victorian Literature and Culture
• Theatricality and Performance in Victorian Literature and Culture
• Crossing the Line: Affinities Before and After 1900
• Victorian Literature and Science
• The British Empire and Victorian Literature and Culture

Victorian Brain

In April 1878 the first issue of Brain: A Journal of Neurology was published. Edited by the eminent psychiatrists J. C. Bucknill and James Crichton-Browne, and by the rising stars in the field of experimental and clinical studies of the brain, David Ferrier and John Hughlings Jackson, it sought to lay claim to a new disciplinary territory: neurology. An index of the journal’s self-conscious modernity in its use of this term is perhaps to be found in the fact that nearly a century and a half later it is still a leading journal in the field, and publishing under exactly the same title. 1 Indeed, there are even similarities in format, with clinical case studies accompanied by articles addressing medical issues of the day, such as ‘brain forcing’ of school children, or effects of alcohol on the brain, in the 1878 volume, matched by short pieces on the Zika virus and Alzheimer’s, in recent issues. 2 Such apparent similarity and continuity of course also masks major shifts. (...) Read the full text here.

Download the entire issue (PDF)