Peyton's Site

While reading Kelsey McKinney’s observations and analyses on the practice of commonplacing, I became very drawn to some of the points she was making. I had always thought of commonplacing as our way to share our ideas and ponderings with our classmates. Although this is a major purpose of the…

Comment 1: Hi Olivia, this is meant to “pay a call” to your commonplace book. The thing I enjoyed most about your Commonplace entries was your inclusion of critiques of the novels we read from the time they were actually written. This allowed us as the reader to see how…

Some of the themes I saw present throughout my commonplace book reading were the themes of reverse imperialism, anachronism, and fears immigration. The first idea I really saw stick out was that of reverse imperialism. Jennifer mentioned this in her entry and it really grabbed my attention because the definition…

“The aim of this essay is to offer a reading of Bram Stoker’s Dracula as an example of the dialogue established between science, literature and the study of the supernatural in Victorian England. The novel, as part of the fin-de-siècle scientific period, can be interpreted as a conscious inquiry into…

“The castle is on the very edge of a terrible precipice. A stone falling from the window would fall a thousand feet without touching anything! As far as the eye can reach is a sea of green tree tops, with occasionally a deep rift where there is a chasm. Here…

In this week’s commonplace book entries on Dracula, there were many themes that were common amongst the entries I read. One of the main ones is the idea of modern London versus old Europe. The idea that there were evil practices and strange people in other parts of the continent…

“The Beetle works to subvert British representations of imperial imperatives. More preoccupied with the penetration of male bodies and the instability of narratives emerging from them than with their solidification, this novel uses the register of the male body to interrogate imperial authority and the physical prowess on which it was…

“the relation between animal and monster that such recognition calls into question has remained curiously under-theorised.” “the figural operation that installs the beast as a human other in the fictional text through the medium of the monster is no different in kind from the discursive acts that structured Victorians’ attitudes…

In my viewing of classmates’ commonplace book entries, the main ideas that stuck out to me were the fears of British expansion into Africa, as well as the role of women and the idea of the “new woman”. First, each of the entries I looked at mentioned the fear of…

“The 19th century witnessed the expansion of the British Empire, but this process did not go unquestioned. Doubts about Empire seem to have intensified in the last quarter of a century. Several texts of the 1890s offered warnings about the consequences of Britain’s actions overseas. A passage in H G Wells’s The…