At the Victorian Popular Fiction Association’s latest Online Study Day, Hannah Armour and Jan Angermeier presented papers on ‘Mind Wandering and Attention in Sheridan Le Fanu’s “The Watcher / Familiar”’ and ‘The Victorian Romance of Knowledge: Illustration and Visuality in the Sherlock Holmes Short Stories’, respectively.
Hannah’s paper examined representations of the subjective and objective within Le Fanu’s tale, considering how the collection’s frame narrator epitomises exemplar mind-wandering and attention habits.
Jan Angermeier employed a computational approach to chart the structure and content of the illustrations originally accompanying the Sherlock Holmes short stories published in The Strand and how they relate to readerly attention.
Both papers converge on the idea that Victorian short fiction is heavily invested in the topic of attention while exploring how specific genres – Gothic and detective fiction – work through the challenges and cultural anxieties about attention pertaining to the Victorian era.
The results gathered contribute to each researcher’s LitAttention sub-projects.