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Virtually London: Literature and Laptops

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Teaching Victorian Literature in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

How do we use technology to make the Victorian period newly legible to students? This article takes up “Virtually London: Literature and Laptops,” a digital Victorian studies class, as a case study. The course uses digital archives and mapping technologies to study nineteenth-century literature about London. Throughout the semester, students make digital narrative maps of where characters travel to look for patterns and to better understand how London functions in works from Sherlock Holmes stories to The Picture of Dorian Gray. This approach lets students examine how issues of gender, class, and race were embedded in the geography of London itself, and by extension, in the literature about London and its environs.

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Swafford, J. (2017). Virtually London: Literature and Laptops. In: Cadwallader, J., Mazzeno, L. (eds) Teaching Victorian Literature in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58886-5_16

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