MA in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture 2013-14
QUESTIONING THE VICTORIANS:
TEXTS, CONTEXTS AND AFTERLIVES
Convenor: Dr James Williams
INTRODUCTION
This course surveys some of the major literary and cultural developments in, and the
central preoccupations of, Victorian writing, as formulated by contemporaries and by
recent critics and theorists. It introduces key thematic areas and problems in the
interpretation of nineteenth-century literature across a broad range of genres.
Sessions are grouped to enable students to sample theoretical, historical, and
aesthetic approaches. Below is an outline of the module so you can see the whole
term at a glance, followed by more detailed descriptions of seminars.
For each seminar there is core reading which is compulsory preparation, and also
a selection of further reading which you are encouraged to sample as widely as
possible. To give you an idea of what to expect, unless a tutor has specified differently
a well-prepared MA student arriving for a seminar will have read all the core reading
and at least three or four article-sized items—which could be, for example, book
chapters—by different authors in the further reading.
THE TERM AT A GLANCE
Week 1:
Week 2:
Week 3:
Week 4:
Week 5:
Week 6:
Week 7:
Week 8:
Week 9:
Week 10:
No seminar
Authorship and Authority: Work, Gender and Power (Trev
Broughton)
Marx’s Ghostly Matters (John Bowen)
Victorian Genres (James Williams)
Hard Times: Fiction and the Limits of Reason (John Bowen)
Tennyson’s Princess: Poetry and Progress (Matthew Campbell)
Civilizing Missions: Writing and Empire (Jim Watt)
Culture and Democracy (David Dwan)
The Warm Decembers—Queer Victorian (After)Lives and
Letters (Jason Edwards)
Questioning the Victorians Round Table (James Williams and
others)
In addition there will be an archival training day in the University of York Library,
where we will study examples of different forms of Victorian publication, and an
away day to Haworth and/or Saltaire ending the day with a curry in Bradford.
SEMINAR INFORMATION
WEEK 2 AUTHORSHIP AND AUTHORITY: WORK, GENDER AND POWER
Dr Trev Broughton
What conditions shaped the emergence in the nineteenth century of the identity
‘author’ and the consolidation of writing for publication as a profession? What might
it mean to think of representations of authorship historically, or as themselves kinds
of history? How did Victorian writers conceive of their roles, responsibilities and
rights? To what extent did class and gender condition the possibilities and experience
of authorship? This seminar will begin by considering a number of different, but
overlapping, engagements with these questions.
Core Reading
NB all these will be available as photocopies. Please do not write on them as I will
need them back once you have finished with them.
Thomas Hood ‘Copyright and Copywrong’ (1837).
Thomas Carlyle ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’ (lecture delivered 1840, pub. 1841).
Elizabeth Barrett Browning Aurora Leigh II ll. 433—541 and III ll. 157—343 (1857).
Elizabeth Gaskell The Life of Charlotte Brontë (Volume I Chapter XIV).
Anthony Trollope, ‘The Panjandrum’ (1870).
Margaret Oliphant The Autobiography pp. pp. 60—108 (written 1890—94).
Further Reading
Try to dip into at least one of the following:
Richard D. Altick ‘Publishing’ in Herbert F. Tucker (ed.) A Companion to Victorian
Literature and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 189—304. or Altick’s
English Common Reader (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1963).
Carol T. Christ, ‘“The Hero as Man of Letters”: Masculinity and Victorian Nonfiction
Prose’ in Thaïs E. Morgan (ed.) Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourse:
Renegotiating Gender and Power (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
1990), pp. 19—45.
Norma Clarke ‘Strenuous Idleness: Thomas Carlyle and the Man of Letters as Hero’
in Michael Roper and John Tosh (eds) Manful Assertions: Masculinities in
Britain since 1800 (London: Routledge, 1991), pp.25—43.
Martin Danahay Gender at Work in Victorian Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).
Philip Davis ‘Conditions of Literary Production’ in The Victorians, Oxford English
Literary History vol. 8, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 197—256.
This should be available as an e-book if you can’t find a paper copy.
Hilary Fraser et al., Gender and the Victorian Periodical (Cambridge: CUP, 2003).
Elisabeth Jay, Mrs Oliphant, ‘A Fiction to Herself’: A Literary Life, (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1995).
Mary Poovey ‘The Man-of Letters Hero: David Copperfield and the Professional
Writer’ in Uneven Developments (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) pp.
89—125.
Jennifer Ruth Novel Professions: Interested Disinterest and the Making of the
Professional in the Victorian Novel (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio University Press,
2006).
Anthony Trollope An Autobiography (1883) (any edition).
Mark Turner, Trollope and the Magazines (Houndmills: Macmillan, 2000).
The library also has stock on each of the writers you’ll be looking at this week –
explore freely.
For influential poststructuralist accounts of the question of authorship, read, if you
haven’t already, Roland Barthes ‘The Death of the Author’ and Michel Foucault
‘What is an Author?’ [1966]. Both are widely anthologised, but available in Vincent
B. Leitch (ed.) The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.
As preparation for the first seminar, pick a theme, idea, trope, image or
concept and come along willing and able to talk informally for a few
minutes (no more than 5) about how it connects (or distinguishes)
representations of authorship/writing in two or more of the set texts
(Hood, Carlyle etc). Examples might include ‘payment’, ‘independence’,
‘periodicals’, ‘paper’ – follow your nose. If you wish to illustrate your
ideas with a short handout (no more than one side of A4), you can send it
to me on jlb2@york.ac.uk before the day of the class and I’ll get it
printed up.
WEEK 3: MARX’S GHOSTLY MATTERS
Prof. John Bowen
Karl Marx was a contemporary of Dickens and George Eliot and did much of his most
important writing in England. His legacies have continued to haunt the study of
Victorian literature and culture and this seminar explores some of the key moments
of that presence and inheritance.
Core Reading
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (London: Routledge, 1994) exordium and chs 1
and 3.
Karl Marx ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoelon Bonaparte’ , in Surveys from
Exile ed. David Fernbach, especially sections 1 and 7. Also available on line at
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/
Peter Stallybrass, ‘Marx’s coat’ in Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable
Spaces, ed. Patricia Spyer (London: Routledge, 1998), 183-207.
Further reading
Geoff Bennington, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto intro. Gareth Stedman
Jones (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002).
William Morris, News from Nowhere (many editions available e.g. Oxford World’s
Classics, 2003).
Francis Wheen, Karl Marx: A Life (New York: Norton, 2000).
WEEK 4: VICTORIAN GENRES
Dr James Williams
Victorian literature is full of genres meeting, clashing, overlapping, dissolving,
reforming. To give just a few examples, we find novels taking on the essay (George
Eliot, Henry James); essays doing the work of fiction (Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde);
life-writing, fiction and autobiography refusing to stay apart (John Ruskin);
children’s literature re-making itself and critiquing the canon from the margins
(George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll). In this seminar, we’ll focus on a particularly
central pressure-point in Victorian genre: the way poetry responds to the dominance
and ambition of the contemporary novel. We’ll look at a group of texts which move
between the categories of poetry and the novel (as well as between epic, lyric, and
satire, comedy and tragedy): Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856),
Arthur Hugh Clough’s Amours de Voyage (1858), and George Meredith’s Modern
Love (1862). We’ll be reading them closely and asking a number of distinct but
related questions: how did the Victorians think about and classify their literature?
Where do we find genres in conversation, or in flux, and how do we read texts which
self-consciously cross over genre boundaries? What might modern and
contemporary genre theory have to say to the Victorians (and what might they say
back)?
Core Reading
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, Aurora Leigh, ed. Kerry McSweeney (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1993).
Clough, Arthur Hugh, Amours de Voyage, in The Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough, ed.
A. L. P. Norrington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). Widely re-printed –
for example Christopher Ricks’s New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse prints the
poem in its entirety.
Please also read as much as possible of:
George Meredith, Modern Love. The standard edition of Meredith is The Poems of
George Meredit, ed. Phylis B. Bartlett, 2 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1978) but Modern Love has been variously reprinted, e.g. ed. Stephen Regan
(Peterborough: Daisy, 1988), and ed. Gillian Beer (London: Syrens, 1995).
Full e-texts of all three poems are also available via Literature Online (LION) and
(for Clough only) Project Gutenberg.
Further Reading
Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London:
Routledge, 1993). The study contains many relevant sections, but try especially
Chapters 5, 7, 12, 15.
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), esp. Chapter 1: ‘Epic and Novel’.
Joseph Bristow, ed., The Victorian Poet: Poetics and Persona (London: Croom
Helm, 1987). A really useful anthology of contemporary writing on poetry – well
worth exploring but see esp. Section 1 ‘What is Poetry?’
Peter Conrad, The Victorian Treasure-House (London: Collins, 1973). Chapter 6:
‘The Past for Poets; the Present for Pigs’.
Jacques Derrida, ‘The Law of Genre’ Critical Inquiry, 7.1 (1980), 55.
Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).
Gérard Genette, The Architext: An Introduction (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1992).
Jerome McGann, ‘Innovation and Experiment’ in Kate Flint, ed., The Cambridge
History of Victorian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Franco Moretti, excerpt from Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary
History in Vincent B. Leitch, ed., The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism
(2nd edn, New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2010), 2441-2464.
Hayden White, ‘Anomalies of Genre: The Utility of Theory and History for the Study
of Literary Genres’ New Literary History 34.4 (2003), 597.
Carolyn Williams, ‘“Genre” and “Discourse” in Victorian Cultural Studies’, Victorian
Literature and Culture 27.2 (1999) 517-20.
———. ‘Genre Matters: Response’ Victorian Studies, 48.2. (2006), 295.
WEEK 5: HARD TIMES: FICTION AND THE LIMITS OF REASON
Prof. John Bowen
Utilitarianism was the dominant philosophical system of the early and midnineteenth-century and held at its heart the relation of reason and human happiness.
Dickens’s Hard Times is an extraordinary confrontation with the doctrine of utility
and the question of the destiny of philosophical reason in modernity more generally.
It is also a very funny book. This seminar explores Dickens’s great novel in relation
to the institutional force of instrumental, bureaucratic or administrative reason, asks
what and where the limits of such reasoning are, and wonders if anything –
horseriding, stupidity, love – might lie beyond it, lost (or found) in its pits and
loopholes.
Core reading
Please read all of the following:
Charles Dickens, Hard Times. Recommended edition: ed. Fred Kaplan and Sylvère
Monod (2nd edn New York: Norton, 1990).
John Stuart Mill, ‘Remarks on Bentham’s Philosophy’ in The Collected Works of
John Stuart Mill, Volume X - Essays on Ethics, Religion, and Society, ed. John M.
Robson, Introduction by F.E.L. Priestley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985) (often reprinted).
http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=24
1&chapter=21482&layout=html&Itemid=27
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (London: Allen Lane, 1977). Part Three:
‘Docile Bodies’.
And at least one of the following:
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Chapter One ‘The Concept of Enlightenment’
in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1979).
John Butt, Dickens at Work (London: Methuen, 1957). Chapter: ‘Hard Times: The
Problems of a Weekly Serial’.
Philip Collins, Dickens and Education (London: Macmillan, 1963).
Catherine Gallagher ‘Relationship Remembered, Relationship Forgot’ in The
Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form,
1832-1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
F. R. Leavis, ‘Hard Times: An analytic Note’ in The Great Tradition and in F. R .
Leavis and Q. D. Leavis Dickens the Novelist (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972).
Paul Schlicke, ‘Hard Times: The Necessity of Popular Entertainment' in Dickens and
Popular Entertainment (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985).
Raymond Williams, ‘The Reader in Hard Times’ in Writing in Society (London:
Verso, 1983).
Further reading
Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question concerning Technology’ in Martin Heidegger, Basic
Writings (London: Routledge, 1978).
WEEK 6: TENNYSON’S PRINCESS: POETRY AND PROGRESS
Prof. Matthew Campbell
Tennyson’s Princess Ida notoriously dismisses the sentiment of the great blank verse
lyric of the passion of the past ‘Tears, idle tears’ by looking forward to ‘That great
year of equal mights and rights’. The Princess: A Medley, published in various
versions between 1847 and 1851, was Tennyson’s most substantial publication before
In Memoriam (1850). While its everyday tale of male undergraduates dressing up in
drag to sneak into a University of women before being afflicted by ‘weird seizures’
might appear to be a rather more burlesque achievement than we associate with the
man who was to become Victoria’s laureate in 1850, it broaches topics of feminism,
science, progress and poetry which are crucial to an understanding of mid-Century
Britain. It also contains a number of great Tennysonian lyrics along with ‘Tears Idle
tears’ – ‘The splendour falls’, ‘Now sleeps the crimson petal’ and ‘Come down O
Maid’ – which are by turns erotic and elegiac. The Princess is a tale of psychic
breakdown, restoration and love told in lush faux-medieval surroundings.
Core Reading
Alfred Tennyson, The Princess. The standard edition of Tennyson is edited by
Christopher Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson, 2nd edn. 3 vols. (London: Longman,
1987). Full texts of the poem are also widely available online via, eg., Literature
Online (LION) and Project Gutenberg.
John Killham, Tennyson and the Princess: Reflections of an Age (London: Athlone
Press, 1958) – a classic of historicised Victorian poetic criticism.
Further Reading
Seamus Perry, Tennyson (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2005).
Matthew Bevis, The Art of Eloquence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Gregory Tate, The Poet’s Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)
Herbert Tucker, Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism (Cambridge MA &
London: Harvard University Press, 1988)
———. Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790-1910 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008)
In addition, on Saturday November 16, students are encouraged to attend
‘Tennyson and the Ancients’, a day seminar with an international cast of speakers
addressing Tennyson's relations with his classical and medieval antecedents.
WEEK 7: CIVILIZING MISSIONS: WRITING AND EMPIRE
Dr Jim Watt
‘There is a destiny now possible to us’, John Ruskin declared in his 1870 inaugural
lecture at Oxford, ‘the highest ever set before a nation to be accepted or refused’. This
session begins with a discussion of the idea of imperial destiny in speeches by
Livingstone and Ruskin, and it goes on to consider a range of more critical and/or
sceptical perspectives on the ‘civilizing mission’ of empire, including from writers
who locate a savage darkness within Britain itself.
Core Reading
David Livingstone, ‘Cambridge Lecture no.1’ (1858).
John Ruskin, ‘Inaugural Lecture’ (1870).
Blanchard Jerrold, ‘Whitechapel and Thereabouts’, from London: A Pilgrimage
(1872).
Edward Wilmot Blyden, ‘The Aims and Methods of a Liberal Education for Africans’
(1881).
General William Booth, ‘Why “Darkest England?”’ (1890).
Joseph Conrad, ‘An Outpost of Progress’ (1898).
Rudyard Kipling, ‘The White Man’s Burden’ (1899).
The Livingstone and Booth are in Imperialism and Orientalism: A Documentary
Sourcebook, ed. Barbara Harlow and Mia Carter (Blackwell, 1999), and the Ruskin,
Blyden, Conrad, and Kipling are in Empire Writing: An Anthology of Colonial
Writing, 1870-1918, ed. Elleke Boehmer (Oxford World's Classics, 1998). These
pieces are all fairly short, and photocopies will be provided.
Further reading
Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 18301914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).
Antoinette Burton, ed. Politics and Empire in Victorian Britain: A Reader
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001).
John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System
1830-1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Felix Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2001).
Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English
Imagination, 1830-1867 (Cambridge: Polity, 2002) [esp. the introduction].
Joseph McLaughlin, Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from
Doyle to Eliot (University of Virginia Press, 2000).
Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in
Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) [esp. chapter one] ‘Victorian
Things’.
WEEK 8: CULTURE AND DEMOCRACY
Dr David Dwan
For many Victorians, the future of Britain, if not much of its present, was irreversibly
democratic. As Matthew Arnold put it in 1961, ‘almost everyone believes in the
growth of democracy, almost everyone talks of it, almost everyone laments it,’ but
virtually everyone was resigned to it. However, the perceived inevitability of
democracy produced anxious debates about its cultural impact. As Arnold argued,
‘the difficulty for democracy is, to find and keep high ideals.’ This seminar will
consider why democracy was judged to pose such a difficulty. We will examine
different and rival assessments of democratic mores - from its tendency to
dangerously aggravate ‘individualism’ to its capacity to undermine it – in a broad
range of writers. What model of ‘culture’ did these debates reflect or sustain? And
how might they have shaped both the theory and practice of literature during the
period?
Core Reading
I’ve listed specific editions of the essays and chapters we’ll be reading, but basically,
go with any vaguely reputable and easily accessible version you can find.
John Stuart Mill, ‘De Tocqueville on Democracy in America, I’ (1835); ‘De
Tocqueville on Democracy in America, II’ (1840) in The Collected Works of John
Stuart Mill, Volume XVIII - Essays on Politics and Society Part I, ed. John M.
Robson, Introduction by Alexander Brady (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977).
———. On the Subjection of Women, Ch. 3, in The Collected Works of John Stuart
Mill, Volume XXI - Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, ed. John M. Robson,
Introduction by Stefan Collini (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984).
Thomas Carlyle, Chartism, in Chartism (London: Fraser, 1839; Boston: Little &
Brown, 1840), Chs. 6, 7 & 9. The essay is more easily located in Thomas Carlyle,
Selected Writings (London: Penguin, 1971).
Matthew Arnold ‘Democracy’ (1861) revised and reprinted in Mixed Essays (London:
Macmillan, 1879).
———. Culture and Anarchy, (London: Macmillan, 1867-9), Chs. 1, 2, 3, 4. Note:
Both this essay and ‘Democracy’ can be found in Matthew Arnold, Culture and
Anarchy and other Essays, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993).
Oscar Wilde, ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ (1891). This originally appeared in
the Fortnight Review, but is published in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde
(London: Collins, 1948).
Note: All of these texts can be found on-line. For Mill, I’d recommend the following:
http://oll.libertyfund.org (plug in J.S. Mill). You will find the an on-line version of
the respected Toronto edition of the Collected Works listed above. The De
Tocqueville essays are in The Collected Works, Volume XVIII - Essays on Politics
and Society Part I. For On the Subjection of Women see The Collected Works,
Volume XXI - Essays on Equality, Law, and Education. Several editions of Carlyle’s
essay on Chartism can be found on http://www.hathitrust.org/. Here you will also
find many versions of Arnold’s Mixed Essays in which the ‘Democracy’ piece is to be
found; the site also contains many versions of Culture and Anarchy (this can also to
be read on http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4212). Wilde’s Soul of Man Under
Socialism
can
be
located
on
http://www.hathitrust.org/
or
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1017 and a number of other websites.
Further Reading
Richard Bellamy (ed.), Victorian Liberalism: Nineteenth-Century Political Thought
and Practice (London: Routledge, 1989).
Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain,
1850-1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
Richard Dellamora, Democracy and the Novel in Victorian England (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
Christopher Harvie, The Lights of Liberalism: Academic Liberals and the Challenge
of Democracy 1860-1886 (London: Allen Lane, 1976).
Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge MA and London:
Harvard University Press, 1980).
Christopher Kent, Brains and Numbers: Elitism, Comtism, and Democracy in MidVictorian England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978).
Frank Prochaska, Eminent Victorians on American Democracy: The View from
Albion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
WEEK 9: THE WARM DECEMBERS—QUEER VICTORIAN AFTERLIVES AND LETTERS
Prof. Jason Edwards
Queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s ground-breaking and paradigm-shifting
work on the polymorphously perverse erotic currents pulsing through and
underpinning Victorian poetry and prose transformed the way in which scholars
understood the nature of nineteenth-century British literary and sexual cultures. In
this session, we consider Sedgwick’s idiomatic, paradigmatic account of Victorian
(after)lives and letters by examining in details The Warm Decembers (1978-1987),
her long, unfinished, meta-Victorian novel, in the form of a narrative poem,
focussing on a queerly extended fictional family around real nineteenth-century
British novelist Anthony Trollope.
Core Reading
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘The Warm Decembers’, Fat Art Thin Art (Durham: Duke
UP, 1994), 89-160.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘The Warm Decembers’, Raritan 6.2 (Fall 1986).
Further Reading
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘A Poem is Being Written’, Tendencies (Durham: Duke UP,
1993), 177-214.
———. Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and London: California University
Press, 1990), 1-90.
———. ‘Privilege of Unknowing: Diderot’s The Nun’ and ‘Jane Austen and the
Masturbating Girl’, in Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press), 23-51 and
109-129.
Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography (1883) ed. by Michael Sadleir and Frederick
Page (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
John Vincent, ‘Flogging is Fundamental: Applications of Birch in Swinburne’s Lesbia
Brandon’, in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (ed.) Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in
Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 269-298.
WEEK 10: QUESTIONING THE VICTORIANS (ROUND-TABLE)
Dr James Williams and others
The term will conclude with a round-table discussion with as many tutors present as
possible, in which you’ll have a chance to ask questions arising from the term’s
seminars. We’ll be particularly asking: what are the live issues in Victorian studies
today? What does the field look like, and what contributions might you make?
James Williams
June 2013