The School of English would like to congratulate Dr Catherine Waters on the award of a three-year AHRC grant for ‘Journalism on the Move: The Special Correspondent and Victorian Print Culture’, worth £208,945 fec. It gets off the ground in January 2013.
This project analyses the significance of ‘special correspondence’ as a new, highly popular form of Victorian journalism and its evolution in the context of developments in the periodical and newspaper press throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. It identifies and charts the careers of individual ‘specials’, many of whom also wrote as novelists and periodical reviewers. Characterised by a vivid, descriptive style of reportage that was criticised by some contemporary commentators as sensational, special correspondence played a key role in forming the discourses of literature and journalism at a time when the boundary between them was contested. The impact of this remains evident today in debate about the relationship between fact and fiction in the press, and in its exploration of the cultural resonance of this writing the project will help to chart the emergence of the modern mass media.
Congratulations Cathy!