NAVSA Prizes
The Donald Gray Prize
NAVSA is delighted to announce the winners of the Donald Gray Prize for the Best Essay published in the field of Victorian studies in the previous year. Named after Donald J. Gray, Culbertson Professor Emeritus in the English Department of Indiana University, the Donald Gray Prize is awarded to the best essay that appeared in print in journals from the previous calendar year on any topic related to the study of Victorian Britain. It carries with it an award of $1000. Essays are self-nominated and are also submitted by journal editors and members of the NAVSA Advisory Board.
WINNER: Sue Zemka, ‘The Death of Nancy “Sikes”, 1838-1912’, Representations no. 110 Spring 2010
The Donald Gray Prize Committee was unanimous in its appreciation of Sue Zemka’s study, which examines nineteenth-century representations of the death of Dickens’ Nancy from Oliver Twist. The article looks at the way Nancy’s murder was portrayed both in contemporary literature (for example, Thomas Peckett Prest’s Oliver Twiss), on the stage, in Dickens’ own readings and on early film. The article ends with D.W. Griffith’s re-imagining of the killing in his 1912 film, Brutality. This is therefore a genuinely multi-media study, which considers the death of Nancy in multiple audience and aesthetic contexts. It is also far more than that. The article builds into an exploration of violence, technology and modernity in the long nineteenth century. Zemka is ultimately seeking to understand the fascination with momentary experiences. Victorianists in a range of disciplines (Cultural History, Literature, Theatre Studies, Film) will need to enter into dialogue with Zemka’s contribution to the ‘aesthetic history of moments’. Hers is an important and ambitious study, which will prove influential in the future.
Honourable Mention:Jesse Rosenthal, ‘The Large Novel and the Law of Large Numbers; Or, why George Eliot hates Gambling’, ELH vol. 77 (2010), 777-811.
This article commences from the observation that George Eliot hated gambling and goes on to offer a detailed reading of Daniel Deronda, focussing on the way Eliot theorised luck and chance. Her objections to gambling ‘actually encapsulate her struggles to express a right and wrong way of thinking about the self, in the context of laws that seem only to operate at the level of large numbers’. Rosenthal’s is a fully realized work that makes a substantial contribution to the discipline, with implications not only for Eliot criticism, but for our understanding of the cultural work of statistical thought and its relationship to the “large” novel. This is a substantial study by a major scholar.
Graduate-Student Paper Prize
Congratulations to the winners of the 2011 Graduate-Student Paper Prize!
WINNER: James Emmott, Birkbeck, University of London for the essay "'You Can Turn Her On as Often as You Like': Performing Phonographic Physiology"
Committee's assessment: James Emmot’s essay builds in an exciting way from Alexander Melville Bell’s phonetic alphabet system to the linguistic re-shaping of Eliza in Shaw’s Pygmalion. Then it expands further, connecting phonographic methods of speech training with theoretical Victorian work on physiological movement, habit and muscular memory formation. We found this essay informative, original, and lucid.
Honorable Mentions:
Anna M. Gibson, Duke University, for the essay "Bodies Acting Out: Physiology, Narrative, and the Sensation Novel"
Committee's assessments: Anna M. Gibson's essay draws attention to the difference between willed and unconscious cerebration in the production of narrative. Arguing that Victorian sensation fiction's mixture of conscious and "embodied" narration is seen as normative, rather than pathological, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the essay offers a useful survey of the psychological literature on the physiological sources of cognition in support of analyses of Bleak House and The Moonstone. We found this essay cogent and the project it describes both ambitious and promising.
Ryan D. Fong, University of California-Davis, for the essay "Oliver Twisted, or Performance and the Parish Boy's Visual Progress"
Committee's assessments:Ryan Fong's essay examines the iconic image of Oliver asking for more and produces a history of its transformation from the original illustration through the most well known film adaptations and concluding with its central place in the commercial imagery of Britain's "Dickens World" theme park. This history shows Oliver's representation change from that of a commodity to that of the modern individual, replaying the central development of the protagonist in the novel. This is a consequential argument and the writer lays it out skillfully.