On Sept. 1, Professor of English Chris Foss presented a paper with an unfortunately long-winded (though appropriately Victorian) title, “Consuming The Yellow Book: On the Decadent Pleasures and Aesthetic Perils of Exploring the Contemporary Afterlife of the Fin-de-Siècle Literary Scene through a Fully Online Summer School Course,” at the British Association for Victorian Studies annual conference, held this year in Cardiff, Wales.
This pedagogy-focused paper provided a tour of the UMW Blogs and VoiceThread websites through which students discussed their readings and presented their work for his May/June 2016 online course ENGL 375B4, Late Victorian Decadent Literature—a course revolving around the groundbreaking avant-garde literary magazine The Yellow Book, the complete digitized volumes of which are available through the wonderful electronic resource The Yellow Nineties Online.
Overall, Foss suggested that digital means of consuming the Victorians hold more pleasures than perils, for instructors and students alike, and that such formats should play an increasingly important role in the contemporary afterlife of Victorian studies.