NAVSA is very excited to announce the winner and honorable mention of NAVSA's prize for the best book of the year (2013). The winner’s book will be featured on a special plenary panel at the 2014 NAVSA conference in London, Canada.
WINNER: Elizabeth Carolyn Miller. Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture. Stanford University Press, 2013.
Original and timely, Elizabeth Miller’s Slow Print is a book that has far-reaching significance for Victorian Studies as an interdisciplinary field of study. Slow Print cuts a broad swath across radical politics, publishing and book history, the Victorian market, periodicals, and the literary genres of fiction, drama, and poetry, offering a point of connection with nineteenth-century studies in all of its interdisciplinary richness. Through pioneering and pathbreaking scholarly research, Miller has excavated materials not readily accessible in major US libraries or in digitized databases. Thus the research, like the conceptualization of “slow print” itself, is highly original. “Slow Print” is, moreover, an important conception that challenges the preoccupations in our own moment of quick production for a ready market. In so doing, it suggests how Victorian Studies as a field might intervene in ethical discussions of the literary marketplace today.
HONORABLE MENTION: Adelene Buckland. Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology. U of Chicago P, 2013.
Beautifully written and richly illustrated, Novel Science offers an important new paradigm for the impact of geology on scientific and literary narratives. It asks us to reconsider the received wisdom about science and literature as it places the geological sciences front and center. Adelene Buckland compellingly demonstrates geologists’ crafting of ‘anti-plot’ narrative to distance this new science from the dangers of theological controversy and to preserve the respectable footing of the men who pursued it. In so doing, she invites us to rethink the relationships between the domains of science and literature, and between the epochs of Romanticism and Victorianism.