And We Are Back in the Swing of Things.

Busy-ness abounds! Classes are going well so far, in part because we take breaks halfway through each to have tea and biscuits. It's very English, and I like it, especially when I haven't gotten a chance to eat lunch. Anyway, my Nation and Empire course is turning out quite well, despite being centered on the Romantic period. There are only five of us in the class, but it's a good mix of people from different disciplines, so we're getting some good discussion in, and have a friendly rapport with each other. The professor's a fairly young guy who's good at leading discussion even when we're all scratching our heads over Coleridge, so all in all I think the course will go well.

My other course is Imperial Masculinities, which will be a challenge on the one hand, but quite fun on the other, because I get the sense that the professor is demanding, but the novels we're reading are basically the adventure books of my youth. I get to do a presentation on The Sign of Four! How cool is that? This week we're reading Allan Quartermaine, and we'll be covering Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson, and yeah, basically all of my favorite books from when I was twelve and devouring books like woah.

I'm also realizing that the way I have my semester set up, I've covered the Victorians proper, and am now studying the era's bookends--Romantics from 1790-1830, approximately, and Victorian fin-de-siecle. Which is leading me very nicely into my tentative PhD proposal, bwahaha. I've done some preliminary digging, and it appears that there are no definitive works on the Gothic and the Industrial Revolution...yet. And thus, with any luck that's what I'd like to write on. I think (so far) that the topic is sound, and as a bonus I'll be able to incorporate my MA dissertation into it--given how my focus this year is on how the Gothic changed in response to industry from the Romantic period to the middle of the Victorian era, I can widen that scope to include the very beginnings of the first Industrial Revolution, all the way up to the fin-de-siecle and the transition into Modernism. It's a very broad time frame, I realize, but given that the thesis will amount to 100,000-150,000 words, and the genre and historical event are fairly specific, I think I'll be able to swing it, at least as a preliminary topic. We'll see how it goes.

Last week, I also had a meeting with my dissertation advisor, Dr. Salmon, which went very well. Dr. Salmon seemed very taken with my topic; we discussed how it was coming along, and I was able to further specify where I'm going with it, so I'll be writing a piece of my introduction and a close analysis of one of my main sources for Easter break. I've not decided which novel I'm going to start with, but hopefully writing will commence in the next couple of weeks.

On a more personal note, my flat's dinner was a resounding success, in part due to the presence of three of Federica's friends from Italy. We had Chinese soup, spring rolls, and rice, along with spaghetti with bacon, egg and cheese, and finally apple pie. It was extremely filling, but we spread it out over the course of the whole evening, and by the end, Alma broke out her guitar, and we had a regular soiree. The Chinese girls sang their national anthem and a couple of traditional songs, the Italians broke out dance and folk music, and I threw in some Fiona Apple and then tried to remember a song I'd written aeons ago, to moderate success, considering my woefully inadequate guitar skills. First time I've sung solo for an audience in years! But it was really fun. We're going to try and do something similar every fortnight or so. So hurrah for Federica, getting us to actually be social! And hurrah for music, the universal language of awesome.

I'm also under orders to teach everyone how to bake pie now. I'm okay with this plan.