I really like dramatic titling.

I have officially declared my dissertation title! It shall be called:

'Demons of Industry: Machines as Monster and Metaphor in the Victorian Gothic'

Exciting, yes? Hopefully the content will be as exciting as the title. We shall see. I'm going to try to get another 2000 words done before Venice happens, because then I'll be a little less than a third of the way through, and that would be extremely excellent.

The last of my unassessed work has been turned in, so I'm feeling a little burned out at the moment--writing an essay a week for three weeks in a row is tiring, so I'm glad it's over. On the flip side though, I'm reading War of the Worlds for Imperial Masculinities this week, and it is lots of fun! I think I'm going to write my final essay for that course on it and Sherlock Holmes, as a sort of compare/contrast piece about detection and imperialism. It will be fun times, hopefully. I also read Byron for Monday's seminar, and while I definitely enjoyed it he is very dense, and I am bad at reading Romantic poetry, so it was a bit of a struggle. He was at least significantly more accessible than Blake, for which I am thankful.

On the application front, I have one more scholarship form to fill out, and then I am done. It will be glorious. It will probably be another few weeks before I start getting any responses back, so I'm just keeping my fingers crossed.

And now, I'm off to a piano lesson. The Ballade is getting better! I'm amazed. Yay for having technical skills actually start to catch up with my interpretive skills. Took me long enough.