Kirstie Blair

Biographic Data

ID4497437
NAMEKirstie Blair
GIVEN NAMESKirstie
FAMILY NAMEBlair
SIGNATUREBLAIR K
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Stirling
ORCID0000-0003-0040-3670
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS10
TOTAL CITATIONS0
AUTHOR COUNT10
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2004
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2023
H-INDEX0

  • Roundtable: Piston, Pen & Press

    Open AccessMike Sanders, Michael Sanders et al.ARTICLEJournal of Victorian Culture2023

    Until relatively recently, working-class literature has occupied a minimal role within Victorian Studies, exciting only intermittent interest in the disciplines of English Literature and History.In the former, the absence of a recognized 'great' labouring-class or artisan writer (comparable to Robert Burns, John Clare or William Blake from the Romantic era) prevented working-class literature from securing even a toehold in the field of literary s…

  • Working-Class Readers and Literary Culture in North-East England: The Allendale Lead-Miners’ Libraries

    Open AccessKirstie BlairARTICLECahiers victoriens et édouardiens2022

    This article investigates the surviving borrowers’ catalogues (c.1850–70) of the Allendale lead-miners’ libraries, situating these within the wider history of workplace libraries in the North-East of England. It considers popular reading habits in this community and the patterns of borrowing among individuals, suggesting that these give us insight into the way in which working-class readers used libraries, especially those founded through managem…

  • Addressing the Machine: Victorian Working-Class Poetry and Industrial Machinery

    Open AccessKirstie BlairARTICLEJournal of Victorian Culture2022

    This article explores the representation of machinery by industrial workers in the Victorian period, and argues that their writings have a qualitatively different literary approach to machinery than that found in the work of established Victorian authors. It uses little-known poems by Scottish and Northern working-class writers to investigate how they use language and form to reflect upon the place of machinery in their working lives

  • Advertising Poetry, the Working-Class Poet and the Victorian Newspaper Press

    Kirstie BlairARTICLEJournal of Victorian Culture2018

    This article investigates the neglected topic of advertising poetry, focusing on its substantial presence in the provincial press. It argues that advertising poetry and newspaper verse, both usually produced by working-class authors, have a complicated relationship in the Victorian period, and that this relationship highlights questions about working-class consumerism and about poetry itself as a marketable commodity

  • Britain

    Open AccessKirstie BlairARTICLEVictorian Literature and Culture2018References: 3

    I N the opening of this brief polemic, I must acknowledge conscious bias: as of 5 a.m. on the morning after the Brexit referendum, I am a card-carrying member of the Scottish National Party. This was not anticipated. Brought up in Belfast as an Ulster-Scots Unionist with a determination to be "British" rather than "Irish," and educated in the most English of institutions, I am now in the awkward position of being grateful for the Irish state's co…

  • Reforming the Religious Sonnet: Poetry, Doubt and the Church in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

    Open AccessKirstie BlairARTICLEStudies in Church History2016

    This essay examines the tradition of ‘doubting’ poetics through an assessment of selected nineteenth- and twentieth-century sonnets. Through considering recent work on Victorian literature and culture, it argues for the importance of the poetics of faith in this period, and assesses the presence of nineteenth-century Christian, and particularly Anglican, forms and concepts in the genre of the sonnet. Analysing later twentieth-century sonnets by G…

  • Transatlantic Tractarians: Victorian Poetry and the Church of England in America

    Kirstie Blair, Blair BlairARTICLEVictorian Studies2013

    This article focuses on transatlantic Tractarian poetics, discussing the poetic exchanges and connections between British Tractarian poets and American Tractarians and the implications that these had for broader questions of religious and national identity. It considers poetry published by leading British Tractarians that dealt with the Church in America, and then briefly assesses poetic responses by leading members of the Episcopal Church in Ame…

  • He Sings Alone”: Hybrid Forms and the Victorian Working-Class Poet

    Open AccessKirstie BlairARTICLEVictorian Literature and Culture2009References: 5

    In 1868, Alexander Wallace paused in his introduction to the life and works of Janet Hamilton, a respected Scottish working-class poet, to note his subject's interest in literary parlour games: “Janet asked us if we had ever tried the writing of Cento verses, which she characterized as a pleasant literary amusement for a meeting of young friends in a winter's night.”

  • Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart

    Kirstie BlairBOOKVICTORIAN POETRY AND THE CULTURE…2006

    "Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart is a significant and timely study of nineteenth-century poetry and poetics. It considers why and how the heart became a vital image in Victorian poetry, and argues that the intense focus on heart imagery in many major Victorian poems highlights anxieties in this period about the ability of poetry to act upon its readers. In the course of the nineteenth century, this study argues, increased doubt abou…

  • The Heart in Victorian Poetry

    Open AccessKirstie BlairARTICLELiterature Compass2004

    This article argues for the importance of heart imagery in Victorian poetry, and briefly outlines how changes in the conception of the heart – both as a physical organ and as a poetic image – are intimately linked to contemporary anxieties about feeling and emotional expression