CFP: Neo-Victorianism and Globalisation (2014 special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies)

Neo-Victorianism and Globalisation:
Transnational Dissemination of Nineteenth-Century Cultural Texts
2014 Special Issue of Neo-Victorian Studies

This special issue seeks to explore the rise and the scope of the globalisation of neo-Victorianism. We are witnesses today to a transnational spread of all things Victorian verging on ‘Victorianomania’, where different elements of nineteenth-century literature and material culture are continuously translated, adapted and recycled for contemporary use. On the one hand, the re-visioned revival of popular genres of the nineteenth century is evident in a spate of neo-Victorian novels that re-visit Victorian fiction in terms of style and content as well as rethink the narrative format of the eponymous ‘loose, baggy monsters’. Whether they are playful investigations of cosmopolitanism within the history of globalised economy – as depicted in Amitav Ghosh’s The Sea of Poppies – or of transatlantic narratives and cultural connections between Victorian London and the contemporary US cityscape – as in HBO’s TV series The Wire – neo-Victorian fictions engage not only with nineteenth-century narrative pace and plotting but also with the period’s cross-fertilised popular genres. At the same time, the plethora of TV, film, video games, graphic novels, fashion and interior design adaptations and appropriations of Victorian art, literature and culture are clearly influenced by the global market, testifying to the impact of the ever-spreading ‘participatory culture’ (Jenkins 2006). This special issue aims to chart the patterns and politics of neo-Victorianism’s transnational production and dissemination.

Some of the key questions Neo-Victorianism and Globalisation seeks to address are:

· To what extent can we talk about the process of translating elements of nineteenth-century literature and culture into contemporary media as ‘neo-Victorianism’ outside of the Anglo-American context?

· How does nostalgia inform/deform the relationship between appropriated Victorian narrative forms and their global circulation?

· What political dynamics underlie the transnational dissemination of the ‘(neo-) Victorian’, both as a term and concept, and what are its ideological implications?

· How broadly can ‘neo-Victorian’ be expanded as a generic term before it loses its critical value?

· Does neo-Victorianism run the risk of being construed as a form of cultural imperialism?

· How does postcolonialism contest and/or intersect with trans- and multiculturalism in neo-Victorian remediations of the nineteenth-century past?

· How can attention to multiple (national, ethnic, and cultural) publics and markets avoid totalising ‘neo-Victorianism’ as a monolithic concept?

· Which particular Victorian genres (such as Gothic, detection or sensation fiction), predominate in different neo-Victorian media and cultural contexts and why?

· What unacknowledged, potentially discriminatory or disabling mechanisms may be discerned in neo-Victorian critical discourse (e.g. Anglo-American/Euro-centrism, Western-focused trauma discourse, new forms of sexism, etc.)?

Please address enquiries and expressions of interest to the guest editors Antonija Primorac at primorac@ffst.hr and Monika Pietrzak-Franger at pietrzak@anglistik.uni-siegen.de. Completed articles and/or creative pieces, along with a short biographical note, will be due by 15 October 2013 and should be sent via email to the guest editors, with a copy to neovictorianstudies@swansea.ac.uk. Please consult the NVS website (submission guidelines) for further guidance.

NAVSA/BAVS/AVSA Venice Conference Registration

Just a reminder for those attending the combined NAVSA/BAVS/AVSA conference, 'The Global and the Local' in Venice, that attendees need to ensure that they have paid their membership fees to their relevant association in order to register. Details of how to join or renew your membership to AVSA are available at the AVSA website. Please note that if you registered for the 2013 AVSA conference in Melbourne, then you are already an AVSA member for this year and do not need to pay a separate membership fee.

CfP Reminder: BAVS 2013, 'Victorian Numbers', 29-31 August

Victorian Numbers: British Association for Victorian Studies Annual Conference: 29-31 August 2013

Keynote Speakers: Alice Jenkins (University of Glasgow); Michael Hatt (University of Warwick); Mary Poovey (New York University); Theodore Porter (University of California, Los Angeles)

The BAVS conference 2013 will be held at Royal Holloway, University of London which was founded by the Victorian entrepreneur and philanthropist Thomas Holloway at Egham, Surrey in 1886. The College and the nearby former Holloway Sanatorium are products of surplus wealth accumulated in the course of Holloway’s activities as financier, in the large-scale manufacture of patent medicines, and in mass marketing – including advertising to Britain’s overseas colonies. While its theme reflects these institutional origins, the Conference aims to explore the relevance of numbers to nineteenth-century studies in a wide variety of ways. We welcome proposals for papers and panels which speak to the interdisciplinary conference theme broadly and innovatively.

Call for Papers
- Mass culture, mass politics and reform; crowds, population, over population; Malthus and Darwin; proliferation and extinction; the residuum and the best circles.
- Collecting and cataloguing; replication; periodicals and serials; prosody and metre; music and rhythm; architecture and proportion; sequence and sequels.
- Mathematics; statistics; geometry; time and technology; timetables and navigation; mass mobility; computation; money; finance and economics.
- The one and the many; duration; the infinite; age and aging.
- Research methodologies in the digital era; quantitative and qualitative; corpus linguistics; periodization; information overload.

Deadline for abstracts: 28th March 2013. Please submit all abstracts to BAVS2013@gmail.com. Visit our blog http://BAVS2013.wordpress.com for regular updates, downloads, and discussion pages. Enquiries about proposing themed panels can be sent to ruth.livesey@rhul.ac.uk or juliet.john@rhul.ac.uk.

CFP: Special AJVS neo-Victorian edition

Call for Papers: Special Edition of the Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies on Neo-Victorianism

The Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies (AJVS) invites submissions for a special edition on Neo-Victorianism to be published in September 2013. AJVS is a fully refereed journal published by the Australasian Victorian Studies Association, with articles covering topics as diverse as archaeology, architecture, art, economics, history, literature, medicine, philosophy, print culture, psychology, science, sociology and theatre appearing in its pages.

The past decade has seen  increasing scholarly interest in what Marie-Luise Kohlke, editor of Neo-Victorian Studies, calls "the afterlife of the nineteenth century in the cultural imaginary". This edition aims to contribute to the growing interdisciplinary dialogue about the ways in which the Victorian period is re-imagined in contemporary culture. The guest editor invites research papers on any aspect of the neo-Victorian, including, but not limited to:

• Neo-Victorian literature, popular fiction, graphic novels and comic books;
• Film, television and dramatic adaptations of Victorian literature;
• Steampunk fiction, art and fashion;
• Neo-Victorianism and cultural conservatism;
• Neo-Victorianism and its significance for Victorian Studies;
• Nostalgia and remembering;
• Gender, sexuality and class politics and neo-Victorianism.

Papers of no more than 7,000 words in length should be emailed as a Word document with an accompanying abstract of approximately 200 words to Dr Michelle Smith, msmith[at]unimelb.edu.au by 1 April 2013.

Author guidelines are available at the journal site.