Wednesday 25 September 2013

CFP: NAVSA/ACCUTE, Victorian Uses and Abuses of History (15 Nov 2013)

Joint North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA)/Association  of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE) sessions 2014
May 24 – 27th 2014
Brock University,St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada

Victorian Uses and Abuses of History

What were the uses of history in the Victorian period? The period saw the publication of numerous historical novels  following the success of Sir Walter Scott’s “Waverley.” Many novelists, including Charles
Dickens, Charles Reade, William Makepiece Thackery, Charles Kingsley, George Eliot and Robert Louis Stevenson all addressed history in their novels. The French Revolution figured largely as a historical warning
against revolution in the minds of many Victorian sages, while the Fall of Rome could be used to warn against overweening pride in the Empire. History could figure as nightmare in Gothic novels. Inspired
by Ruskin and Morris, many looked back to the Medieval period as a source of values and an alternative to industrialized Britain. This call for papers invites proposals for individual or collaborative papers on the theme of "Victorian Uses and Abuses of History.”
Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to:

•       The Victorian Historical Novel
•       Victorian Medievalism
•       "The Renaissance" according to Victorians
•       Victorian Historians and Historiography
•       Historical Time vs. Geological Time
•       Past and Present Contrasts
•       "Neo" Architecture and Literature of the Victorian Period
•       Historical Self-Consciousness
•       History and Aesthetics
•       Historical Utopias and Dystopias

Send 250 word proposals or completed papers for 15-20-minute talks to
Martin Danahay <mdanahay@brocku.ca>.   Deadline: 15 November 2013

Neo-Victorian Uses and Abuses of History

In the relatively new field of Neo-Victorian studies the status of history is the focus of much debate. Is the recourse to the Victorian period necessarily nostalgic? Can the Victorian period be used to critique racism, violence and homophobia? And what of imaginative reconstructions of the Victorian period in genres such as Steampunk: are novels that reconfigure the Victorian period with contemporary technology and issues “historical” or do they call into question totalizing historical narratives?

Possible topics include but are by no means limited to:

•       History, collective memory and nostalgia
•       The commodification of the Victorian period
•      Retro-futurism and the status of history
•       Refiguring colonialism in Neo-Victorian texts
•       Ecohistory and Neo-Victorianism
•       Play and history in Neo-Victorian texts
•       The Victorian period as utopia/dystopia
•       Race, history and Neo-Victorianism
•       Subverting the “Victorian” in Neo-Victorianism

Send 250 word proposals or completed papers for 15-20-minute talks to
Martin Danahay <mdanahay@brocku.ca>.   Deadline: 15 November 2013

Sunday 15 September 2013

Journal Announcement: New Edition of The Latchkey: Journal of New Woman Studies

We are pleased to announce that the new issue of The Latchkey: Journal of New Woman Studies is now online.
The Latchkey is a peer-reviewed, open-access online journal devoted to the concept of the New Woman, covering the lives and writings of New Women authors and figures, the representation of the New Woman in literature, culture, art, and society, proto-feminism and early feminist journalism, and current innovative scholarship on the New Woman. We accept article submissions year-round and are always looking for qualified book reviewers, peer reviewers, and contributors of New Woman biographies to our "Who's Who" page.  Please send any inquiries to our journal email address, unbolt@gmail.com.
Best wishes,
The Editorial Team: Petra Dierkes-Thrun, Sharon Bickle, and Joellen Masters

TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Essays

Jad Adams, “Feminist Solidarity in the Life and Work of Ella Hepworth Dixon”
Karsten Piep, “Business as Usual: Re-Domesticating the New Woman in Henry Sydnor Harrison’s Post-World War I Novel, Saint Teresa (1922)”
Melissa Purdue, “’She had suffered so many humiliations for want of money’: The Quest for Financial Independence in Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book”

Book reviews
Catherine Morris, Alice Milligan and the Irish Cultural Revival. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2012. Reviewed by Heidi Hansson.
Jessica Cox, ed. New Perspectives on Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012. Reviewed by Gabrielle Malcolm.
Ouida, The Massarenes. Vol. 7 of New Woman Fiction, 1881-1899. Ed. by Andrew King. London: Pickering & Chatto 2011. Reviewed by Catherine Pope.
Shannon Hunter Hurtado, Genteel Mavericks: Professional Women Sculptors in Victorian Britain. Bern: Peter Lang, 2012. Reviewed by Paula Murphy.
Ann R. Hawkins and Maura Ives (eds.), Women Writers and the Artifacts of Celebrity in the Long Nineteenth Century. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2012. Reviewed by Donna Parsons.
Jill Rappoport, Giving Women: Alliance and Exchange in Victorian Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Reviewed by Jennifer Redmond.
Emelyne Godfrey, Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society: From Dagger-Fans to Suffragettes. (Crime Files series, Gen. ed. Clive Bloom.) Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Reviewed by Lena Wånggren.

Featured New Women
Ouida. By Kirby-Jane Hallum
Rhoda Broughton. By Kirby-Jane Hallum.

New in our Gallery section: 
“The New Woman in Context.” An image essay by Molly O’Donnell.

Wednesday 11 September 2013

CfP: The Michael Field Centenary Conference (Deadline 31/12/13)

The Michael Field Centenary Conference: New Directions in Fin de Siècle Studies
11-12 July 2014
Institute of English Studies, Senate House, University of London

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
Professor Joseph Bristow (UCLA)
Professor Margaret D. Stetz (University of Delaware)

Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) occupies an increasingly central role as one of the most fascinating figures of the fin de siècle. Following ground-breaking revisionist scholarship of the 1990s which rediscovered Bradley and Cooper’s poetry, the last twenty years has seen a major resurgence in work on Michael Field – reflecting Bradley and Cooper’s own belief that their work would not be appreciated until sometime in the distant future.

This major international conference will mark the Michael Field Centenary, bringing together world-renowned scholars of fin de siècle literature, poetry, life writing, women’s writing and gender and sexuality.

The Michael Field Centenary conference also aims to acknowledge and celebrate the diversity and vitality of new scholarship surrounding Michael Field and fin de siècle literature generally, providing a platform for new voices and perspectives from postgraduate/ early career scholars. As the first major Michael Field conference following the 2004 ‘Michael Field and their World’ conference at University of Delaware, we aim to assess the how the ‘field’ has changed over the last ten years; for example, following the publication of significant works such as Margaret D. Stetz and Cheryl A. Wilson’s Michael Field and their World (2007), Marion Thain’s ‘Michael Field’: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Fin de Siècle and Sharon Bickle’s The Fowl and the Pussycat: Love Letters of Michael Field, 1876-1909 (2008).

We invite proposals for 20 minute papers on topics related to Michael Field and fin de siècle culture, which may include, but are not limited to:

Fin de siècle poetry
Late-Victorian literary culture
Aestheticism and Decadence
Verse drama/closet drama
Drama and performance
Poetic form, prosody, the lyric
History, time, historiography
Interactions with different periods/literary traditions
Life writing, biography, autobiography
Gender, sexuality, desire
Michael Field’s circle/influences
Fashion and dress culture
Catholicism and religious writing
Art and design
Book history, book design, printing
The New Woman, the Female Aesthete
Modernity, modernism
Michael Field’s influence on later writers

Deadline for abstracts: 31 December 2013
Please email 300-word abstracts to michaelfield2014@gmail.com

Organisers: Dr Ana Parejo Vadillo (Birkbeck, University of London), Dr Sarah Parker (University of Stirling) and Dr Marion Thain (University of Sheffield)

Monday 9 September 2013

CfP: Victorian Network special issue "Victorian Bodies and Body Parts" (30/11/13)

Call for Papers: Victorian Bodies and Body Parts 
Victorian Network is an MLA-indexed online journal devoted to publishing and promoting the best postgraduate work in Victorian Studies.
The ninth issue of Victorian Network, guest edited by Professor Pamela K. Gilbert (University of Florida), is dedicated to a reassessment of the place of the human body in the Victorian literary and cultural imagination. Rapid medical and scientific advances, advancing industrialization and new forms of labour, legal reforms, the rise of comparative ethnology and anthropology, the growth of consumer culture, and the ever changing trends of Victorian fashion are just a few of the many forces that transformed how Victorians thought about the human body and about the relationship between the embodied, or disembodied, self and the object world.
Nineteenth-century configurations of the body have long been of interest to Victorian scholars. However, recent years have seen the field reconfigured by the emergence of a range of exciting new and theoretically sophisticated approaches that harness the insights of the new materialism, thing theory, cultural phenomenology and actor-network theory to explorations of Victorian embodiment, bodies and body parts.
We are inviting submissions of no more than 7000 words, on any aspect of the theme. Possible topics include but are by no means limited to the following:
·      embodied experience and the senses
·      the body in stillness and in motion: practices of confinement and mobility
·      consumerism, fashion and the stylized body
·      the body and technology
·      bodies of empire and colonialism
·      bodies and body parts on display: anatomical museums, ethnological shows, hospital ward        tours
·      sciences of the body: medicine, biology, ethnology, statistics, etc.
·      bodies, sex and gender
·      health and illness
·      affective bodies and embodied emotions
·      labour power and the body as property
·      the poetics and aesthetics of the human body
·      human and animal bodies before and after Darwin

All submissions should conform to MHRA style conventions and the in-house submission guidelines.
 Deadline for submissions: 30 November 2013.