Sunday 17 December 2017

CFP: NAVSA 2018, "Looking Outward", St Petersburg, Florida 11-14 October 2018

NAVSA 2018 will be held October 11-14, 2018 at the Hilton St. Petersburg Bayfront Hotel.

We are excited to announce our three plenaries: Erika Rappaport, Belinda Edmondson, and Sally Shuttleworth. These keynotes anchor three foci of the conference, and we hope there will be lively conversations on Caribbean Studies, Global Victorians, and Science/Medicine, even as the conference overall ranges more widely.

Deadline for paper and panel sessions on the theme "Looking Outward" is 4 March 2018.

Full details at the conference site: https://sites.clas.ufl.edu/english-navsa2018/

Monday 6 November 2017

Extended CFP: 'Forgery and Imitation', Victorian Network, Deadline 15 December 2017

Victorian Network is an open-access, MLA-indexed, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to publishing and promoting the best work across the broad field of Victorian Studies by postgraduate students and early career academics. We are delighted to announce that our twelfth issue (Summer 2018) will be guest edited by Aviva Briefel on the theme of Forgery and Imitation.

Recent scholarship has drawn attention to the increase in art and literary forgery in the nineteenth century, and to the preoccupation with themes of illicit imitation in the Victorian cultural zeitgeist. Critics have highlighted the manifold, intricate, and sometimes surprising ways in which forgery was woven into the social and cultural fabric of the era. The forged, the fake, and the imitative became pressing issues for artistic reproduction as growing demand and changing technology shaped the way in which texts, images, and objects circulated. The spectrum encompassed forged and imitative objects faked with criminal intent, as well as cultural and economic productivity.

Anxieties surrounding the concepts of originality and fakery also permeated nineteenth-century discussions of social authenticity – did forging an identity in a changing world open the door to faking social class, race, or gender? Did cleaving closely to imitate cultural peers maintain the status quo, mask individual dishonesty, or constitute plagiarism? Frauds, cheats, liars, and copycats of every ilk caught the public imagination. The range of depictions was broad and ambivalent. From villainous cheats like Count Fosco to romantic depictions of Chatterton, forgery and imitation marked for the Victorians a point of uneasiness that called for intricate negotiation. Furthermore, as channels of patronage and influence became increasingly fragmented, new ways of conceptualising artistic indebtedness were required. Here, too, forgery and imitation did moral battle. Appropriation, pastiche, and homage had their dark doubles: deceit, plagiarism, and hack work. Navigating intertextuality meant gauging where boundaries of influence could be crossed and where they should be policed.

We invite submissions of approximately 7,000 words on any aspect of the theme in Victorian literature and culture. Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to:

Fakery and cultural identity, the (cultural and/or economic) value of forgeries and imitations
Fakes as cultural participation
Identities of forgery and forged identities (individual, cultural/national)
Illegitimacy, genealogy, and heredity theory
Imitation in nature and evolutionary or scientific theory
Artistic reproduction (eg. photographs, prints, and casts), copying, and forgery: the original versus the copy
Forgery and imitation as gendered activities
Public persona: masks and makeup
Fashions, trends, and crazes
Acting as imitation; theatricality versus authenticity
Fraud, counterfeit money, financial corruption, white-collar crime
The forgery of memory; history-writing; misremembrance
Originality, the Romantic genius, and Victorian imitation
Imitation as literary practice: (mis-)quotation, adaptation, plagiarism, piracy
Literature as imitation: re-creating other mediums in words (ut pictura poesis)
Imitating the Victorians: the re-creation of Victorian texts in neo-Victorian writing and fan cultures

All submissions should conform to MHRA house style and the in-house submission guidelines. Submissions should be received by 15 December 2017.
Contact: victoriannetwork@gmail.com

Sunday 16 July 2017

Reviews Editor Position at The Gaskell Journal (15 Sept. 2017)

The Gaskell Journal seeks a new Reviews Editor. As well as publishing peer-reviewed articles, this annually produced academic journal features 2-4 book reviews, of works focused on Elizabeth Gaskell but also on Victorian literature and culture more generally. The reviews editor’s role is to identify suitable books for review, contact publishers to request a complimentary review copy, and appoint appropriate reviewers. As well as engaging with our regular reviewers, this also involves making new contacts in relevant scholarly fields. The reviews editor must then keep in contact with the reviewer to ensure that the review is completed in good time, and meets house requirements, to be forwarded to the journal editor. This role might particularly appeal to research postgraduates or early career scholars in the field of Victorian studies, as a way to gain editorial experience and build academic contacts. Some familiarity with Gaskell’s works is an advantage.

Please send your 250-word statement of interest to Dr Rebecca Styler, rstyler@lincoln.ac.uk, no later than Friday September 15th 2017.

Thursday 13 July 2017

CFP: Victorian Network journal, "Forgery and Imitation" (1 Nov. 2017)

Call For Papers: Forgery and Imitation

Victorian Network is an open-access, MLA-indexed, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to publishing and promoting the best work across the broad field of Victorian Studies by postgraduate students and early career academics. We are delighted to announce that our twelfth issue (Summer 2018) will be guest edited by Aviva Briefel on the theme of Forgery and Imitation.

Recent scholarship has drawn attention to the increase in art and literary forgery in the nineteenth century, and to the preoccupation with themes of illicit imitation in the Victorian cultural zeitgeist. Critics have highlighted the manifold, intricate, and sometimes surprising ways in which forgery was woven into the social and cultural fabric of the era. The forged, the fake, and the imitative became pressing issues for artistic reproduction as growing demand and changing technology shaped the way in which texts, images, and objects circulated. The spectrum encompassed forged and imitative objects faked with criminal intent, as well as cultural and economic productivity.

Anxieties surrounding the concepts of originality and fakery also permeated nineteenth-century discussions of social authenticity – did forging an identity in a changing world open the door to faking social class, race, or gender? Did cleaving closely to imitate cultural peers maintain the status quo, mask individual dishonesty, or constitute plagiarism? Frauds, cheats, liars, and copycats of every ilk caught the public imagination. The range of depictions was broad and ambivalent. From villainous cheats like Count Fosco to romantic depictions of Chatterton, forgery and imitation marked for the Victorians a point of uneasiness that called for intricate negotiation. Furthermore, as channels of patronage and influence became increasingly fragmented, new ways of conceptualising artistic indebtedness were required. Here, too, forgery and imitation did moral battle. Appropriation, pastiche, and homage had their dark doubles: deceit, plagiarism, and hack work. Navigating intertextuality meant gauging where boundaries of influence could be crossed and where they should be policed.

We invite submissions of approximately 7,000 words on any aspect of the theme in Victorian literature and culture. Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to:

Fakery and cultural identity, the (cultural and/or economic) value of forgeries and imitations
Fakes as cultural participation
Identities of forgery and forged identities (individual, cultural/national)
Illegitimacy, genealogy, and heredity theory
Imitation in nature and evolutionary or scientific theory
Artistic reproduction (eg. photographs, prints, and casts), copying, and forgery: the original versus the copy
Forgery and imitation as gendered activities
Public persona: masks and makeup
Fashions, trends, and crazes
Acting as imitation; theatricality versus authenticity
Fraud, counterfeit money, financial corruption, white-collar crime
The forgery of memory; history-writing; misremembrance
Originality, the Romantic genius, and Victorian imitation
Imitation as literary practice: (mis-)quotation, adaptation, plagiarism, piracy
Literature as imitation: re-creating other mediums in words (ut pictura poesis)
Imitating the Victorians: the re-creation of Victorian texts in neo-Victorian writing and fan cultures

All submissions should conform to MHRA house style and the in-house submission guidelines. Submissions should be received by 1 November 2017.
Contact: victoriannetwork@gmail.com

Wednesday 3 May 2017

Draft Programme: AVSA 2017 Conference, 14-16 June, Melbourne, Australia

Draft AVSA programme – Victorian Materialities 14-16 June 2017

Deakin University, Deakin Downtown, Level 12, Tower 2, 727 Collins Street


DAY 1 –
JUNE 14



9-9:30
Registration

9:30-10:45
Keynote speech
Alexis Easley

10:45 – 12:15
1A. COLLECTIONS AND COLLECTING

1B. POPULAR FICTION

12:15 – 1:15
Lunch
1:15 – 2:45
2A. LIVES AND BIOGRAPHIES

2B. VICTORIAN PRESS: PAST AND PRESENT

2:45 – 3:15
Afternoon tea
3:15 - 4:45
3A. SCIENCE AND SPIRITUALITY

3B. EMOTIONS AND THINGS


DAY 2 –
JUNE 15



9:30-11:00
Plenary session
4A. MAKING AND SELLING THE COLONIAL BOOK

11:00 - 11:30

Morning tea
11:30 - 1:00
5A. RECORDING AND MEMORIALISING
5B: MATERIALITY OF THE BOOK
1:00 - 2:00
Lunch
2:00 - 3:30
6A. LITERARY OBJECTS

6B. DOMESTIC INTERIOR


Afternoon activity: TBD

7:00
Conference dinner: Melba's, Langham Hotel

DAY 3 –
JUNE 16



9:30-11:00
7A. ART AND CULTURE

7B. CHILDHOOD

11:00-11:30

Morning tea
11:30-1:00
8A. VISUAL ART

8B. CLOTHING AND BODIES

1:00 – 2:00
Lunch
2:00 - 3:00
Conference close and AVSA AGM


PANELS
1A: Collections and Collecting
George Isaacs’ Collection
Anne Black
Browning’s Curiosities
Jennifer McDonell
Iron, China, and Art:  Production, Consumption, Exhibition, and the Imperial Project
Dianna Vitanza

1B: Popular Fiction
‘The Inevitable White Man’: Slavery and Indenture in Jack London’s South Sea Tales
Mandy Treagus
Recalcitrant Particulars and the Probabilistic Form of the Sherlock Holmes Stories
Adam Grener
Men Blowing Hot Air: Wonder Woman: Amazonia, Feminism and Steampunk
Matthew Thompson

2A: Lives and Biographies
The Unwitting Life of Things: Reactions in Melbourne to Tolstoy’s Reading of Beethoven’s ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata
Suzanne Robinson
‘Inlaid and Extended’: The Material Forms of Victorian Biography
Lucy Whitehead
Uncertain Provenance: Pseudo-relics and Life Writing in Serena Partridge’s ‘Accessories’ and Brontë Biographical Fiction
Amber Pouliot

2B: The Victorian Press: Past and Present
The strange case of the Queen’s etchings and the commodification of ‘intimate’ information
Ainslie Robinson
A Writer with a View:  Louise Mack on Florence, the Italian Gazette, and the English-speaking community that supported it.
Meg Tasker
Contextualising the production of the Dickensian periodical for today’s digital serial.
Susannah Oddi

3A: Science and Spirituality
Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders (1887) and The Value of Brains
Sara Lyons
The Materiality of Poetic Form and Catholic Ritual: Challenging the Social Order in the Works of Adelaide Procter and Alice Meynell
Lesa Scholl
The Devil and the Table-Spirits: A Mid-Victorian Controversy
Sarah Bartels
3B: The Emotion of Things
Setting sail into the midnight: Branwell Bronte’s Dunedin Fragment
Grace Moore and Tom McLean
‘Heavy with watching and weeping’: The eyes and emotions of The Old Curiosity Shop
Megan Nash
“The little daisy … knew that if she were torn out she would die”: Environmental
Empathy in English Versions of Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tale Literature
Victoria Tedeschi
4A: Making and Selling the Colonial Book
‘Marvellous Melbourne’ and its Publishers
Lucy Sussex
E.W. Cole: Cosmopolitan things and thoughts
Tanja Luckins
Negotiating the (im)material: Editorial Practice in Nineteenth-Century Australia
Jocelyn Hargrave
5A: Recording and Memorialising
Keeping Records on Women: Prisoner Registers in the Victorian Colony
Vicky Nagy
Where the Dead Men Lie: A Case Study of a Rural Community's Commemorative Response
Lynne Dore
Soldiers of the Queen: Remembering and Forgetting
Bronwyn Hughes

5B: The Materiality of the Book
Victorian Madurai Illustrated: The Cultural Logic and Commodity of Victorian India
Divya Athmanathan
'Chaste and Rich': Gender and the Victorian Material Book
Maura Ives
The Owner Bound Volume: Collector’s Album, Family Artefact or Cultural Object?
Clare Gleeson
 6A: Literary Objects
Isabel Archer acquires an expatriate husband: objects, acculturation and marriage in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady

Claire Thomas
Squirreling heart-beats and leather-clad books: the materiality of George Eliot’s Middlemarch and contemporary speculative realism
Susan Pyke
Intimacy and Exchange: Affective Objects in George Eliot’s Middlemarch
Francesca Kavanagh
Thomas Carlyle and the Significance in Things: Victorian Materiality and the Romance of the Real
Lowell T. Frye

6B: The Domestic Interior
A Queen Made Material: The Powerful Place of Queen Victoria's Image in the Nineteenth-Century Australian Domestic Interior
Kim Clayton-Greene
‘Investigation: Travels in the Boudoir: Permeable Boundaries of a Material World’
Judith Johnston
"To touch for a moment, the lustrous past": household objects, furnishings and space, and the Victorian country house servant.
Ellen O’Brien

7A: Art and Culture
Seeing, Reading, Understanding: The Role of Art in Victorian Literature
Elizabeth J. Deis
Stretched on an ottoman’: Representations of Turquerie in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
Ann Erskine
British Goths and British Romans at Beijing’s Summer Palace

Chris Murray

7B: Childhood
'Teaching by things rather than words': China in Victorian Children's Games, Toy Collections, and Picture Books
Shih-Wen Sue Chen
Thomas Barnardo, Children and Material Culture
Kristine Moruzi
The Doll Protagonist in 19th Century Literature
Fiona McDonald

8A: Visual art
“A gigantic botanical postage-stamp album”:  The Marianne North Gallery
Shale Preston
Objects Conceptualized: Reflections on James Whistler’s “Gentle Art” of Anti-Materialism
Yi-Ching Teng
Otago Ceramics in Victorian New Zealand
Moira White

8B: Clothing and Bodies
Material Maternity: The Clothes, Bodies, and 'Things' of Victorian Mothers
Catriona Fisk
“Not Always an Obvious Analogy”: Sartorial Materialities and Narratives of Illicit Sexuality in George Moore’s A Drama in Muslin
Madeleine C. Seys
Bound in the Narratives of the Past: Intersections of Transgression and Purity in H. Rider Haggard's She
Charlotte Kelso

The Gaskell Journal: Joan Leach Memorial Graduate Student Essay Prize 2018



The Gaskell Journal
Joan Leach Memorial Graduate Student
Essay Prize 2018

Deadline for submissions: 1st February 2018

The Gaskell Journal runs a biennial Graduate Student Essay Prize in honour of Joan Leach MBE, founder of the Gaskell Society.

Terms
The essay competition is open to all graduate students currently registered for an MA or PhD in Victorian Studies. Entries are invited that offer an original contribution to the field of Gaskell studies, whether by reading her works in relation to Victorian cultural, religious, aesthetic and scientific contexts, or through innovative close readings enlightened by critical theory, or a comparative study connecting Gaskell’s with another author’s work.  Essays will be shortlisted by the Gaskell Journal Editorial Board, with the final judgment being made by a leading scholar in Gaskell studies.

Prize
The winning essay will be published in the Gaskell Journal (subject to appropriate revisions), and its author will receive £200 from the Gaskell Society, and a complimentary copy of the Journal. High quality runners-up will also be considered for publication.

Conditions
Essays should be 6000-7000 words, and not under consideration for publication elsewhere. Please see the Gaskell Journal website for the stylesheet (MHRA with endnotes), and for the form to submit with your anonymised essay: www.gaskelljournal.co.uk

Please submit these directly to the Editor Dr Rebecca Styler rstyler@lincoln.ac.uk by/on 1st February 2018, who can also answer any inquiries.