victorian

Humour and Satire in British Romanticism - Hatfield College, Durham University, UK - 13-14 September 2019

This two-day conference will explore the role of humour and satire in the Romantic period (as well as its influences and legacies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), focusing on everything from literary and graphic satire, to scientific conceptions of humour, to witty table talk.

This is a call for abstracts of short papers (ca. 3,000 words) on the work of Lucas Malet to be presented at a summer symposium in Eversley, Hampshire. Organised in conjunction with the CK200 Festival (https://ck200.live), celebrating the bicentennial of the author’s father Charles Kingsley, this symposium provides students and scholars opportunity to discuss recent research on Malet’s work.

Happiness: Enlightenment to PresentKing’s College, CambridgeSaturday, October 19 – Sunday, October 20, 2019 

The question of what makes us happy, let alone how to actually define happiness, has preoccupied writers and philosophers since the Ancient Greeks. Happiness has often been viewed with suspicion; be it located in another world, aligned with worldly dangers, or pictured as an endless pursuit symptomizing our fall from grace. From the Enlightenment onwards, however, writers begin to reinvent or reinvigorate the idea of happiness in new forms. Rather than scold ourselves out of expectation, happiness is viewed as a component of real quotidian life, as something we might learn to expect from our encounters with reality.

We invite manuscripts of scholarly articles (4000-6000 words) on any of the following: Bram Stoker, the novel Dracula, the historical Dracula, the vampire in folklore, fiction, film, popular culture, and related topics.

Submissions should be sent electronically (as an e-mail attachment in .doc or .rtf). Please indicate the title of your submission in the subject line of your e-mail. Send electronic submissions to journalofdraculastudies@kutztown.edu.

I have spoken with an Senior Commissioning Editor at Manchester University Press (with their strengths in theatre, nineteenth century lit, and politics), and he is very excited about the prospects of this edited collection. He/MUP is eagerly awaiting a proposal.

The book is called, Wilde Politics: The Political Thought of Oscar Wilde. My Introduction is (currently) entitled, “The Politics of Being Oscar Wilde.” The three sections of the book are “Victorian Politics”; “The Politics of Aesthetics”; and “Political Philosophy.”