victorian

Rocky Mountain 

Modern Language Association

Seventy-sixth annual convention
English Nineteenth-Century Panel

October 11-14, 2023

Denver, Colorado

Abstract Deadline: April 1, 2023

This special session panel, for the 2024 MLA in Philadelphia, PA, will reflect on how performativity, acting, and theatre appear in writing. When we consider the novel, especially, how does theatre show its impact on authors and how do authors invoke theatrical performance or acting in a non-visual form? For texts with visual components, such as manga or illustrated stories, how do the images interface with the text to create an experience of performance for readers? When we see the theatre itself appear in literature, what is its role? When we see an amateur performance, such as Lovers' Vows in Austen's Mansfield Park, what does that say about how theatre is constructed in Austen's understanding of society?

RSVP Field Development Grant

The RSVP Field Development Grant was created with funds from a generous bequest to RSVP by the late Eileen Curran, pioneering researcher and Emerita Professor of English at Colby College. The grant is intended to support one or a team of researchers in creating resources that will facilitate the work of other scholars in their studies of 19th-century British newspapers and periodicals.

NEW LITERARIA invites the submission of articles, shorter essays, interviews, and book reviews offering historical, interdisciplinary, theoretical, and cultural approaches to literature and related fields for its Volume 4 Issue 2.

Submissions should be emailed to newliteraria@gmail.com by no later than 30th May 2023. All submissions must include a cover letter that includes the author's full mailing address, email address, telephone numbers, and professional or academic affiliation.

Articles should be between 3,500 and 8,000 words long (including bibliography and footnotes). Book reviews should be between 750 and 1,500 words.

The Irish Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Forum invites proposals for a guaranteed roundtable at MLA 2024 (4-7 January) in Philadelphia, PA. 

This roundtable considers points of collision, comparison, and friction in the diasporic literary and cultural histories of the Global South and Ireland. How have different legacies of conquest, occupation, and resistance determined understandings of belonging to knowable communities? In turn, how have distinct practices and experiences of diaspora helped to effect specific forms of identity, affiliation, and tendency? And how have literary and cultural works served to articulate these relations into the fraught present? 

The Review of English and American Literature

Call for Papers

Special Issue: The Plantationocene

Deadline for Submissions: April 10, 2023

The Oscar Wilde Society invites abstracts for a special session at the 2024 MLA Convention in Philadelphia, PA, Jan. 4-7 2024.

The Martineau Society will be hosting its annual conference in Norwich, England.  The Martineau Society conference is an interdisciplinary conference that focuses on the lives, work, and contributions of the Martineau family, including its two most famous and influential members, Harriet Martineau (1802-1876) and James Martineau (1805-1900).

Started by Norwich Unitarians in 1994, the Martineau Society encourages scholarship on the Martineau family and their nineteenth-century context as well as their continuing influence.  

Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

Theology and Religion

Literature (all genres, including Children’s Literature and Travel Writing)

Language and Linguistics

Henry James and the Visual Arts

University of Reading, Thursday 29 June 2023

Chapter proposals are sought for a volume of critical essays on Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Proposed chapters should ideally also connect to contemporary lives of the play, adaptations, influence on later works, translations, and/or connections with cultural studies' paradigms. The target readership for the volume includes teachers/instructrors, and students, which should bear upon the accessibility and adaptability of the essays themselves.

There is a common adage that labour is invisible in Victorian literature. From Bruce Robbins’s discussion of the servant’s spectral “hand” to Carolyn Lesjak’s claim that labour is often hidden in the Victorian novel, scholars have often asserted that labour is rarely made visible. Yet, in the Victorian period itself, as Tim Barringer suggests, certain types of labour were made increasingly visible through aesthetic means. Whether it was paintings of farmers and other agricultural workers, Ford Madox Brown’s painting “Work,” or the Great Exhibition “of the Works of Industry of All Nations,” where audiences watched printmakers and seamstresses create new pieces and engineers fine-tune machines, labour was something highly visualized.

The term “gaslighting” has reentered the popular lexicon with a vengeance in recent years, appearing in countless news stories and opinion pieces on the subjects of sex, race, politics, medicine, and emotional abuse. It refers to “the experience of having your reality repeatedly challenged by someone who holds more power than you do,” as one Washington Postcolumn recently articulated it. Such pieces often note that the term is drawn from a specific twentieth-century source text: George Cukor’s 1944 film Gaslight, based on Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play of the same name, which tells the story of a sadistic husband actively working to make his wife believe she is losing her mind.

CALL FOR PAPERS, ABSTRACTS, AND PANEL PROPOSALS

Midwest Popular Culture Association/Midwest American Culture Association Annual Conference

Friday-Sunday, 6-8 October 2023

DePaul University, Chicago, IL

Address: DePaul Center, 1 E. Jackson Blvd. Chicago, IL 60604 Phone: (312) 362-8000

Conference participants will be responsible for securing their own lodging. 

Conrad's works feature linguistic sophistication, narrative complexity, psychological nuance, subtle irony, political contestation, and historical challenge. While some might seek to avoid difficulty, this panel instead embraces difficulty and considers how precisely the most challenging aspects of Conrad's art can empower students and cultivate subtlety, humanistic and historical breadth, and even humility. This panel invites papers that consider how the multivalent difficulty of Conrad’s works — syntactic, psychological, political, or aesthetic — offers pedagogical opportunity.  Comparative approaches are welcome.