Current Call for Papers: Guest-Edited Autumn Issues

Victorian Popular Fictions Journal is currently accepting proposals for guest-edited Autumn 2021, 2022 and 2023 issues. If interested, please submit a proposal to Mariaconcetta Costantini and Andrew King at vpfjournal@gmail.com by 1st September 2020. Proposals should include a short description of your topic, a sample CFP, and brief editor biographies.

Past and future special issues focus on "Mapping Victorian Popular Fiction" and "Short Stories". For full issues, please see the VPFJ website. All special issue guest-editors should be members of the VPFA throughout the publishing process. Information on VPFA membership can be found here.

Victorian Popular Fictions is the journal of the Victorian Popular Fiction Association. The VPFA was established in 2009 in order to offer a regular forum for the dissemination and discussion of new research into nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century popular narrative. Mariaconcetta Costantini and Andrew King launched the VPFJ in Spring 2019 to publish the new research of the organisation on an Open Access online platform to a wider audience.

Focussing on popular narrative in all its forms, VPFJ solicits articles which help us re-evaluate our view of Victorian culture as a whole and how that might be considered, including debates about canonicity and hybridity, digitisation, and the identification of pedagogical issues in the teaching of Victorian popular fictions.

VPFJ takes it for granted that “Victorian” means the long nineteenth century and that “popular” means widely disseminated, but at the same time it welcomes challenges to those definitions. It invites the identification and analysis of tropes that coalesced into tales for a few years and subsequently dissolved to make new solutions. It also welcomes discussions of Neo-Victorian re-imaginings of nineteenth-century popular fiction.

VPFJ encourages the critical examination of now neglected fiction, forgotten creators, disseminators and interpreters of stories ‑ poets, dramatists, novelists, journalists, journals, publishers, artists, critics and readers.

Remembering that the American Harriet Beecher Stowe and the French Dumas were amongst the most widely read and adapted “Victorian” writers, VPFJ urges submissions on the trans-Atlantic and transnational circulation and translation of narrative.

Believing that rigorous peer-review and scrupulous editing are essential to forwarding exploration of our field, the VPFJ benefits from a distinguished international Editorial Board. Each submission is double blind peer reviewed and undergoes a careful editorial process based on the VPFJ Style Guide (downloadable here). Where we feel it is appropriate, we shall not hesitate to screen for plagiarism.

We believe in civil communication and friendly council. Alert to the necessity of working to reduce the physical, social and economic barriers to academic participation and to fostering an environment where all persons enjoy equal respect, we are committed to Open Access and fostering new talent as well as new ideas. Authors retain their own copyright and there are no submission or processing charges. We operate according the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Don’t think of the squabbles in the Athenaeum Club or the oracular pronouncements of the Higher Journalism, but the energy, ambition, range and conversation of the Beetons, Braddon and Eliza Cook.