cfp.english.upenn.edu

Re-Orienting Victorian Studies
25-27 June 2010
Keynote speaker:
Talia Schaffer (Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY)

The next annual conference of the Australasian Victorian Studies Association (AVSA) will take place on 25-27 June 2010 in Singapore, hosted by the Centre of the Liberal Arts & Social Sciences (CLASS) and the Division of English at Nanyang Technological University.
To mark this move to Asia, the theme of the conference held in 2010 will be “Re-Orienting the Victorians.” This “re-orientation” is intended to comprise any form of reformulation or re-conceptualisation of the field and its analysis, inviting redirections beyond geographical extensions of the long nineteenth century.

Keynote Speaker:

Talia Schaffer is an Associate Professor of English at Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her books include Literature and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (2006); an edition of Lucas Malet’s 1901 novel The History of Sir Richard Calmady (2004); The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (2001); and Women and British Aestheticism (1999), co-edited with Kathy A. Psomiades. She has published widely on late-Victorian noncanonical novels, women’s writing, and material culture. Her book in progress analyses the Victorian domestic handicraft as a model for mid-Victorian realism.

We invite submissions of papers covering the full range of possible meanings of a “re-orienting” of Victorian studies, including, but not limited to
- Reconsidering “the long nineteenth century”
- Directions and re-directions in literary culture
- Disoriented Victorians
- Being undirected, redirected, unsettled, resettled, or otherwise disturbed in Victorian literature
- The orientations of the Victorian home / family
- Literary, cultural, social, and geographical orientations, including the Victorians’ “Orient” reconsidered
- Travel, emigration, settlement, and returns
- new and redirected forms in Victorian literature, art, and culture
- reworking/rewriting/reorienting traditions in Victorian concepts of history, the arts, literature, and social practices (e.g. folklore, neo-medievalism, archaeology, &c.)
- the orientations of Victorian realism, sensationalism, &c., including Gothic re-orientations of form
- re-orienting the canon and the different orientations in traditional and new recovery work
- re-orienting the Victorians and their literary legacies in neo-Victorian film and fiction
Those interested in proposing 20-minute papers or full panels (of three speakers, plus a chair) should submit 500-word abstracts and a 200-word bio by 1 February 2010 through the following website at http://portal.hss.ntu.edu.sg/AVSA_CFP.

Full details about the conference will also be posted on the website. Note that information about travel grants available (competitively) to postgraduate students is already available there.