victorian

If ecology is without nature, as Timothy Morton provocatively argued in 2007, then one may wonder of ecology without the feminine as a corollary. For nature, much like the feminine, has been fetishized, exoticized, and romanticized as a signifier emptied out—a sort of lacuna. If we can be at ease with the gap, vacancy, or interval and, perhaps, theorize about the unfilled space while sorting out the inconsistencies of what it means to represent nature, the feminine, and androgyny, then we might begin to trace the valuable contributions of 19th-century women writers to the development of the term oecologia coined by Ernst Haeckel in 1866 and beyond. 

Many analyses of Victorian empire focus on India and Africa, yet the British empire also expanded to many parts of Oceania, both directly and indirectly. The papers in this session will examine cultural texts that explore relationships between Victorian empire and Oceania. This session especially welcomes essays that make connections between Victorian empire and Hawai'i.

Individual paper presentations will be between 15 and 20 minutes long. Please submit proposals via the online system by June 26, 2017. The PAMLA 2017 Conference will be held at the lovely Chaminade University of Honolulu (with the official conference hotel being the Ala Moana) from Friday, November 10 to Sunday, November 12.

In 1875, Anthony Trollope published The Way We Live Now, a novel about financial crises, political corruption, debt, and xenophobia. These topics are familiar to us as well: The Way We Live Now is, in many ways, still the way we live now.

Much recent debate in Victorian studies has concerned “presentism”—the idea that we still live with in a Victorian world. Presentism says that there is not much new about “neoliberalism:” as the manifesto of the V21 collective puts it, “In finance, resource mining, globalization, imperialism, liberalism, and many other vectors, we are Victorian, inhabiting, advancing, and resisting the world they made."

Masculinity in Women’s Literature

In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Bennett can never match the resourcefulness of his wife in her attempts to settle their five daughters in life; Edgar Linton in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is a caricature of manliness; in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, an only daughter, Molly Gibson, proves to be a better child to her father than a son, Osborne Hamley, who fails his parents; George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss presents Maggie Tulliver as a far stronger, braver and tougher character than her brother Tom.

The Victorian Review invites submissions for its special issue devoted to Trans Victorians. From the Chevalier/Chevalière D’Eon, Fanny and Stella, Dr. James Miranda Barry, and Vernon Lee, to the intersecting identities found in gender diverse side shows, including Madame Clofullia and Julia Pastrana, and the political cross-dressing of the Welsh Rebecca Riots, the Victorian era was populated by all manner of non-binary and gender expansive slippages. At the same time, Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s conflation of queer sexual orientation and trans gender identity and expression became part of the scientific foundation that informed cisnormative and heteronormative standards not only in medicine and the law, but the popular imagination.