victorian

Writers and writers’ organisations have a long history of using their public standing and cultural capital to promote causes that transcend the literary sphere, from abolition and gender equality to free expression, anti-war agitation, and environmental issues. This two-day conference explores the intersections of authorship, politics, activism, and literary celebrity across historical periods, literatures, and media. It examines the forms and impact of authorial field migrations between literature and politics and the ways in which they are situated within, and shaped by, structural frameworks that include academic institutions, prize-giving bodies, publishing industries, and literary celebrity culture.

This session engages in a matter-oriented approach, raising questions about the ontological status of the autonomous writing subject by joining it to the vast network of relations to objects within an area—ecozone, bioregion, biome, or ecosystem. Though the contributions by science-based writers are important (e.g., Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday, George Perkins Marsh, John Muir, etc.) New Materialist Interpretations of 19th-century Writers focuses on a different trajectory, accentuating less detectable and unacknowledged contributions to natural history writing offered by literary writers.

Seeking paper abstracts for the panel “The Nineteenth-Century Gothic” at the Victorians Institute Conference in Charleston, SC, from October 31-November 2, 2019.

The organizer invites submissions that explore the literary features, historical contexts, theoretical approaches, and adaptations/neo-Victorian incarnations of nineteenth-century ghost stories or Gothic topics. Papers related to the Gothic in the conference’s thematic territories of Charleston, Britain, Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean are especially welcome. Please email your CVs and 250-300-word abstracts to Indu Ohri at io3jc@virginia.edu by Friday, June 28, 2019.

Colonial Knowledges: Environment and Logistics in the Creation of Knowledge in British Colonies from 1750 to 1950.

27th-28th February 2020, University of Manchester.  

Keynote speaker: Professor Javed Majeed, King’s College London.

The effects of colonial power dynamics on knowledge creation in the long nineteenth century and beyond are well known and have become the foundation of a postcolonial reading of British scholarship in the context of empire. What has been less well examined are the practical effects of the colonial context on knowledge making.    

Jane Eyre calls herself “a wander on the face of this earth.” Excluded from the family in which she is raised and the normative models of female development that should guide her, her state is one of radical orphan-hood. An unwanted, unearthly thing, she must nonetheless find or make a space for herself in this world.