victorian

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.

From Shakespeare’s King Lear to Flaubert’s Frédéric Moreau, who lives off of his uncle’s money, and Edward St Aubyn’s novels about the troubled heir Patrick Melrose, literature has always been occupied with inheritance and inherited wealth. The insights provided by this literary legacy are more important than ever. Once considered a relic from the aristocratic past superseded by liberal meritocracy, inherited wealth is now recognized as a source of rising social inequality. It therefore poses an important challenge for the present – and for the future. To meet this challenge, inheritance must be understood in all its historical and cultural complexity. For inheritance is more than a means of transferring wealth between generations.