victorian

Nineteenth-Century Formations

The University of Hong Kong

December 6-7

This interdisciplinary conference asks participants to rethink the nineteenth century and its social, aesthetic, and discursive formations. It brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines to consider the categories that inform and shape our various disciplinary approaches to the nineteenth century. In doing so, it invokes the term “formations” in a broad sense, to convey the processes by which concepts, categories, structures, systems, and institutions—many of which remain in place today—came into existence during this period.

Things often end badly for males in George Eliot’s fiction. Macarthy, the antisocial artist in her first published prose fiction, dies unappreciated; dreamy Seth Bede reconciles himself to a pitiful bachelordom; Smilesian Tom Tulliver charters his wealth (but not his wellbeing); opportunistic Harold Transome is chastened by his circumstances; pedantic Edward Casaubon fails as a scholar and as a gentleman; and formidable Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt drowns because Eliot is unsure what else to do with him. These men are usually disposed of in credible ways, but are they treated fairly? Are their respective fates convincing given their character flaws and contexts, or are they treated more harshly than the women who share their fictional worlds?

For this session, we seek proposals exploring the factors shaping nineteenth- and twentieth-/twenty-first-century literature (in its broad sense) about the Middle Ages as well as the differences in approaches to the Middle Ages in each century. What historical, social, and intellectual views shaped nineteenth-century approaches to the Middle Ages? In what ways were these views limited or biased based on what the Victorians knew and believed and did not know, particularly when compared to advances in historical, psychological, and political knowledge in the next centuries? Conversely, what shaped twentieth-/twenty-first-century views of the Middle Ages?

From golems to Gollum, ghosts to Ironman, hobbits to succubi, zombies to dopplegangers, the possessed to those who wield the dark arts, the not-human, the almost-human, the was-human, the wants-to-be-human, the beyond-human, and those who use unknown powers to prey on humans have populated human culture and narrative from the beginning. Analysis from any critical perspective, exploring texts drawn from literature, film/TV, graphic novels, manga, comics, visual arts, and elsewhere, is welcome.

Us, Get Out, The Walking Dead, Cthulhu, It, and a wide variety of other texts would be appropriate topics. 

Please submit through the PAMLA.org website directly. 

PAMLA is in San Diego, November 14-17, 2019. 

Call for Papers: Subject--Technology and 19th-C. British Literature

Seeking contributors for a book of essays that explore connections between technology and nineteenth-century British literature. To be published by McFarland Press, a leading publisher of academic books. (See: https://mcfarlandbooks.com/) Essays should be of interest to, and readable by, both scholars and non-academics.

Suggested topics include:

*The effects of technology on nineteenth-century British literature.

*Portrayals/rhetoric regarding technology in nineteenth-century British literature.

2020 MVSA Conference

April 24-25—Chicago, Illinois

CALL FOR PAPERS (First-Come, First-Served Extended Deadline Period)

Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) Conference

Thursday, November 14, 2019 to Sunday, November 17, 2019, Wyndham San Diego Bayside Hotel, San Diego, California

Conference Theme "Send in the Clowns"

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.

Soliciting proposals and abstracts for a special edition of Nineteenth-Century Prose honoring the bicentennial of Matthew Arnold's birthday, to appear in 2022.  If interested, please send a 250 word abstract/proposal, along with a brief CV (both as attachments in MS Word), to Shannon Gilstrap (Guest Editor) at the University of North Georgia (Shannon.Gilstrap@ung.edu) by 1 August 2019. Proposals for essays in the following areas are needed: Arnold's religious writings;Arnold in/on America (Trans-Atlantic studies);Arnold and cultural studies;Arnold and imperialism;Arnold and the Digital Humanities Of course, other unique essay proposals will be considered. Feel free to visit Nineteenth-Century Prose's website: 

The Postgraduate English Journal, Durham University’s online peer-reviewed literary journal, is one of the longest-running online postgraduate literary journals in the UK. In recent years the journal has received reprint requests from academic publishers.

Early-career researchers/academics and postgraduates are invited to submit papers of 5,000–7,000 words (or book reviews of no more than 2,000 words) by 30th August 2019 for the journal’s 39th edition. Early submission is greatly encouraged.

Embodying Romanticism

Romantic Studies Association of Australasia 2019 Conference

21 - 23 November 2019

UNSW Canberra Northcott Drive

Canberra ACT 2600 Australia

Confirmed Keynote Speakers

Professor Will Christie, Australian National University

Professor Kevin Gilmartin, California Institute of Technology

Associate Professor Kevis Goodman, University of California Berkeley

Professor Clara Tuite, University of Melbourne

Call for Papers

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.

The Victorians Institute has extended the deadline for proposals to our 2019 conference:

Transatlantic Connections: Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas, & Victorian Studies will take place Oct 31-Nov 2 in Charleston, SC.

Our conference site affords an opportunity to think about transatlantic connections in the 19th century, when Charleston was a prominent intersection on a web that connected Britain, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas.

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.