victorian

Since its beginnings, London has been regarded as the epitome of progress and advancement even in times of profound crisis and discord, exerting the charm of the vast setting that concentrates most, if not all, human experiences. From ancient Londinium to the 21st-century metropolis, the ever expanding urban settlement has emerged as a complex heterogeneous entity forging a particular code of conduct governed by imagination and originality, talent and vision that generate almost endless significations of the self.

We welcome papers on any aspect of Shaw studies, including but not limited to:

          individual plays/characters,

          comparative treatment of plays by Shaw,

          Shaw and his contemporary playwrights,

           cultural aspects of Shaw’s works, and

           international Shaw play productions.

CALL FOR PAPER PROPOSALS:

READING W.D. HOWELLS (1837-1920) A CENTURY LATER

NEMLA, Boston, MA, March 5-8, 2020 

It’s a commonplace to say that realism is having a moment again, or that realism has never left. This seminar recognizes both that realism is always important and that realist critical projects have proliferated in the past decade. The majority of these renew our interest in literary realism as an aesthetic tradition. Where realism was previously defined in contrast to modernism, naturalism, or more speculative genres, what distinguishes this recent revival in realism seems to be its increased interdependence with these other aesthetic categories and modes. Fredric Jameson’s The Antinomies of Realism, for instance, takes realism not as a static epistemological or narrative structure, but as an increasingly affective mode of estrangement.

Transatlantic Literature at CEA 2020

March 26-28, 2020 | Hilton Head Island, South Carolina

Hilton Head Marriott Resort and Spa

The College English Association, a gathering of scholar-teachers in English studies, welcomes proposals for presentations on Transatlantic Literature for our 51st annual conference. Submit your proposal at www.cea-web.org

As the tides sweep both shores of the Atlantic, so do ideas, themes, and issues.  All topics in Transatlantic Literature are welcome.

Conference Theme

By the turn of the twentieth century, the ‘new astronomy’ had developed into a proper scientific discipline, with its own sets of instruments, its own journals, its own jargon, and its own interpretative authority. With the acceleration of new discoveries and insights into stellar phenomena, the emerging mass media ensured that this astronomical knowledge fascinated an even wider audience in the late 19th and early 20th century. At the same time, literature across Europe responded to the fascinating astronomical developments in a variety of modes, styles, and genres.

Scholarship credits Sarah Grand with devising the term “New Woman” in 1894, although occasional differing claims nod to others, Lady Mary Jeune, for instance, in 1889. The label, which characterized and categorized the independent, self-supporting woman, quickly became popular in late Victorian culture and has resurfaced in our fascination with the Neo-Victorian. In the 1890s the New Woman appeared as the nonconformist heroine in novels, in articles about women’s education, tracts about employment equality. Magazines satirized the bicycle-riding emancipated female; conduct books warned about an un-feminine type. In their variety and scope, representations of the New Woman were, as New Woman scholars like Lyn Pyckett have established, ambivalent.

OUR DICKENS: DICKENS AND HIS PUBLICS

17th-19th July 2020, Bloomsbury, London

In 2020, the 150-year anniversary of Dickens’s death, the annual Dickens Society Symposium will take place in Bloomsbury, Dickens’s home for periods of time and where he produced some of his most memorable novels. Organised by Royal Holloway, University of London, in collaboration with the Charles Dickens Museum (formerly the Dickens House Museum), the anniversary Symposium seeks to explore what Dickens means to so many people across the world and why he has meant so much to diverse publics over time.

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