victorian

“The final revelation is that Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art.”—Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying

This book project seeks to elaborate lines of thinking that emerged during the panel, “The Unsettling Real in the Composition of Nineteenth-Century American Photography,” from this year’s C19 conference at Penn State University.  The heart of our inquiry concerns the problem of referentiality and the real in photographic compositions that proliferated middle-class culture through the machinery of Victorian-era mass production.  Contemporary scholarly analysis of this photographic tradition has tended to follow the classical semiotic assumption that the referent and its representation occupy distinctly different epistemological spaces.  In contrast, we draw on the insights of contemporary aesthetic theory and the field of object studies to c

To mark the centenary of the first edition of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Poems (1918), there will be a special issue of Victorian Poetry in summer 2018. The guest editors of the issue are asking for completed essays that focus on a specific poem, or a pair of poems. (Submissions should not focus on “The Wreck of the Deutschland.”) Contributions should account for the shifting critical receptions of the texts since their publication and suggest new directions for Hopkins scholarship. Contributors might consider issues such as the politicization of Hopkins, Hopkins’s changing audience, appropriations of Hopkins, or Hopkins inside and outside of the academy.

Though neither Mr. Thornton nor Mr. Bell evoke “Utopia” flatteringly in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North & South, each mention of the term situates the concept of utopianism at the center of the novel’s labour dispute and makes the reader wonder if Margaret Hale might not be a utopian heroine. Not considered a utopic text, North & South nevertheless engages itself in a conversation about utopianism (and dystopianism). This panel seeks papers re-reading non-utopic texts (or authors) from the nineteenth century as utopic. By June 9th, please submit a 200-word abstract, brief bio, and A/V requirements to Dan Abitz, Georgia State University, dabitz1@gsu.edu.

 Mapping the Metropolis: Coldnoon CitiesLondon – Lahore – Cairo – Calcutta (Call for Submissions)

To read the concept note and call for submissions, please visit: http://coldnoon.com/mapping-the-metropolis-london-lahore-cairo-calcutta/