victorian

 My Victorian Novel

Isobel Armstrong has lamented that the way we teach the Victorian novel, with enthusiasm and delight, is so different from the way we criticize it. I wonder if this is also partially true about the way we really read and experience Victorian novels, if there is a Wemmick-like division between the absorbed and happy reader, cozy and contented in the Castle, and the buttoned-up professor at the lectern or the laptop. Rereading Victorian fiction over time, for our classes or our scholarship, must at some level involve a relaxation of feeling, the evocation of memories, psychic immersion, and moral engagement––alongside critical distance, objectivity, or suspicion. 

 Roundtable on how critical race theory can shape the disciplinary futures of Victorian Studies (non-guaranteed session). Send 250-word proposals for a 5-minute talk and brief bio by 9 March 2018 to Dr. Ronjaunee Chatterjee (ronjaunee.chatterjee@concordia.edu).

The WMS is seeking submissions for the following session, co-sponsored with The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, for the 2019 MLA Convention. Please note that this session is not guaranteed (and is subject to approval by the MLA):

This session seeks new perspectives on publishing William Morris and his circle. Topics might focus on Morris as publisher, on illustrations, on printing, or on the physical format of the book. We especially welcome papers that address publications outside of the Kelmscott Press, and/or that feature book history or digital humanities approaches. 

The WMS is seeking submissions for the following guaranteed session for the 2019 MLA Convention:

Labor unrest and repression in late nineteenth-century Chicago, Paris, and London helped forge internationalist ties that laid the basis for the Second International. William Morris, Walter Crane, and their acolytes were very much a part of this trans-Atlantic radical political, literary, and artistic exchange of ideas. This panel explores the dynamics and consequences of their efforts, doing so in a way that more fully elucidates Morris’s trans-Atlantic influence on socialism’s rise in the West.

Transnational poetics; Aestheticism and Decadence at the fin de siècle

A One-Day Symposium at New York University

Monday May 14th 2018

Keynote Speaker: Prof Regenia Gagnier (Exeter):

‘Transnational Poiesis and the Making of Community’

Organizers: Prof Marion Thain (NYU), Dr Kate Hext (Exeter), Dr Jane Desmarais (London)

Call for participants