victorian

We invite proposals for monographs or edited volumes for our Series in Literary Studies.

Literary studies is one of the richest and most interdisciplinary fields of study, encompassing a wide array of valid approaches, from the historical, to the theoretical, to the experimental. Broadly speaking, works of literary scholarship aim to change or enhance the way we read texts by investigating their complexity.

We are particularly interested in books on English Literature, although we are open to proposals which examine any type of world literature.

The scope of the present call is broad. Possible topics include (non-comprehensive list):

SEASECS 2020, February 20-22, Macon, Georgia

SEASECS will hold its 46th annual meeting at the Macon Marriott City Center. The theme for this year's meeting is "Encounters in the 18th Century: Maps, Materials, and Media." In addition to panels and plenary sessions, special events include tours to historic sites including the Ocmulgee Indian Mounds National Historic Park, the 1869 Hay House, the Tubman Museum, historic Rose Hill Cemetery, and the Allman Brothers’ “Big House.” Host institutions include Georgia College & State University, Middle Georgia State University, and Wesleyan College.

ACCUTE Member-Organized Panel: Fangs, Claws, and Pariahs: Victorians vs. the Creature

Panel Organizers: Alicia Alves (16apa@queensu.ca), Lin Young (l.young@queensu.ca), and Alyce Soulodre (17as43@queensu.ca)

Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Western University, London, Ontario, May 30-June 5, 2020

Convenors:

• Emily Bell, Loughborough University (e.bell@lboro.ac.uk)
• Georges Letissier, Université de Nantes (georges.letissier@univ-nantes.fr)
• Céline Prest (celine.prest@gmail.com)

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?