CALL FOR PAPERS

Journal of Victorian Literature and Culture

Editors' Topic: Mapping Women's Poetries at the fin de siècle

Edited by Marion Thain and Ana Vadillo

The purpose of this publication is to rethink the relationship between fin-de-siècle women's poetry, and the poetry, poetics and politics of the late-Victorian period. This special edition of Victorian Literature and Culture aims to map women's poetry by tracing an array of the many positions from which the woman poet could speak at the turn of the century. The current emerging dialogue between the recognised types of the New Woman and the Female Aesthete is the start of such a process, but we need to do more to recognise the spectrum of positions that exist between, and around, the two. The variety of positions we hope to recognise in this edition will reflect a diversity of voices which will reveal women poets' key role in the formation and articulation of the culture of the period (mainstream and marginal). The resulting myriad of voices, we suggest, will overturn the current (and often reductive) cartography which tends to classify women's poetry as a separate cultural category rather than an integrated
part of the recognised cultural variety of the fin de siècle. We are seeking papers that position women's poetry in relation to any recognised political, cultural, or artistic manifesto of the turn of the century, uncovering women poets' engagement with major or minor trajectories. Such positions might include:

-- women's poetry in the context of decadent and aesthetic periodicals such as The Yellow Book, The Savoy, The Dial or Oscar Wilde's Woman's World.
-- women poets' engagement with radical new movements such as anti-vivisectionism or vegetarianism.
-- women's poetry and the politics of conservatism, liberalism, socialism, anarchism etc. (for example the Fabians).
-- women's poetry and religious or atheistic groupings and societies.
-- women's poetry and the Empire; responses to the New Imperialism; migration and immigration.
-- women poets and any of a variety of Aesthetic theories and figures (i.e. impressionism, symbolism, decadence, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, etc.) or to any other literary/poetical movement.
-- women poets and the Rhymers' Club, or any other literary coterie
-- women poets relationship to New Woman literature.
-- women's poetry and fin-de-siècle intellectual networks of any kind.
-- women's poetry and technological or scientific groups and discourses
-- women's poetry and factions within the visual arts.
-- the relationship between women's poetry and any other cultural grouping

Deadline: 1 November 2004

Word length: around 7-8,000 words (20 to 30 pp.)

Style: MLA style

Please send electronic and paper copies of your paper, by the deadline, to both:

Dr Ana Vadillo:
School of English and the Humanities,
Birkbeck College
University of London,
WC1E 7HX

a.parejovadillo_at_eng.bbk.ac.uk <mailto:a.parejovadillo_at_eng.bbk.ac.uk>

Dr Marion Thain:
Department of English,
University of Birmingham,
Edgbaston,
Birmingham,
B15 2TT

M.Thain_at_bham.ac.uk <mailto:M.Thain_at_bham.ac.uk>

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Received on Fri Nov 28 2003 - 02:12:36 EST