Neo-Victorian Families: Gender, Sexual and Cultural Politics

We invite contributions on neo-Victorian representations of the nineteenth-century family for the second volume in a newly commissioned 6-volume series on Neo-Victorian Studies, to be published by Rodopi in early 2011. Nineteenth-century nuclear and extended families acted as the enabling fulcrum and dissemination point of capitalist values, imperial ideals, attitudes towards class and race, and sexual and gender politics, inculcating and reproducing cultural ideologies. Hence, many neo-Victorian writers and filmmakers position the family as central to their critical revisions of the period and its socio-political legacies in the present day. This volume aims to interrogate neo-Victorian strategic interventions in the nineteenth-century discourse of family and how these implicitly or explicitly engage with latter day issues, e.g. with regards to family breakdown, child abuse, divorce law and so forth. Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
- the family at home and abroad
- parent-child and sibling relations
- ideal communities: alternative, adoptive, self-chosen, and 'improper' families
- family traumas: divorce, sickness, death, emigration, domestic violence, and/or sexual abuse
- the familial neo-Victorian Gothic
- family politics of ethnicity, race, and eugenics
- mothering: good/bad mothers, single/deserted mothers, working mothers
- crime and familicide: infanticide, stolen children, baby-farming, child criminals/murderers
- genealogy, inheritance, and family memory
- family, nation and empire
- 19th-century legacies in 20th/21st-century social policy and family law

Please send 300 word proposals for 8,000-10,000 word chapters to the series editors Dr Marie-Luise Kohlke at m.l.kohlke@swansea.ac.uk and Prof Christian Gutleben at Christian.GUTLEBEN@unice.fr by 31st October 2009. Completed chapters will be due by 30 June 2010.