Travel, Translation and Communication 19th-21st July 2017
Institute of English Studies, Senate House, London

Keynote Speakers:
Anne-Marie Beller (Loughborough)
Mary Hammond (Southampton)
Catherine Wynne (Hull)

 Exhibition:
‘Picturing The Mass Market: Popular Late Victorian Periodicals’ Curated by John Spiers

 Reading Group:
‘Travels of the Mind and Body’ Hosted by Chloé Holland and Anne-Louise Russell

Call for Papers

The Victorian Popular Fiction Association is dedicated to fostering interest in understudied popular writers, literary genres and other cultural forms, and to facilitating the production of publishable research and academic collaborations amongst scholars of the popular. Our annual conference is integral to this aim and brings together academics with interests in Victorian popular writing, culture and contexts. The conference has a reputation for offering a friendly and invigorating opportunity for academics at all levels of their careers, including postgraduate students, to meet, connect, and share their current research.

The organisers invite a broad, imaginative and interdisciplinary interpretation of the topic and its relation to any aspect of Victorian popular literature and culture which might address literal or metaphorical representations of the theme.

We welcome proposals for 20 minute papers, or for panels of three papers, on topics which can include, but are not limited to:

Textual travel: syndication (national and international), railway bookstalls, Mudie’s boxes, international/colonial editions (Tauchnitz), international copyright, piracy, serial publication / triple decker / single volume
Genre crossings: Realism, melodrama, sensation, detective, adventure, science and speculative fiction, fiction/non-fiction, high to low brow
Forms of communication: verbal, technological (telegraphs), written, epistemological, spiritualism, telepathy, mesmerism
Translation: languages, adaptation, cultural adaptation, Neo-Victorianism, intertextuality, metatextuality
Migration: transportation, immigration, expatriotism, diaspora, empire, race and colonialism, slave narratives, agency, freedom, dislocation
Tourism: Grand Tours, leisure cruise ships (P&O), watering holes, accommodation, sanatoriums, travel writing, holiday reading, the seaside, cosmopolitanism
Trade and commerce: money, speculation, business, postal service
Crossing boundaries: North and South, border controls, diplomatic exchanges, Europe, America, globally
Transport: trains, trams, buses, ships, bicycles, carriages, on foot (flâneur, voyeur)
Travel plans: maps, cartography, Bradshaw’s Guides, packing, travel diaries
Religious movements: pilgrimage, religious processions
Communication between the classes: class mobility, exploring other classes (Dickens, Mayhew, etc), reform literature
Communication between genders: Romance literature, secrets and lies, miscommunication
Education and transmission of knowledge: lectures, Working Men’s Clubs, conduct literature, temperance movement, pedagogical approaches, journalism, exposés
Movement and performance: travelling fairs, the circus, touring theatrical companies, cross dressing
Travels in time, space and place: histories, time travel, reincarnation, transmigration, space travel, journeys to the centre of the earth
Life stages: birth, ageing, death, crossroads, mobility and immobility
Digital humanities: travel and space intersections, network analysis, flow modelling, GIS-based research

Special topic panels:
Following our successful formula, we are continuing the special panels which will be hosted by guest experts; therefore we especially welcome papers about the following topics:

Topic 1: Transport, hosted by Charlotte Mathieson

Topic 2: The Sea and the Seaside, hosted by Joanne Knowles

Topic 3: Travel and Archives, hosted by Nickianne Moody

Papers in previous years have also discussed authors and publishers such as:

Harrison Ainsworth; Grant Allen; J. M. Barrie; Isabella Beeton; Mary Elizabeth Braddon; Rhoda Broughton; Hall Caine; Lewis Carroll; Mary Cholmondeley; Wilkie Collins; Arthur Conan Doyle; Hugh Conway; Marie Corelli; Dinah Craik; Catherine Crowe; Charles Dickens; George Du Maurier; Pierce Egan; William Gilbert; George Gissing; Bracebridge Hemyng; Joseph Hocking; Jerome K. Jerome; Rudyard Kipling; Eliza Lynn Linton; Florence Marryat; Richard Marsh; Edith Nesbit; Margaret Oliphant; Charles Reade; G. W. M. Reynolds; Charlotte Riddell; Olive Schreiner; Ouida; Robert Louis Stevenson; Bram Stoker; William Makepeace Thackeray; Margaret Todd; Anthony Trollope; Mary Augusta Ward; H. G. Wells; Oscar Wilde; Ellen Wood; Charlotte Yonge

Please send proposals of no more than 300 words and a 50 word biography in Word format to Drs Janine Hatter, Helena Ifill and Jane Jordan at:  vpfamembership@gmail.com

 Deadline for proposals: Friday 28th April 2017

WEBSITE: http://victorianpopularfiction.org/vpfa-9th-annual-conference/