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

From the natural world to the unnatural world, the Victorian imagination was filled with imagery of ‘the creature,’ be it scientific, fantastic, or other-ly. From butterfly collections lovingly labeled to terrifying bedtime stories of werewolves and vampires, from monstrously dehumanized or ‘creature-fied’ bodies to stories narrated by anthropomorphized animals, Victorians were expanding the limits of ‘creaturehood’ like never before. Between animals, insects, monsters, fantastical beings, and othered bodies, in what ways did Victorians embrace ‘creatures’ in their daily lives, while reviling them in others? This panel invites papers that consider many broad definitions of ‘creatures’ in Victorian literature, culture, art, and other mediums. 

Possible topics may include (but are not limited to): 

• Collected creatures and animals, and their curators 
• Exploration and ‘discovery’ of species 
• Fantastical or nonhuman creatures such as vampires, werewolves, and supernatural monsters
• Dehumanized or creaturely people  
• Animalistic or creaturely attributes, or hybridity
• Domesticated animals and their relationships to their keepers, whether child or adult 
• Debates surrounding practices such as vivisection and meat consumption 
• Representations of creatures in art, advertisements, photography, or other visual mediums
• Neo-Victorian representations of the creature

Please submit paper proposals by November 15, 2019 through the ACCUTE Proposal Submission Form available here: https://accute.ca/accute-conference/proposal-submission-form/. In your submission, please include a 300-500-word proposal without personal identifying marks, a 100-word abstract, and a 50-word bio.