There is a common adage that labour is invisible in Victorian literature. From Bruce Robbins’s discussion of the servant’s spectral “hand” to Carolyn Lesjak’s claim that labour is often hidden in the Victorian novel, scholars have often asserted that labour is rarely made visible. Yet, in the Victorian period itself, as Tim Barringer suggests, certain types of labour were made increasingly visible through aesthetic means. Whether it was paintings of farmers and other agricultural workers, Ford Madox Brown’s painting “Work,” or the Great Exhibition “of the Works of Industry of All Nations,” where audiences watched printmakers and seamstresses create new pieces and engineers fine-tune machines, labour was something highly visualized.

In light of NAVSA’s 2023 theme of “Revision, Return, Reform,” this panel aims to explore the impetus behind making labour a spectacle and how this idea might help revise critical conceptions of labour representations in Victorian literature. Papers might address questions such as: How can revising or reforming our approaches to analyzing domestic labour, creative labour, service work, care work, and other forms of work and labour complicate our understanding of their visibilities? How do highlighted performances of workers in fiction, and particularly of those marginalized on the basis of race, gender, or sexuality, affect interpretations of these figures in other art forms? How might we, in returning to Victorian texts with new modes of envisioning labour, reassess their legacies of exhibition and exploitation by including Marxist, colonialist, gendered, or disabled accounts of labour?

Submissions will be accepted until February 26, 2023. Please submit your abstract (max. 250 words) and brief bio (max. 125 words) to Emily Halliwell-MacDonald (emily.halliwell.macdonald@utoronto.ca) and Colleen McDonell (c.mcdonell@mail.utoronto.ca).