Lost Girls & New Women: Woolf, Conrad, & the Regendering of Empire

 Comparative panel considering Conrad’s and Woolf’s female characters as challenging imperial gender norms.  Papers might range from Conrad’s often biracial colonial feminine roles to Woolf on threatening sexualities or “New Women.”  Short bio, 300wd proposals.

 Deadline for submissions: Saturday, 15 March 2025

Ben Leubner, Montana State University < leubnerb@montana.edu >

Mark Deggan, Simon Fraser University < mark_deggan@sfu.ca >

 DESCRIPTION:  Both Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf were sharp critics of imperium as well as the debilitating sociocultural fallouts of empire on individuality, individual conscience, and gender.  Woolf’s focus on feminine consciousness in the major fiction is pressed into new relief when read against Conrad’s early interest in, for instance, the young biracial female characters at the heart of so many of his early fictions.  Whether focusing on fallen or combative iterations of femininity – including characters ranging from Rachel Vinrace in The Voyage Out, to Nina Almayer in Almayer’s Folly, Mrs. Dalloway’s Doris Kilman, Miss La Trobe from Between the Acts, Victory’s Lena, or Aissa in An Outcast of the Islands – each author foregrounds female characters in relation to the distortions of imperial society and overturns expected discourses surrounding the roles and interiorities of women. In each case, the gender expectations of empire are not only put under pressure through the elaboration of a feminine point of view, but the authors show the ways in which imperial mores governing gender might be countermanded.

 This proposed MLA in-person session is a joint project of The International Virginia Woolf Society & the Joseph Conrad Society of America.  It hopes to attract paper proposals that consider one or both authors on issues of gender common to their works, with emphasis on the continuities linking the attempts of both writers to complicate imperial fiction vis-à-vis the status and agency of women. Proposals welcome on either author, but papers are sought, especially, on themes addressing both authors.