Extended CFP: 'Forgery and Imitation', Victorian Network, Deadline 15 December 2017

Victorian Network is an open-access, MLA-indexed, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to publishing and promoting the best work across the broad field of Victorian Studies by postgraduate students and early career academics. We are delighted to announce that our twelfth issue (Summer 2018) will be guest edited by Aviva Briefel on the theme of Forgery and Imitation.

Recent scholarship has drawn attention to the increase in art and literary forgery in the nineteenth century, and to the preoccupation with themes of illicit imitation in the Victorian cultural zeitgeist. Critics have highlighted the manifold, intricate, and sometimes surprising ways in which forgery was woven into the social and cultural fabric of the era. The forged, the fake, and the imitative became pressing issues for artistic reproduction as growing demand and changing technology shaped the way in which texts, images, and objects circulated. The spectrum encompassed forged and imitative objects faked with criminal intent, as well as cultural and economic productivity.

Anxieties surrounding the concepts of originality and fakery also permeated nineteenth-century discussions of social authenticity – did forging an identity in a changing world open the door to faking social class, race, or gender? Did cleaving closely to imitate cultural peers maintain the status quo, mask individual dishonesty, or constitute plagiarism? Frauds, cheats, liars, and copycats of every ilk caught the public imagination. The range of depictions was broad and ambivalent. From villainous cheats like Count Fosco to romantic depictions of Chatterton, forgery and imitation marked for the Victorians a point of uneasiness that called for intricate negotiation. Furthermore, as channels of patronage and influence became increasingly fragmented, new ways of conceptualising artistic indebtedness were required. Here, too, forgery and imitation did moral battle. Appropriation, pastiche, and homage had their dark doubles: deceit, plagiarism, and hack work. Navigating intertextuality meant gauging where boundaries of influence could be crossed and where they should be policed.

We invite submissions of approximately 7,000 words on any aspect of the theme in Victorian literature and culture. Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to:

Fakery and cultural identity, the (cultural and/or economic) value of forgeries and imitations
Fakes as cultural participation
Identities of forgery and forged identities (individual, cultural/national)
Illegitimacy, genealogy, and heredity theory
Imitation in nature and evolutionary or scientific theory
Artistic reproduction (eg. photographs, prints, and casts), copying, and forgery: the original versus the copy
Forgery and imitation as gendered activities
Public persona: masks and makeup
Fashions, trends, and crazes
Acting as imitation; theatricality versus authenticity
Fraud, counterfeit money, financial corruption, white-collar crime
The forgery of memory; history-writing; misremembrance
Originality, the Romantic genius, and Victorian imitation
Imitation as literary practice: (mis-)quotation, adaptation, plagiarism, piracy
Literature as imitation: re-creating other mediums in words (ut pictura poesis)
Imitating the Victorians: the re-creation of Victorian texts in neo-Victorian writing and fan cultures

All submissions should conform to MHRA house style and the in-house submission guidelines. Submissions should be received by 15 December 2017.
Contact: victoriannetwork@gmail.com

Reviews Editor Position at The Gaskell Journal (15 Sept. 2017)

The Gaskell Journal seeks a new Reviews Editor. As well as publishing peer-reviewed articles, this annually produced academic journal features 2-4 book reviews, of works focused on Elizabeth Gaskell but also on Victorian literature and culture more generally. The reviews editor’s role is to identify suitable books for review, contact publishers to request a complimentary review copy, and appoint appropriate reviewers. As well as engaging with our regular reviewers, this also involves making new contacts in relevant scholarly fields. The reviews editor must then keep in contact with the reviewer to ensure that the review is completed in good time, and meets house requirements, to be forwarded to the journal editor. This role might particularly appeal to research postgraduates or early career scholars in the field of Victorian studies, as a way to gain editorial experience and build academic contacts. Some familiarity with Gaskell’s works is an advantage.

Please send your 250-word statement of interest to Dr Rebecca Styler, rstyler@lincoln.ac.uk, no later than Friday September 15th 2017.

The Gaskell Journal: Joan Leach Memorial Graduate Student Essay Prize 2018

The Gaskell Journal
Joan Leach Memorial Graduate Student
Essay Prize 2018

Deadline for submissions: 1st February 2018

The Gaskell Journal runs a biennial Graduate Student Essay Prize in honour of Joan Leach MBE, founder of the Gaskell Society.

Terms
The essay competition is open to all graduate students currently registered for an MA or PhD in Victorian Studies. Entries are invited that offer an original contribution to the field of Gaskell studies, whether by reading her works in relation to Victorian cultural, religious, aesthetic and scientific contexts, or through innovative close readings enlightened by critical theory, or a comparative study connecting Gaskell’s with another author’s work.  Essays will be shortlisted by the Gaskell Journal Editorial Board, with the final judgment being made by a leading scholar in Gaskell studies.

Prize
The winning essay will be published in the Gaskell Journal (subject to appropriate revisions), and its author will receive £200 from the Gaskell Society, and a complimentary copy of the Journal. High quality runners-up will also be considered for publication.

Conditions
Essays should be 6000-7000 words, and not under consideration for publication elsewhere. Please see the Gaskell Journal website for the stylesheet (MHRA with endnotes), and for the form to submit with your anonymised essay: www.gaskelljournal.co.uk

Please submit these directly to the Editor Dr Rebecca Styler rstyler@lincoln.ac.uk by/on 1st February 2018, who can also answer any inquiries.

CFP: Special Edition of AJVS: Pre-Raphaelitism in Australasia (abstracts due 29 Feb 2016)

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Paolo and Francesca
da Rimini 1867. National Gallery of Victoria,
Melbourne.

CFP – Special Edition of AJVS: Pre-Raphaelitism in Australasia 

The Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies is pleased to announce a Special Issue on ‘Pre-Raphaelitism in Australasia’ to be published in late 2016. Inspired by Medieval Moderns: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood Exhibition and Symposium at the National Gallery of Victoria in July 2015, this Special Issue invites papers from both the Symposium and others conducting research in this field.

Australasian collections of Pre-Raphaelite works are now recognised by the wider international community as integral to the understanding of the movement. The NGV’s rich holdings are especially renowned as they include many important works by Edward Burne-Jones, William Holman Hunt, Ford Madox Brown, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and others.

In addition to important holdings of major British Pre-Raphaelite works, there is an increasingly well-documented body of Australasian artists and writers who knew, worked with and were inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites.  Publication of new work in this field will enhance understandings of how the concepts, techniques and ideals of Pre-Raphaelitism were interpreted and developed in the colonies.

To that end, we invite papers exploring the visual culture, literary, or historical aspects of Pre-Raphaelitism or the related Arts and Crafts movement in Australasia. Papers should be 5-7,000 words in length, and we strongly encourage illustrations, although authors will need to arrange permissions themselves and provide documentation to the editors.

The special issue is being guest-edited by Alison Inglis and Nancy Langham-Hooper together with AJVS editor Meg Tasker, and will be published on the open-access Online Journal System hosted by Sydney e-Scholarships Publishing. http://openjournals.library.usyd.edu.au/index.php/AJVS.

Contributors are invited to send an abstract of 250-300 words to preraphaelites2016ajvs@gmail.com by 29 February 2016.  Full papers will be due by 4 April, and must be submitted online, with abstract. New users will need to create a login and password at: http://openjournals.library.usyd.edu.au/index.php/AJVS/login

CFP: Special issue of Victorian Network on the Victorian Brain (Deadline: 15 Aug. 2015)

Victorian Network is an open-access, MLA-indexed, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to publishing and promoting the best postgraduate and early career work across the broad field of Victorian Studies. We are delighted to announce that our eleventh issue (Winter 2015) will be guest edited by Professor Sally Shuttleworth (University of Oxford), on the theme of the Victorian Brain.

In the nineteenth century, the discipline of psychology, or the science of the mind, underwent a profound reorientation: a reorientation which was both fuelled by contemporary literature, and which influenced that literature’s form and content. Investigating the mind’s workings was the joint project of such diverse parties as authors and poets; natural scientists and doctors; but also the public, as citizen scientists. Phrenology and the legibility of physiognomy remained central concerns. Simultaneously, medical research created a counterweight to eighteenth-century folk psychology and pseudoscience. Observation of mentally-ill asylum inmates offered another route into the human psyche. These asylums in turn experienced restructuring, turning from spaces of “[chains], straw, filthy solitude, darkness and starvation” (Dickens) in the eighteenth century, to institutions implementing “moral management” by 1900.

Mid-Victorians discussed the human brain extensively in both popular literature and specialized periodicals, ranging in disciplines from natural and medical sciences to literature and philosophy. The Journal of Mental Science and Dickens’s Household Words are but two examples from different sides of that spectrum. As these widespread discussions destabilized longstanding convictions including the supremacy of the mind and the integrated self, these convictions’ intricate connections to cultural concerns including gender and class grew evident. Investigations in all possible directions proliferated, bringing (especially in the century’s closing decades) rapid disciplinary changes in neuroscience (e.g. through the work of William Richard Gowers), psychology and psychotherapy.

The examination of human consciousness also occurred in the nineteenth-century novel. The period’s novelists had such a significant part in shaping the discourse on the mind not least because, in the words of Karen Chase, they “did not inherit a supple and illuminating picture of the mind, but […] had to construct it for themselves, taking insights where they found them.”

We invite submissions of around 7,000 words on any aspect of the theme. Possible topics include but are by no means limited to:

•    The novel as shaping and shaped by discourses on psychology, the mind, and the brain.
•    Mental science and poetry; the “psychological monologue”.
•    Animal dissection and vivisection.
•    The brain as central organ of the nervous system, mind and body as connected; the concept of the mental faculties; the soul as (no longer) extra-corporeal; religion vs scientific psychology. The senses.
•    The mind as culturally formed; national and international conceptions of psychology.
•    The gendered brain and its implications (gender as a universal taxonomy).
•    The Victorian mind in childhood.
•    The theatrical brain: displaying thought and memory on the Victorian stage; depicting mental illness and madness; character interiority; psychology and actor training.
•    Altered states of mind: drug use; mesmerism, hypnosis and trance; dreams and daydreams; somnambulis.
•    Memory and/or trauma; memory and objects (from diaries to post-mortem photography). Sites and cultures of remembering and forgetting.
•    Different disciplines and disciplinary developments: evolutionary and developmental psychology. Psychoanalysis: pre-Freudian concepts of the psyche.
•    Mental illness: asylums, “moral management”; depression; delusions; puerperal disorders; links between mental and bodily health.
•    Insanity and the law  (criminality, legislation, fitness to stand trial); the development of forensic psychology; insanity and sensation.
•    Automatism and volition: new conceptions of the unconscious (e.g. as possessing agency); the unconscious vs habit and self-discipline: automatism, responsibility and accountability.
•    4e cognition (embodied, embedded, enacted and extended cognition) and Victorian literature and culture.
•     “wound culture”: its roots in the industrial nineteenth century, and the attendant renegotiation of private identity in public terms.
•    Neo-Victorian representations of any issue outlined above.
 
All submissions should conform to MHRA house style and the in-house submission guidelines. Submissions should be received by 15 August 2015. Contact: victoriannetwork@gmail.com

CFP: 'The Victorians and Memory', AJVS special issue (Deadline: 10 Aug 2015)

AJVS is a refereed multi-disciplinary journal published by the Australasian Victorian Studies Association (AVSA), with articles in Victorian Studies welcome from any disciplinary or cross-disciplinary area of the humanities, particularly from Australasian scholars or on topics relating to the region. While this call is for a special issue, papers on other topics/themes for general issues may also be submitted via the OJS system (see below for link to register, login, and submit).

Special Issue, 'The Victorians and Memory'. Deadline 10 August 2015

Following on from the recent AVSA Conference in Auckland, and inspired by the great range of papers given there, the Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies is calling for papers relating to this theme. Topics may include but are not limited to print culture, poetics, museums, science, hauntings, historiography, memory (and forgetting), colonial and post-colonial memory, politics, memorials, biography, memoir, art, film, theatre.  Authors need not have presented at the conference, and any papers that were delivered should be reworked as scholarly articles before submission to the Journal - please see the ‘Author Guidelines’ at the AJVS website.

Papers should be 5-7,000 words in length, be accompanied by an abstract, and use MLA style citations. Please register and submit via the online journal’s website.

Co-editors for this issue will be Professor Joanne Wilkes, University of Auckland j.wilkes@auckland.ac.nz and Assoc. Prof. Meg Tasker, Federation University Australia, m.tasker@federation.edu.au.  If you have any problems with the online registration or submission process, you may email the Journal Manager, Dr Kris Moruzi kristine.moruzi@deakin.edu.au or Meg Tasker as General Editor.  Please note that the Journal will be moving to a new publishing system at the end of the year, so submissions after August may not be able to be lodged online. The new server/host will be announced once confirmed. We expect to use the same software and will continue to operate as a free open-access journal.  All back issues will be preserved.

CFP: Neo-Victorianism and Discourses of Education, Special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies

Neo-Victorianism & Discourses of Education

Special Issue of Neo-Victorian Studies – extended deadline: 15 October 2015

The nineteenth century saw the beginnings of mass education in Britain and elsewhere, while the more recent millennial turn has seen a range of reforms and ‘revolutions’ within educational systems world-wide, not least the insistent commercialisation of universities and a concomitant move to redefining educators and students as ‘service providers’ and ‘customers’ respectively. A large number of neo-Victorian novels are set in or engage with educational contexts, including universities, libraries, anatomy schools, private tutoring/governessing, ragged schools, and art colleges, mirroring the settings and concerns with Bildung in canonical works by Victorian writers such as Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and others.

Just as significantly, however, are contemporary self-conscious engagements with inherited nineteenth-century ideas regarding the purposes and ethos of education, such as character building, civic identity formation, the connection between personal and societal development, issues of widening access, the inculcation of moral values and national ideologies, and the perception that education systems serve as ‘engines’ of the economy. Then as now, however, prevalent concerns and anxieties about the achievements and failings of education hardly constituted a monolithic uncontested discourse; rather they divided public opinion and provoked continuous political and societal debate, much as these same concerns continue to do today.

This special issue will explore how neo-Victorian works contribute to this on-going debate by foregrounding the ‘origins’ of modern-day educational systems and approaches. What particular aspects of nineteenth-century education are highlighted and why? What are the main points of contention? How do today’s politicians appropriate (past) educational discourses for party-specific agendas? To what extent are nineteenth-century educational models proposed as alternatives to present-day problems in education? What nineteenth-century educational aims and ideals are depicted as still unfulfilled and unrealised? Possible topics may include, but need not be limited to the following:

·         the discourse of universal access and the move to ‘mass’ higher education

·         education as a means for national progress and economic development

·         Gradgrindean echoes of educational utilitarianism and measurable outcomes (performance statistics, league tables, proportional admission targets for economically disadvantaged groups, etc.)

·         representations and biofictions of educators and students past and present

·         curriculum changes and modifications, including tailoring courses to ‘consumer’ demand, the high proportion of nineteenth-century content (e.g. slavery, the British Empire, the US Civil War), links to conservative political agendas, targeted funding, and the recent valorisation of  Science and Technology over the disparaged Arts and Humanities

·         higher education, universities,  and the growing centrality of research and publication to institutional identities since the nineteenth century

·         Bildung and the Bildungsroman tradition (the idea of character formation, education in civic responsibilities, education as nation-building, etc.)

·         desired outcomes (the ideal of rational autonomy, personal development, societal prosperity and progress, production of a skilled workforce, national and international competitiveness, graduate attributes, etc.)

·         the emergence of disciplines at the nineteenth-century fin-de-siècle vs. more recent moves towards interdisciplinary teaching and research

·         the ethos of future pasts: nineteenth-century models, unrealised ambitions, and anticipated trajectories in education systems

·         discourses of liberal humanism and neo-liberalism, the impact on education of laissez-faire economics, and the revitalisation of (Smiles’) ‘self-help’ discourse

·         education and creativity, including Ruskinean notions of curiosity, mystery and wonder, discursive constructions of creativity, and the harnessing of creativity for  capitalism

·         education, industry, and the shift to a knowledge-based society in the information age

Please address enquiries and expressions of interest to the guest editors Frances Kelly at f.kelly@auckland.ac.nz and Judith Seaboyer at j.seaboyer@uq.edu.au. Completed articles and/or creative pieces, along with a short biographical note, will be due by 15 October 2015 and should be sent via email to the guest editors, with a copy to neovictorianstudies@swansea.ac.uk. Please consult the NVS website (‘Submission Guidelines’) for further guidance.

New Issue of The Eighth Lamp: Ruskin Studies Today

The ninth issue of The Eighth Lamp: Ruskin Studies Today (ISSN 2049-3215) is now online.
The new home of the journal is https://independent.academia.edu/L8
and the latest issue is available here. Current and past issues can now be downloaded directly.

Some highlights are:

REVIEWS:
─ Cynthia Gamble, Review of Marriage of Inconvenience by Robert Brownell. London: Pallas Athene, 2013… 33
─ Anita Grants, Review of Building Ruskin's Italy: Watching Architecture by Stephen Kite. London: Ashgate, 2012… 37
─ Rachel Dickinson, Review of Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft & Nineteenth-Century Fiction by Talia Schaffer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011… 40
─ Anita Grants, Review of Exhibition, John Ruskin: Artist and Observer. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 14 February–11 May 2014 [Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh 4 July–28 September 2014], curated by Christopher Newall and Conal Shields… 43
ARTICLES
─ “Swift visions of centuries”: Langdale Linen, Songs of the Spindle, and the Revolutionary Potential of the Book by Patrick Mcdonald… 46
─ John Ruskin and the characterisation of ‘word-painting’ in the nineteenth century by Marjorie Cheung… 62

The Eighth Lamp: Ruskin Studies Today (ISSN 2049-3215) invites contributors to submit scholarly papers (8,000-10,000 or 3500-4000 words), ideas for book reviews, exhibition reviews, news and events, titles of publications and projects in progress, and creative work and abstracts related to John Ruskin and related nineteenth century scholarship. Scholarly papers should be submitted at least six to eight months in advance to allow for the refereeing and revisions process. Please email submissions directly to the editors at theeighthlamp@gmail.com.

The Eighth Lamp is an online and double blind refereed journal led and managed by Professor (Dr) Anuradha Chatterjee (Founding Editor and Co-Editor), and Dr Laurence Roussillon-Constanty (Co-Editor), Senior Lecturer in English, Paul Sabatier University, Toulouse, France. The journal is also complemented by a ten strong Editorial Board that provides intellectual and pedagogical support and leadership to the journal. The scope of The Eighth Lamp is multidisciplinary and it welcomes submissions related to art, religion, historiography, social criticism, tourism, economics, philosophy, science, architecture, photography, preservation, cinema, and theatre. The journal is circulated to over 100 scholars and academics internationally. The journal is listed in key Victorian studies and nineteenth century literature, culture, and visual studies forums. The Facebook page is https://www.facebook.com/eighth.lamp.

Journal Announcement: Special issue of AJVS on Neo-Victorianism

Issue 18.3 (2013) of the Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies has just been published and is freely available at the journal website. It is a special themed issue on Neo-Victorianism guest edited by Michelle J. Smith.

Articles:
*Neo-Victorianism: An Introduction
Michelle J. Smith

*Neo-Victorian Biofiction and the Special/Spectral Case of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus
Marie-Luise Kohlke

*Neo-Victorian Presence: Tom Phillips and the Non-Hermeneutic Past
Christine Ferguson

*Twisting Dickens: Modding Childhood for the Steampunk Marketplace in Cory Doctorow’s “Clockwork Fagin” (2011)
Sharon Bickle

*Tme Machine Fashion: Neo-Victorian Style in Twenty-First Century Subcultures
Christine Feldman-Barrett

*Robert Browning and Mick Imlah: Forming and Collecting the Dramatic Monologue
John Morton

*The Spectre and the Stage: Reading and Ethics at the Intersection of Psychoanalysis, the neo-Victorian, and the Gothic
Jessica Gildersleeve

Book Reviews
*Dickens and Modernity by Juliet John, ed. (rev.)
Grace Moore

*Neo-Victorianism and the Memory of Empire by Elizabeth Ho (rev.)
Kristine Moruzi

*Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999-2009 by Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn (rev.)
Michelle J. Smith

*Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence and Degeneration in the Re-Imagined Nineteenth Century by Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, eds (rev.)
Tammy Ho Lai-Ming

Issue 18.2 of the Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies has now been published and is available online. The issue includes the following articles and book reviews.

Articles:

*Business and Terror in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities
Lynn Shakinovsky
*Home Baked: Dickens's English Muffins and Corporate Characters
Susan Elizabeth Cook
*The English Warner Brother triumphs over religious hegemony on the road to celebrity and dynasty.
Ann Lazarsfeld-Jensen

Book Reviews:

*Science, Sexuality and Sensation Novels: Pleasures of the Senses (rev.)
Heidi Logan
*Picturing Scotland through the Waverley Novels: Walter Scott and the Origins of the Victorian Illustrated Novel (rev.)
Josef Alton Olson
*Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific: Travel, Empire, and the Author’s Profession (rev.)
Karen McLean
*British Colonial Realism in Africa: Inalienable Objects, Contested Domains (rev.)
Hamish Dalley
*The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885-1918 (rev.)
Fiona Paisley

Journal Announcement: Colonial Girlhood Special Issue of the Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies

Issue 18.1 of the Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies has been published. This special issue, guest edited by Kristine Moruzi and Michelle J. Smith, focuses on the theme of Colonial Girlhood. All AJVS articles and book reviews are freely available on the journal site.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Articles
* Colonial Girlhood - Kristine Moruzi and Michelle J. Smith
* Girlhood in Transition: Girls’ Shipboard Diaries on Journeys to New Zealand, 1879-1881- Lilja Sautter
* The Disruption Of Fairyland: “Fairies Had Never Known How To Cry Until Then” - Anita Callaway
* She Rides Astride: Mateship, Morality and the Outback-Colonial Girl - Caroline Campbell
* From Victorian Accomplishment to Modern Profession: Elocution Takes Judith Anderson, Sylvia Bremer and Dorothy Cumming to Hollywood, 1912-1918 - Desley Deacon
* “These forces are in our midst”: YWCA “Girls” and Challenges of Transnationalism Between the Wars -
Ellen Warne

Book Reviews
*Genteel Women: Empire and Domestic Material Culture, 1840-1910 - Erin Atchison
*White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940 - Desley Deacon
* X Marks the Spot: Women Writers Map the Empire for British Children, 1790–1895 - Ruth Feingold
* Westward Bound: Sex, Violence, the Law, and the Making of a Settler Society - Laura Ishiguro
* A Sisterhood of Suffering and Service: Women and Girls of Canada and Newfoundland During the First World War - Jan Noel

Journal Announcement: New Edition of The Latchkey: Journal of New Woman Studies

We are pleased to announce that the new issue of The Latchkey: Journal of New Woman Studies is now online.

The Latchkey is a peer-reviewed, open-access online journal devoted to the concept of the New Woman, covering the lives and writings of New Women authors and figures, the representation of the New Woman in literature, culture, art, and society, proto-feminism and early feminist journalism, and current innovative scholarship on the New Woman. We accept article submissions year-round and are always looking for qualified book reviewers, peer reviewers, and contributors of New Woman biographies to our "Who's Who" page.  Please send any inquiries to our journal email address, unbolt@gmail.com.

Best wishes,

The Editorial Team: Petra Dierkes-Thrun, Sharon Bickle, and Joellen Masters

TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Essays

Jad Adams, “Feminist Solidarity in the Life and Work of Ella Hepworth Dixon”
Karsten Piep, “Business as Usual: Re-Domesticating the New Woman in Henry Sydnor Harrison’s Post-World War I Novel, Saint Teresa (1922)”
Melissa Purdue, “’She had suffered so many humiliations for want of money’: The Quest for Financial Independence in Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book”

Book reviews
Catherine Morris, Alice Milligan and the Irish Cultural Revival. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2012. Reviewed by Heidi Hansson.
Jessica Cox, ed. New Perspectives on Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012. Reviewed by Gabrielle Malcolm.
Ouida, The Massarenes. Vol. 7 of New Woman Fiction, 1881-1899. Ed. by Andrew King. London: Pickering & Chatto 2011. Reviewed by Catherine Pope.
Shannon Hunter Hurtado, Genteel Mavericks: Professional Women Sculptors in Victorian Britain. Bern: Peter Lang, 2012. Reviewed by Paula Murphy.
Ann R. Hawkins and Maura Ives (eds.), Women Writers and the Artifacts of Celebrity in the Long Nineteenth Century. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2012. Reviewed by Donna Parsons.
Jill Rappoport, Giving Women: Alliance and Exchange in Victorian Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Reviewed by Jennifer Redmond.
Emelyne Godfrey, Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society: From Dagger-Fans to Suffragettes. (Crime Files series, Gen. ed. Clive Bloom.) Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Reviewed by Lena Wånggren.

Featured New Women
Ouida. By Kirby-Jane Hallum
Rhoda Broughton. By Kirby-Jane Hallum.

New in our Gallery section: 
“The New Woman in Context.” An image essay by Molly O’Donnell.

CfP: Victorian Network special issue "Victorian Bodies and Body Parts" (30/11/13)

Call for Papers: Victorian Bodies and Body Parts 

Victorian Network is an MLA-indexed online journal devoted to publishing and promoting the best postgraduate work in Victorian Studies.

The ninth issue of Victorian Network, guest edited by Professor Pamela K. Gilbert (University of Florida), is dedicated to a reassessment of the place of the human body in the Victorian literary and cultural imagination. Rapid medical and scientific advances, advancing industrialization and new forms of labour, legal reforms, the rise of comparative ethnology and anthropology, the growth of consumer culture, and the ever changing trends of Victorian fashion are just a few of the many forces that transformed how Victorians thought about the human body and about the relationship between the embodied, or disembodied, self and the object world.

Nineteenth-century configurations of the body have long been of interest to Victorian scholars. However, recent years have seen the field reconfigured by the emergence of a range of exciting new and theoretically sophisticated approaches that harness the insights of the new materialism, thing theory, cultural phenomenology and actor-network theory to explorations of Victorian embodiment, bodies and body parts.

We are inviting submissions of no more than 7000 words, on any aspect of the theme. Possible topics include but are by no means limited to the following:

·      embodied experience and the senses

·      the body in stillness and in motion: practices of confinement and mobility

·      consumerism, fashion and the stylized body

·      the body and technology

·      bodies of empire and colonialism

·      bodies and body parts on display: anatomical museums, ethnological shows, hospital ward        tours

·      sciences of the body: medicine, biology, ethnology, statistics, etc.

·      bodies, sex and gender

·      health and illness

·      affective bodies and embodied emotions

·      labour power and the body as property

·      the poetics and aesthetics of the human body

·      human and animal bodies before and after Darwin

All submissions should conform to MHRA style conventions and the in-house submission guidelines.
 Deadline for submissions: 30 November 2013.

Contact: victoriannetwork@gmail.com

CfP: Special Edition of Victorian Periodicals Review on Digital Pedagogies (1 July 2014)

“Digital Pedagogies: Building Learning Communities for Studying Victorian Periodicals”

Essays of 6,000-7,000 words are sought for a special number of Victorian Periodicals Review inspired by the range of research and good practice that has been developed in recent years by scholars of the nineteenth century periodical press.

Since Patrick Leary’s seminal essay “Googling the Victorians”, first published in 2005, significant advancements have been made in the field of periodical research, largely as a result of the rise in digital projects.  In almost ten years of scholarship, researchers have been examining and developing new digital methods for analysing and extrapolating data. Scholars have been considering not only the construction of digital resources but how they can be used in many different ways; to enhance research, to identify neglected texts, to inspire and engage students.   This special number of VPR gives us the opportunity to bring together these ideas and debates, to reflect on how the field of periodicals research has changed as a result of the digital revolution and to consider where it may be in the next ten years.

Possible topics might include:

      The role of the digital archive in uniting disparate periodicals and newspapers

       Building, constructing, maintaining digital projects on periodicals

•        Rise of the collaborative digital project

•        New methods for research and data analysis of circulation figures, distribution and ‘popularity’ of publications

•        Advances in the visualisation of data for identifying patterns of consumption

•        Contribution of genealogy studies  to identifying periodical authors

•        New software packages for the presentation of periodical research and analysis

•        Models of good practice in teaching and learning with periodicals and newspapers

•        Student publishing – selection, editing and curation of periodicals projects

•        Building learning communities for staff and students to enhance knowledge of the nineteenth century press

•        Debates about the emergence of an alternative ‘digital’ canon of periodicals and newspapers

•        Digital literacy/digital competency in accessing periodicals online

Please submit completed manuscripts by 1^st July 2014 (for publication in 2015) in Word (no PDFs please) to C.L.Horrocks@ljmu.ac.uk

In the meantime, informal queries or expressions of interest are welcome.

Gaskell Journal Graduate Student Essay Prize: Deadline 10 January 2014

The Gaskell Journal
Joan Leach Memorial Graduate Student Essay Prize 2014

Deadline for submissions: January 10th 2014

The Gaskell Journal runs a biennial Graduate Student Essay Prize in honour of Joan Leach MBE, founder of the Gaskell Society.

Aims of the Prize
The essay competition is open to all graduate students currently registered for an MA or PhD in Victorian Studies. Entries are welcome which consider Gaskell's writings within Victorian cultural, religious, aesthetic and scientific debates, and which have an inter-disciplinary aspect. Also welcome are essays which offer innovative and focused close readings of Gaskell's works, including those enlightened by critical theory.
In all cases, clarity of argument and control of expression are paramount, and the essay must clearly offer an original contribution to the field of Gaskell studies.
The Prize
The winning essay will be published in The Gaskell Journal and its author will receive £200 from the Gaskell Society, and a complimentary copy of the Journal. High quality submissions other than the winner will also be considered for publication in the journal.
Conditions
Essays should be no longer than 7,000 words, and not under consideration for publication elsewhere. We request that you use the MHRA system of referencing, with endnotes rather than footnotes.
Judging
Essays will be judged by members of The Gaskell Journal Editorial Board, with the final decision being made from a shortlist by a leading scholar in Gaskell studies.

IMPORTANT: All judging will be anonymous. Please keep your name and affiliation separate from your article. Complete the below form, and send with your anonymised essay to The Gaskell Journal editor, Rebecca Styler rstyler@lincoln.ac.uk by/on January 10th 2014. All entrants will be informed of the outcome of their submission. These details are also available though the journal website:www.gaskelljournal.co.uk

CfP: Special Issue of Victorian Review, "Victorians and Risk" (Deadline 1 Sept. 2013)

Victorian Review seeks proposals for articles for a special issue on “Victorians and Risk,” to be published in Fall 2014 and guest edited by Dr. Daniel Martin.

Since the publication of Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society (1992), sociologists and historians have interrogated the frequency of risks of all kinds in modern life: railway accidents, colliery explosions, natural and industrial catastrophes, spills, fires, and collisions, among countless others. However, the emergence of risk as a sociological and economic reality of everyday life in the nineteenth century still lacks significant scholarly theorizing in the humanities. Current scholarship about Victorian contributions to a modern “risk society” requires a sustained dialogue about how the Victorians conceived of accidents, disasters, catastrophes, and risks of all kinds beyond the limited scope of the local. For this issue, we seek papers that address such a dialogue through analysis of Victorian culture’s fascinations with and anxieties about risky activities, behaviors, industries, legalities, philosophies, and forms of expression.

In general, risks have a peculiar temporality. To “run a risk” is to operate in that space between the historian or statistician and the prophet or sage, to exist in a present moment that requires a continual reconsideration of simple linear or chronological time. Risks mark themselves off against past accumulations of data and past accidental phenomena, but they also anticipate spaces and developments for future prevention. We seek original essays that attempt to situate such theoretical and abstract notions of risk within literary, historical, and cultural contexts. We are especially interested in essays that draw connections between specific risk events and Victorian theorizing about the constantly accumulating risks and accidental phenomena of modern life.    

Interested scholars may wish to develop their ideas according to the following topics:
* Risk and the Victorian railway network
* Representations of accidents in the Victorian press
* Risk and Victorian theories of temporality
* The subjectivity/performance of risky activities and behaviors
* Victorian insurance and the origins of risk management
* Insurance frauds and risky business
* The phenomenology of bodies at risk
* Risk, athletics, and bodily performance/techniques
* Risk and the limits of the body
* Risky bodies and the origins of statistical personhood
* Rethinking, revising, reevaluating the notion of a “risk society”
* Risks in their local and global contexts
* Genres of risks and genres of the accidental
* Risk and the periodical press
* Danger, affliction, and disability
* Transformations in Victorian concepts of space and time
* Industrial or human-made disasters and catastrophes
* Risk and catastrophic thinking in Victorian social theory
* Risk and decadence/ the aesthetics of risk

Please submit abstracts of 500 words or address enquiries to Dr. Daniel Martin (dmartin@wlu.ca) by Sept 1, 2013. Final essays will be due by Feb 1, 2014.

CFP: Neo-Victorianism and Globalisation (2014 special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies)

Neo-Victorianism and Globalisation:
Transnational Dissemination of Nineteenth-Century Cultural Texts
2014 Special Issue of Neo-Victorian Studies

This special issue seeks to explore the rise and the scope of the globalisation of neo-Victorianism. We are witnesses today to a transnational spread of all things Victorian verging on ‘Victorianomania’, where different elements of nineteenth-century literature and material culture are continuously translated, adapted and recycled for contemporary use. On the one hand, the re-visioned revival of popular genres of the nineteenth century is evident in a spate of neo-Victorian novels that re-visit Victorian fiction in terms of style and content as well as rethink the narrative format of the eponymous ‘loose, baggy monsters’. Whether they are playful investigations of cosmopolitanism within the history of globalised economy – as depicted in Amitav Ghosh’s The Sea of Poppies – or of transatlantic narratives and cultural connections between Victorian London and the contemporary US cityscape – as in HBO’s TV series The Wire – neo-Victorian fictions engage not only with nineteenth-century narrative pace and plotting but also with the period’s cross-fertilised popular genres. At the same time, the plethora of TV, film, video games, graphic novels, fashion and interior design adaptations and appropriations of Victorian art, literature and culture are clearly influenced by the global market, testifying to the impact of the ever-spreading ‘participatory culture’ (Jenkins 2006). This special issue aims to chart the patterns and politics of neo-Victorianism’s transnational production and dissemination.

Some of the key questions Neo-Victorianism and Globalisation seeks to address are:

· To what extent can we talk about the process of translating elements of nineteenth-century literature and culture into contemporary media as ‘neo-Victorianism’ outside of the Anglo-American context?

· How does nostalgia inform/deform the relationship between appropriated Victorian narrative forms and their global circulation?

· What political dynamics underlie the transnational dissemination of the ‘(neo-) Victorian’, both as a term and concept, and what are its ideological implications?

· How broadly can ‘neo-Victorian’ be expanded as a generic term before it loses its critical value?

· Does neo-Victorianism run the risk of being construed as a form of cultural imperialism?

· How does postcolonialism contest and/or intersect with trans- and multiculturalism in neo-Victorian remediations of the nineteenth-century past?

· How can attention to multiple (national, ethnic, and cultural) publics and markets avoid totalising ‘neo-Victorianism’ as a monolithic concept?

· Which particular Victorian genres (such as Gothic, detection or sensation fiction), predominate in different neo-Victorian media and cultural contexts and why?

· What unacknowledged, potentially discriminatory or disabling mechanisms may be discerned in neo-Victorian critical discourse (e.g. Anglo-American/Euro-centrism, Western-focused trauma discourse, new forms of sexism, etc.)?

Please address enquiries and expressions of interest to the guest editors Antonija Primorac at primorac@ffst.hr and Monika Pietrzak-Franger at pietrzak@anglistik.uni-siegen.de. Completed articles and/or creative pieces, along with a short biographical note, will be due by 15 October 2013 and should be sent via email to the guest editors, with a copy to neovictorianstudies@swansea.ac.uk. Please consult the NVS website (submission guidelines) for further guidance.