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

CFP: Special Issue of Victorian Poetry (Spring 2017) on Augusta Webster

CFP: Special Issue of Victorian Poetry (Spring 2017) on Augusta Webster

Guest Editor: Patricia Rigg

 

Please consider submitting an essay for a special edition of Victorian Poetry devoted to Augusta Webster. Writing prolifically across genres, Webster produced dramatic and lyric poetry, verse drama, long and short fiction, and translations of Aeschylus and Euripides.  She contributed incisive essays on a variety of literary, political, social, and cultural topics to the Examiner and served as one of the main poetry reviewers for the Athenaeum.  She was a member of the first London Suffrage Society, and she was twice elected to the London School Board.

 

Essays concerned with any aspect of Webster’s work, with Webster in relation to her contemporaries, or with Webster in the context of Victorian culture, politics, and society are welcome.

 

Please submit essays to patricia.rigg@acadiau.ca by 15 January 2016 for publication in Victorian Poetry (Spring 2017).  Early expressions of interest and proposals of topics are welcome as well.  Essay submissions should follow the conventions of Victorian Poetry and be formatted according to the Chicago Manual of Style 15th Edition.

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