CfP: 'Decadence and the Senses', Goldsmiths, 10-11 April 2014

Decadence and the Senses, An Interdisciplinary Conference
Goldsmiths, University of London, 10 – 11 April 2014

Keynote Speaker: Catherine Maxwell (Queen Mary, University of London)

From the perfumed verse of Baudelaire to the ‘fleshly’ poetry of Swinburne, from the extravagant and perverse sensory experiences of Des Esseintes in A Rebours to the refined visual aesthetics of Dorian Gray, we encounter corresponding senses (synaesthesia) and extreme sensations, intensified by nervous or pathological psychological states.  Reading Decadence, from ancient times to the present day, is to indulge in voluptuous pleasures (and pain), to sample exotic tastes and sounds, and to envisage states of mind in highly visual terms.  ‘For each emotion’, as Oscar Wilde imagined for his drama, Salomé (1894), ‘a new perfume’.

This interdisciplinary conference explores the relationship of Decadence and the senses, and the ways in which Decadent writers attempt to capture fleeting sensations.  It is an opportunity to trace common visual, aural and ‘perfumed’ motifs in Decadent works, and to reflect on the extent to which the senses are important to our understanding of the tradition.

We welcome proposals on any aspect of Decadence and the senses.  Papers (about 20 mins in length) might include discussion of:

sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch
decadent objects: fur, perfume, jewels
correspondences
synaesthesia
kinaesthesia
hypersensitivity and hypersensuality
nerves and nervousness
perception
pleasure and pain
hypersexuality and erotomania
appetite and femininity
feasts
fecal, feral, floral
bodily fluids
perversity
dream states and memory
invention and ornamentation
symbolism
nature and the organic
artifice
altered states
decay and degeneration
deliquescence

Abstracts of 500 words plus brief biography should be sent to: decadence2014@gold.ac.uk by 31st December 2013

For further details and updates please see the website: decadence2014.wordpress.com

CfP: 'Liberty and Limits 1789-1920', Macquarie Uni, 5-6 Dec 2013

Call for Papers
'Liberty and Limits 1789-1920', Macquarie University, Sydney
 5-6 December 2013
Abstracts due 1 August 2013

Keynote speakers
Professor Nancy Armstrong (Duke), Professor Deirdre Coleman (Melbourne), Professor David Punter (Bristol)The long nineteenth century was inaugurated by the French Revolution and closed in the aftermath of the First World War. In Britain the intervening period was marked by a dialectic compounded of sub-revolutionary change and processes of containment. In all cultural fields new modes of knowledge, theories, and aesthetic forms emerged. The Romantics and Victorians inherited the discursive energies of the eighteenth century in terms of the ways in which literary and other forms of writing were lauded or vilified as intervention, catalyst, palliative or purge. The energy of this period was enacted as much through writing and reading as through empire building and military/mercantile expansion. We invite papers that engage with all aspects of cultural change – including evolution, excess, experimentation, nostalgia, suppression, dissent.

Themes addressed can include, but are not confined to, the following:

Material print culture and new modes of dissemination of information
Literary revolutions
Life writing and the private as public performance
The modern city
The fin de siècle and the emergence of Modernism
Gender/sexual identity
Class mobility/instability
Industrialisation
Anglophone writing and readership
Self-help and social mobility
Romantic and Victorian poetics
Crime and detection
Policing
Juvenilia
The rise of children’s literature
Education and literacy
Evolutionary theory and social Darwinism
The marketplace and the birth of the consumer
Science and technology
Celebrity authorship as cultural phenomenon
The changing nature of readership
The politics of Empire
Photography/ images
Cultural and literary antecedents
Afterlife: Steampunk and neo-Victorian narratives, the long nineteenth century in film adaptations

Date: 5-6 December 2013
Venue: MGSM, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

Please send 300 word abstracts by 1 August to: libertyandlimits@mq.edu.au

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

Call for Abstracts: 'Fire Stories' Symposium, University of Melbourne, 4-6 December 2013

Call for Abstracts: 'Fire Stories' Symposium presented by The Australian Centre, The ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100-1800) and The University of Melbourne.

Full-size PDF of poster available here.

Confirmed keynote speakers:
Dr Danielle Clode (Flinders University), Professor Bill Gammage (Australian National University), Associate Professor Alan Krell (College of Fine Arts, UNSW), Associate Professor Pablo Mukherjee (University of Warwick).

A source of survival, comfort and terror, humans have struggled to control and harness fire since its discovery tens of thousands of years ago. This symposium will address emotional responses to fires in literature and history, looking particularly at how the fleeting destruction of a blaze is conveyed in narrative terms. Participants will be invited to consider a dialogue between ancient and modern representations of fire (including the mythical) and the affective responses that they evoke. Speakers are also encouraged to address the role that fictional representations of burning landscapes or cityscapes can play in the aftermath of a major disaster.

Topics may include:
• fire and mythology
• disaster narratives/environmental  catastrophe
• The ecology of fire
• Representations of bushfires/wildfires
• Climate change
• performing fire/ the aesthetics of fire
• The poetics of the flame
• fire in the colonies
• sati
• fire and colonial settlers
• indigenous representations of fire
• fire and childhood
• fire and folklore
• fire and national identity
• firescapes and emotions
• psychological responses to fires
• survivor stories
• fire and memory
• Artefacts/conservation
• Trauma
• Arson/pyromania
• Campfires
• The domestic hearth
• destruction/reconstruction

Please send abstracts to: fire-stories@unimelb.edu.au  by no later than August 31st 2013.

Please note that the conference will  incorporate a symposium to be convened by the Australian Centre, on species:  ‘Narrative, Indigeneity, Ecology’. This  symposium will take place on Wednesday December 4 and a program will be released  in due course. Confirmed keynote speaker: Professor Ursula Heise (UCLA).

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: AVSA 2014 Conference, 'Victorian Transport'

William Powell Frith, The Railway Station (1862). Royal Holloway College, London.

Australasian Victorian Studies Association Annual Conference
'Victorian Transport', Hong Kong, 10-12 July 2014
http://www.english.hku.hk/events/victoriantransport/

The Victorian Age is one of mobility and of transportation: goods, people and money were transported within Great Britain, across Europe, and to the far reaches of Empire. Ideas – whether economic, political, educational, religious or philosophical – were imported and exported. And far from being unemotional, the Victorians were also regularly ‘transported’ by emotions which doctors, scientists and psychologists tried to theorise.

This conference seeks to redefine the parameters of transport through inter-disciplinary approaches to material, metaphorical and metaphysical journeys during the Victorian era. Papers on global crossings are particularly welcome.

Keynote speakers: 
Stephen Davies (Hong Kong Maritime Museum)
Josephine McDonagh (King’s College, London)
Peter McNeil (University of Technology, Sydney)

Topics might include but are not limited to:

• Transporting people, transporting goods
• Modes of Transportation
• Intellectual transport
• Trade and trafficking
• Penal colonies
• Theorising ‘transport’
• Theories of the emotions
• Women and transport
• Transport, its politics and policies
• Transatlantic and Transpacific transportation
• Transference and the subconscious
• Dreams and Telepathy
• Transporting and translating literature abroad
• Transport hubs/ urban development 
• Speed
• Transportive music
• Landscape and environment
• Immobility
• Time Travel
• Neo-Victorian Transport

A special section of the conference calls for papers on Victorian Transport related to China and the ‘China-West’ axis. Please signal in your application whether you would like your paper to be considered for inclusion in any of these ‘China’ or ‘China-West’ panels.

Five postgraduate travel bursaries (also applicable to SWIFs) will be awarded by the Conference Committee, on the basis of need and merit. Please include a short covering letter and cv in your application for such funding.

Abstracts of up to 300 words, together with your biodata (ca. 100-150 words), should be sent to: avsa2014@hku.hk. 
Deadline for Abstracts: 30 November 2013. Notification by end-January 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.