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

REMINDER: CfP AVSA 2014, 'Victorian Transport', Hong Kong (Deadline 30/11/13)

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: 
James Buzard (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
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: "Victorian Treasures and Trash", VPFA (Deadline 4/4/14)

The Victorian Popular Fiction Association
CFP: Victorian Treasures and Trash
6th Annual Conference, 8-10 July 2014
Institute of English Studies, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU

Keynote Speaker: Dr Jonathon Shears (Keele), ‘“[...] battered [...] soiled [...] broken [...] empty [...] half-smoked [...] stale”: The Hangover in Victorian Popular Fiction’.

Guest Speaker: Judith Flanders, ‘Painting Reality: Home vs. Home-ness’

Senate Library Special Collections Talk and ‘hands-on’ mini-exhibition: Dr Karen Attar, ‘Trash, Treasure or Trashy Treasure at the Institutional Library’.

The Victorian Popular Fiction Association conference is recognised as an important event on the annual conference circuit and offers a friendly and invigorating opportunity for established academics and post graduate students to share their current research. We remain committed to the revival of interest in understudied popular writers which is pivotal to the reputation this conference has established.  

The organisers invite a broad, imaginative and interdisciplinary interpretation of the topic and its relation to any aspect of Victorian popular literature and culture which might address literal or metaphorical representations of the theme.

We welcome proposals for 20 minute papers, or for panels of three papers, on topics which can include, but are not limited to:

*Treasures and Trash in: the home, the street, the store, the library, the gutter, the island, the workhouse, the factory, etc.
*Print culture and the literary marketplace: ‘trash’ fiction, high/low culture, taste, fashion, rarity, cheap editions, fine editions, ‘specials’, royalties, contracts, collectors, etc.
*Treasure: buried, hoarded, displayed, collected, traded, neglected, etc.
*Waste: scrap/s, refuse, recycling, reclamation, that which is/those who are discarded/unwanted, the abandoned, etc.
*Dirt: gossip, scandal, degeneracy, decay, cleanliness, healthfulness, godliness, etc.
*Trashed: defaced, vandalised, wasted, defamed, scandalised, denounced, drunk, drugged, etc.
*Industry: the ethics of production, craftsmanship, the cheap, the mass-produced, etc.
*Money: markets, debts/debtors, savings, shares, inheritances, ransoms, fortunes, etc.
*Papers and artefacts: archives, special collections, the museum, the preserved, the priceless, the lost, digitised treasures, etc.
*The Beloved: persons, possessions, memories, moments, etc.
*Values: validity, value/worth, cost, price, morals, family values, etc.
*Things: junk, clutter, paraphernalia, bric-a-brac, curiosities, trinkets, tokens/keepsakes, troves, etc.
*People: fortune-hunters, gold-diggers, prospectors, speculators, pirates, con-artists, thieves, beggars, prostitutes, consumers, etc.

Special author panels: This year we will schedule special panels to be hosted by guest experts on each of six key popular authors; therefore we especially welcome papers about the following authors:

Mary Elizabeth Braddon (hosted by Anne-Marie Beller)
Wilkie Collins (hosted by Mariaconcetta Constantini)
Marie Corelli (hosted by Nickianne Moody)
Florence Marryat (hosted by Greta Depledge)
Ouida (hosted by Jane Jordan and Andrew King)
Robert Louis Stevenson (hosted by Sara Clayson)

Other suggested authors/papers in previous years have also discussed authors such as:
J. M. Barrie | Mrs Beeton | Anne Brontë | Charlotte Brontë | Emily Brontë | Rhoda Broughton | Lewis Carroll | Mary Cholmondeley | Arthur Conan Doyle | Charles Dickens | George Eliot | Elizabeth Gaskell |
George Gissing | Thomas Hardy | Jerome K. Jerome | Rudyard Kipling | Eliza Lynn Linton | Edith Nesbit |
Margaret Oliphant | Dinah Craik | Olive Schreiner | Bram Stoker | William Makepeace Thackeray | Anthony Trollope | Mary Augusta Ward | H.G. Wells | Ellen Wood | Charlotte Yonge

Please send proposals of no more than 300 words to Drs. Kirsty Bunting, Janine Hatter and Helena Ifill at vpfamembership@gmail.com

Deadline for proposals: Friday 4th April 2014

Organisers will offer acceptances in the days following the 18th April 2014.

The VPFA 2014 conference website can be found here: http://victorianpopularfiction.org/ and conference registration details will be announced shortly. All speakers must be a member of VPFA to present. To become a member, please visit the website or email vpfamembership@gmail.com for a membership form.

Meanwhile you can meet delegates and hear the latest conference news on the VPFA Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Victorian-Popular-Fiction-Association/128736877207708 and through the twitter account @VPFA1. Also, you can follow the conference discussions using the hashtag #VPFA14.

CfP: BAVS 2014, 'Victorian Sustainability' (proposal deadline 31/3/14)

Victorian Sustainability, British Association of Victorian Studies conference
University of Kent, Canterbury 
September 4-6, 2014

Call for Papers

From emerging ideas about the perils of environmental degradation to the establishment of the National Trust, the concept of sustainability began to take on a new importance in the Victorian period that remains relevant in 21-st century modernity. We welcome proposals which address any aspect of Victorian sustainability and especially encourage interdisciplinary approaches.

Topics may include but are not limited to:
- Victorian nature writing and/or discourses of nature and science
- Heritage and preservation (of built environments, natural landscapes, species, material cultures)
- Climate change and the Victorians
- Sustenance and sustainability
- Victorian discourses of emotional/psychological sustainability or wellbeing
- Eco-criticism and environmental aesthetics in Victorian literature
- Sustaining the Victorians (literary and/or cultural legacies)
- ‘Green imperialism’ and/or colonial sustainability
- The emergence of self-sufficiency and sustainable ways of life in the Victorian period
- Waste/pollution vs. recycling/renewal in urban and industrial contexts
- Narratives of catastrophe, risk, decay or crisis in the Victorian period
- Representations of growth, flourishing and/or transformation in Victorian literature and culture
- Social ecology and the relation between human and non-human in the Victorian period
- Victorian pastoral and/or the legacy of Romanticism
- The sustainability of Victorian Studies

Proposals (300 words max.) are due by March 31, 2014, and should be sent to kentbavs2014@gmail.com. Panel proposals (comprised of 3 paper proposals, plus an additional 300 words explaining how the papers are linked in addressing the theme) are also welcome.

The 2014 BAVS conference will be hosted by the new Centre for Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Kent, Canterbury. Any inquiries about the Centre or the conference may be sent to the Centre Director, Professor Wendy Parkins at W.J.Parkins@kent.ac.uk

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

CFP: NAVSA/ACCUTE, Victorian Uses and Abuses of History (15 Nov 2013)

Joint North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA)/Association  of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE) sessions 2014
May 24 – 27th 2014
Brock University,St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada

Victorian Uses and Abuses of History

What were the uses of history in the Victorian period? The period saw the publication of numerous historical novels  following the success of Sir Walter Scott’s “Waverley.” Many novelists, including Charles
Dickens, Charles Reade, William Makepiece Thackery, Charles Kingsley, George Eliot and Robert Louis Stevenson all addressed history in their novels. The French Revolution figured largely as a historical warning
against revolution in the minds of many Victorian sages, while the Fall of Rome could be used to warn against overweening pride in the Empire. History could figure as nightmare in Gothic novels. Inspired
by Ruskin and Morris, many looked back to the Medieval period as a source of values and an alternative to industrialized Britain. This call for papers invites proposals for individual or collaborative papers on the theme of "Victorian Uses and Abuses of History.”
Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to:

•       The Victorian Historical Novel
•       Victorian Medievalism
•       "The Renaissance" according to Victorians
•       Victorian Historians and Historiography
•       Historical Time vs. Geological Time
•       Past and Present Contrasts
•       "Neo" Architecture and Literature of the Victorian Period
•       Historical Self-Consciousness
•       History and Aesthetics
•       Historical Utopias and Dystopias

Send 250 word proposals or completed papers for 15-20-minute talks to
Martin Danahay <mdanahay@brocku.ca>.   Deadline: 15 November 2013

Neo-Victorian Uses and Abuses of History

In the relatively new field of Neo-Victorian studies the status of history is the focus of much debate. Is the recourse to the Victorian period necessarily nostalgic? Can the Victorian period be used to critique racism, violence and homophobia? And what of imaginative reconstructions of the Victorian period in genres such as Steampunk: are novels that reconfigure the Victorian period with contemporary technology and issues “historical” or do they call into question totalizing historical narratives?

Possible topics include but are by no means limited to:

•       History, collective memory and nostalgia
•       The commodification of the Victorian period
•      Retro-futurism and the status of history
•       Refiguring colonialism in Neo-Victorian texts
•       Ecohistory and Neo-Victorianism
•       Play and history in Neo-Victorian texts
•       The Victorian period as utopia/dystopia
•       Race, history and Neo-Victorianism
•       Subverting the “Victorian” in Neo-Victorianism

Send 250 word proposals or completed papers for 15-20-minute talks to
Martin Danahay <mdanahay@brocku.ca>.   Deadline: 15 November 2013