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Victorian Network is an MLA-indexed (from 2012) online journal dedicated to publishing and promoting the best postgraduate work in Victorian Studies.
The fifth issue of Victorian Network, guest edited by Dr Ella Dzelzainis (Newcastle University), is dedicated to a reassessment of nineteenth-century investments in concepts of productivity and consumption. Accelerating industrialisation, the growth of consumer culture, economic debates about the perils of overconsumption as well as emerging cultural discourses about industriousness, work ethic and the uses of free time radically altered the ways in which Victorians thought about practices of production and consumption. Literary authors intervened directly in these economic and social debates while alsonegotiating analogous developments within a literary marketplace transformed by new forms of writing, distributing and consuming literature.
We are inviting submissions of no more than 7000 words. Possible topics include but are by no means limited to the following:
- Literature of industrialisation
- Victorian (global) spaces of production, forms and practices of consumption
- Images of the industrial city, the factory, factory workers, and machines
- Consumption as spectacle, the rise of the department store and the advertising industries
- Changing concepts of literary production and new agents in the literary marketplace: publishers, editors, book sellers
- Celebrity authors, audiences, and self-marketing in the literary sphere
- Economic theory, finance, and nineteenth-century literature
- Leisure, spare time and other modes of ‘unproductiveness’
- Productivist and consumerist ideologies and the politics of social class
- Reassessing Marxist perspectives on Victorian literature and culture
