CFP: Hard Cash: Money, Property, Economics and the Marketplace in Victorian Popular Culture (4/30/2012; 7/11-13/2012)

Victorian Popular Fiction Association
4th Annual Conference, 11th – 13th July 2012
Institute for English Studies, University of London

Theme:  Hard Cash: Money, property, economics and the marketplace in Victorian Popular Culture

Keynote speakers: Regenia Gagnier: "The Globalization of Victorian Popular Fiction" and Deborah Wynne: ‘Hades! The Ladies! Male Drapers and Female Shoppers'

Guest Speakers:  David Waller, author of The Perfect Man: The Muscular Life and Times of Eugen Sandow Victorian Strongman and Helen Rappaport author of Beautiful For Ever: Madame Rachel of Bond Street– Cosmetician, Con-Artist, and Blackmailer

The VPFA conference is now an established event on the annual conference timetable and offers a friendly and invigorating opportunity for established academics and post graduate students to share their current research.  Our theme this year is Hard Cash: Money, property, economics and the marketplace in Victorian Popular Culture.  This theme enables us to develop the interdisciplinary study
of nineteenth-century popular culture, and changing attitudes to money and economics across the period.

Papers relevant to the theme may be drawn from any aspect of Victorian popular culture and may address literal or metaphorical representations of the theme.

We remain committed to the revival of interest in understudied female and male popular writers which is pivotal to the reputation this conference has established.   We invite proposals for 20 minute papers on any aspect of the above theme.

Topics can include, but are not limited to:

• Money, Economics and literary production
• Literary contracts, agents, serialization, syndication, cheap editions, copyright law
• Advertising and the popular press
• Money and the popular press
• Money and class in Victorian popular culture
• New money in Victorian popular culture
• Business and the marketplace
• Inheritance
• Married Women’s Property and Divorce Law
• Public readings, stage adaptation
• Celebrity
• Theft, blackmail and swindling
• Financial scandals
• Banks and bankers
• Shopping and consumerism

Postgraduate students are particularly welcome.

Please send abstracts of no more than 200 words to either Jane Jordan (j.jordan@kingston.ac.uk) or Greta Depledge (depledgeg@aol.com) by: Monday 30th April 2012.

For further information about the Victorian Popular Fiction Association, see: http://fass.kingston.ac.uk/research/victorian/