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Symposium: “New Approaches to the Victorian Short Story”
Thursday, July 4, 2013
University of Birmingham
This symposium aims to address the lack of critical
attention that the Victorian short story has received by bringing together
academics working on different aspects of the form. Owing to the popularity of
the periodical press, the genre flourished throughout the period; Dickens,
Gaskell, Collins, Eliot and James as well as lesser-known authors all produced
short stories. The limitations of the form allowed for a degree of
experimentation, which may have been too much of a commercial risk in a full-length
work. As John Bowen writes, “The short story is in many ways a marginal form,
which often takes marginal or outlaw figures as its central concern. It
troubles itself, and thus its readers, with remarkable or strange events, with
the inexplicable, disorderly or queer.” We aim to start a critical conversation
regarding the nature and functions of the short story genre within the larger
context of Victorian literature.
For more details please see ':http://jimmussell.com/2013_new_approaches_programme.pdf.
For inquiries, contact Lizzie Ludlow (e.ludlow@bham.ac.uk)
or Maddie Wood (madeleine.wood@brunel.ac.uk).
