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Call for Contributions
The Male Body in Victorian
Literature and Culture
There exists a
considerable amount of research focused on the female body in the Victorian
period, from seminal texts such as Krugovoy Silver’s exploration of anorexic
female bodies (2002), Talairach-Vielmas’ examination of the female body
and femininity (Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation
Novels, 2007) through to Sondra Archimedes’ Gendered
Pathologies: The Female Body and Biomedical Discourse in the Nineteenth-Century
English Novel (2005).
However, the
representations of and discourses surrounding the physicality of her male
counterpart have begun to be examined only recently. Critics such as Andrew
Dowling have questioned whether it is anachronistic to discuss masculinity in
the nineteenth century because ‘the topic did not exist in the way we conceive
it today’ (Manliness and the Male Novelist, 2001, p.1). He concludes that,
while it was not a topic of contemporary debate, the idea of what constituted
manliness was deeply embedded within Victorian culture, not least through
images of male deviance in the literature of the period. Despite the work
completed by Dowling and others (such as John Tosh, James E. Adams and Sander
L. Gilman, for example), the breadth and depth of scholarship on Victorian
men and masculinities leaves much to be explored.
Focusing approximately on
the period between 1830 and 1910, this edited collection of essays aims to
contribute to the bridging of this gap in existing Victorian scholarship. The
collection intends to explore the male body as represented in Victorian literary
and cultural texts, from visual culture to the periodical press, fiction,
poetry and drama, and from art to advertisement and fashion. In doing so, the
editors seek to navigate the diversity of representations of physical maleness,
manliness, and masculinities in the Victorian period in order to illuminate
further this little examined field.
- Topics for essays may include, but are by no means limited to:
- Extreme physicalities (starving, corpulence, physical ideals);
- Regulation of the male body (diet, exercise, science, and medicine);
- Military or ‘heroic’ bodies;
- Muscular Christianity and the cult of exercise;
- Deviant or queer male bodies;
- The foreign and/or ‘other’ male body as represented in discourses of nationhood, nationality, and empire;
- Dress, fashion, and the male body;
- Modified male bodies (body building, tattoos, etc.);
- Disability and the male body.
The editors invite
500-word proposals for chapters of up to 7,000 words, accompanied by a short
biographical note, to be submitted to both Dr Nadine Muller (n.muller@ljmu.ac.uk) and Joanne Parsons (Joanne.Parsons@live.uwe.ac.uk)
no later than August 31, 2013.
If you have any questions about this project or about a potential proposal,
please do not hesitate to get in with us via email.
