CFP: Upstairs and Downstairs: The British Historical Costume Drama on TV (4/15/2013)

Upstairs and Downstairs: The British Historical Costume Drama on TV (from The Forsyte Saga to Downton Abbey)

The recent popular success of “Downton Abbey” calls for a renewed examination of such earlier BBC/ITV/Masterpiece Theatre serialized period dramas as “Upstairs Downstairs,” “The Pallisers,”and “The Forsyte Saga,” among others that have aired (and have been repeated) since the 1970s. We also want to examine how more recent dramas like “Downton Abbey” engage with these earlier productions in terms of style, thematic content, and programming.

We are seeking essays for a critical anthology that addresses such topics (but are not limited to) as the following:

• How the small screen period drama interrogates past and present gender/ class/race relations and notions of historical “authenticity”
• Transatlantic reception /interpretations
• How these TV serials fulfill and/or disrupt notions of “quality television”
• The afterlife of the serialized period drama on video/DVD
• The role of fans in shaping the content/reception of these dramas (message boards, role playing, Facebook and other social media sites that connect fans, etc)
• The relationship between history, heritage, and the costume drama
• Adaptation and the translation from historical novel to the TV miniseries
• How history and culture are commodified for popular audiences
• The feminization of history via the costume drama
• The relationship between these series and wider developments in TV or popular culture more generally
• How these programs have engaged with, or been received in relation to, ideas of region and regional difference
• How the development of the genre been bound up with technological changes, such as the use of video, widescreen and (more recently) HD

Please submit a 500 word abstract and brief CV by April 15 to the editors, Julie Anne Taddeo, University of Maryland, USA (taddeo@umd.edu) and James Leggott, Northumbria University, UK (james.leggott@northumbria.ac.uk).

If accepted, the first draft of essays (approx. 7000 words) will be due Sept. 15, 2013 (guidelines from press will follow).

Please note: Individual authors are responsible for permissions for any images reproduced in their essays.

CFP: The Transcendent Immanence: The Generative Aesthetic of the King James Bible (11/25/2012)

CFP for an anthology titled The Transcendent Immanence: The Generative Aesthetic of the King James Bible. I have several articles already as well as an interested publisher, but I feel that the anthology is not complete. Interdisciplinary in scope, its focus is identifying major thought and significant tours de force generated through the appropriation of the King James Bible. Suggested topics are below, and others are invited but not on Victorian literature because that’s covered.

• The KJB and Art or the KJB and the Pre-Raphaelites
• The KJB and Slavery in Britain and America
• The KJB and Victorian Medicine
• The KJB and British Imperialism
• The KJB and Western Colonization
• The KJB and Romanticism (German, American, English, or All Three)
• The KJB and Political Rhetoric
• The KJB and War

Submit a 250-word abstract or a paper of about 7,000 words in the MLA style directly to bayres@liberty.edu by November 25.

Brenda Ayres, PhD 

Professor of English and Assistant Director of Honors

Liberty University

1971 University BL

DH 3310

Lynchburg, VA 24502

CFP: Essay Collection on News of the World (5/31/2012)

News of the World: ‘Journalism for the Rich, Journalism for the Poor’ 1843-2011

Editors: Laurel Brake, Chandrika Kaul, Mark W. Turner
Publisher: ‘Studies in the History of the Media’, Palgrave Macmillan

Founded in 1843, the News of the World was one of the UK’s longest-running and most popular Sunday newspapers when it came to its inauspicious end in the summer of 2011. As the UK’s Leveson Inquiry, due to report in 2013, continues to unravel details about the recent ‘hacking’ scandal, the News of the World will continue to make the news for some time to come.

We are organizing a volume of essays and seek articles of 7000 words on any aspect of the newspaper’s history, from the 19th century through the present, which help to deepen our understanding of this
title and of media history more generally.

Key themes and topics might include:

• The Genre of Sunday papers, in/since the 19th century
• Newspaper Form:  layout, multiple editions, departments, etc.
• Illustration and Photography: the New Journalism, Photojournalism, etc.
• Readerships and Circulations: ‘metropolitan’ and ‘country’; provincial editions/readers; international
• contexts
• Empire: decolonisation; popular cultures
• Comparative Readings: America, Empire, etc.
• Investigative journalism: 19th, 20th, 21st centuries
• Politics and the Popular Press: 19^th, 20th, 21st centuries
• The Economics of the Popular Press
• Crime and Court Reporting
• War and the Popular Press: e.g. Crimea, Boer, WWI, WW2, Falklands
• Celebrity
• Sports News, since the 19th century
• Sex and the Popular Press
• Proprietors and Media Moguls
• Practices of Newsgathering since the 19th century
• Press Freedom  and Press Controls
• The Closing of the NOTW: the rise of the Sunday Sun

Please send proposals of up to 250 words, for articles of between 6000-7000 words, to all the editors by 31st May 2012:
Laurel Brake:  l.brake@bbk.ac.uk
Chandrika Kaul: ck24@st-andrews.ac.uk
Mark Turner:  mark.2.turner@kcl.ac.uk

We aim to inform authors that they have been selected for the volume by the middle of June 2012. Completed articles will be due to the editors by the end of December 2012, and we expect publication in 2013. Please see the Palgrave Macmillan website for style guidelines.

CFP: Edited Collection: Victorian Medicine and Popular Culture (5/15/2012; 6/30/2012)

How was the rise of scientific medicine in the Victorian era appropriated and adapted by popular culture? This essay collection explores the relationship between the increasingly specialized medical disciplines and a variety of texts and contexts, including popular (non-canonical) literature, journalism, advertisements, home medical and nursing manuals, and lectures and exhibitions at and mechanics institutes. The collection also offers perspectives on literature's reciprocal influence on diverse health care fields including nursing, pharmacy, medical philanthropy, health care missionary work, advertising, and quackery.

The proposed collection seeks to add to the growing body of scholarship on Victorian scientific and medical writing by considering representations of health care within specifically popular fields.  How can we understand the relationships that existed between consumerism, health care, and popular literature in the Victorian period? When and how was lay practice or its representation complimentary, and when was it a form of resistance to increasingly professionalized and scientific medicine?     How do popular texts and artifacts of the period represent medical and popular health care trends of the era, such as the scientific revolution in Victorian healthcare? How did visual iconography including advertisements reflect changing views of health care practitioners and consumers? We invite interdisciplinary scholarship and work drawn from a range of disciplines: art history, literature, history, anthropology, public health, sociology, and communications to broaden our understanding of the non-elite bodies of professionals, texts, and cultures that influenced Victorian health care policy and practice.

Please send abstracts to Louise Penner (Louise.Penner@umb.edu) or Tabitha Sparks (tabitha.sparks@mcgill.ca) by May 15, 2012, or complete essays (3,000-7,000 words) by June 30, 2012.

CFP: anthology chapter on A Christmas Carol, It's A Wonderful Life, or Groundhog Day (2/22/2012)

Dr. Marc DiPaolo is looking for an essay that examines the contemporary relevance of It's a Wonderful Life - and the text that inspired it, A Christmas Carol - in light of recent religious, economic, and political events, including the "war on Christmas" and the continuing commercialization of Christmas, Occupy Wall Street, and Banxodus, and that consider the characters of Scrooge and Mr. Potter as examples of modern American capitalist amorality. This contemporary, ahistorical analysis should, naturally, include a serious study of the works in their original socio-political context, as well as consider issues of authorial intent.

The essay would be due in mid-February but would be included in a contracted book that will be published by McFarland at the end of 2012 or the start of 2013. The writing style should be intellectually rigorous enough to be considered solid scholarship, but written in an accessible style for undergraduate readers and a possibly broader-than-academic readership. References to another "religious" reform story, Groundhog Day, are welcome, but not necessary.

Length of Contribution: 6,000 – 8,500 words (including notes)

Citation Style: Modern Language Association

Please contact Dr. Marc DiPaolo at captainblackadder@hotmail.com. 

Deadline Extended: Violent Women in 19th-Century England (12/15/2012)

Deadline Extended for the CFP on Violent Women in 19th-Century England
New Deadline: 15th December 2011

The number of women who are victims of crime has always been higher than the number of women partaking as offenders. However, women were very often involved with crime- not always petty in nature. Previous research in women and crime in 19^th-century England has focused attention on the lives of women who committed crimes such as infanticide, or the social and economic situations that led to their working in the sex industry, and in doing so have explored the lives and times of women in 19^th-century England. This collection aims to write more women back into the criminal record by focusing on those women who committed violent crimes during this period. This collection asks what narratives were created about these women (and possibly their femininity), what were societal and cultural responses to these women and crimes, and what methodologies are employed by scholars to reveal the stories about women who have, until now, been ignored or overlooked?

Possible topics (but by no means limited to this list):

• Treatment of violent women by the courts early, mid- and late nineteenth century (changes to the punishment of violent offenders, perceptions in the courtroom of violent offenders)
• New methodologies by which we could study violent female criminals in the nineteenth century
• Possible crimes these violent women partook in: women who were part of street gangs; women involved in violent robberies; women who murdered for commission, revenge or jealousy; women who were involved in abductions, blackmail or extortion; women who were serial killers
• Violent women from the working vs middle or upper classes (outside of the traditional Madeline Smith; Constance Kent and Florence Maybrick cases): representations, responses to them
• Narratives from the offenders themselves and how they saw their place in English society, the significance of their crime, how they saw themselves as women etc.
• Newspaper narrative creation about violent female offenders
• Social changes that women’s crimes were in answer to

Entries to this collection will be in the range of 7,000-9,000 words due in early June 2012.

Currently am in talks with Routledge series editors about publication of this collection

Please send abstracts (250 words) and short bio by 15th December 2011 to vicnagy AT gmail.com OR vicky.nagy@monash.edu

CFP: Violent Women in 19th-Century England (Collection) (11/12/2011)

The number of women who are victims of crime has always been higher than the number of women partaking as offenders.  However, women were very often involved with crime - not always petty in nature. Previous research in women and crime in 19th century England has focused attention on the lives of women who committed crimes such as infanticide, or the social and economic situations that led to their working in the sex industry, and in doing so have explored the lives and times of women in 19th century England. This collection aims to write more women back into the criminal record by focusing on those women who committed violent crimes during this period.  This collection asks what narratives were created about these women (and possibly their femininity), what were societal and cultural responses to these women and crimes, and what methodologies are employed by scholars to reveal the stories about women who have, until now, been ignored or overlooked?

Possible topics (but by no means limited to this list):

• Treatment of violent women by the courts early, mid- and late nineteenth century (changes to the punishment of violent offenders, perceptions in the courtroom of violent offenders)
• New methodologies by which we could study violent female criminals in the nineteenth century
• Possible crimes these violent women partook in: women who were part of street gangs; women involved in violent robberies; women who murdered for commission, revenge or jealousy;  women who were involved in abductions, blackmail or extortion; women who were serial killers
• Violent women from the working vs middle or upper classes (outside of the traditional Madeline Smith;  Constance Kent and Florence Maybrick cases): representations, responses to them
• Narratives from the offenders themselves and how they saw their place in English society, the significance of their crime, how they saw themselves as women etc.
• Newspaper narrative creation about violent female offenders
• Social changes that women’s crimes were in answer to

Entries to this collection will be in the range of 7,000-9,000 words due in early June 2012.
Please send abstracts (250 words) and short bio by 12th November 2011 to vicnagy AT gmail.com

CFP: Essay Collection "Symptoms of Disorder: Reading Madness in British Literature 1744-1845" (12/1/2011; 7/1/2012)

Symptoms of Disorder: Reading Madness in British Literature 1744-1845

The editors are currently seeking proposals for a collection of essays investigating the subject of madness in British literature between 1744 and 1845.

These are landmark dates for the historical, philosophical and medical history of mental deviance. They imply a passage from an indefinite system of institutionalization and treatment of the insane (1744 Vagrancy Act, section 20) to a more sophisticated and attentive one (1845 Lunatic Asylums Act). The century as a whole is dotted with a stream of momentous events (most James Hadfield’s attempt on the life of George III and the consequent trial), which reveal a progressive transformation in the medical, legal and social response to mental disease. Our aim is, therefore, to encourage a rethinking of such a response, which inevitably implies a reassessment of the very notion of madness.

We invite submissions that explore different representations of ‘insanity’ in the fictional writing between 1744 and 1845. More precisely, the volume intends to analyse how mental derangement affects both poetry and prose in terms of themes, imagery and style (syntax, word choice, figures of speech…). Focus should be on the intersections between literature and contemporary epistemological discourse on insanity. We are especially interested in how literary texts appropriate or, perhaps, even ‘symptomatically’ anticipate some of the major issues discussed in the historical, legal, philosophical and medical fields.

We welcome discussions on the works of authors who are conventionally recognised as outstanding figures of their time, as well as of authors who are less familiar to the general reader.

A choice of authors may include but is not limited to:

• Lawrence Sterne (1713-1768)
• Thomas Gray (1716-1771)
• William Cowper (1731-1800)
• Henry Mackenzie (1745-1831)
• Robert Ferguson (1750-1774)
• Frances Burney (1752-1840)
• George Crabbe (1754-1832)
• William Godwin (1756-1836)
• William Blake (1757-1827)
• William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
• Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1885)
• John Clare (1793-1864)
• John Perceval (1803-1876)

Please send 500-word titled abstracts, with a brief (no more than 200 words) author biography, by December 1st, 2011, to the editors Ilaria Natali and Annalisa Volpone (editorsrm@gmail.com). Authors whose abstracts are accepted will be expected to produce completed essays (6000-7000 words) by
July 1st, 2012. 

CFP: a collection on H. Rider Haggard (10/31/2011)

Henry Rider Haggard (1856-1925) was a novelist, country gentleman, social commentator, onetime colonial administrator and failed ostrich farmer whose prodigious output comprises a significant but under-examined contribution to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature. While his two most famous works, King Solomon’s Mines (1886) and She (1887) have attracted a steady stream of articles in recent years, most notably from the fields of postcolonial and gender studies, a significant proportion of his oeuvre remains almost entirely unstudied, despite their considerable popular success in his lifetime. Following an initial call for papers we have assembled a strong line-up of essays including contributions on Haggard and science; historical romance; carnivorousness; Haggard’s Aztec writing; Haggard’s gorilla novels; authorship and textuality; Haggard and Modernism and a study of a  previously unpublished Haggard short story. 

We are now seeking to extend and enhance the collection with a small number of additional essays. Radical reappraisals of Haggard’s most noted texts are welcome, but we are particularly interested in articles that investigate less well-known works or that intend to explore Haggard’s diverse range of interests and under-estimated influence on and engagement with other, more celebrated authors. We aim for publication in late 2012.

Topics and approaches may include, but are not limited to:

• Spiritualism and the occult
• Egyptology
• Ecocritical readings
• Romance
• Cultural cross dressing
• Haggard, Freud and psychoanalysis
• Botany/ horticulture
• Haggard and his contemporaries
• Animal Studies
• Queer readings
• Literary topographies
• Fantasy
• Gender, space and the body
• Degeneration and urbanisation
• The fin-de-siècle
• Zionism/ anti-Semitism
• Anthropology/ ethnography
• The Best-seller
• The Nordic
• South African experiences
• Children’s Literature

Please send abstracts not exceeding 500 words along with a brief biographical profile to John Miller at jmiller1@unbc.ca by 31^st October.  Chapters will be 6,000 words in length and will be commissioned by 15^th November for delivery by 1^st March. Any queries are welcome. 

Reminder - edited collection: Urban Monstrosities (10/1/2011; 4/1/2012)

Call for Articles: Edited Collection "Urban Monstrosities"
Joseph Lamperez and J. Alexandra McGhee, University of Rochester

The contemporary city bears the trace of at least two seismic developments: the Enlightenment rationalization of urban space, marked by the twinned banishment of death to the urban periphery and the creation of a regime of spatial surveillance; and the emergence of the modern city as simulacrum, its widened boulevards and glossy surfaces allowing for the continual flow of commodities and capital. How do contemporary authors of speculative fiction figure and respond to these and other major urban transformations in their own work? We are seeking articles that explore the city as a space of monstrous potential, and which examine how the uncanny cityscape has (d)evolved since the Industrial Revolution. SF and weird fiction, for example, often depict the city as a living organism that is alternately transformative and malicious. How do these and other literary and artistic modes figure urban space as a site of bizarre experiences and subjectivities? What entity can be read in, and attempts to speak through, the oneiric facades of the architectural fantasia? What are the ramifications of a sentient city? How useful are Blake's “dark Satanic Mills," Dickens's "Animate London," and Eliot's "unreal" cities as models for reading contemporary instances of urban monstrosity?

This collection attempts to posit the neglected but important link between the nineteenth and early twentieth century city as an unreal spectacle of overwhelming crowds, urban wilderness, and new social formations, and contemporary representations of the city as an incipient organism or fantastic bestiary, its space a site of chthonic splendor and ruinous allure. What new readings become possible when sophisticated modern fantasists like China Mieville and Jeff VanderMeer are placed in a tradition of urban representation stretching back to Wordsworth and Blake, Baudelaire and Poe? How can Mayhew's explorations or Benjamin's body of work on the flâneur and the urban phantasmagoria offer new ways of theorizing the global renaissance of street art, or the burgeoning documentation and aestheticization of derelict architectural structures known as "ruin porn"? Are areas of potential insurrection within the city—Bhabha’s “third space,” the urban carnivalesque—inimical to, or in league with urban monstrosity?

Please send a 500-word abstract, tentative title and brief (1-2 pp) CV to Joseph Lamperez  atjosephlamperez@gmail.com and J. Alexandra McGhee at alimcghee@gmail.com by October 1, 2011. Completed articles will be due April 1, 2012, and should be between 3500-5000 words. For queries please contact Joseph Lamperez and J. Alexandra McGhee at the email addresses above.

CFP: Ireland and the New Journalism (12/1/2011)

For a contributed volume on the influence of W. T. Stead on Irish  journalistic practices, we seek essays examining the impact of New  Journalism on Irish politics, culture, newspaper practices, and representations of journalism from the 1870s through the 1930s. Essays might consider editorial, typographical, and textual changes in Irish newspaper and periodical practices during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We encourage essays that engage in wide cultural perspectives, exploring how Irish periodicals provide new opportunities and challenges for cultural researchers seeking to understand and analyze cultural phenomena, such as nationalist advocacy, progressive activism, sexual scandal, reading practices, national pedagogy, theatrical and political spectacle, and more.

 Abstracts (500 word) due 1 December 2011
 Completed essay (3,000-5,000 word) due 1 June 2012

Please submit electronically to Karen Steele (k.steele@tcu.edu) AND Michael de Nie (mdenie@westga.edu).

CFP: Imagining Victorian Settler Homes: Antipodal Domestic Fiction, extended deadline (9/1/2011)

We invite original articles for an edited collection on settler homes in nineteenth-century Australian and New Zealand writing. The collection proposes antipodal domestic fiction as a distinct genre that had an important formative function in the development of nineteenth-century literature in English, while it participated in a discourse on settler colonialism that was to engender persistent clichés in the popular imagination, both “back home” in the metropolitan centre and in the new homes overseas.

Nineteenth-century literature and art created some of the most poignant and lasting images of settler homes. On both sides of the Pacific as well as the Atlantic pro-emigration posters, advice manuals for the future settler, cautionary tales, a widely circulated periodical press, as well as popular novels capitalised on a pervasive fascination with colonial expansion, with the frontier, the possibilities of the New World, and the difficulties of setting up home elsewhere. They helped establish images of ideal settler homes, meeting an urgent need for affirmative representations of the new lives that would-be settlers were planning overseas. At the same time, as settler authors frequently wrote with a twofold – colonial and metropolitan – readership in mind, they at once traded on and sought to rework popular representations of the wild, exotic, easily sensationalised “bush.” However, whereas tales of the gold rush, of adventures at the frontier, the bush, or during the New Zealand Wars played into readerly expectations in the metropolitan centre and simultaneously created ideologies of mateship that were to define settler masculinity, emergent genres of domestic settler fiction (predominantly, if not exclusively, by women writers) increasingly attempted to revise clichéd images of the wild bush. Children’s literature, women’s settler memoirs, and magazines specifically targeting the colonial girl, as well as domestic novels constructed and revised changing expectations of settler homes. Simultaneously, they helped create and circulate nineteenth-century literature on an unprecedentedly global scale.

While the collection’s main focus is domestic fiction about Britain’s geographical “antipodes,” comparative approaches to transpacific and transatlantic settler genres or to contrasting representations in metropolitan and colonial settler writing are also welcome.

Please submit abstracts of ca. 500 words, accompanied by a brief biographical note, to tswagner@ntu.edu.sg

The deadline for abstracts has been extended to 1 September 2011.


Completed essays will be due on 1 February 2012.

Tamara S. Wagner
Associate Professor
English Literature
http://www.ntu.edu.sg/home/tswagner/tamarawagner.htm

CFP: Urban Monstrosities (10/1/2011; 4/1/2012)

Call for Articles: Edited Collection Urban Monstrosities
Joseph Lamperez and J. Alexandra McGhee, University of Rochester

The contemporary city bears the trace of at least two seismic developments: the Enlightenment rationalization of urban space, marked by the twinned banishment of death to the urban periphery and the creation of a regime of spatial surveillance; and the emergence of the modern city as simulacrum, its widened boulevards and glossy surfaces allowing for the continual flow of commodities and capital. How do contemporary authors of speculative fiction figure and respond to these and other major urban transformations in their own work? We are seeking articles that explore the city as a space of monstrous potential, and which examine how the uncanny cityscape has (d)evolved since the Industrial Revolution. SF and weird fiction, for example, often depict the city as a living organism that is alternately transformative and malicious. How do these and other literary and artistic modes figure urban space as a site of bizarre experiences and subjectivities? What entity can be read in, and attempts to speak through, the oneiric facades of the architectural fantasia?  What are the ramifications of a sentient city? How useful are Blake's “dark Satanic Mills," Dickens's "Animate London," and Eliot's "unreal" cities as models for reading contemporary instances of urban monstrosity?

This collection attempts to posit the neglected but important link between the nineteenth and early twentieth century city as an unreal spectacle of overwhelming crowds, urban wilderness, and new social formations, and contemporary representations of the city as an incipient organism or fantastic bestiary, its space a site of chthonic splendor and ruinous allure. What new readings become possible when sophisticated modern fantasists like China Mieville and Jeff VanderMeer are placed in a tradition of urban representation stretching back to Wordsworth and Blake, Baudelaire and Poe? How can Mayhew's explorations or Benjamin's body of work on the flâneur and the urban phantasmagoria offer new ways of theorizing the global renaissance of street art, or the burgeoning documentation and aestheticization of derelict architectural structures known as "ruin porn"? Are areas of potential insurrection within the city—Bhabha’s “third space,” the urban carnivalesque—inimical to, or in league with urban monstrosity?

Please send a 500-word abstract, tentative title and brief (1-2 pp) CV to Joseph Lamperez at josephlamperez@gmail.com and J. Alexandra McGhee at alimcghee@gmail.com by October 1, 2011. Completed articles will be due April 1, 2012, and should be between 3500-5000 words.  For queries please contact Joseph Lamperez and J. Alexandra McGhee at the email addresses above.

CFP, Reminder: Steaming into a Victorian Future: A Steampunk Anthology (8/15/2011)

We are seeking contributors for a collection of critical essays on Steampunk. Steampunk remains an elusive topic even among its admirers and practitioners, but at its heart, it re-imagines the Victorian age (both in the future and the past), and re-works its technology, fashion, and values with a dose of anti-modernism. From sci-fi and fantasy to websites catering to a steampunk lifestyle, this multi-faceted genre demands greater scholarly analysis.

The editors of this anthology seek contributions in the following suggested subject areas (but we are not limited to these):

• Steampunk Film Steampunk Literature (romance; historical fiction/sci fi, etc
• Steampunk History Steampunk Fashion/dress history
• Steampunk Technology Steampunk Fandom/fan culture
• Steampunk Art & Design Steampunk as Culture/Lifestyle
• Gender, Race, Class and Steampunk Critiques of existing analyses of s.p.

Submission Guidelines: Send a 1000 word abstract in Microsoft Word by email attachment on or before August 15, 2011; include a brief biography or vita. International submissions are welcomed and encouraged.

Abstracts chosen for inclusion in the anthology will be considered “conditional acceptances” – the editors will secure the submission in the volume, but the editors reserve the right to reject any full essay that does not meet the standards (of style/content, etc) agreed to between the editors and authors. Endnotes are mandatory; illustrations are encouraged and must be secured (along with permissions)by the author and submitted with the final draft.

Editors:
Dr. Julie Anne Taddeo
History Dept., University of Maryland
Email: taddeo@mail.umd.edu

Dr. Cynthia Miller
Institute for Liberal Arts, Emerson
Email: cynthia_miller@emerson.edu

Dr. Ken Dvorak
Northern New Mexico College
email: krdvorak@gmail.com

CFP: Imagining Victorian Settler Homes: Antipodal Domestic Fiction (8/1/2011)

We invite original articles for an edited collection on settler homes in nineteenth-century Australian and New Zealand writing. The collection proposes antipodal domestic fiction as a distinct genre that had an important formative function in the development of nineteenth-century literature in English, while it participated in a discourse on settler colonialism that was to engender persistent clichés in the popular imagination, both “back home” in the metropolitan centre and in the new homes overseas.

Nineteenth-century literature and art created some of the most poignant and lasting images of settler homes. On both sides of the Pacific as well as the Atlantic pro-emigration posters, advice manuals for the future settler, cautionary tales, a widely circulated periodical press, as well as popular novels capitalised on a pervasive fascination with colonial expansion, with the frontier, the possibilities of the New World, and the difficulties of setting up home elsewhere. They helped establish images of ideal settler homes, meeting an urgent need for affirmative representations of the new lives that would-be settlers were planning overseas. At the same time, as settler authors frequently wrote with a twofold – colonial and metropolitan – readership in mind, they at once traded on and sought to rework popular representations of the wild, exotic, easily sensationalised “bush.” However, whereas tales of the gold rush, of adventures at the frontier, the bush, or during the New Zealand Wars played into readerly expectations in the metropolitan centre and simultaneously created ideologies of mateship that were to define settler masculinity, emergent genres of domestic settler fiction (predominantly, if not exclusively, by women writers) increasingly attempted to revise clichéd images of the wild bush. Children’s literature, women’s settler memoirs, and magazines specifically targeting the colonial girl, as well as domestic novels constructed and revised changing expectations of settler homes. Simultaneously, they helped create and circulate nineteenth-century literature on an unprecedentedly global scale.

While the collection’s main focus is domestic fiction about Britain’s geographical “antipodes,” comparative approaches to transpacific and transatlantic settler genres or to contrasting representations in metropolitan and colonial settler writing are also welcome.

Please submit abstracts of ca. 500 words, accompanied by a brief biographical note, to tswagner@ntu.edu.sg

The deadline for abstracts is 1 August 2011.

Completed essays will be due on 1 February 2012.

Tamara S. Wagner
Associate Professor
English Literature
http://www.ntu.edu.sg/home/tswagner/tamarawagner.htm

CFP: Steaming into a Victorian Future: A Steampunk Anthology (8/15/2011)

Steaming into a Victorian Future: A Steampunk Anthology

We are seeking contributors for a collection of critical essays on Steampunk. Steampunk remains an elusive topic even among its admirers and practitioners, but at its heart, it re-imagines the Victorian age in the future, and re-works its technology, fashion, and values with a dose of anti-modernism. From sci-fi and fantasy to websites catering to a Steampunk lifestyle, this multi-faceted genre demands greater scholarly analysis.

The editors of this anthology seek contributions in the following suggested subject areas: Steampunk film, technology, fashion, literature, art & design, gender and steampunk, steampunk fan culture, steampunk as culture and lifestyle, and critiques of existing analyses of steampunk.

Submission Guidelines: Send a 1000 word abstract in Microsoft Word by email attachment on or before August 15, 2011; include a brief biography or vita. International submissions are welcomed and encouraged.

Abstracts chosen for inclusion in the anthology will be considered “conditional acceptances” – the editors will secure the submission in the volume, but the editors reserve the right to reject any full essay that does not meet the standards (of style/content, etc) agreed to between the editors and authors. Endnotes are mandatory; illustrations are encouraged and must be secured (along with permissions) by the author and submitted with the final draft.

Editorial Team:

• Dr. Julie Anne Taddeo, History Dept., University of Maryland (Taddeo@mail.umd.edu) 
• Dr. Cynthia Miller, Institute for Liberal Arts, Emerson College (cynthia_miller@emerson.edu)
• Dr. Ken Dvorak, Distance Education, Northern New Mexico College (krdvorak@nnmc.edu)

CFP: Cosmopolitans at Home and Abroad: Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British and American literature. (4/11/2011)

Cosmopolitans at home and abroad: 
Cosmopolitanism in nineteenth-century British and American literature.

This proposed collection seeks essays addressing cosmopolitanism and the figure of the cosmopolitan in British and American literature from 1789 to 1914.

The idea of the global or universal citizen, as formulated in the context of late eighteenth-century Kantian philosophy, remains central to utopian ideas about world government and human rights. Relatedly, cosmopolitan ideals ostensibly aim to create international geopolitical relationships, in which national borders are eradicated, legal codes are harmonized and commercial and personal traffic is eased. As such, cosmopolitanism has become synonymous with the idea of a “world citizen” and the multicultural state.  Assumptions about the utopian nature of the cosmopolitan state, however, have been seen as troubling in the context of imperial and state power.  In this context, the figure of the cosmopolitan has often been represented as potentially threatening to local or regional traditions and collectives:  its seeming detachment from immediate geopolitical and social relationships and presumed lack of a personal connection to a place or a people made it a source of suspicion. 

The rapid cultural and economic expansion of the Anglo-American world over the long nineteenth century brought the tensions described by these competing definitions of cosmopolitanism to the fore with special urgency.  For this reason, its literary representation provides a site to consider issues such as the renegotiation of regional and global interests, the creation of new national and imperial identities, and the intersections between cultures both locally and internationally.  The recent turn to transnational, transatlantic and hemispheric studies offers the opportunity to explore these relationships issues from new perspectives.

Topics of interest might include but are not limited to: 
 

• Imperialism, expansionism and colonialism
• Technological advances and cultural exchange
• Transatlantic reform networks, lecture circuits and exhibitions
• Secret societies and conspiracy theories
• Economic, financial and corporate cosmopolitanism
• Representations of foreigners, travelers, tourists and expatriates
• National, racial, ethnic and class identities
• Geography, environment and nature
• Romantic nationalism and regionalism
• Authorial cosmopolitanism

Please send inquiries or proposals of approximately 500 words to James Hewitson atjhewitso@utk.edu or Yvonne Elizabeth Pelletier at ypelleti@utk.edu by Monday, April 11, 2011