CFP: The Michael Field Centenary Conference "New Directions in Fin de Siècle Studies" (12/31/2013; 7/11-12/2014)

The Michael Field Centenary Conference: New Directions in Fin de Siècle Studies

Institute of English Studies, Senate House, University of London

July 11-12, 2014

Deadline: December 31, 2013

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

Professor Joseph Bristow (UCLA)

Professor Margaret D. Stetz (University of Delaware)

Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) occupies an increasingly central role as one of the most fascinating figures of the fin de siècle. Following ground-breaking revisionist scholarship of the 1990s which rediscovered Bradley and Cooper’s poetry, the last twenty years has seen a major resurgence in work on Michael Field – reflecting Bradley and Cooper’s own belief that their work would not be appreciated until sometime in the distant future.

This major international conference will mark the Michael Field Centenary, bringing together world-renowned scholars of fin de siècle literature, poetry, life writing, women’s writing and gender and sexuality.

The Michael Field Centenary conference also aims to acknowledge and celebrate the diversity and vitality of new scholarship surrounding Michael Field and fin de siècle literature generally, providing a platform for new voices and perspectives from postgraduate/ early career scholars. As the first major Michael Field conference following the 2004 ‘Michael Field and their World’ conference at University of Delaware, the committee aims to assess the how the ‘field’ has changed over the last ten years; for example, following the publication of significant works such as Margaret D. Stetz and Cheryl A. Wilson’s Michael Field and their World (2007), Marion Thain’s ‘Michael Field’: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Fin de Siècle and Sharon Bickle’s The Fowl and the Pussycat: Love Letters of Michael Field, 1876-1909 (2008).

We invite proposals for 20 minute papers on topics related to Michael Field and fin de siècle culture, which may include, but are not limited to:

• Fin de siècle poetry
• Late-Victorian literary culture
• Aestheticism and Decadence
• Verse drama/closet drama
• Drama and performance
• Poetic form, prosody, the lyric
• History, time, historiography
• Interactions with different periods/literary traditions
• Life writing, biography, autobiography
• Gender, sexuality, desire
• Michael Field’s circle/influences
• Fashion and dress culture
• Catholicism and religious writing
• Art and design
• Book history, book design, printing
• The New Woman, the Female Aesthete
• Modernity, modernism
• Michael Field’s influence on later writers

Deadline for abstracts: December 31, 2013

Please email 300-word abstracts to michaelfield2014@gmail.com

Organisers: Dr Ana Parejo Vadillo (Birkbeck, University of London), Dr Sarah Parker (University of Stirling) and Dr Marion Thain (University of Sheffield)

Exhibit: UCLA Clark Library "Odd Volumes: Bibliophilia at the Fin de Siècle" (Fall 2013)

Odd Volumes: Bibliophilia at the Fin de Siècle

UCLA

Fall 2013 Clark Library Exhibit

Ellen Crowell, Guest Curator and Lecturer

A curious bookcase at the back of the Clark Library Reading Room—virtually unopened for over fifty years—contains an almost untouched archive of the publications and proceedings of a private London bibliophilic dining club, The Sette of Odd Volumes. Formed in London in 1878 by prominent bookseller and collector Bernard Quaritch, and in continuous operation from 1878 through the 1940s, the group's name derives from bibliophilic parlance: bound volumes not paired with others in their "set" were "odd," and thus less valuable than when united. This exhibit will open up the Odd Volumes bookcase to the public, showcasing the Clark’s collection of over 1000 rare books, typed and handwritten letters, original artwork, photographs, and other ephemera chronicling the history of this literary and artistic society, founded on a love of book collecting, whose heyday was between 1885 and 1895. By the mid 1880s, the Odd Volumes boasted a distinguished membership of prominent booksellers, bookbinders, illustrators, poets, novelists, artists, entrepreneurs, and publishers—a diverse and at times discordant network of aesthetically-minded gentlemen whose overarching connection to each other was a passion for books. This exhibit offers a fascinating glimpse into intellectual, aesthetic and social interactions of an network comprised of key figures in the cultures of aestheticism, decadence, and early modernism.

In an accompanying lecture, Dr. Ellen Crowell will illuminate how this late-Victorian network and its collective preoccupations dovetail with those of key artists of the long fin-de-siècle.  By enlisting Oscar Wilde, a figure key to Clark Library collections, as a guide through the Odd Volumes bookcase, this lecture will trace intersections between the proceedings of this bibliophile club and Wilde’s aesthetic development from 1885 to 1892 and demonstrate how this stand-alone archive offers scholars new entrance points into the history of fin-de-siècle literary, visual, commercial and sexual subcultures.

Ellen Crowell is Associate Professor of English at Saint Louis University. She is the author of Aristocratic Drag: The Dandy in Irish and American Southern Fiction (Edinburgh, 2007). Other work has appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, Eire-Ireland, and BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Her current book project, Oscar Wilde’s Body, reconstructs forgotten subcultures of mourning, fandom, and queer self-fashioning to reimagine Wilde’s presence in the literary and cultural landscapes of early modernism.

Conference: Romanticism at the Fin de Siècle (6/14-15/2013)

Romanticism at the Fin de Siècle
An international conference on collecting, editing, performing, producing, reading, and reviving Romanticism at the Fin de Siècle.
Trinity College Oxford, 14-15 June 2013

Keynote Speaker: Professor Joseph Bristow (UCLA)

Registration: You can register online for this conference here: http://www.oxforduniversitystores.co.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&catid=22&modid=2&prodid=167&deptid=110&prodvarid=0

This conference places Romanticism at the core of the British Fin de Siècle. As an anti-Victorian movement, the British Fin de Siècle is often read forwards and absorbed into a long twentieth century, in which it takes the shape of a prehistory or an embryonic form of modernism. By contrast, Fin-de-Siècle authors and critics looked back to the past in order to invent their present and imagine their future. Just at the time when the concept of Victorian crystallized a distinct set of literary and cultural practices, the radical break with the immediate past found in Romanticism an alternative poetics and politics of the present.

The Fin de Siècle played a distinctive and crucial role in the reception of Romanticism. Romanticism emerged as a category, a dialogue of forms, a movement, a style, and a body of cultural practices. The Fin de Siècle established the texts of major authors such as Blake and Shelley, invented a Romantic canon in a wider European and comparative context, but also engaged in subversive reading practices and other forms of underground reception.

The aim of this conference is to foster a dialogue between experts of the two periods.

Conference organisers: Luisa Calè (Birkbeck) and Stefano Evangelista (Oxford)

This conference is co-organised by the Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies and the English Faculty of Oxford University with the support of the MHRA.

For more information or to download the conference poster, please visit the website at: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/our-research/research_cncs/our-events/romanticism-at-the-fin-de-siecle

CFP: Romanticism at the Fin de Siècle (1/15/2013; 6/14-15/2013)

Romanticism at the Fin de Siècle

an international conference on collecting, editing, performing,

producing, reading, and reviving Romanticism at the Fin de Siècle

Trinity College Oxford, 14-15 June 2013

Keynote Speaker: Professor Joseph Bristow (UCLA)

Call For Papers:

This conference places Romanticism at the core of the British Fin de Siècle. As an anti-Victorian movement, the British Fin de Siècle is often read forwards and absorbed into a ‘long twentieth century’, in which it takes the shape of a prehistory or an embryonic form of modernism. By contrast, Fin-de-Siècle authors and critics looked back to the past in order to invent their present and imagine their future. Just at the time when the concept of ‘Victorian’ crystallized a distinct set of literary and cultural practices, the radical break with the immediate past found in Romanticism an alternative poetics and politics of the present.

The Fin de Siècle played a distinctive and crucial role in the reception of Romanticism. Romanticism emerged as a category, a dialogue of forms, a movement, a style, and a body of cultural practices. The Fin de Siècle established the texts of major authors such as Blake and Shelley, invented a Romantic canon in a wider European and comparative context, but also engaged in subversive reading practices and other forms of underground reception.

The aim of this conference is to foster a dialogue between experts of the two periods. We welcome proposals for papers on all aspects of Fin-de-Siècle Romanticism, especially with a cross-disciplinary or comparative focus. Topics might include:

• bibliophilia and bibliomania
• collecting
• cults
• editing
• objects
• performance
• poetics
• politics
• print culture
• sociability
• continuities and discontinuities
• Romanticism and Decadence
• Romantic Classicism
• European Romanticism and the English Fin de Siècle

Deadline for abstracts: 15 January 2013

Please email 300-word abstracts to romanticfin@bbk.ac.uk

Conference organisers: Luisa Calè (Birkbeck) and Stefano Evangelista (Oxford)

This conference is co-organised by the Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies and the English Faculty of Oxford University with the support of the MHRA.

CFP: Romanticism at the Fin de Siècle (1/15/2013; 6/14-15/2013)

An international conference on collecting, editing, performing, producing, reading, and reviving Romanticism at the Fin de Siècle

Trinity College Oxford, 14-15 June 2013

Keynote Speaker: Professor Joseph Bristow (UCLA)

Call For Papers

This conference places Romanticism at the core of the British Fin de Siècle. As an anti-Victorian movement, the British Fin de Siècle is often read forwards and absorbed into a ‘long twentieth century’, in which it takes the shape of a prehistory or an embryonic form of modernism. By contrast, Fin-de-Siècle authors and critics looked back to the past in order to invent their present and imagine their future. Just at the time when the concept of ‘Victorian’ crystallized a distinct set of literary and cultural practices, the radical break with the immediate past found in Romanticism an alternative poetics and politics of the present.

The Fin de Siècle played a distinctive and crucial role in the reception of Romanticism. Romanticism emerged as a category, a dialogue of forms, a movement, a style, and a body of cultural practices. The Fin de Siècle established the texts of major authors such as Blake and Shelley, invented a Romantic canon in a wider European and comparative context, but also engaged in subversive reading practices and other forms of underground reception.     

The aim of this conference is to foster a dialogue between experts of the two periods. We welcome proposals for papers on all aspects of Fin-de-Siècle Romanticism, especially with a cross-disciplinary or comparative focus. Topics might include:

• bibliophilia and bibliomania
• collecting
• cults
• editing
• objects
• performance
• poetics
• politics
• print culture
• sociability
• continuities and discontinuities
• Romanticism and Decadence
• Romantic Classicism
• European Romanticism and the English Fin de Siècle

Deadline for abstracts: 15 January 2013

Please email 300-word abstracts to romanticfin@bbk.ac.uk

Conference organisers: Luisa Calè (Birkbeck) and Stefano Evangelista (Oxford)

This conference is co-organised by the Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies and the English Faculty of Oxford University with the support of the MHRA

Symposium: “Richard Marsh: Re-Reading the Fin de Siècle” (7/20/2012)

Richard Marsh: Re-Reading the Fin de Siècle

A one-day symposium at the University of Brighton, Friday 20th July 2012

Richard Marsh is best-known for his 1897 novel The Beetle, a gothic bestseller at the time more popular than Dracula. Indeed Marsh was a prolific and extremely successful writer in the 1890s and the early 20th century. Strikingly, however, his writing has until recently been mostly forgotten. With several of his novels and shorter fictions now being republished, this situation is set to change. The symposium seeks to harness renewed academic interest in Marsh towards a reappraisal of his significance for a fin de siècle culture that is often considered to offer a kind of mirror onto our own culture at the start of the 21st century. It will bring together literary and historical specialists of the period to examine Marsh's oeuvre as a whole. A central concern will be to examine how Marsh's ambivalent fiction often works against the grain of more canonical texts and therefore has the potential productively to unsettle what it is thought is known about fin de siècle culture. Understanding late-Victorian / Edwardian questions about gender and sexuality, imperialism, science and the nature of history, surely remain incomplete without negotiating the complex terrain of Richard Marsh's writing.

Further information, including the provisional programme and details of how to register, is now available here: http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/study/humanities/news/richard-marsh-re-reading-the-fin-de-siecle-a-one-day-symposium

Edited Collection CFP: Pedagogies of the End: Teaching and Knowledge at the Fin de Siècle (8/1/2012)

Co-Editors: Dan Bivona, Arizona State University, and Helena Gurfinkel, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

500-word abstracts and 1-paragraph bios to dbivona@asu.edu and hgurfin@siue.edu by August 1st, 2012.

This collection explores a possible relationship between the fin in the fin de siècle (the turn of the nineteenth century) and pedagogy. We welcome essays about fin de siècle literature and culture that theorize

*teaching the end/decline, or teaching at the end

*the pedagogical/didactic, implications of catastrophic thinking

*teaching as inaugurating, offering (or not) a new beginning after the end.

Geographically and theoretically, this volume it is not limited to Britain, the US, and Continental Europe. We encourage submissions that leave the precincts of the “West.”

We invite contributions focusing on

• the reinventions of Foucault’s systems of power and knowledge as pedagogical strategies
• fin-de-siècle anxieties surrounding physical, moral, and intellectual decline
• didactic representations of a pending catastrophe and attempts to teach how to avoid it.

Examples include but are not limited to

• Max Nordau’s Degeneration
• Thomas Hardy, the Education Reform Act of 1870, and the dangers of literacy
• George Gissing and concerns about declining literary standards
• The didactics of social Darwinism
• Scientia sexualis as a teaching/didactic tool against perversion and degeneration Eugenics, colonialist education, and protecting the “healthy” national/racial body from decline
• The end of traditional womanhood and the fear of the New Woman.
• Fin-de-siècle approaches to paideia
• Religion, pedagogy, and eschatology at the fin-de-siècle.

CFP:Richard Marsh: Re-Reading the Fin de Siècle (4/20/2012; 7/20/2012)

Richard Marsh: Re-Reading the Fin de Siècle
A one-day symposium at the University of Brighton

Friday 20th July 2012

Richard Marsh is best-known for his 1897 novel The Beetle, a gothic bestseller at the time more popular than Dracula. Indeed Marsh was a prolific and extremely successful writer in the 1890s and the early 20^th century. Strikingly, however, his writing has until recently been mostly forgotten. With several of his novels and shorter fictions now being republished, this situation is set to change. The symposium seeks to harness renewed academic interest in Marsh towards a reappraisal of his significance for a fin de siècle culture that is often considered to offer a kind of mirror onto our own culture at the start of the 21^st century. It will bring together literary and historical specialists of the period to examine Marsh's oeuvre as a whole. A central concern will be to examine how Marsh's ambivalent fiction often works against the grain of more canonical texts and therefore has the potential productively to unsettle what it is thought is known about fin de siècle culture. Understanding late-Victorian / Edwardian questions about gender and sexuality, imperialism, science and the nature of history, surely remain incomplete without negotiating the complex terrain of Richard Marsh's writing.

We invite abstracts for papers on any aspect of Marsh's output, but in particular on the following themes:

• Gothic
• Fictions of crime and detection
• Romance
• Comedy
• Discourses of race, empire and eugenics
• The New Woman
• Homosociality and homosexuality
• Late-Victorian understandings of history / the use of the classical past
• The literary market-place

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to d.orrells@warwick.ac.uk and v.margree@brighton.ac.uk. We anticipate that speakers will have approximately 20 minutes to deliver their papers on the day. A small registration fee will be charged (details to be confirmed). We also welcome participants who wish to attend the event without delivering a paper, although places are limited.

Deadline for abstracts: Friday 20th April 2012