Reminder: NVSA 2014 "Victorian Senses" (10/15/2013; 4/11-13/2014)

CFP: NVSA 2014

Victorian Senses

Stony Brook University,

April 11-13, 2014

Proposals Due: October 15, 2013

The Northeast Victorian Studies Association calls for papers that treat the Victorians and the senses—sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell.

The committee invites papers from all disciplines on topics ranging from the representation of individual sense experience to the scientific, psychological, and philosophical study of the senses; from the sensory impact of mechanization, industry, and the urban city to the extrasensory world of the Victorian séance and spirit rapping. How were the senses categorized and conceptualized in the period? How did Victorian writers and artists understand and represent the sensations of living in their world? What role did capitalism or politics play in the transformation of the Victorian world of the senses—the rise of consumer culture or the publication of Chadwick’s 1842 Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population, for instance, or Victorian censorship? How did the ascendancy of empiricism shape the ways in which Victorian scientists and writers experienced and described the world? In what ways were the senses regarded as unreliable or inadequate for a full understanding of reality? How did the Aesthetic and Decadent movements define or exploit sensory experience? In what ways were sensory interactions with the world enhanced, complicated, or compromised by new communication and sensory technologies? How were sensory deficits—blindness, deafness—understood? What explains the cultural popularity of sensation fiction and public spectacle in Victorian culture?

Topics to be considered can include, but are not limited to, the following:

Senses and the Body:

• sensory deficits (blindness, deafness)
• illusions
• dreaming
• mesmerism and hypnotism
• anaesthesia
• synaesthesia
• hallucination
• sense illusions
• drugs and alcohol
• the senses and evolution
• extrasensory perception
• insanity and nervous disease

Studying the Senses:

• psychology of sense perception
• experimental study of the senses
• physiology and the senses
• sexual science
• sensory deprivation
• animal senses

Communication, Optical, and Acoustic Technologies:

• photography and its predecessors
• the phonograph
• sound recordings
• the microscope
• the telescope
• extending the senses through technology

Senses and the Victorian World:

• factories and industrialization
• urbanization
• the sensory overload of the metropolis
• consumerism and the senses

History, Method, and Philosophy:

• empiricism—sense experience as the origin of knowledge
• rationalism
• the unreliability or inadequacy of the senses
• sense experience and consciousness
• social and cultural history of the senses
• sociology and anthropology of the senses
• the hierarchy of the senses: vision as the highest sense   

Culture and the Arts:

• Sensation fiction
• the sensational
• the representation of sense experience in fiction, poetry, and art
• literary realism and empiricism
• spectacle
• the poetry of sensation, spasmodic poetry, the “fleshly school” of poetry
• magic
• Decadence and Aestheticism
• sentimentality

Proposals (no more than 500 words) by Oct. 15, 2013 (email submissions only, in Word format): Erika Behrisch Elce, Chair, NVSA Program Committee: Erika.Behrisch.Elce@rmc.ca

Please note: all submissions to NVSA are evaluated anonymously. Successful proposals will stay within the 500-word limit and make a compelling case for the talk and its relation to the conference topic. Please do not send complete papers, and do not include your name on the proposal. Please include your name, institutional and email addresses, and proposal title in a cover letter. Papers should take 15 minutes (20 minutes maximum) so as to provide ample time for discussion.

The Coral Lansbury Travel Grant ($100.00) and George Ford Travel Grant ($100.00), given in memory of key founding members of NVSA, are awarded annually to the graduate student, adjunct instructor, or independent scholar who must travel the greatest distance to give a paper at our conference. Apply by indicating in your cover letter that you wish to be considered. Please indicate from where you will be traveling, and mention if you have other sources of funding.

CFP: NVSA 2014 "Victorian Senses" (10/15/2013; 4/11-13/2014)

CFP: NVSA 2014

Victorian Senses

Stony Brook University,

April 11-13, 2014

Proposals Due: October 15, 2013

The Northeast Victorian Studies Association calls for papers that treat the Victorians and the senses—sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell.

The committee invites papers from all disciplines on topics ranging from the representation of individual sense experience to the scientific, psychological, and philosophical study of the senses; from the sensory impact of mechanization, industry, and the urban city to the extrasensory world of the Victorian séance and spirit rapping. How were the senses categorized and conceptualized in the period? How did Victorian writers and artists understand and represent the sensations of living in their world? What role did capitalism or politics play in the transformation of the Victorian world of the senses—the rise of consumer culture or the publication of Chadwick’s 1842 Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population, for instance, or Victorian censorship? How did the ascendancy of empiricism shape the ways in which Victorian scientists and writers experienced and described the world? In what ways were the senses regarded as unreliable or inadequate for a full understanding of reality? How did the Aesthetic and Decadent movements define or exploit sensory experience? In what ways were sensory interactions with the world enhanced, complicated, or compromised by new communication and sensory technologies? How were sensory deficits—blindness, deafness—understood? What explains the cultural popularity of sensation fiction and public spectacle in Victorian culture?

Topics to be considered can include, but are not limited to, the following:

Senses and the Body:

• sensory deficits (blindness, deafness)
• illusions
• dreaming
• mesmerism and hypnotism
• anaesthesia
• synaesthesia
• hallucination
• sense illusions
• drugs and alcohol
• the senses and evolution
• extrasensory perception
• insanity and nervous disease

Studying the Senses:

• psychology of sense perception
• experimental study of the senses
• physiology and the senses
• sexual science
• sensory deprivation
• animal senses

Communication, Optical, and Acoustic Technologies:

• photography and its predecessors
• the phonograph
• sound recordings
• the microscope
• the telescope
• extending the senses through technology

Senses and the Victorian World:

• factories and industrialization
• urbanization
• the sensory overload of the metropolis
• consumerism and the senses

History, Method, and Philosophy:

• empiricism—sense experience as the origin of knowledge
• rationalism
• the unreliability or inadequacy of the senses
• sense experience and consciousness
• social and cultural history of the senses
• sociology and anthropology of the senses
• the hierarchy of the senses: vision as the highest sense   

Culture and the Arts:

• Sensation fiction
• the sensational
• the representation of sense experience in fiction, poetry, and art
• literary realism and empiricism
• spectacle
• the poetry of sensation, spasmodic poetry, the “fleshly school” of poetry
• magic
• Decadence and Aestheticism
• sentimentality

Proposals (no more than 500 words) by Oct. 15, 2013 (email submissions only, in Word format): Erika Behrisch Elce, Chair, NVSA Program Committee: Erika.Behrisch.Elce@rmc.ca

Please note: all submissions to NVSA are evaluated anonymously. Successful proposals will stay within the 500-word limit and make a compelling case for the talk and its relation to the conference topic. Please do not send complete papers, and do not include your name on the proposal. Please include your name, institutional and email addresses, and proposal title in a cover letter. Papers should take 15 minutes (20 minutes maximum) so as to provide ample time for discussion.

The Coral Lansbury Travel Grant ($100.00) and George Ford Travel Grant ($100.00), given in memory of key founding members of NVSA, are awarded annually to the graduate student, adjunct instructor, or independent scholar who must travel the greatest distance to give a paper at our conference. Apply by indicating in your cover letter that you wish to be considered. Please indicate from where you will be traveling, and mention if you have other sources of funding.

Program: NVSA 2013 Conference (4/5-7/2013)

“1874” – The Northeast Victorian Studies Association conference
Boston University, April 5-7, 2013

Please see the conference website for information on registration, travel, and accommodation: http://sites.bu.edu/nvsa2013/

PROGRAM

Friday, April 5
1:30 pm Tour of Victorian Boston with Martha Vicinus

2:00-3:30 pm Registration

3:45 pm Welcome

4:00-5:45 pm: Literary Culture, 1874: Will Lee (Yeshiva U), Moderator
Maia McAleavey (Boston College), “Aurora Floyd (1874)”
Sarah Weaver (U of Cambridge), “Tennyson Turns Playwright”
Laura Green (Northeastern U), “Bathsheba Everdene, Young Brown, and Zelda the Gypsy: At Home in Cornhill Magazine, January, 1874”
Dennis Taylor (Boston College), “Catholicism and Literary Culture in 1874”

5:45-7:15 pm Welcome Reception

7:30-9:30 pm Optional dinner off campus

Saturday, April 6
Book Exhibit

8:00-9:00 am Breakfast and Registration

9:00-11:00 am Keynote panel: James Eli Adams (Columbia U), Moderator
Isobel Armstrong (Birkbeck, U of London)
Robert J. Richards (U of Chicago)
Herbert Tucker (U of Virginia)

11:00-11:15 am Coffee Break

11:15 am-12:45 pm Science, 1874: Vanessa Ryan (Brown U), Moderator
Elisha Cohn (Cornell U), “Playful Atoms and Beautiful Cells: Scientific Aestheticisms, 1874-1890”
Kyle Fetter (SUNY Buffalo), “Anxious Scribblings: Genre, Heredity, and Periodization in Samuel Butler’s First Notebook of 1874”
John Mulligan (Brown U), “Richard Proctor’s Sense of Scientific Duty and the 1874 Transit of Venus”

1:00-2:30 pm Lunch
The Saturday lunch, a long-standing tradition, is a convivial event at which topics are proposed and voted on for the following year. All are welcome.

2:30-4:00 pm Technology and Design, 1874: Aaron Worth (Boston U), Moderator
Dory Agazarian (CUNY Graduate Center), “Past into Present: The 1874 Design Debate over the Completion of St. Paul’s Cathedral”
Christopher Keep (U of Western Ontario), “Bodies, Machines, and the QWERTY Keyboard”
Ayla Lepine (Yale U), “Watts and Company, Founded 1874: Religion, Decorative Arts, and Political Controversy”

4:00-4:15 pm Coffee Break

4:15-5:45 pm Philosophy, 1874: Vincent Lankewish (Professional Performing Arts School), Moderator
Patrick Fessenbecker (Johns Hopkins U), “Sidgwick, Meredith, and Parfit on Reasons and Egoism”
Matthew Sussman (Harvard U), “Henry Sidgwick and the Methods of Aesthetics”
S. Pearl Brilmyer (NYU), “Schopenhauer’s Drive: Sex, Agency, and Victorian Literary Feminism”

6:00-7:00 pm Reception (The Castle, 225 Bay State Road)

7:00-9:30 pm Dinner Banquet (The Castle)

9:45 pm After-dinner Drink (Beacon Street Tavern, 1032 Beacon St., Brookline, MA)

Sunday, April 7
8:00-9:00 am Breakfast

9:00-10:30 am Empire, 1874: Sebastian Lecourt (Rutgers U), Moderator
Lucy Sheehan (Columbia U), “Present Pasts: Performances of Slavery and Abolition in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda”
Mark Doyle (Middle Tennessee State U), “The Bombay Riots of 1874: Liberty and Violence in an Imperial City”
Jane McGaughey (Concordia U), “The Orangeman in Winter: Ogle Gowan, Masculine Frailties, and the Rise of the Orange Order”

10:30-10:45 am Coffee Break

10:45 am-12:15 pm Teaching 1874: Lisa Rodensky (Wellesley College), Moderator
Anne Humphreys (Lehman College)
Timothy Alborn (Lehman College)
Rosemarie Bodenheimer (Boston College)

12:15-1:00 pm Conference Wrap-Up
John Plotz (Brandeis U)
Jonathan Loesberg (American U)

Reminder: NVSA 2013 "1874" (10/15/2012; 4/5-7/2013)

All the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bee:

—Robert Browning

CFP: Northeast Victorian Studies Association 2013

1874

Boston University: April 5-7, 2013

NVSA solicits submissions for its annual conference. The topic this year is 1874.

The conference will feature a keynote panel including Isobel Armstrong, Robert J. Richards, and Herbert Tucker, and a walking tour of Victorian Boston led by Martha Vicinus.

* * *

The Northeast Victorian Studies Association calls for papers from all disciplines on any aspect of 1874, the year in which The Way We Live Now was serialized in monthly numbers, John Tyndall delivered his “Belfast Address” on scientific materialism, Benjamin Disraeli was appointed prime minister for the second time, and red became the standard color for pillarboxes of the Royal Mail. We welcome submissions on any topic relevant to 1874, as well as papers that engage with the conceptual and methodological issues raised by taking a single year as a focus for study.

What are the consequences of thinking about Victorian works of art, texts, objects, and events in relation to their specific year in history? How is our perspective on the period—or on periodization itself—altered by this vantage point? What does the close examination of a single year—a year literally picked out of a hat by the program committee rather than chosen for its significance—reveal about the relationship between dates that “matter” in Victorian Studies and dates that do not? Is the calendar year a significant unit of time or useful organizational framework for our exploration of the Victorian period as a whole? How is our understanding of annual publications, commemorations, and other yearly events and forms changed when we concentrate on a single occurrence of each? In 1874 S. O. Beeton’s Christmas annual Jon Duan sold 250,000 copies in three weeks, vastly outperforming Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. Which, then, is the “major” text under the rubric of our conference? How does our sense of the canonical and non-canonical shift as a result of such micro-periodization?

Other texts and events from 1874 worth considering:

Texts

M. E. Braddon’s Lost for Love

William Benjamin Carpenter’s Principles of Mental Physiology

Wilkie Collins’s The Frozen Deep and Other Stories published; The Law and the Lady serialized

John William Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science

Amelia Edwards’s A Night on the Borders of the Black Forest

George Eliot’s The Legend of Jubal, Arion, and A Minor Prophet; first one-volume edition of Middlemarch

F. W. Farrar’s Life of Christ

John Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens, final volume

Francis Galton’s English Men of Science

W. S. Gilbert’s Charity

John Richard Green’s Short History of the English People

Thomas Huxley’s “On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata”

G. H. Lewes’s Problems of Life and Mind, Vol. 1

Henry Maudsley’s Responsibility in Mental Disease

George Meredith’s Beauchamp’s Career serialized

Margaret Oliphant’s A Rose in June and For Love and Life

John Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain, Vol. 4

Henry Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics

James Sully’s Sensation and Intuition

Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Bothwell: A Tragedy

James Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night

Anthony Trollope’s Lady Anna and Phineas Redux

Alfred Russell Wallace’s “A Defence of Modern Spiritualism”

Mrs. Henry Wood’s Johnny Ludlow

Events

London School of Medicine for Women founded

Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge founded

Fiji Islands annexed by Britain

Ghana established as a British colony

Shipton-on-Cherwell train crash (and other notable train crashes)

David Livingstone’s body returned to England

Victoria Embankment opened

Astley Deep Pit disaster

Public Worship Regulation Act

Factory Act of 1874

1874 Transit of Venus

Wilkie Collins’s readings in America

Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease founded

First Impressionist exhibition, Paris

*     *     *

Proposals (no more than 500 words) by Oct. 15, 2012 (e-mail submissions only, in Word format):

Professor Tyson Stolte, Chair, NVSA Program Committee (tmstolte@nmsu.edu).

Please note: all submissions to NVSA are evaluated anonymously. Successful proposals will stay within the 500-word limit and make a compelling case for the talk and its relation to the conference topic.

               

Please do not send complete papers, and do not include your name on the proposal.

 

Please include your name, institutional and email addresses, and proposal title in a cover letter. Papers should take 15 minutes (20 minutes maximum) so as to provide ample time for discussion.

For information about NVSA membership and travel grants, please visit the NVSA website at http://nvsa.org/

NVSA 2012 "Victorian Clichés and Orthodoxies" (4/13-15/2012)

If any of you will be in New York City or its environs next weekend, do think about attending the annual conference of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association (http://www.nvsa.org/). The theme is “Victorian Clichés and Orthodoxies,” and the conference will be held at Columbia University, April 13-15, 2012. The keynote panel will feature Nicholas Dames (Columbia U), Yopie Prins (U of Michigan), and James A. Secord (U of Cambridge). For the conference program and additional details, visit http://nvsa2012.wordpress.com/.

Reminder: NVSA 2012: Victorian Clichés and Orthodoxies (10/15/2011; 4/13-15/2012)

This message is a reminder that the October 15 deadline is approaching to submit proposals for this year's NVSA conference. The topic this year is Victorian Clichés and Orthodoxies.  The conference will be held at Columbia University on April 13-15, 2012, and will feature a keynote panel including Nicholas Dames, Yopie Prins, and Jim Secord as well as a visit to the Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

The text of the official CFP follows below. If you'd like a PDF copy of the call for papers emailed to you in order to post it in your department, please contact this year's program committee chair, David Kurnick, at david.kurnick@rutgers.edu.

The Northeast Victorian Studies Association calls for papers on cliché and orthodoxy in and about the Victorian period. We encourage papers that reflect on Victorian conceptions of conventional thinking, practice, and expression as well as on the critical orthodoxies that govern contemporary approaches to the period. How did the Victorians understand cliché—a term that comes into its current use only in the 1890s—in literary culture, or in aesthetics (art, music and theater) more generally? What orthodoxies organized scientific inquiry, and what was science's relation to religious orthodoxy? How do we understand the marriage of heterodoxy and orthodoxy in religious movements as various as the Oxford movement and low-church revivalism? How did orthodoxy regulate education and domestic life? While the supposed political stability, liberalism, and realistic aesthetics of the Victorian period have often been contrasted with the social and artistic experimentation of Romanticism and modernism, such features of the period have been both vigorously debunked and vigorously defended as more dynamic than previously thought. We invite papers that reflect on the status of those critical shibboleths (and on the catch-phrases used to express them: “age of equipoise,” “the marriage plot,” “the gospel of work”) as well as on the literary touchstones that the nineteenth century seems to have produced in higher volume than any other. We also invite reconsiderations of older and newer critical texts—from The Victorian Frame of Mind to Culture and Imperialism and beyond—that have set the terms of debate for generations of scholars.

Topics for consideration:

Form and Cliché
Victorian melodramas and tearjerkers
ideology and form
“normal literature” and extraordinary texts
the invention of genre fiction
readers’ pleasures in repetition and recognition
canonicity as critical orthodoxy
poetic and prosodic orthodoxies
parody as ridicule of literary convention

Religious and Scientific Orthodoxies
religious authenticity and belief
religious orthodoxy as an adventure
Christian orthodoxy and its opponents (atheism, agnosticism, free thinking, spiritualism, etc.)
revivalism and the Oxford movement
scientific naturalism’s attack on orthodoxy
science as orthodoxy
scientific orthodoxies

Victorian Cliché
“We are not amused”
“Spare the rod, spoil the child”
“The angel in the house”
“The dismal science”
“Lie back and think of England”
clichés in Victorian advertising
cliché and mass media (cliché as a function of printing technology)
the history of clichés; how do innovations become clichés?
ready-made phrases, generic expressions

Victorian Social and Cultural Orthodoxies
political and economic orthodoxies
were the Victorians sexually orthodox?
unspoken orthodoxies; what goes without saying in the Victorian period?
orthodoxy as truth and as convention: did the valence of orthodoxy change in the period?
orthodoxy and authority
conduct manuals, self-help, etiquette guides
educational orthodoxies

Our Critical Orthodoxies
separate spheres
“Always historicize!”
prudery and repression
the marriage plot
the ideology of progress
liberalism and individualism
the hermeneutics of suspicion
modernist clichés about the Victorian period
angel/whore view of women
round vs. flat characters
the Bildungsroman

Critical Stock Phrases
“the crisis of faith”
“the gospel of work”
“the age of equipoise”
“the age of doubt”
“the age of compromise”
“the Victorian sage”
“the two nations”

Canonical Critical Texts
Buckley’s Victorian Temper
Armstrong’s Victorian Poetry
Langbaum’s Poetry of Experience
Trilling’s Sincerity and Authenticity
Marcus’s Other Victorians

Gilbert and Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic
Williams’s Culture and Society
Houghton’s Victorian Frame of Mind
J. Hillis Miller’s Disappearance of God
Levine’s Realistic Imagination
D. A. Miller’s Novel and the Police
Sedgwick’s Between Men
Said’s Culture and Imperialism

Literary Touchstones
“Reader, I married him.”
“Theirs not to reason why,/ Theirs but to do and die.”
“Why always Dorothea?”
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
“The Everlasting Yea/Everlasting No”
“nature red in tooth and claw”
“sweetness and light”
“How do I love thee?”
the “Dickensian” and Dickens’s characters’ tag-lines
Trollope’s titles

*     *     *

Proposals (no more than 500 words) by Oct. 15, 2011 (e-mail submissions strongly encouraged, in Word format):
Professor David Kurnick, Chair, NVSA Program Committee (david.kurnick@rutgers.edu)
English Department, Rutgers University, 510 George Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901

Please note: all submissions to NVSA are evaluated anonymously. Successful proposals will stay within the 500-word limit and make a compelling case for the talk and its relation to the conference topic. Please do not send complete papers, and do not include your name on the proposal. Please include your name, institutional and email addresses, and proposal title in a cover letter. Papers should take 15 minutes (20 minutes maximum) so as to provide ample time for discussion.

The Coral Lansbury Travel Grant ($100.00) and George Ford Travel Grant ($100.00), given in memory of key founding members of NVSA, are awarded annually to the graduate student, adjunct instructor, or independent scholar who must travel the greatest distance to give a paper at our conference. Apply by indicating in your cover letter that you wish to be considered. Please indicate from where you will be traveling, and mention if you have other sources of funding.

CFP: NVSA 2012 "Victorian Clichés and Orthodoxies" (10/15/2011; 4/13-15/2012)

People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something  heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy.

-G. K. Chesterton

CFP: NVSA 2012

Victorian Clichés and Orthodoxies

Columbia University: April 13-15, 2012

NVSA solicits submissions for its annual conference; the topic this year is Victorian Clichés and Orthodoxies.  The conference will be held at Columbia University on April 13-15, 2012, and will feature a keynote panel including Nicholas Dames, Yopie Prins, and Jim Secord as well as a visit to the Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

The text of the official CFP follows below. If you'd like a PDF copy of the call for papers emailed to you in order to post it in your department, please contact this year's program committee chair, David Kurnick, at david.kurnick@rutgers.edu.

The Northeast Victorian Studies Association calls for papers on cliché and orthodoxy in and about the Victorian period. We encourage papers that reflect on Victorian conceptions of conventional thinking, practice, and expression as well as on the critical orthodoxies that govern contemporary approaches to the period. How did the Victorians understand cliché—a term that comes into its current use only in the 1890s—in literary culture, or in aesthetics (art, music and theater) more generally? What orthodoxies organized scientific inquiry, and what was science's relation to religious orthodoxy? How do we understand the marriage of heterodoxy and orthodoxy in religious movements as various as the Oxford movement and low-church revivalism? How did orthodoxy regulate education and domestic life? While the supposed political stability, liberalism, and realistic aesthetics of the Victorian period have often been contrasted with the social and artistic experimentation of Romanticism and modernism, such features of the period have been both vigorously debunked and vigorously defended as more dynamic than previously thought. We invite papers that reflect on the status of those critical shibboleths (and on the catch-phrases used to express them: “age of equipoise,” “the marriage plot,” “the gospel of work”) as well as on the literary touchstones that the nineteenth century seems to have produced in higher volume than any other. We also invite reconsiderations of older and newer critical texts—from The Victorian Frame of Mind to Culture and Imperialism and beyond—that have set the terms of debate for generations of scholars.

Topics for consideration:

Form and Cliché
-  Victorian melodramas and tearjerkers
-   ideology and form
-  “normal literature” and extraordinary texts
-  the invention of genre fiction
-  readers’ pleasures in repetition and recognition
-  canonicity as critical orthodoxy
-  poetic and prosodic orthodoxies
-  parody as ridicule of literary convention

Religious and Scientific Orthodoxies
-  religious authenticity and belief
-  religious orthodoxy as an adventure
-  Christian orthodoxy and its opponents (atheism, agnosticism, free thinking, spiritualism, etc.)
-  revivalism and the Oxford movement
-  scientific naturalism’s attack on orthodoxy
-  science as orthodoxy
-  scientific orthodoxies

Victorian Cliché
-  “We are not amused”
-  “Spare the rod, spoil the child”
-  “The angel in the house”
-  “The dismal science”
-  “Lie back and think of England”
-  clichés in Victorian advertising
-  cliché and mass media (cliché as a function of printing technology)
-  the history of clichés; how do innovations become clichés?
-  ready-made phrases, generic expressions

 Victorian Social and Cultural Orthodoxies
-  political and economic orthodoxies
-  were the Victorians sexually orthodox?
-  unspoken orthodoxies; what goes without saying in the Victorian period?
-  orthodoxy as truth and as convention: did the valence of orthodoxy change in the period?
-  orthodoxy and authority
-  conduct manuals, self-help, etiquette guides
-  educational orthodoxies

Our Critical Orthodoxies
-  separate spheres
-  “Always historicize!”
-  prudery and repression
-  the marriage plot
-  the ideology of progress
-  liberalism and individualism
-  the hermeneutics of suspicion
-  modernist clichés about the Victorian period
-  angel/whore view of women
-  round vs. flat characters
-  the Bildungsroman

Critical Stock Phrases
-  “the crisis of faith”
-  “the gospel of work”
-  “the age of equipoise”
-  “the age of doubt”
-  “the age of compromise”
-  “the Victorian sage”
-   “the two nations”

Canonical Critical Texts
-  Buckley’s Victorian Temper
-  Armstrong’s Victorian Poetry
-  Langbaum’s Poetry of Experience
-  Trilling’s Sincerity and Authenticity
-  Marcus’s Other Victorians
-  Gilbert and Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic
-  Williams’s Culture and Society
-  Houghton’s Victorian Frame of Mind
-  J. Hillis Miller’s Disappearance of God
-  Levine’s Realistic Imagination
-  D. A. Miller’s Novel and the Police
-  Sedgwick’s Between Men
-  Said’s Culture and Imperialism

Literary Touchstones
-  “Reader, I married him.”
-  “Theirs not to reason why,/ Theirs but to do and die.”
-  “Why always Dorothea?”
-  “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
-  “The Everlasting Yea/Everlasting No”
-   “nature red in tooth and claw”
-  “sweetness and light”
-  “How do I love thee?”
-   the “Dickensian” and Dickens’s characters’ tag-lines
-   Trollope’s titles

Deadline: Proposals (no more than 500 words) by Oct. 15, 2011 (e-mail submissions strongly encouraged, in Word format):
Professor David Kurnick, Chair, NVSA Program Committee (david.kurnick@rutgers.edu)
English Department, Rutgers University, 510 George Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901

Please note: all submissions to NVSA are evaluated anonymously. Successful proposals will stay within the 500-word limit and make a compelling case for the talk and its relation to the conference topic. Please do not send complete papers, and do not include your name on the proposal. Please include your name, institutional and email addresses, and proposal title in a cover letter. Papers should take 15 minutes (20 minutes maximum) so as to provide ample time for discussion.

Travel Grants: The Coral Lansbury Travel Grant ($100.00) and George Ford Travel Grant ($100.00), given in memory of key founding members of NVSA, are awarded annually to the graduate student, adjunct instructor, or independent scholar who must travel the greatest distance to give a paper at our conference. Apply by indicating in your cover letter that you wish to be considered. Please indicate from where you will be traveling, and mention if you have other sources of funding. 

Rudikoff first book prize (7/20/2011)

The Northeast Victorian Studies Association is accepting nominations for the Sonya Rudikoff Award for the best first monograph on the Victorian period published in 2010. The Sonya Rudikoff Award was established by the Robert Gutman family in honor of Mr. Gutman's late wife. Ms. Rudikoff was an active member of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association and a recognized scholar.

Any text nominated for this award must be the author's first academic monograph. The subject should address Victorian literature and/or culture. Our focus is on Victorian Great Britain and the Empire, although we will consider texts that are transatlantic or long nineteenth-century in focus. We will not consider texts that are strictly American Victorian. Books must have been published during 2010. The award winner will receive a cash prize. The winning author and publisher will be announced at the April 2012 conference of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association at Columbia University.

Please have the publisher submit seven copies of the text by July 20, 2011 to

Professor Anne Humpherys
Ph.D. Program in English
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10016-4309

More information may be found at: http://www.nvsa.org/rudikoff.htm

Any questions should be directed to Jason Rudy at jrrudy@umd.edu