CFP: Navigating Networks: Women, Travel, and Female Communities (4/1/2013; 10/4/2013)

In the field of travel studies, the past two decades have witnessed an ever-growing interest in women’s travel writing. One aim of scholars has been to counter stereotypical assumptions about travel and travel writing being a principally masculine enterprise, emphasising instead that the perception of the gendering of travel is to a large extent a misconception, an ideological construct that assumes the notion of gendered separate spheres. This day-­long conference seeks to move beyond the already established fact that women travelled far more than the patriarchal ideology of separate spheres would suggest. It aims to delve further into the rich topic of women’s travel and travel writing practices by examining the ways in which women navigated female networks and created communities with one another, both through their travels and travel writing. In doing so, it will draw upon the notion of travel as a means of building networks and fostering connections with others. Through an examination of various female travel networks, this conference seeks to explore further the significance of women’s travel throughout the ages, including the opportunities for communication it fostered and the unique privileges that it cultivated.

We invite papers that address the topic of women’s travel networks in any historical period. We welcome discussion on any of the following: nonfictional or literary accounts; diaries; letters; articles; films; documentaries; photographs; and paintings.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

The Act of Travel

• women travelling in groups, independently of men (‘unprotected’ female travellers, spinsters abroad)
• access to exclusively female spaces abroad (harems, baths, spas, circles of gossip)
• development of alliances between the female traveller and the female local
• issues of ‘othering’ – do women have an imperial agenda or do they sympathise with foreign women?
• bonds of sisterhood, friendship, and partnerships
• communities of female expats; salons and social scenes abroad
• feminine self-­fashioning: creation of female travel identities abroad
• negative associations with female travel networks: women’s aversion to being lumped together with other female travellers; their desire to break free from collective identities and stereotypes

Recording Travels

• female literary communities developed through the practice of travel and writing
• female travel writers’ engagement with one another’s texts
• female reception to travel texts
• modern travel blogs
• travelogues, advice books, or periodical pieces aimed at female readers/ travellers
• similar stylistic characteristics of women’s travel writing
• shared attitudes, interests, and goals in women’s travel writing

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words (for papers of 20 minutes) to Hannah Sikstrom and Kimberly Marsh at <travelculturesseminar@gmail.com> by 1 April 2013.

Travel Cultures is an interdisciplinary seminar series at the University of Oxford for anyone with an interest in inter-­cultural communication, exploration, and travel writing.

Announcing an Updated Version of the Victorian Women Writers Project

The Indiana University Digital Library Program and Indiana University Libraries are proud to announce the launch of an updated version of the Victorian Women Writers Project: http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/collections/vwwp.

The Victorian Women Writers Project (VWWP) was begun in 1995 at Indiana University under the determined leadership and editorship of Perry Willett. The VWWP was celebrated early on for exposing lesser-known British women writers of the 19th century, writers whose popularity did not make the transition into the 20th century or inclusion in a literary canon. Originally the VWWP focused on poetry, but soon Willett acknowledged the variety of genres in which women of that period were writing—novels, children’s books, political pamphlets, religious tracts and so on. Thus the collection was expanded to include genres beyond poetry and so the VWWP grew until about the turn of the twenty-first century, ultimately including nearly two hundred texts as part of the corpus.

Quiet since 2003, the VWWP is pleased to be back with an expanded purview that includes women writing in the nineteenth century in English beyond Britain. As before, the project will devote time and attention to the accuracy and completeness of the texts, as well as to their bibliographical descriptions. New texts, encoded according to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) P5 Guidelines, will adopt principles of scholarly encoding, facilitating more sophisticated retrieval and analysis.

Since 2010, the Victorian Women Writers Project has served as a pedagogical tool, imparting to English graduate and undergraduate students—at Indiana University and beyond—the critical and technical skills commonly employed by digital humanists. It has also served as a significant research tool to which the graduate and undergraduate students directly contribute. Their contributions include scholarly encoded texts, enhanced bibliographic access, and contextual materials such as scholarly annotations, introductions, and author biographies that shed further light on these little known women writers.

New features that are part of this release include: genre browse based on the Modern Language Association Thesaurus, an interactive timeline situating authors, publications and major events in historical context, and contextual materials authored by students.

Now available are approximately twenty encoded texts that were created as part of a new digital humanities seminar (ENG L501: Professional Scholarship in Literature: Digital Humanities Practicum) taught in the IU English department during the Fall 2010 semester under the fearless leadership of Professor Joss Marsh, also known as "the manager." Monographs by Mrs. M. Alexander, Mary Cholmondeley, Juliana Ewing, Fanny Kemble, and Anne Thackeray Ritchie are now part of the collection along with introductions to the these texts and biographies authored by the L501 graduate students. Since then, the VWWP editors have partnered with Judson College and Texas A & M for additional contributions to the project as part of their respective English courses and curricula. We look forward to establishing the VWWP as a reliable and respected pedagogical and scholarly online resource, and in turn growing and evolving the VWWP in the coming years.

To learn more about the technical details surrounding the new web site, please visit the project information page (http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/vwwp/projectinfo.do ), where specifics about text encoding and technical implementation are provided. Or skip the boring stuff and explore the new web site: http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/collections/vwwp.

Stay tuned as we continue to add monographs and contextual materials over time!

Happily,
Michelle, Co-Editor, VWWP

Michelle Dalmau, Digital Projects & Usability Librarian
Indiana University Digital Library Program
Herman B Wells Library
http://mypage.iu.edu/~mdalmau/

International Centre for Victorian Women Writers / Mary Braddon exhibition (7/16-22/2012)

Co-directors Professor Adrienne Gavin and Dr Carolyn Oulton are delighted to announce the official launch of the International Centre for Victorian Women Writers (ICVWW) on the opening day of the exhibition 'Victorian Rebel: The Many Faces of Mary Braddon'.

Exhibition dates: 16th-22nd July 2012
Augustine House, Canterbury Christ Church University

This free exhibition, celebrating the life and work of the bestselling Victorian author Mary Braddon, features a public lecture by Visiting Research Fellow and expert on the Braddon archive, Dr Gabrielle Malcolm at 5:30 on the 16th July.

The exhibition will include letters, drawings, photographs and a rare copy of Braddon's unpublished memoir of childhood Before the Knowledge of Evil.

The Braddon Archive has recently been transferred from the Braddon family to the ICVWW.

Exhibition Opening Hours 9-5.30 M to F, 9-1pm Sat and Sun
Augustine House, Canterbury CT1 2YA, UK

Augustine House is a 5 minute walk from Canterbury East Station and next to Canterbury High Street. Please note disabled parking is available at this site and Pay and Display car parks are close to the building.

http://www.canterbury.ac.uk/Research/Centres/ICVWW

CFP: Special Issue of Women’s Writing on Nineteenth-Century Australian and New Zealand Girls’ Culture (9/1/2012)

Colonial girls’ culture is receiving growing critical attention, prompting us to rethink its significance for women’s writing. The journal Women’s Writing invites original papers for a special issue dedicated to the colonial girl and her literature in nineteenth-century Australia.

What was it like to be a girl at “the antipodes” in the nineteenth century? How was the colonial girl constructed, both “back home” and throughout the British Empire, and how did she view and represent herself? Was there a distinctly “antipodal,” Australian, or New Zealand girls’ culture and in what ways did it parallel, overlap with, influence, and in turn, become influenced by constructions of girlhood in other parts of the Empire? How did antipodal girls’ culture harness and redefine imperialist ideologies and their malleable relationship to domesticity? In what ways did their literary representation not only mould imperialist representations, but help to shape nineteenth-century literature in English in general, including children’s and especially popular girls’ fiction, which was emerging as a distinct genre in the course of the century? These are some of the questions that individual articles will be addressing. The colonial girl’s changing depiction in Victorian culture at the same time raises larger issues about the representation of the antipodes in British and colonial texts. A new look at colonial girlhood constructively draws into question the still dominating discourses on male mateship, for example. In addition, it helps us to reassess the wide range of genres that constituted nineteenth-century Australian and New Zealand literature and read them in tandem with similar cultural formations.

This special issue aims to create a forum for a more encompassing approach to nineteenth-century Australian literature, inviting comparative work on British and colonial texts, while providing new detailed insight into Australian girls’ literature.

Topics may include but are not limited to:
Colonial girlhood and its literary representation
The construction of colonial girls’ culture
Australian girls’ magazines and periodicals
“The antipodes” in both British and colonial girls’ publications
Colonial children’s literature and writing for girls
Individual authors and their works
Comparative approaches

Please submit papers for consideration between 4000-7000 words to Tamara S. Wagner at tswagner_at_ntu.edu.sg, by 1 September 2012.

Contributors should follow the journal’s house style details of which are to be found on the Women’s Writing website http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/09699082.asp. This is the new MLA. Please note that instead of footnotes, we use endnotes with NO bibliography. All bibliographical information is included in the endnotes. For example, we require place of publication, publisher and date of publication in brackets after a book is cited for the first time.

Please also include an abstract, a brief biographical blurb (approximately 100 words), and a key of 6 words suitable for indexing and abstracting services.

CFP: Commitment in British Women Writers' Novels

Commitment in British Women Writers' Novelists of the 18th & 19th Centuries

Contributions are invited for a conference which will take place at the University of Caen in France on 17th and 18th June 2010.

As soon as novels developed, women played an important role both as readers and as authors, since among the 2,000 works which were published in the 18th century, 600 were written by women. One can then wonder about the way they used that means of expression and ask whether Mary Wollstonecraft opened the path for a British female literature characterized by commitment through her desire for political and social equality with men. Let us specify that during that seminar the term “commitment” will be used in the sense it had in the 18th and 19th centuries rather than in the sense it took in the 20th century.

Some could focus on the different aspects of commitment whether it is political, social, religious, moral, intellectual, artistic… It would also be quite interesting to consider the sources of inspiration for that commitment in novels by Hannah More, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, or the Brontës (this is not an exhaustive list). Besides one could deal with the role played by some major figures such as Harriet Martineau or Harriet Taylor Mill, John Stuart Mill’s wife, but also by some ideals and among them that of the “New Woman”.

Other proposals could be centred on the form that commitment takes on. Does it influence women writers’ strategies for articulating their experience? How does commitment characterize the very text? Does it make itself known always strikingly? And more generally are women writers’ means of expression the same as those adopted in the society of the time?

Please send your proposals (one A4 page maximum) before 1st December 2009 to Elise Ouvrard (ouvrard_elise@hotmail.com).