Reminder: Victorian Network "Victorian Bodies and Body Parts" (11/30/2013)

"Victorian Bodies and Body Parts"
Victorian Network
Deadline: November 30, 2013

Victorian Network is an MLA-indexed online journal devoted to publishing and promoting the best postgraduate work in Victorian Studies.

The ninth issue of Victorian Network, guest edited by Professor Pamela K. Gilbert (University of Florida), is dedicated to a reassessment of the place of the human body in the Victorian literary and cultural imagination. Rapid medical and scientific advances, advancing industrialization and new forms of labour, legal reforms, the rise of comparative ethnology and anthropology, the growth of consumer culture, and the ever changing trends of Victorian fashion are just a few of the many forces that transformed how Victorians thought about the human body and about the relationship between the embodied, or disembodied, self and the object world.

Nineteenth-century configurations of the body have long been of interest to Victorian scholars. However, recent years have seen the field reconfigured by the emergence of a range of exciting new and theoretically sophisticated approaches that harness the insights of the new materialism, thing theory, cultural phenomenology and actor-network theory to explorations of Victorian embodiment, bodies and body parts.

The editorial board are inviting submissions of no more than 7000 words, on any aspect of the theme.  Possible topics include but are by no means limited to the following:

• embodied experience and the senses
• the body in stillness and in motion: practices of confinement and mobility
• consumerism, fashion and the stylized body
• the body and technology
• bodies of empire and colonialism
• bodies and body parts on display: anatomical museums, ethnological shows, hospital ward tours
• sciences of the body: medicine, biology, ethnology, statistics, etc.
• bodies, sex and gender
• health and illness
• affective bodies and embodied emotions
• labour power and the body as property
• the poetics and aesthetics of the human body
• human and animal bodies before and after Darwin

All submissions should conform to MHRA style conventions and the in-housesubmission guidelines.
 Deadline for submissions: November 30, 2013. Contact: victoriannetwork@gmail.com

CFP: Victorians and the Law (5/10/2013)

Victorian Network is an MLA-indexed online journal dedicated to publishing and promoting the best postgraduate work in Victorian Studies.

The eighth issue of Victorian Network, guest edited by Dr Cathrine Frank (University of New England), will take a fresh look at the interfaces between literature and legal cultures in the Victorian period. From the Reform Acts through the growth of colonial law to the establishment of divorce courts, nineteenth-century legislature shaped and responded to the same cultural developments – the rise of the middle class, industrialisation, imperial expansion, and shifting ideas about gender, to name but a few – that were also eagerly debated by literary writers. The politics and aesthetics of many nineteenth-century novelists, poets and playwrights were informed by a sustained engagement with legal debates and practices. Their works often reflected on, and sometimes challenged, the law’s construction of civic, social and gender identities, while also casting a critical (or appraising) eye over the bureaucratic apparatus on which legal practice was built.

We are inviting submissions of no more than 7000 words. Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to, the following:

• wills, trusts and guardianship accounts: the materiality of the legal archive
• Victorian trials, sensation and theatricality
• criminal law, lawlessness, realist epistemologies and the detective plot
• Victorian law and gender
• the reaches of the law: imperialism and the legal & literary creation of colonial identities
• intersections between genres of legal and literary writing
• “brought up a barrister”: nineteenth-century authors, legal training, professionalization and the bar
• radical politics, social change and the working class in Victorian literature and the law
• debates about rights to intellectual and literary property
• the spaces and cultural venues of legal practice

 All submissions should conform to MHRA style conventions and the in-house submission guidelines. The deadline for submissions to our next issue is 10th May, 2013. Contact: victoriannetwork@gmail.com. 

Reminder: Victorians and the Law (4/1/2013)

Victorian Network is an MLA-indexed online journal dedicated to publishing and promoting the best postgraduate work in Victorian Studies.

The eighth issue of Victorian Network, guest edited by Dr Cathrine Frank (University of New England), will take a fresh look at the interfaces between literature and legal cultures in the Victorian period. From the Reform Acts through the growth of colonial law to the establishment of divorce courts, nineteenth-century legislature shaped and responded to the same cultural developments – the rise of the middle class, industrialisation, imperial expansion, and shifting ideas about gender, to name but a few – that were also eagerly debated by literary writers. The politics and aesthetics of many nineteenth-century novelists, poets and playwrights were informed by a sustained engagement with legal debates and practices. Their works often reflected on, and sometimes challenged, the law’s construction of civic, social and gender identities, while also casting a critical (or appraising) eye over the bureaucratic apparatus on which legal practice was built.

We are inviting submissions of no more than 7000 words. Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to, the following:

• wills, trusts and guardianship accounts: the materiality of the legal archive
• Victorian trials, sensation and theatricality
• criminal law, lawlessness, realist epistemologies and the detective plot
• Victorian law and gender
• the reaches of the law: imperialism and the legal & literary creation of colonial identities
• intersections between genres of legal and literary writing
•  “brought up a barrister”: nineteenth-century authors, legal training, professionalization and the bar
• radical politics, social change and the working class in Victorian literature and the law
• debates about rights to intellectual and literary property
• the spaces and cultural venues of legal practice

All submissions should conform to MHRA style conventions and the in-house submission guidelines. The deadline for submissions to our next issue is 1 April, 2013.

Contact: victoriannetwork@gmail.com

Reminder: Other Worlds (9/14/2012; 12/3/2012)

Other Worlds
Victorian Network Conference
3 Dec 2012, Senate House, University of London

Keynote Speakers: Dr John Holmes (Reading) and Professor Cora Kaplan (KCL)

From other lands to other planets to other dimensions, the nineteenth-century imagination thrived on the idea of ‘elsewhere’. Alongside a developing rhetoric of geographically and intellectually bounded identities grew a fascination with alterity. Other Worlds seeks to explore the many ways in which Victorians looked beyond their quotidian spheres to imagined alternatives. We invite submissions which explore nineteenth-century modes of thought which position themselves as other, alternative, transcendent, secret or hidden.

This conference also seeks to explore how we, as a network of Victorian scholars, construct the ‘other Victorian’. We use ‘Victorian’ to denote a period of time, describe our research, talk of a people and a nation. Yet this casual use is juxtaposed with a tacit recognition of the instability of the term and its homogenizing tendency as it collapses differences to construct an ideologically seamless era. Abandoning the quest for what ‘Victorian’ really means – an inevitable failure – this conference seeks to embrace the multiplicity of worlds that the term denotes and inhabits and the rebellious tendencies of the ‘Victorians’ themselves towards the idea of a single world.

Other Worlds aims to bring together scholars working in a wide range of disciplines to explore in greater depth the many fields of thought covered by the conference theme.  Papers might deal with some of the following topics:

• Private worlds; confessional writing; secrecy
• The spiritual world; prayers, religious writing; heaven, hell and purgatory
• Fantastical and imaginary worlds
• Children's writing; childhood fantasy
• Marginal or subversive communities
• Travel, exploration, unknown countries
• Alternative histories
• The Victorians as ‘other world’

Please send abstracts of around 250 words to otherworldsconference@gmail.com along with a brief biography by 14th September 2012.

Other Worlds is a joint conference between King’s College London and Victorian Network and is organised by Sarah Crofton, Melissa Dickson and Fariha Shaikh. It is supported by the AHRC.

Reminder: Sex, Courtship and Marriage in Victorian Literature and Culture (5/30/2012)

CFP: Sex, Courtship and Marriage in Victorian Literature and Culture

Victorian Network is an MLA-indexed (from 2012) online journal dedicated to publishing and promoting the best postgraduate work in Victorian Studies.

The sixth issue of Victorian Network, guest edited by Dr Greta Depledge (Royal Holloway), is dedicated to a reassessment of nineteenth-century constructions and understandings of sex, courtship and marriage. Although the heteronormative and companionate marriage was vital for economic and reproductive reasons - as well as romantic impulses - recent scholarship has illuminated its status as but one of several diverse paradigms of marriage/sexual relationship accessible to the Victorians
Across the nineteenth century, profound crises of faith, extensive legal reforms and the new insights afforded by the emergent discipline of anthropology all contributed to a culture of introspection about the practice of marriage, at the same time as advances in science and medicine opened up new interpretations and definitions of sexual practices and preferences.

We are inviting submissions of no more than 7000 words, on any aspect of the theme. Possible topics include but are by no means limited to the following:
 

• Victorian narratives of queer desire: text and subtext
• Representations of women’s sexuality (angels, whores and spinsters)
• Prudishness and censorship: “deviant” novels and scandalous dramas
• Adultery, bigamy, divorce and other affronts to the ideal of companionate marriage
• Transgressive relationships
• Nineteenth-century marriage law, including prohibited degrees of affinity, property reform and breach of promise
• Representations of sexual innocence and experience (virginity, puberty and prostitution
• Subversion of traditional courtship narratives
• Sex and class: adventuresses, mistresses, sex workers and blackmail
• Customs of the country: courtship conventions, betrothals and bridal nights
• Performance, stylization and parody: gender scripts, consumer culture, theatrical subversion

All submissions should conform to MHRA style conventions and the in-house submission guidelines. The deadline for submissions is 30 May 2012.

Contact: victoriannetwork@gmail.com
Website: http://www.victoriannetwork.org/index.php/vn