Reminder: Joint NAVSA/ACCUTE Panel 2014 "Neo-Victorian Uses and Abuses of History" (11/15/2013; 5/24-27/2014)

Joint NAVSA/ACCUTE Panel 2014
Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada

May 24 – 27, 2014

Deadline: November 15, 2013

"Neo-Victorian Uses and Abuses of History"
In the relatively new field of Neo-Victorian studies the status of history is the focus of much debate. Is the recourse to the Victorian period necessarily nostalgic? Can the Victorian period be used to critique racism, violence and homophobia? And what of imaginative reconstructions of the Victorian period in genres such as Steampunk: are novels that reconfigure the Victorian period with contemporary technology and issues “historical” or do they call into question totalizing historical narratives?

Possible topics include but are by no means limited to:

• History, collective memory and nostalgia
• The commodification of the Victorian period
• Retro-futurism and the status of history
• Refiguring colonialism in Neo-Victorian texts
• Ecohistory and Neo-Victorianism
• Play and history in Neo-Victorian texts
• The Victorian period as utopia/dystopia
• Race, history and Neo-Victorianism
• Subverting the “Victorian” in Neo-Victorianism

Send 250 word proposals or completed papers for 15-20-minute talks to Martin Danahay .   Deadline: November 15, 2013

CFP: ACCUTE 2014 “The Senses in Victorian Literature” (11/1/2013; 5/24-27/2014)

2014 ACCUTE Conference 

Brock University

May 24-27, 2014

Deadline: November 1, 2013a

Organizer: Ann Gagne (Seneca College)

“The Senses in Victorian Literature”
A recent turn in sensory studies has seen an increased focus on how the senses are valuable to literary study. This session seeks to explore the relationship of the senses as narrated and depicted in Victorian literature. The senses, particularly touch, can be used to portray a character’s knowledge; often functioning as boundary markers between the self and others. Moreover an emphasis on the senses can be indicative of larger historical or societal preoccupations. Papers addressing any of the senses (touch, taste, hearing, sight, smell) as present in Victorian texts will be considered. Readings of embodiment in relation to the sensory (how senses highlight borders of the body) or broader aspects of the sensory relative to class and societal negotiations (how senses address boundaries in society) are particularly welcome.

Please send a 300-500 word proposal, a 100 word abstract, a 50 word bio, and a completed Proposal Submission Information form (Found here: http://accute.ca/general-sessions/)

by November 1, 2013 to ann.gagne@senecacollege.ca

CFP: Joint NAVSA/ACCUTE Panel 2014 "Neo-Victorian Uses and Abuses of History" (11/15/2013; 5/24-27/2014)

Joint NAVSA/ACCUTE Panel 2014
Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada

May 24 – 27, 2014

Deadline: November 15, 2013

"Neo-Victorian Uses and Abuses of History"
In the relatively new field of Neo-Victorian studies the status of history is the focus of much debate. Is the recourse to the Victorian period necessarily nostalgic? Can the Victorian period be used to critique racism, violence and homophobia? And what of imaginative reconstructions of the Victorian period in genres such as Steampunk: are novels that reconfigure the Victorian period with contemporary technology and issues “historical” or do they call into question totalizing historical narratives?

Possible topics include but are by no means limited to:

• History, collective memory and nostalgia
• The commodification of the Victorian period
• Retro-futurism and the status of history
• Refiguring colonialism in Neo-Victorian texts
• Ecohistory and Neo-Victorianism
• Play and history in Neo-Victorian texts
• The Victorian period as utopia/dystopia
• Race, history and Neo-Victorianism
• Subverting the “Victorian” in Neo-Victorianism

Send 250 word proposals or completed papers for 15-20-minute talks to Martin Danahay .   Deadline: November 15, 2013

CFP: Joint NAVSA/ACCUTE Panel 2014 “Victorian Uses and Abuses of History” (11/15/2013; 5/24-27/2014)

Joint NAVSA/ACCUTE Panel 2014
Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada

May 24 – 27, 2014

Deadline: November 15, 2013

“Victorian Uses and Abuses of History”
What were the uses of history in the Victorian period? The period saw the publication of numerous historical novels following the success of Sir Walter Scott’s “Waverley.” Many novelists, including Charles Dickens, Charles Reade, William Makepiece Thackery, Charles Kingsley, George Eliot and Robert Louis Stevenson all addressed history in their novels. The French Revolution figured largely as a historical warning against revolution in the minds of many Victorian sages, while the Fall of Rome could be used to warn against overweening pride in the Empire. History could figure as nightmare in Gothic novels. Inspired by Ruskin and Morris, many looked back to the Medieval period as a source of values and an alternative to industrialized Britain. This call for papers invites proposals for individual or collaborative papers on the theme of "Victorian Uses and Abuses of History.”  

Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to:

• The Victorian Historical Novel
• Victorian Medievalism
• “The Renaissance" according to Victorians
• Victorian Historians and Historiography
• Historical Time vs. Geological Time
• Past and Present Contrasts
• "Neo" Architecture and Literature of the Victorian Period
• Historical Self-Consciousness
• History and Aesthetics
• Historical Utopias and Dystopias

Send 250 word proposals or completed papers for 15-20-minute talks to Martin Danahay .   Deadline: November 15, 2013

CFP: VSAO-ACCUTE Panel 2014 "Stuff and Stuffing" (11/1/2013; 5/24-27/2014)

The annual VSAO-ACCUTE Panel to be held at the 2014 Congress

Joint Session: Victorian Studies Association of Ontario (VSAO) at ACCUTE
Brock University, St Catharines, Ontario.

May 24-27, 2014
Deadline: November 1, 2013

“Stuff and Stuffing”

Henry James’ infamous condemnation of nineteenth-century novels as “loose baggy monsters” is so perfectly devastating that many forget that the author was posing a question. Flummoxed by a literary form that so readily included “the accidental and the arbitrary” in its representations, James pondered: what do they “artistically mean?” Walter Benjamin, another modern looking back on the nineteenth century with a sense of bewilderment, suggested elliptically that the swollen cushions, ample hangings, and profusion of dust covers, doilies, and antimacassars of the nineteenth-century interior were evidence of a deeply engrained “posture … of struggle and defense.”

This panel seeks to address James and Benjamin’s queries, and, more generally, to explore the profusion of “stuff” in the Victorian era. A notoriously vague term, “stuff” can refer to a workable material that can be molded into other forms—think of the abundance of new commodities and technologies wrought by the industrial revolution, or the discovery of new entities, speciations, and categories of materiality by the burgeoning fields of science. However, “stuff” can also refer to material that remains stubbornly unspecialized, undifferentiated, and inert—dust, batting, and fillings that are useful chiefly in their ability to insulate and take up space. How did the Victorians interact with, represent, and imitate their materially profuse surroundings? What stuffs Victorian texts?

Papers may consider such topics as:

• Taxidermy and other stuffed animals
• Crinoline, padding, puffed sleeves, and the stuff of cloth
• Foodstuffs and stuffing oneself: gluttony, corpulence, and satiation
• Baggy monsters: rhetorical verbiage, textual excess, narrative bulk, and the serial novel
• Dickensian stuff: the Cratchitt Christmas goose stuffing, Sir Duddle’s stuffed people; the Veneerings and the Buffers
• Modernist creations of and reactions to Victorian “stuffiness”
• Filling in and filling up
• Household stuff and stuffy houses: billowing curtains, draped fabrics, covers and casings
• Stuff and nonsense

Questions and submissions should be sent toVSAOatACCUTE@gmail.com. Please submit the following as separate documents by November 1, 2013:

• a proposal of 300-500 words that has NO identifying marks for the author
• an abstract of 100 words and a bio of 50 words
• a proposal sheet, available at: http://accute.ca/general-sessions/

Please note that speakers must be members of either VSAO or ACCUTE at the time of the conference.  VSAO: http://vsao.apps01.yorku.ca/

CFP: At the edge of perception: Victorian conceptions of the unseen universe (11/1/2012; 6/1-4/2013)

Joint Session CFP for ACCUTE/NAVSA:

At the edge of perception: Victorian conceptions of the unseen universe 

ACCUTE 2013

Victoria, British Columbia

June 1-4, 2013

We invite papers that engage with the congress theme “@ the edge,” especially as related to the Victorian conceptions of the unseen. We suggest papers related (but not limited to) the following themes: 

• Victorians and ghosts, seers, spirits, the occult 
• Victorians and ether, magnetism, energy 
• Victorians and the edge of the “real,” 
• Victorians and the limits of human perception 
• Victorians and faith, agnosticism, atheism, unbelief 
• Victorians and space 
• Victorians and mapping/seeking the unknown 

Please send proposals of 300-500 words, along with 100-word abstracts and 50-word bios, to Lisa Surridge, lsurridg@uvic.ca. Materials must be received by November 1. 

CFP: “We Are Not Amused”: Victorian Comedy and Humour (11/1/2012; 6/1-4/2013)

CFP for the Victorian Studies Association of Ontario's ACCUTE (Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English) member-organized panel:
“We Are Not Amused”: Victorian Comedy and Humour

Abstracts due: Nov 1, 2012
Conference date and location: June 1-4, University of Victoria, BC

Comedy is under-explored in Victorian literary criticism, but it is pervasive in the texts of the era, from brief moments—Dickens’ caricatures and Thackeray’s asides—to more extended treatments, in Lear’s nonsense verse and Jerome K. Jerome’s widely popular Three Men in a Boat.

This panel invites papers that explore comedy, humour and laughter in Victorian literature and cultural productions. What functions did comedy serve in Victorian texts? When is its humour riotous and anarchic, and when does it reinforce norms? How comfortably did comedy sit alongside the period’s idealization of moral and artistic solemnity? What effect does laughing at, or laughing with, texts and characters have upon our understanding of them? Why are the comic features of a scene or moment important?

Papers may consider such topics as:

• Parody, burlesque, farce and satire
• Ditties, jokes, word-play, wit and puns
• Black humour and the grotesque
• Clowning, the circus, and comic performance
• “Serious cheerfulness” and the mixing of wit and gravity
• Savoy Operas and the music hall
• Eminent Victorians and depictions of Victorian earnestness          
• Failed humour or humourlessness
• Caricatures and stereotypes
• Comedy as social critique or subversive force
• Sentimental humour
• The science and philosophy of Victorian laughter

ACCUTE requires the following of all proposed papers: 

• a 700-word proposal or completed paper (of approximately 8-10 double-spaced pages, not to exceed 20 minutes in presentation). Please note that because of our policy of blind vetting, ACCUTE cannot accept proposals or papers that include identifying marks. These include information in headers, references to your work or to your collaborations with others, your rank or institutional affiliation, or any other information that might identify you to a vettor.
• a completed Proposal Submissions Information Sheet, available from the ACCUTE website: http://www.accute.ca/generalcall.html
• a 100-word abstract of the proposed presentation
• a 50-word bio-bibliographical note on yourself

Email address for submissions: VSAOatACCUTE@gmail.com

CFP: Victorian Hesitations: Indeterminacy in Language, Art, and Politics (11/15/2011; 5/28-31/2012)

Victorian Studies Association of Ontario/ Assoc. of Canadian College and University Teachers of English - Joint Panel

Fiona Coll and Constance Crompton

Victorian Hesitations: Indeterminacy in Language, Art, and Politics

For knowing his way he is answerable, and therefore [the young artist] must not walk doubtingly … he may pause, but he must not hesitate. - Ruskin, Modern Painters

Lord Hartington's conduct seems to give signs of hesitation. - The Nation, April 1886

The Victorian ethos is often understood to have been based upon action, expansion, and initiative. However, behind all the evidence of Victorian vim and vigour lie traces of equivocation, vacillation, and indecision. From the Crown's factual reluctance to make Cameroon a British protectorate to Lady Bracknell's fictional admonition against irresolution in The Importance of Being Earnest, a concern with hesitation marks the prose and policy of the era. This panel invites papers that explore suspended moments in Victorian culture – moments when a delay, however long, was of real consequence. How did the Victorians understand hesitation? How did they weigh the ethics of equivocation against the virtues of candor? How did their moments of uncertainty manifest themselves in movement? How was the difference between deliberation and doubt calibrated in this age of enterprise?

Papers may focus on, but need not be limited to:

• Anxiety
• Contemplation
• Deliberation
• Doubt
• Dubiety
• Irresolution
• Meditation
• Pause
• Prevarication
• Reconsideration
• Reflection
• Reluctance
• Restriction
• Stillness
• Suspense

Following the instructions on the ACCUTE website (under Conference) for joint association sessions, send your 700-word proposal (or 8-10 page double-spaced paper), a 100-word abstract, a 50-word biographical statement, and the submitter information form (http://www.accute.ca/generalcall.html#submit), to Constance Crompton at VSAOatACCUTE@gmail.com by November 15th.

ACCUTE: http://www.accute.ca/

CFP: ACCUTE/NAVSA Joint Session: Victorian Technologies and the Technologies of Victorian Studies (11/1/2011; 5/28-31/2012)

From railways to telegraphy, typewriters to telephones, Victorians were engaged with new, and developing, technologies of connection and communication. Innovations in technology over the course of the Victorian period influenced wider cultural ideas of connection, of scale and of human capacity. Like the Victorians, researchers in Victorian Studies are using new technologies of reading, writing, research and social connection that are changing the nature of our work and its dissemination.

This call is for papers that critically address Victorian Technologies and/or the technologies of Victorian Studies. Whether you are interested in the Blackberry or the trans-Atlantic cable, you are invited to submit a proposal for a 20 minute paper to be presented at the ACCUTE/NAVSA joint panel at the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities in Waterloo, Ontario from May 28-May 31 2012.

 Possible topics may include:

• technologies of reading, writing, printing and publishing
• photography, phonography, telephony and other media and information technologies
• from horses to railways: technological innovation vs. the natural world
• industrial innovations and working with/as machines
• technologies of the body: medical instruments, prostheses
• the railway, the telegraph and other social networks
• theories, histories and discourses of the technological
• Archives then and now
• the history and future of the [Victorian/Victorian Studies] Book
• Victorian Studies e-journals and archive digitization projects
• Victorian Studies social media: blogs, facebook groups and twitter
• Victorian Studies and the digital humanities

Please submit your proposal by November 1 to Jennifer Esmail at jesmail@wlu.ca. Submission instructions are available at http://www.accute.ca/joint.html#submit. All submitters must be members in good standing of either NAVSA or ACCUTE.

CFP: Victorian Systems and Standardization (11/15/2009)

Congress 2010: Victorian Studies Association of Ontario/ Association of Canadian
College and University Teachers of English Joint Session

VICTORIAN SYSTEMS AND STANDARDIZATION

Our little systems have their day…
Tennyson, In Memoriam, Prologue, st. 5

From the factory to the railway, the telegraph to the postal service, the growth of empire to the establishment of national educational curricula, the nineteenth century was marked by large-scale impositions of system, and by a concurrent emphasis on the standardization of objects, concepts, and people. This panel seeks to explore the imbrications of system and standardization throughout the Victorian era, and to examine how the concept of rationalized organization was imagined and understood by Victorians. How did the generalized abstraction inherent in the process of standardization shape the lived experience of individuals? What supra-individual needs were anticipated in the construction of various kinds of system? To what extent did the Victorians envisage a connection between systematization and knowledge production?

Papers may focus on any occurrence of system or standardization during the
Victorian period, such as:
- Genre as artistic standardization
- Disciplines (scientific and otherwise)
- Domestic conventions
- Bodies in systems
- Heterodox and orthodox belief systems
- Formal and informal economies
- The aesthetics of system

We are also interested in events and ideas that were explicitly figured as
resistances to system, such as:
- Works of genius or inspiration
- Free love
- Anarchy
- Mutiny

For more information see http://www.accute.ca/2010cfp.html#jo. Please send your
700-word proposal (or 8-10 page double-spaced paper), a 100 word abstract, a 50
word biographical statement, and the ACCUTE submitter information form, to
VSAOatACCUTE@gmail.com by November 15th.

Image by flickr user British Postal Museum and Archive / CC licensed