CFP: Beyond the Grand Tour: Continental Tourism and Travel Writing, 1815-1915 (01/01/2014)

 With the re-opening of borders on the Continent in 1814/15, writers flooded the literary market with works exploring continental tours and experiences.  Invited are submissions for a proposed essay collection concerning the trends and evolutions of travel writing about and within the Continent during the long nineteenth century.

Essays might address gendered travel, narratives determinedly off the beaten paths, Byronic or other ‘celebrity’ tourism, commercialization and mass tourism, genre challenges and boundaries, and the intersections of tourism and travel in many different avenues. Essays will consider the variety of ways in which writers responded to the opening of borders and their accompanying crossings throughout the century, as well as the ways in which familiarity with such Continental landscapes mutated with the development of texts and culture at home and abroad. Authors are invited to submit their essays of approximately 6,500 words, by January 1st, 2014, via email to Dr. Benjamin Colbert (B.Colbert@wlv.ac.uk) and Dr. Lucy Morrison (lxmorrison@salisbury.edu); Palgrave has already expressed an interest in considering the collection. All enquiries are welcome.

CFP: Bicycles / Bicycling in Literature and Culture (proposals 8/1/2013; essays 2/1/2014)

The following CFP might be of interest to my fellow Victorianists. The editors hope that the collection will contain a strong Victorian presence--the Victorians invented the bicycle, after all. Entries on precursors to the bicycle (velocipedes, the "Dandy-horse," etc.) are certainly welcome. 

Bicycles / Bicycling in Literature and Culture (proposals 8/1/13; essays 2/1/14)

The American author Charles Morley once said: “The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.” As Morley’s quote suggests, many people have perceived an intimate connection between cycling and literature, and this edited collection aims to further reflect on that relationship between bicycles and art. We are seeking interdisciplinary essays from scholars interested in analyzing the role and significance of the bicycle in the novels, poems, short stories, plays, memoirs, films, television shows, songs (etc.) of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Essays on texts other than
literature and mass media will be considered, so long as they are primarily still engaging in textual or literary analysis. Since the bicycle is becoming increasingly important and relevant given our world’s growing environmental and economic troubles, we intend for this collection to make a timely and useful foray into understanding the historical and current significance of these fascinating machines.

Possible topics include but certainly are not limited to cycling / bicycles and

• class mobility, socialism, depressions and economic “cycles”
• environmentalism, nature, wilderness
• modernism (Hemingway, Beckett, Joyce, etc.)
• the Victorians (Wells, Conan Doyle, etc.)
• perceptions of time, speed, and space
• the country and the city
• urban design, contested urban space, suburbia
• gender, masculinity, femininity
• race studies, postcolonialism
• cycling memoirs
• travel writing, cyclotourism
• sexuality (heteronormativity, queerness, etc.)
• childhood, children’s literature and culture
• film: “cycling films” (Breaking Away, Quicksilver, etc.), cycles in film
• (E.T., The Wizard of Oz, etc.), documentary (Bicycle Dreams, B.I.K.E., etc.)
• bike (sub)cultures: racing, bike messenger, tall bike, etc.
• music, song, performance
• leisure and labor
• cycling periodicals: poems, stories, travelogues, photo essays, zines, comics
• ghost bikes: the influence of bikes in cycle-less texts.

Abstracts due:  August 1st (250-300 words; include contact info and short bio or CV)
Final essays due: February 2014

Please direct all questions and submissions to the editors:
Jeremy Withers, Iowa State University (withers@iastate.edu)
Daniel Shea, Austin Peay State University (shead@apsu.edu)

CFP: Hotels and Inns in the Long Nineteenth Century (6/7/2013)

Hotels and Inns in Britain and in the United States in the Long Nineteenth Century

We invite submissions for a collection of essays on the hotel in literary works, in journals and correspondences, in travelogues, or in other texts written or published during the long nineteenth century. Our predominant focus is on literary and cultural studies.

We want to concentrate on the long nineteenth century. Inns offering a bed and food to the weary traveler have existed since antiquity, yet textual accounts of the hotel or the inn as a space in which travelers from various social, regional, or national backgrounds, men and women, the old and the young, met and mingled became central to the traveling experience as a locus of self-discovery and self-assertion or of alienation and instability from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. In the long nineteenth century, traveling was facilitated by technical innovations (improved roads, railways), international and especially transatlantic travel became more frequent, and at the end of the century, an increased awareness of types of accommodation existed. The kinds of guesthouses one could stay in had become more differentiated: grand hotels, urban hotels, rural inns, and small pensions offered very different sorts of comfort and of human encounters. Literary and non-literary texts abound with accounts of real and fictitious hotels.

Our collection of essays seeks to examine this under-researched field. We invite fresh looks at old and new material, at real and fictitious hotels, splendid abodes as well as Gothic dwellings. The collection will be geographically restricted to Britain and the United States. Papers with a transatlantic focus (e.g. British travelers in American hotels, American travelers in British inns) are particularly welcome, but excursions of Anglo-American travelers to the Continent and their experiences with Continental accommodations are also of interest.

Possible topics:

• Types of hotels and guests:
• hotel, inn, grand hotel, guesthouse
• country inns vs. urban hotels
• hotels in various surroundings: seaside, mountains, cities, villages
• institutions (how can Habermas's concept of the public sphere be applied?)
• the hotel in contrast with other institutions
• splendor vs. the back doors
• encounters between different strata of society, men and women, individuals belonging to different nations/ethnicities
• cultural contact, especially transatlantic contact
• African Americans in hotels
• hotels and war (e.g., the Civil War)
• soldiers, merchants, travelers, explorers as guests
• national cuisine and hotel menus

Real, virtual, and emotional spaces:

• What does it mean to enter the threshold of a hotel—what does one leave behind, what kind of temporary home does one create, what elements of nostalgia arise, how does a sense of loss coexist with the draw of the new?
• How does the hotel or inn offer a liminal space for exploration in the life of the author (or his/her protagonists)?
• transitions (staircase, back doors), threshold spaces, liminality
• architecture of inns: rooms, windows (looking out, panorama, seeing obstacles)
• staircases (symbols of upward movement?)
• spatial theory and the hotel
• alienation, alterity
• home away from home, homesickness
• fleeting moments of enlightenment
• judgmental attitudes towards the different, new, or other
• suitcases full of memories, or souvenirs as kitsch (the hotel in a nutshell)
• boundaries between self and other

The hotel, class, and the family:

• attitudes towards servants or other travelers in hotels
• elites and non-elites
• the privilege of travel
• the kitchen help/the landlady as family
• status: class structure and class distinctions in hotels (rooms, eating arrangements)
• children's experiences in hotels
• chaperones and ladies in hotels
• love stories in hotels

Unusual hotels:

• the unspeakable in hotels
• unmade beds, lost suitcases, unwelcome intruders, lost keys, unpaid bills
• ghosts, haunted or Gothic hotels
• unexpected encounters
• assignations in hotels

We invite two-page proposals by the deadline of June 7, 2013. Please also include a short bio. If your proposal is selected, the final essay will be due on December 15, 2013. Please email the proposals to both of the following addresses:

Prof. Monika Elbert (Montclair State University, New Jersey), elbertm@mail.montclair.edu
PD Dr. Susanne Schmid (from April 2013: guest professor, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany), suschmid@aol.com.

CFP: Queer Relations: Revising the Victorian Family (4/1/2013)

Queer Relations:  Revising the Victorian Family

Proposal deadline: 1 April 2013

Dr Duc Dau, University of Western Australia duc.dau@uwa.edu.au

Dr Shale Preston, Macquarie University shale.preston@mq.edu.au

We invite contributions for an upcoming volume of essays which examine the Victorian family through a queer lens. 

The Victorian family can be taken to mean the nineteenth-century nuclear or extended family, or the family of texts associated with the Victorian period (e.g. nineteenth-century and neo-Victorian texts).  We are looking for exciting interrogations into the discourse of the Victorian family.  These interrogations can focus on untraditional familial arrangements, non-normative relationships, polyamorous attachments, queer families in disparate communities/locations (e.g. circuses, theaters, brothels, homes for fallen women, monasteries, convents, hospitals, schools, ships, military units, thieving fraternities), homosexual/homosocial utopias, erotic fantasy worlds (e.g. fairy, goblin), etc. 

Alternatively, the interrogations can examine queer 20th and 21st century texts/domains/mediums that allude to or mash-up the Victorian family of texts (canonical or otherwise) or seek to revise traditional notions of the Victorian family.  Focus areas can include but are not limited to the novel, poetry, film, television, theater, auto/biography, periodicals, the internet, steampunk etc.

Please send 300 word proposals and a two-page CV to the editors Dr Duc Dau at duc.dau@uwa.edu.au and Dr Shale Preston at shale.preston@mq.edu.au by 1 April 2013. Completed chapters of 6,000 - 8,000 words will be due by 1 February 2014.

Reminder: Essay Collection on Thomas Hardy’s Short Stories (9/7/2012)

Hardy’s short stories have had little attention as compared to his novels and poetry. Therefore, I am organizing a volume of previously unpublished essays and seek articles of 6,000 to 8,000 words on any aspect of Hardy’s short stories which help deepen our understanding of his use of the genre. Proposals may address a story individually or the stories as collected in the volumes Wessex Tales (1888), A Group of Noble Dames (1891), Life’s Little Ironies (1894), A Changed Man (1913).

Key themes and topics might include:

Implications of periodical publication;

Readership of individual stories and/or collected stories;

Use of sensationalism;

Use of humor;

Emphasis on class and cultural issues;

Importance of music;

Gender relations;

Use of setting;

Use of supernatural, mystery, mythical aspects;

Use of religion;

Emphasis on community relations and mores;

Use of narrative form

Please send proposals of up to 500 words, for articles of between 6,000-8,000 words, by 7 September 2012 to Juliette B. Schaefer: schaefej@ohiodominican.edu Ohio Dominican University (614) 251-4667. Proposals should include the article’s working title, the author’s academic affiliation, and a 100-word biography.

Inquiries are welcome. I will aim to inform authors that they have been selected for the volume by the second week of October. 

Reminder: News of the World Essay Collection (5/31/2012)

News of the World: ‘Journalism for the Rich, Journalism for the Poor’ 1843-2011

Editors: Laurel Brake, Chandrika Kaul, Mark W. Turner

Publisher: ‘Studies in the History of the Media’, Palgrave Macmillan

Founded in 1843, the News of the World was one of the UK’s longest-running and most popular Sunday newspapers when it came to its inauspicious end in the summer of 2011. As the UK’s Leveson Inquiry, due to report in 2013, continues to unravel details about the recent ‘hacking’ scandal, the News of the World will continue to make the news for some time to come.

We are organizing a volume of essays and seek articles of 7000 words on any aspect of the newspaper’s history, from the 19th century through the present, which help to deepen our understanding of this title and of media history more generally.

Key themes and topics might include:

• The Genre of Sunday papers, in/since the 19th century
• Newspaper Form:  layout, multiple editions, departments, etc.
• Illustration and Photography: the New Journalism, Photojournalism, etc.
• Readerships and Circulations: ‘metropolitan’ and ‘country’; provincial editions/readers; international contexts
• Empire: decolonisation; popular cultures
• Comparative Readings: America, Empire, etc.
• Investigative journalism: 19th, 20th, 21st centuries
• Politics and the Popular Press: 19th, 20th, 21st centuries
• The Economics of the Popular Press
• Crime and Court Reporting
• War and the Popular Press: e.g. Crimea, Boer, WWI, WW2, Falklands
• Celebrity
• Sports News, since the 19th century
• Sex and the Popular Press
• Proprietors and Media Moguls
• Practices of Newsgathering since the 19th century
• Press Freedom  and Press Controls
• The Closing of the NOTW: the rise of the Sunday Sun

Please send proposals of up to 250 words, for articles of between 6000-7000 words, to all the editors by 31st May 2012:

Laurel Brake:  l.brake@bbk.ac.uk

Chandrika Kaul: ck24@st-andrews.ac.uk

Mark Turner:  mark.2.turner@kcl.ac.uk

We aim to inform authors that they have been selected for the volume by the middle of June 2012. Completed articles will be due to the editors by the end of December 2012, and we expect publication in 2013.

Please see the Palgrave Macmillan website for style guidelines.