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

CFP: NCGS Special Issue "Gender and the Law in Nineteenth-Century England" (5/15/2012)

Nineteenth-Century 

Gender Studies

http://www.ncgsjournal.com/

Special Issue "Gender and the Law in Nineteenth-Century England" (Summer 2012)

The nineteenth century was a period rife with watershed moments in the history of law and gender in England. It is also a period marked by contradictions: legislation that granted women greater rights under the law took place in fits and starts, and was never unaccompanied by cultural and social backlash. The period began, in 1801, with a national census that revealed women outnumbered men by 400,000, and ended with the repeal of the discriminatory Contagious Diseases Acts (1866) and the passage of the First Married Woman's Property Act (1870).  Debates about the relationship between women and the law, and their attendant questions (e.g. Were women legal persons? Could they be?), permeated the legislation, court cases, newspapers, serials, and novels of the day. The roles, and legal power, of English men were also in flux during the period. The rise of industrialism, as well as the middle class, challenged the masculinity of the landed and leisured male aristocrat. Laws that granted women greater rights in marriage, divorce, and ownership of earnings and property served to challenge the centrality of the male patriarch in traditional family structures. In turn, masculinity became increasingly defined by both state-sponsored and independent imperial ventures in the colonies. And by the end of the nineteenth century, a new version of manhood came into being. The rise of the aesthetes, as represented by the publicity surrounding Oscar Wilde, and the criticism of the aesthetes, as symbolized by his rather public trial, serve as the most infamous example of events that brought to light growing anxieties about masculinity, sexuality, and the law.

This special issue of NCGS invites scholars from across the arts and humanities to contribute their work on the intersections between law, gender, femininity, masculinity, and sexuality. Topics that might be addressed include:

• Queen Victoria
• Marriage, Motherhood, and/or Families (including the Child Custody Act, the Matrimonial Causes Act, and the Married Woman's Property Act)
• Governesses and their relationship to legal families
• Property and inheritance
• Authorship and the International Copyright Act
• Education (including the establishment of Queen’s College, London; Bedford College; and Girton College)
• The “odd” women (singletons)
• Women and reform movements (including the Voting Act and the Equal Franchise Act)
• Labor laws (including the Ashley’s Mines Act and the Factory Acts)
• Health Care and the Contagious Diseases Act
• Criminal Justice (including Prostitution, Sodomy Trials, and Prisons)
• Imperialism, colonialism, and gender
• Masculinities
• Performance

Please send complete papers (of between 5,000 and 8,000 words) electronically for consideration to the guest editors of the special issue (Prof. Katherine Gilbert and Prof. Julia Chavez) at the following email addresses: kgilbert@drury.edu and JChavez@stmartin.edu

Deadline for submissions: May 15, 2012

Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies is a peer-reviewed, online journal committed to publishing insightful and innovative scholarship on gender studies and nineteenth-century British literature, art and culture. The journal is a collaborative effort that brings together scholars from a variety of universities to create a unique voice in the field. We endorse a broad definition of gender studies and welcome submissions that consider gender and sexuality in conjunction with race, class, place and nationality. Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies publishes two regular issues a year, in addition to a specially-themed summer issue, and accepts submissions year-round.