Special Event: Monsters and Detectives: Re-Writing the Victorians for Television and Radio (11/23/2013)

Monsters and Detectives: Re-Writing the Victorians for Television & Radio
Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD
Saturday November 23, 2013, 2:00-5:00pm

Adaptations of nineteenth-century narratives are a staple of prime-time drama, but the costume classics have now been joined by a new kind of Neo-Victorian tale. Popular shows like Ripper Street and Sherlock reinvent the past as a fictive playground of ideas, where contemporary fears and fantasies can be played out. But why do writers return to the past in order to scrutinise modernity? And what happens in the intersection between history, literature and mass media?

Speakers:
Dr Marie-Luise Kohlke (Swansea): 'Reciprocal Haunting in Ripper Street: Spectres of Twenty-First-Century Sexual Abuse in Neo-Victorian Media'
Michael Eaton (television and radio writer): 'Victorians such as Us'
Dr Benjamin Poore (York): “The Strange Casebooks of Dr Jekyll and Mr Holmes: Adaptations and the limits of Neo-Victorianism”

Admission is free, but registration is essential: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/events-calendar/monsters-and-detectives-re-writing-the-victorians-for-television-and-radio

CFP: ESSE 2014 "Gender and Sexuality in Neo-Victorianism" (2/28/2014; 8/29-9/2/2014)

12th ESSE CONFERENCE

KOŠICE, SLOVAKIA

August 29-September 2, 2014

Deadline: February 28, 2014

Convenors: Georges Letissier (U. of Nantes) <georges.letissier@univ-nantes.fr > and Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz (U. of

Málaga) <mirr@uma.es>

The seminar will investigate the centrality of gender and sexuality in “neo-Victorianism”, including both scholarly works (history, cultural studies, social anthropology etc.) and creative works (fiction, film, arts) and the possible productive interaction between the two. The relevance of gender and sexuality identified as foundational at the inception of what is both a genre (with still undefined contours) and an academic discipline will be appraised by addressing questions of representation (performativity, scopophilia, voyeurism) and reception (“sexsational read”, bifocality etc.), without omitting the ethical and ideological implications of such aesthetic choices. The tensions between marginality and norms (queering, gender-bending) and the historical epistemology of sexuality may also be considered.

Please send proposals to both seminar convenors, including name, affiliation, Email, title of paper and abstract (max. 200 words). Deadline for submission of 200-words proposals: February 28, 2014

The conference webpage, http://www.esse2014kosice.sk, will become active by the end of September 2013.

CFP: Journal of Victorian Culture Online "Neo-Victorian Studies and Digital Humanities" (7/15/2013; 9/15/2013)

This fall, the Journal of Victorian Culture Online will feature a week  of posts devoted to the connections between Neo-Victorian studies and  digital humanities. The goal of this week is to consider the ways in which we are mobilizing the tools, concepts, and methodologies of digital humanities research and pedagogy to re-contextualize, revise,
and re-envision Victorian culture in terms of our age.

Just as JVC Online’s digital form enables it to have broad reach, so too do the digital and technological elements of how we teach and study Neo-Victorian culture, literature, and artifacts uniquely position this work to traverse disciplinary, cultural, and genre boundaries. To this end, we invite proposals for blog posts that discuss and/or enact the
intersections between Neo-Victorian studies and digital humanities.

Please send all 75-word proposals with a one-page C.V. as a single attached file (MS Word document or Adobe pdf) to Lisa Hager (lisa.hager@uwc.edu) by July 15, 2013. Final submissions of accepted posts will be due on September 15, 2013.

For further information, please visit:
http://myblogs.informa.com/jvc/2013/05/24/cfp-neo-vict-dh-week/

www.victorianculture.com

CFP: Neo-Victorian Humour: The Rhetorics and Politics of Comedy, Irony and Parody (2/28/2014; 9/1/2014)

The editorial board for Neo-Victorian Studies invite contributions on the theme of Neo-Victorian Humour for the fifth volume in Rodopi’s Neo-Victorian Series, to be published in 2015. This edited collection will examine the manifold modes, functions, and implications of humour across neo-Victorian media, such as literature, film, anime, graphic novels, videogames, visual art, performance and lifestyle (e.g. steampunk). The volume will explore neo-Victorianism in the light of contemporary aesthetics as the art of indirect speech, what Umberto Eco famously described as   “accept[ing] the challenge of the past, of the already said” to “consciously and with pleasure play the game of irony” (Reflections on The Name of the Rose, 1994) – but also to engage in more aggressive games of parody, aesthetic travesty, confrontation and denunciation. The omnipresence of a humorous awareness tends to insist on a crucial difference and distance between neo-Victorianism and its nineteenth-century referent, thus seemingly arguing against a nostalgic stance. Yet humorous devices can also be employed to recycle invidious ideologies (e.g. racism, imperialism, classism, sexism) under the politically correct guise of comical debunking or subversion, even to the point of carrying forward a pro-nostalgic agenda. From a technical point of view, humour also implies the establishment of a complicity with the audience, involving readers/viewers in complex games that may finally have less bearing on the diegetic world than on the textual, intertextual and metatextual nineteenth-century worlds being re-imagined. We encourage chapters to investigate the inherent contradictions of neo-Victorian humour’s aims and effects, both as a means of self-consciously creative experimentation and adaptation of historical events, figures, and artifacts and as a self-defeating nihilistic or anti-historical project. Possible topics may include, but need not be limited to the following:

• humour’s shaping of contemporary views of ‘the Victorian’ and the long nineteenth century
• the postmodern features and implications of neo-Victorian humour
• the technical distancing devices of neo-Victorian humour: anachronism, parody, comedy, irony, structural counterpoint, double or multiple narratives, mise en abyme, and all forms of metatextuality
• comic modes, audience complicity, and resistance
• neo-Victorian humour and the Gothic
• the politicisation of neo-Victorian humour
• neo-Victorian humour, empathy, and its limits
• comic innovation and the principle of ironic reprise
• the role of playfulness and narrative games
• ethical and non-ethical humour in neo-Victorianism
• humour’s functions within and across neo-Victorian genres and media
• neo-Victorian humour and trauma
• the principle of humour  in adaptations and adaptive practice
• neo-Victorianism, symbolic justice, and having the last laugh

Please send 300-500 word proposals (for 8,000-10,000 word chapters) by 28 February 2014 to the series editors, Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian  Gutleben (m.l.kohlke@swansea.ac.uk and Christian.GUTLEBEN@unice.fr). Please add a  short   biographical  note  in  the  body of your email. Completed chapters will be due by 1 September 2014.

CFP: Neo-Victorian Villainy (3/24/2013; 5/25/2013)

Neo-Victorian Villainy:

Adaptation and Reinvention on Page, Stage and Screen

Department of Theatre, Film and Television

University of York, UK

Saturday May 25th 2013

This one-day symposium aims to facilitate cross-disciplinary discussion between scholars in Film, Theatre, Television, Neo-Victorian Studies, Literature, Adaptation Studies, and Fan and Popular Culture Studies. At its heart is the research question:

In what ways do modern representations of the villain in popular culture draw on the popular culture and iconic villains of the Victorian period?

Responses might consider any number of cultural manifestations, from direct adaptations of Victorian fiction and neo-Victorian fiction, to sequels/prequels, crossover fiction and modernisations, to new stories set in the Victorian era, or the more indirect ways in which Victorian conventions and innovations continue to influence popular good-versus-evil narratives.

Rationale:

One of the attractions of much neo-Victorian fiction, film and TV is undoubtedly the ‘permission’ that it grants readers to indulge their enjoyment of fast-paced, incident-packed narrative, in homage to, or pastiche of, the classic nineteenth-century novel. But to what extent do such narratives also permit the reader to return to clear character categories of good and evil, even if only as an inversion, where the villains are those who were once considered the ‘great and the good’ of the Victorian period? 

Some further areas for consideration might include, but are not limited to:

• Lines of influence between uncanny figures of the fin de siècle – Count Dracula, Svengali, Edward Hyde, Moriarty, Dorian Gray, Ayesha – and twentieth-century film, television and comic-book villains
• Neo-Victorian fiction, film, TV and theatre interrogate the (re)gendering of the villain
• Historical events, such as the Wilde trials or the Ripper murders, which have been reframed in recent work to create new ‘villains of the piece’
• The roots of neo-Victorian representations of villainy in the ‘Gaslight Melodramas’ of the 1940s: Gaslight, Fanny By Gaslight/Man of Evil, Footsteps in the Fog, Hangover Square
• The influence of psychoanalytical ideas, filtered through pop psychology and the self-help industry, on modern readings of Victorian villains
• The relationship between the Victorian popular press and sensational fiction, and its modern echoes in print, TV and new media.

Please send abstracts of around 200 words to the symposium organiser, Dr Ben Poore, at benjamin.poore@york.ac.uk by midnight on March 24th 2013. Authors of successful proposals will be notified during the following week. Details of how to register will also be circulated at that point.

CFP: Neo-Victorian Cultures (3/1/2013; 7/24-26/2013)

Neo-Victorian Cultures

24-26 July 2013, 

Liverpool John Moores University

                 

While aesthetic, political and artistic returns to the Victorians have been prevalent throughout the twentieth century, the last decade has seen a particular surge in scholarly work addressing the seemingly ceaseless desire to reassess and adapt Victorian texts, theories, ideas and customs. Such work has focused in particular on manifestations of the neo-Victorian on page and on screen; this conference seeks to build on but also expand these debates by bringing together writers, practitioners and researchers working on the lasting presence of the Victorians since 1901 in a wide variety of realms, ranging from art and architecture to science, politics, economics, fiction and film. In doing so, the event aims to further expand the vibrant field of neo-Victorian studies both within and beyond the arts and humanities through an examination of the Victorians’ continuing influence on twentieth and twenty-first century culture. We therefore welcome and encourage abstracts from postgraduate students, academics and independent researchers from all academic realms in the hope of capturing the diverse work being done on Victorian afterlives across a wide spectrum of disciplines and across traditional disciplinary boundaries.

Topics may include, but are by no means limited to, the following: 

• the ethics, politics and aesthetics of adaptation
• the gender and sexual politics of neo-Victorianism
• neo-Victorianism on page, screen and canvas
• neo-Victorian subcultures
• the Victorians in contemporary architecture, art and design
• neo-Victorian journalism/ the Victorian press and contemporary journalism
• the Victorians in contemporary science and medicine
• the neo-Victorian canon
• teaching neo-Victorianism
• the neo-Victorian marketplace; consuming and marketing the (neo-)Victorians
• Steampunk

Presentations should take the form of 20-minute papers. We also welcome proposals for fully-formed panels or roundtables. For individual papers, please submit a 300-word abstract as well as a short biographical note. For panel and roundtable proposals, please provide a brief outline of the session’s aims together with abstracts and biographical notes for each speaker and for the proposed panel chair or discussant. All proposals should be emailed to the organisers at organisers@neovictoriancultures.org.uk no later than 1 March 2013. Please do not hesitate to email us if you have any questions about the event.

We look forward to receiving your proposals and to welcoming you to LJMU in July!

The Organisers: Nadine Muller, Lucinda Matthews-Jones, and Jonathan Cranfield

Conference Website: http://www.neovictoriancultures.org.uk/

CFP: Neo-Victorianism and Tactility panel (1/2/2013; 7/19-20/2013)

Dr Duc Dau and Dr Caitlin McGuinness are seeking to organise a panel for the conference “The Victorian Tactile Imagination,” 19-20 July 2013, at Birkbeck, University of London. They are looking for two papers to complete our panel on Victorian reimagining and tactility. Abstracts that complement their paper on amputation, illustration and fairy tales in Jane Campion's film The Piano would be highly desirable. But they are also open to anything that sounds interesting. Papers could be about novels, films, theatre, poems, graphic novels, or steampunk, among other things. The conference CFP can be found below. Please send abstracts of 400 words and a brief biographical note to Duc Dau at duc.dau@uwa.edu.au and Caitlin McGuinness at caitlinfmcguinness33@gmail.com by Wednesday 2 January.  Preliminary inquiries would be most welcome. 

Call for Papers
The Victorian Tactile Imagination conference

Birkbeck, University of London, 19-20 July 2013

Keynote speakers:
Professor Gillian Beer (University of Cambridge); Professor William Cohen (University of Maryland); Professor Hilary Fraser (Birkbeck, University of London); Dr Constance Classen (author of The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch)

“You people who can see attach such an absurd importance to your eyes! I set my touch, my dear, against your eyes, as much the most trustworthy, and much the most intelligent sense of the two”. (Wilkie Collins, Poor Miss Finch, 1872)

This conference will explore the various ways in which the Victorians conceptualised, represented, experienced, performed and problematized touch. What does touch signal in nineteenth-century art and literature, and how is it variously coded? How are hands and skin – tactile appendages and surfaces – imagined in the period? By investigating the Victorian imaginary of touch, the conference will address and reappraise some of the key concepts and debates which have shaped Victorian studies in the past twenty years – in particular the emphasis on visuality as the dominant mode via which subjectivities and power were effected in the period: not least Jonathan Crary’s influential thesis that the nineteenth century witnessed a pervasive ‘separation of the senses’. The conference aims to investigate instead the workings of a more textured vision and reanimate the interoperability of sight and touch in nineteenth century culture.

The conference will also extend and build upon recent critical studies that have begun to explore nineteenth-century tactility in relation to material culture, bodies, and the emotions. By focusing closely on touch and tactility, it aims to establish whether and in what terms we might talk about a Victorian ‘aesthetics of touch’, and to explore how touch constructs and disrupts, for example, class and gender identities. It will also consider the historical trajectories of touch, asking, for example, in what ways does touch mark or blur the divide between Victorianism and Modernism?

Proposals of up to 400 words should be sent to Heather Tilley at victoriantactileimagination@ gmail.com by 10 January 2013. Please also attach a brief biographical note. Proposals for panels of three papers are also welcome, and should be accompanied by a brief (one-page) panel justification.

Possible topics might include:

• Tactile/haptic aesthetics (representations of hands and touching; art historical writing on the senses; perspectival theory; nineteenth century sculpture; arts and crafts)
• Rethinking “visual” media and technologies (photography; stereoscopy; cinema)
• Touch in the Museum (handling/viewing objects; curating; museum policy)
• Readers and writers (material cultures of the book; embodied readers and writers; the writer’s hand)
• Social history (domestic violence; hands and work; the gloved hand)
• Travel and place (the imperial touch; haptic geographies)
• The hand, skin and dermal structures in design theory and evolutionary science
• Medicine (blindness; physiology of touch; the medical touch; nerve theory and motor function; pain)
• Theories of mind and body (psychophysiology; cognitive psychology; phenomenology; psychoanalysis)
• The gender and sexual politics of touch, the queer touch (lesbianism, tender masculinities)
• Histories of touch (inheriting and disrupting eighteenth century models of touch; anticipating Modernist touch).

The conference is organised by Birkbeck, University of London’s Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, with support from the Newcastle Institute for the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities.

CFP: Neo-Victorian Cities: Re-Imagining Utopian and Dystopian Metropolises (2/28/2013)

We invite contributions on the theme of Neo-Victorian Cities for the fourth volume in Rodopi’s Neo-Victorian Series, to be published in 2014. This collection will examine the retrospective presentation of nineteenth-century metropolises in the light of contemporary approaches to urban politics and geopolitics, exploring links between the city and the past’s paradoxical ‘modernity’, now obsolete. If the metropolis is seen as a synecdoche of the world, how does this conception reiterate or contradict nineteenth-century views of the city as a synecdoche of nations and/or Empire? How do urban centres reflect environmentalist grievances or anxieties surrounding globalisation, paradoxically functioning as sites of literal and metaphorical pollution and progressive forces? Does the hypermodern understanding of urbanism as a purveyor of plural ethnoscapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes find an echo in the re-examination of nineteenth-century cities as centres of social and ideological reform and cross-cultural encounter? By essence palimpsestuous places where the past can be read in the present and where the dead co-exist with the living, metropolises naturally lend themselves to neo-Victorian thematisation. We encourage chapters to investigate the problematic tension between the city as a site of social progress as well as segregation and injustice, as an ethical place of encountering the other and a non-place of individual negation, as a location of creative experimentation and (self-) annihilation. We also welcome analyses of the technical means used by neo-Victorian literature, film, and other media to convey the idea of the city as modernity in progress and never-ending because always re-creating itself anew.

Possible topics may include, but need not be limited to the following:

• the neo-Victorian city as palimpsest & site of passage towards the present
• global cities & national identities
• the city as theatre
• the re-imagined nineteenth-century flaneur
• queering the neo-Victorian city
• global urbanism vs. imperial urbanism
• metropolitan narratives of past/present migration
• exploring the anxieties & opportunities of globalisation
• metropolitan mirrors of postmodernity
• urban race, class & gender politics & conflict
• cities’ public places vs. domestic spheres
• urban architectures of crime & justice: courts of law, prisons & public executions
• (post)colonial cities & the re-visioned subaltern
• the neo-Victorian metropolis & Marxism
• city & spectacle (pageants, processions, galleries, exhibitions, etc.)
• the monstrous city: enabling spaces of crime, exploitation, and perversity
• metropolises and their margins
• the urban underground

Please send 300-500 word proposals (for 8,000-10,000 word chapters) to the series editors: Dr Marie-Luise Kohlke at m.l.kohlke@swansea.ac.uk and Prof Christian Gutleben at Christian.GUTLEBEN@unice.fr by 28 February 2013. Please add a short biographical note in the body of your email.

Completed chapters will be due by 1 September 2013.

Registration Open: “The Other Dickens” conference (7/6-8/2012)

The University of Portsmouth is pleased to announce that registration for 'The Other Dickens: Victorian and Neo-Victorian Contexts' conference at the Centre for Studies in Literature, University of Portsmouth, 6-8 July, is now open.  You can register and view the draft conference programme online at http://www.port.ac.uk/research/csl/literatureevents/conferences/otherdickens/

As well as the conference itself, Victorianists are invited to register for two special events: a public lecture by Lillian Nayder entitled 'Afterlives: Mrs Dickens in Fact and Fiction' (7pm, 6th July) and Miriam Margolyes' show 'Dickens' Women' (5pm, 8th July, Portsmouth Grammar School).  Further details can be found at http://www.port.ac.uk/special/dickens2012/specialevents/

We look forward to seeing you in the city of Dickens' birth for these bicentenary events!

CFP: MLA 2013 Special Session "Neo-Victorianism and Marginal Voices" (3/15/2012; 1/3-6/2013)

This proposed special session panel seeks papers that explore the parameters of neo-Victorian literature from a variety of historical, formal, or theoretical approaches.  Questions addressed might include (but are certainly not limited to) the following:

• What is neo-Victorian literature?  What are the genre’s boundaries?   What are its defining characteristics?  Are there exemplary texts?
• What is “new” about neo-Victorian literature?  Form?  Subject positioning?  Narrative technique?  The alignment of readers’ sympathies?  Something else?
• How has it developed as a genre?  From where does it come, and where might we expect it to go?
• How does neo-Victorian literature provide a site for marginal voices to address issues of identity, subjectivity, politics, race, class, etc.?  How does it work in establishing alternative histories?
• What do these texts aim to do?  Do they (or must they) have political agendas?  In what way do they question ideologies or ideas of history or given knowledge in other epistemological categories like science or sexuality?  Do they always represent an alternative to the dominant cultural narrative?
• What relationships does this literature depict between the metropolitan center and the colonial margins?  Must it be set in one or the other?  As a genre, does it represent a particular subject position?  Must it address the colonial experience?
• Is neo-Victorian literature best understood as a subset of postcolonial literature, or is it a distinct genre?
• What time period forms the boundaries of neo-Victorian literature?  When can it be written, and when must it be set?
• Where should neo-Victorian literature be taught?  In courses on Victorian literature or the Victorian novel?  Postcolonial courses?  Twentieth-century Anglophone courses?  Elsewhere?  And what might be the point of teaching these texts?
• What do neo-Victorian texts tell us about the Victorians?  What do they tell us about ourselves in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries?

Papers that contextualize neo-Victorian texts, the issues they raise, or their creators or consumers are welcome.

Please send 250-word abstracts to Cameron Bushnell (cbushne@clemson.edu) and Elizabeth McClure (emcclure@umd.edu) no later than March 15, 2012.