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CfP: The Female Fantastic, 1860-1930: On the Gendered Supernatural in Texts by Women

Where realism was the signature feature of earlier Victorian fiction, mid-to-late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century writers increasingly embraced fantastic modes. Rosemary Jackson, in her 1981 Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, inaugurated the now-ubiquitous truism of literary studies that late Victorian fantastic narratives frequently hold strong – and often covertly revolutionary – metaphorical relations to social concerns. Supernatural and symbolic texts are ideal sites for encryption of radical queries and pervasive anxieties related to gender, sexuality, religion, medicine, science, ethnicity, substance abuse and colonialism (to name a few).

This is an especially persistent trait – one manifested and developed in many directions in the Edwardian and early Modernist fantastic. In supernatural thrillers, ghost stories, science fictions, and amorphous fantasias, counter-cultural angsts find substitutive satisfactions and conflated expression.  The uncanny effects of fantastic literature enable this; indirection, obscuration and innuendo are ideal mediums for saying-not-saying things. Indeed, whatever energies crescendo in fantastic literature are exactly those that  realism – by default – tends to eclipse, reduce, or normalize.  Experiments in form and language, from aestheticism to Modernism, only add to the covert power of fantasy.

Given the substantial scholarship dedicated to non-realist representations written by male writers, this book project will specifically explore women-identified writers’ uses of the fantastic from 1860-1930. Writers like Ouida, Vernon Lee, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Mary Butts, Elizabeth Bowen, and Sylvia Townsend Warner used narratively polymorphous fantastic sub-genres to dramatize their particularly activist arguments and ideas. This provided the flexibility to explore not only the darkest corners of the external world, but also the deepest subterranean secrets of the mind. For not only did women-identified writers wield these forms’ easy strategic cover to subvert the status quo, but they also used them to explore the gendered psyche’s links to imagination, pathology and creative, personal and erotic agency. In addition to providing dynamic presentations of female and gender-queer subjectivity, these texts also illuminate intriguing and complex relationships to key moments in gender(ed) history.

This collection will be submitted to an already-enthusiastic selective academic press.

We invite submissions that engage in any related issues, including the following:

 

  • Fantastic figures (ghosts, mummies, werewolves, vampires).
  • The evolving genre and forms of the fantastic/supernatural
  • Occult communication networks: Annie Besant, Emma Hardinge Britten, Helena Blavasky, and the women of the Golden Dawn
  • The shifting meaning/purpose of the female fantastic from mid-century (Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant, Florence Marrayat, Charlotte Riddell) to the fin de siècle  to the 20th-century
  • The transatlantic, global, or colonial supernatural
  • The role of the fantastic or otherworldly in conceptualizations of gender and sexuality
  • Nationhood, the “fantastic” other, race, and empire
  • Nationalism, Fascism, Socialism and other political movements
  • Pacificism, war, and trauma
  • The fantastic in periodical and print culture
  • Visualizing or depicting the fantastic through illustrations, art, performance, photography and film
  • Science, pseudo-science, psychoanalysis, medicine, and the supernatural
  • Mental illness, Addiction, and Social Deviance
  • Relations of Fantastic to Aestheticism, Decadence, Symbolist, Surrealist, Modernist or other movements
  • Female-authored sources for and/or reactions to more “canonical” fantastic literature
  • Female academic influences on the Classical and/or “Oriental” imagination (Jane Harrison and Margaret Murray, for example)

Abstracts should be 500 words, exclusive of a selected bibliography and brief author’s bio. Final papers should run between 4,000 – 6,000 words (inclusive of endnotes and works cited) and be formatted in current MLA style. Revisions may be requested as a condition of acceptance. Please send all queries to the editors (Dr. Elizabeth McCormick, Dr. Jennifer Mitchell, and Dr. Rebecca Soares) at FemaleFantasticBook@gmail.com.

Submissions Guidelines and Timeframe

By February 15, 2016:

  • Send one electronic copy of your 500-word abstract to FemaleFantasticBook@gmail.com;
  • Include a selected bibliography of 10 sources;
  • and a brief bio of less than 250 words.

By March 15, 2016:  We will notify applicants of our decisions.

By July 15, 2016  Full papers are due.

——-

Rebecca Soares, Ph.D.

 

Honors Faculty Fellow

Barrett, the Honors College

Affiliated Faculty, Department of English

Arizona State University

Rebecca.Soares@asu.edu

The Ravenclaw Conference 2016 (Theme: Sociology of Harry Potter)

 

6th Annual Ravenclaw Conference 2016

Sept 19-23 (during our 6th annual Edinboro Potterfest)

Edinboro University

 

We invite submissions from faculty and students on the wide range of USA societal issues raised in the Harry Potter saga.  Paper topics or panel discussion should focus on any of the following:

  • prison issues, death penalty issues, the use of brutal interrogation techniques, the national security surveillance state, the use of mass media to control and influence opinion and public policy (Azkaban &The Ministry)
  • the war with death through organ transplants, cryonics, and cloning (Horcruxes and The Resurrection Stone)
  • diversity vs. purist cultural issues, feminism, education system issues, discrimination against behavioral or appearance abnormalities (Hogwarts)
  • the sports culture “balance” between the value of individual talent vs. team success, the tradition of excluding females from full contact (coed) sports (Quidditch Pitch)
  • adoption and foster care, child abuse, bullying (Dursley Cupboard)
  • care and treatment of other creatures (Hagrid’s Hut)
  • national health care issues (Madam Pomfrey)
  • war on public education?  war on higher education? (Hogwarts School)

 

Submissions could also be discussions of articles published in the Sociology of Harry Potter (2012).  Our Keynote Speaker will be Professor Jenn Sims.

 

An abstract with a 200 word maximum should be submitted by faculty and students.  Students submitting paper proposals should also submit their paper along with their abstract.  Deadline for consideration: Sept 2, 2016.  Papers accepted and presented will be included in our conference Proceedings. Past presentations can be accessed online via our website:  potterfest.com

 

Submissions should be sent to: Dr Corbin Fowler, cfowler@edinboro.edu

For more information, contact Dr Fowler via email or phone (814) 602 1694.

 

Presentations will be given throughout the week of Sept 19-23, afternoon and evening sessions.

Contact Info:

Dr Corbin Fowler, Department of English and Philosophy, Edinboro Unviersity, Edinboro, PA 16444

Contact Email:
corbinfowler3@gmail.com
URL:
http://potterfest.cs.edinboro.edu/

Call for Papers: The Weird & the Southern Imaginary

General Eds.: Travis Rozier & Bob Hodges

 

Deadline extension: Our first round netted some excellent submissions, but we are extending the deadline for proposals to January 18, 2016.

 

Keynote: The Weird & the Southern Imaginary will introduce the aesthetics and generic conventions of the Weird to cultural studies of the U.S. South and the region’s local, hemispheric, and (inter)national connections. Contributions from literary critics, film and popular culture scholars, philosophers, and critical theorists will consider forms of the Weird in a range of texts (literature, art, film & television, comics, music) from, about, or resonant with conceptions of different South(s).

 

Description: S. T. Joshi periodizes Haute Weird Fiction from 1880-1940, and China Miéville describes how the paradigm of Haute Weird Fiction, especially in its foremost practitioner H. P. Lovecraft, invokes horror, alterity, and/or awe on a cosmic scale, which seeps into the mundane experiences of cognitively ill-equipped scientific or academic protagonists. The Weird aesthetic, especially pre-World War II, is often inextricable from revanchist horrors of democracy, political revolution, miscegenation, and female or other non-normative sexualities, although Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s recent Weird compendium stresses the “darkly democratic” aspect of a C20 and C21 Weird tradition that spans nations, genders, genres, and levels of literary status.

 

Representations of the U.S. South as an irrational or reactionary space draw on what Deborah Barker and Kathryn McKee describe as the southern imaginary, a fluid reservoir of topoi referencing an enduring material history of land appropriation, coercive labor practices, carceral landscapes, racial and commercial mixing, extralegal violence, and insular patriarchies. The Weird & the Southern Imaginary will explore Weird South(s) of national aberrance and cosmic otherness.  For example, the first television season of True Detective melds the conservative politics and religious fervor often equated with the South to vaster hints of conspiratorial and cosmic horror in a postindustrial Louisiana swampscape.

 

The dark fantasy of the Weird diverges sharply from the usual monstrosities of horror and speculative fictions as well as many modes of southern representation: the gothic, the grotesque, the uncanny, the ghostly or hauntological, or the folkloric, modes with longstanding southern associations and almost as longstanding critical fatigue for Southernisits. The Weird can also bridge Southern Studies and its old associations with recent work in object-oriented ontology, ecotheory, other new materialisms, and nihilist philosophy as well as apocalyptic popular cultural fixations.

 

Submission Guidelines: All proposed essays should address the concepts of the Weird and the South, however understood. Essays should be written in English, but can be written about texts read or viewed in other languages. We will also accept work on texts in translation. We are looking for critical essays (5,000-8,000 words). If you are interested in contributing an essay to the collection please send us a 300-500 word abstract.

 

Possible Topics:  (Feel free to combine topics or propose a topic not represented in the list)

  • Weird South(s) in U.S. literature
  • International Weird Fiction & southern imaginary, subtly connected or not
  • Race & the southern imaginary in Weird Fiction
  • Political or cultural reaction & Weird South(s)
  • Weird carceral practices & the southern imaginary (Franz Kafka “In the Penal Colony”)
  • Environmental transformation or degradation & Weird South(s)
  • The nonhuman or posthuman in southern literature (Matthew Taylor)
  • Dark ecology (Timothy Morton) & southern landscapes, swampscapes, etc.
  • Nihilism, extinction, or the recalcitrance of the world (Eugene Thacker) & the South(s)
  • C19 South & proto-Weird Fiction (Ambrose Bierce, Charles Chesnutt, Edgar Allan Poe)
  • The Weird associations of the South & the Antarctic (Poe, Herman Melville, Lovecraft)
  • R. H. Barlow in Florida, his Weird Fiction, or his correspondence with Lovecraft
  • Robert E. Howard in Texas, his Weird Fiction, or his correspondence with Lovecraft
  • Weird Appalachia (Lovecraft, Manly Wade Hopkins’s Silver John stories, Fred Chappell)
  • Henry S. Whitehead’s Weird West Indian tales
  • Eudora Welty & Weird Fiction (Mitch Frye)
  • Weird Fiction, modernist literary strategies, & the South (William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston “Uncle Monday”, Flannery O’Connor)
  • The Weird in Latin American Boom fiction (Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Augusto Monterroso), its forbearers (Jorge Luis Borges), or its successors (Junot Díaz, Jamaica Kincaid)
  • Contemporary or New (South) Weird (Poppy Z. Brite, Moira Crone, Stephen Graham Jones, Caitlín Kiernan, Joe Lansdale, Joyce Carol Oates, Jeff VanderMeer)
  • Weird southern comics (Alan Moore et al. Saga of the Swamp Thing, Garth Ennis et al. Preacher) 
Contact Info:

Travis Rozier / Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz / jamesrzr138@gmail.com; Bob Hodges / University of Washington /bhodge4@gmail.com

Contact Email:
jamesrzr138@gmail.com

CfP: IAFA GRADUATE STUDENT AWARD

The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts presents an annual award and stipend to the graduate student submitting the most outstanding paper at the Association’s conference. The award, and a check for $250, will be presented to the winner at the Awards Banquet on Saturday evening. Students must submit their completed paper (3500 words, excluding bibliography) and verification of student status by February 1.

CRITERIA & INSTRUCTIONS

  1. The student will have had a paper accepted for presentation at the Conference. The paper submitted for the competition should be essentially the same as that presented at the conference. The maximum length for entries is 3500 words (about 2 pages over the recommended reading length of 8-9 pages).  Students should be aware that funds are limited and that only one award will be given. The paper selected will be published in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, and therefore must not have been previously published or submitted for publication elsewhere. Please note that acceptance of a paper for the Conference does not guarantee an award.
  1. It is the responsibility of the student to send a copy of the paper by 1 February 2016 to the 1st VP Dale Knickerbocker (knickerbockerd@ecu.edu), as well as a copy of the letter of acceptance and verification of student status. Submissions may be in Word, RTF or PDF format.
  1.  The committee is looking for clear, coherent, and interesting writing. Essays should be solidly grounded in scholarly tradition, showing awareness of previous studies and of historical and theoretical contexts.  Essays may use any suitable method of analysis, including historical and sociological approaches as well as those that originate in literary theory.  Essays will be evaluated for their originality and quality of insight into the text.

The judges for the 2016 award will be:

Mary Pharr, Florida Southern College

Sherryl Vint, University of California-Riverside

Taylor Evans, University of California-Riverside

Call for Nominations – IAFA President and 1st VP by October 30th

Call for Nominations – IAFA President and 1st VP by October 30th

Download this call as a file from Dropbox here.

The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts announces a Call for Nominations for the elected Executive Board positions of President and First Vice-President. Any IAFA member in good standing is invited to run for the position of First Vice-President; to be eligible for the office of President, a member must be in good standing and have served either as an IAFA Division Head or as a member of the IAFA Executive Board. Those interested in running for either position should send a nomination to both IAFA Immediate Past-President Jim Casey at <caseyj AT arcadia.edu> and IAFA Chief Technical Officer Michael Smith at <anarresti AT gmail.com> no later than October 30th, 2015 (self-nominations welcome). Candidates eligible for the offices to which they have been nominated and willing to run for those offices will be asked to submit position statements by November 20th, 2015. The Election Committee will distribute position statements and ballots to the membership on or about December 10th, 2015, and ballots will be counted by the Election Committee after January 10th, 2016. For those elected, the term will begin immediately following the conclusion of ICFA 37 in March 2016 and will last for three years. Duties of each position are listed below, along with additional information regarding IAFA elections procedures. Please contact Jim Casey if you have any questions. We look forward to hearing from you!

Duties of the President

The President is the chief executive officer, responsible for directing and coordinating all functions of the organization, including the annual conference, the quarterly journal, other sponsored publications, the Awards Program, and public relations of all kinds. The President sets the agenda for, and presides at, all meetings of the Executive Board and the annual Business meeting at the ICFA. The President is also the chief planning officer, responsible for setting agendas in all Association projects. The President oversees the work of the other officers, recruits special guests, seeks institutional support, confirms non-elected Board members, etc. The President is elected by majority vote of the membership of IAFA.

First Vice-President

The First Vice-President coordinates the ICFA Program, overseeing the work of the Division Heads and scheduling paper sessions, and the Annual Conference Program. The First Vice- President also consults with the President concerning appearances by special guests in panels, readings, and lectures, and with the Conference Chair about physical arrangements such as AV equipment, room assignments, etc. The First Vice-President substitutes for the President when necessary. The First Vice-President also oversees the IAFA Graduate Student Award: advertising the award, organizing and chairing the prize committee, and collecting and forwarding submissions to the committee for a blind reading process. The First Vice-President is elected by majority vote of the membership of the IAFA.

Election Procedures (from the IAFA Constitution):

The Election Committee for the IAFA will be chaired by the Immediate Past President and will include two other members chosen from the Executive Board by the Executive Board.

The election process will typically span several months, from the summer preceding the voting period through to the announcement of the results at the annual business meeting in the spring of the election year.

All notifications, announcements, and ballots will be distributed primarily through electronic means (via the Internet via e-mail or secure web-site), though print and surface mail distribution will be employed where necessary.

The Election Committee will announce upcoming elections with a call for nominations, including self-nominations. The opening date for nominations will be on 30 September. The closing date for nominations will be on 30 October of the year preceding the actual vote.
The Election Committee will notify each nominee of his or her nomination and will provide each with the names of everyone else nominated during that election cycle.

Candidates declining nomination must notify the Elections Committee immediately upon notification of their nomination.

Candidates eligible for the offices to which they have been nominated and willing to run for those offices will be asked to submit position statements by 20 November of the year preceding the vote.

The Election Committee will distribute position statements and ballots to the membership on or about 10 December, and ballots must be returned by 10 January of the election year.

The Election Committee will count the ballots immediately after the 10 January deadline, and if no candidate has a clear majority (51% or more), a run-off election will be held between the two candidates who have received the most votes. The run-off election will be conducted promptly, with appropriate announcements, and with ballots being distributed by 10 February, and with a final vote deadline of 1 March of the election year.

The Election Committee will announce results of the election at the IAFA business meeting during the annual conference of the election year, with additional announcements in appropriate IAFA venues thereafter.

The elections’ calendar described here serves as a guideline rather than as a table of fixed deadlines: when circumstances require it, the Elections Committee will adjust the calendar for the elections process as needed to insure an orderly, open, and fair process.

CfP: Words and worlds

Words and worlds. Poetry  Dear all it’s time to think of offering a fantastic/scifi/horror poetry reading at the conference ! As usual,  we have two sessions, this time both at  1’1/2 hours so aim to be able to have a maximum of twelve to fifteen people reading. This always fills up fast so please let me know if you want  to read  at g.wisker@brighton.ac.uk.

 

Words and worlds. Fiction  This year for the second time we hope to see the welcome return of the words and worlds fiction session. (NB This will be dependent on rooming however) – So if you have a piece of short fantastic/scifi/horror fiction/ a short  extract  you would like to read, please let me know. We hope to have 1 1/2 hrs , so slots of up to 20 mins (but preferably a bit shorter) are possible. Again please let me know.at g.wisker@brighton.ac.uk

CfP: Victorian medievalisms

For those of you working on Victorian medievalisms, you might be interested in the following panel I’m organizing with Lindsay Reid of NUI Galway, for the ESSE conference next year. It would be great to have a diversity of periods represented, and there is plenty of Victorian material that would be relevant! Feel free to contact me off-list (yuri.cowan@ntnu.no) for more information.

A seminar dedicated to “Anachronism and the Medieval” is planned for the next European Society for the Study of English (ESSE) Conference, to be held from 22-26 August 2016 in Galway, Ireland. The organizers look forward to receiving proposals for papers to be presented in this seminar.

This seminar focuses on anachronism, broadly defined, and its relation to the medieval period. Often understood negatively as a computational fault or disruptive error, anachronism is closely related to archaism, presentism, and para-/pro-chronism, as well as to the notion of the preposterous (in its literal Latin sense of “before-behind”). Contributors to this seminar might reflect on broad issues of temporality or particular instances of anachronism—intentional or unintentional—in relation to medieval literary exemplars, but equally welcomed are contributions that explore anachronicity in conjunction with later (Renaissance to contemporary) engagements with the medieval past and its textual traditions.

According to the ESSE conference website (found at http://www.esse2016.org/): “The seminar format is intended to encourage lively participation on the part of both speakers and members of the audience. For this reason, papers will be orally presented in no longer than 15 minutes rather than read. Reduced versions of the papers will be circulated beforehand among participants.”

Please send proposals of 300 words to both Yuri Cowan (yuri.cowan@ntnu.no) and Lindsay Reid (lindsay.reid@nuigalway.ie) no later than 28 February 2016. Earlier submissions would be appreciated.

CfP: One-Day Conference: Defining and defying the concepts of deviance and degeneration in the British Isles and North America in the 19th century

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Call For Papers: One-Day Conference: Defining and defying the concepts of deviance and degeneration in the British Isles and North America in the 19th century

This one-day conference aims at exploring the definition(s) and contours of deviance and degeneration as it was conceived in the British Isles and North America in the 19th century. PhD students, postgraduate students and junior scholars whose research pertains to the study of deviant groups, whether self-defined or not, are particularly welcome to participate. Speakers will be invited to focus on the processes of definition of the standards of normality – whether religious, social, political, legal, medical or sexual – as well as what those processes entailed for those who were labelled ‘deviants’. The role of scientists, doctors but also political authorities is of considerable interest in this respect, as are the ways in which normative standards were circumvented and challenged.

Although the concepts of abnormality, vice and anomaly, defined as individual violations of the norm, date back to Antiquity, “deviance” and “degeneration” as crucial societal issues were arguably notions born in the early 19th century, when, for the first time, they were conceived as “social pathologies”. They conjure up images of Victorian lunatic asylums, American temperance societies, Irish Magdalene laundries for fallen women, and other institutions or organisations designed to curb and/or reform purportedly deviant tendencies; thereby redressing and redeeming the fallen women and feeble-minded men who yielded to temptation. Cultural, social, medical and penal spheres were tightly intertwined. Sexual deviants could be deemed criminal and imprisoned; convicts could be labelled as insane; while addicts, inebriates, the ‘feeble-minded’ and ‘fallen women’ ran the risk of being hospitalised, incarcerated, or even sterilised. Deviation from the norm prompted fears of degeneration in the context of eugenics, and simply being different could lead to forced ostracism, imprisonment or experimentation. Curing, and failing that, curbing the ‘degenerate’ population became a matter of national concern. Both the British Isles and North America faced this normative wave, which penetrated both popular and scientific discourse. However, despite these common elements, there was considerable variation in the way the issues were debated and the measures implemented, both between the two continents, and within them, revealing contrasting priorities and mentalities.

Topics may include but are not limited to (in no particular order of importance):

·      The border between deviance, immorality, decadence and sin: religious interpretations of deviance and the cult of respectability; 

·      Labelling deviants: who sets the norm? The part played by scientists, political authorities, religious groups, social movements, etc.; 

·      Deviance and disease: psychiatric and medical responses to world alcoholism & addiction, feeble-mindedness & madness; 

·      How were deviants considered to undermine the nation and/or contaminate society? And if so, how could this contagion be prevented?;

·      The scientific approach: physical or mental manifestations of deviance, phrenology, degeneration theory, eugenics, etc.;

·      Deviance and the legal system: were sentencing magistrates, judges and juries influenced by medical definitions of deviance? Did they have their own definitions?;

·      Deviance, gender and crime: prostitution, the Contagious Diseases Acts, refuges for the ‘fallen women’;

·      Sexual deviance: the borderline between ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ sexual practices;

·      Political deviance; 

·      Embracing deviance: nonconformists claiming their “difference”;

·      Saving the deviants? Philanthropy and deviance;

·      Institutions of deviance and the links between them: hospitals, asylums, prisons, refuges, reformatories, borstals, etc. 

Prof. Neil Davie (Université Lyon 2) will deliver the keynote speech. 

He is the author of Tracing the Criminal: The Rise of Scientific Criminology in Britain, 1860-1918 (Bardwell Press, 2005).  

Submission guidelines

Please send 400-word proposals to alice.bonzom@univ-lyon2.fr and / or irene.delcourt@ens-lyon.fr by November 10th, 2015. The abstract should include a title, name and affiliation of the speaker, and a contact email address. Feel free to submit abstracts presenting work in progress as well as completed projects. Papers will be a maximum of twenty minutes in length. Proposals for suggested panels are also welcome.

This conference will be hosted on January 14th 2016 in the Université Lyon 2/ENS campus in Lyons, France.

Organising committee:  Alice Bonzom – Irène Delcourt – Mélanie Cournil

Call for papers Vol.3., nº2, Brumal. Revista de Investigación sobre lo Fantástico/ Brumal.

Call for papers Vol.3., nº2, Brumal. Revista de Investigación sobre lo Fantástico/ Brumal. Research Journal on the Fantastic (http://revistes.uab.cat/brumal/pages/view/callforpaper): Monographic Section: “Monographic Issue: “The Fantastic in the New Golden Age of Television (1999-2015)” (Alfonso Cuadrado and Rubén Sánchez Trigos, Coords.)

Miscellaneous Section: This Miscellaneous section is open to any type of article on any of the diverse artistic manifestations of the fantastic (narrative, theater, film, comics, painting, photography, video games), whether theoretical, critical, historical or comparative in nature, concerning the fantastic in any language or from any country, from the nineteenth century to the present. Scholars who wish to contribute to either of these two sections should send us their articles by 15 January 2016, registering as authors on our web page. The Guidelines for Submissions may be found on the Submissions section of the web page (http://revistes.uab.cat/brumal .

CfP: NeMLA 2016

Dear Colleagues,

Please consider submitting a proposal to NeMLA 2016, held in Hartford, Connecticut, from 3/17-3/20, 2016. (The deadline for submissions is September 30th.) The call for papers is below.

Thanks,

Rebekah Greene and Anna Brecke

*

An ever increasing interest in Victorian popular fiction prompts us to ask why have we in Victorian Studies become so invested in the popular in recent years? How have certain theoretical fields such as gender studies, material culture/thing theory, post-colonial theory, etc. contributed to this rapid increase in interest? What does the popular do for us as scholars that the “canon” does not, or can we still think in terms of canonical and non-canonical texts in Victorian Studies? Is it still possible to think of a standard Victorian canon in a post-Google age when so many previously unavailable texts are now available at the tips of our fingers? How is the inclusion of the popular in the classroom changing Victorian Studies for our students? This roundtable welcomes submissions that address these questions and many more from scholars whose work examines the spectrum of Victorian popular fiction. 

This roundtable welcomes submissions that address these questions and many more from scholars whose work examines the spectrum of Victorian popular fiction. Please submit a 250-word abstract and a one-page CV to co-chairs Anna Brecke and Rebekah Greene. Submit abstracts online at https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/15788

Topics might include:

  • Sensation fiction (Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Mrs. Henry (Ellen) Wood, Rhoda Broughton, Charles Reade)
  • Adventure fiction (Frederick Marryat, M. P. Shiel, R. M. Ballantyne, Bessie Marchant)
  • Speculative fiction (Edward Bulwer-Lytton)
  • Spiritualism, Mesmerism, or the Occult (Margaret Oliphant, Florence Marryat, Helena P. Blavatsky, Andrew Lang, Richard Marsh, Marie Corelli)
  • Drama and melodrama (George Meredith, Fanny Kemble, Caroline Norton, George Du Maurier, Fanny Stevenson, Lloyd Osborne, Dion Boucicault, Gilbert and Sullivan)
  • Satire and parody
  • Mystery and Detective fiction (E. W. Hornung, Charles Warren Adams, George W.M. Reynolds)
  • New Woman fiction (Amy Levy, Ouida, George Gissing, Mona Caird, Charlotte Mew, Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner)
  • Sentimental or religious texts (Catherine Gore, members of the Booth Family, George MacDonald, Charlotte Yonge)