Extended CFP: Victorian Network Journal
CfP: Production and Consumption in Victorian Literature and Culture
Victorian Network
30 September 2011
Victorian Network is an MLA-indexed (from 2012) online journal dedicated to publishing and promoting the best postgraduate work in Victorian Studies.
The fifth issue of Victorian Network, guest edited by Dr Ella Dzelzainis (Newcastle University), is dedicated to a reassessment of nineteenth-century investments in concepts of productivity and consumption. Accelerating industrialisation, the growth of consumer culture, economic debates about the perils of overconsumption as well as emerging cultural discourses about industriousness, work ethic and the uses of free time radically altered the ways in which Victorians thought about practices of production and consumption. Literary authors intervened directly in these economic and social debates while also negotiating analogous developments within a literary marketplace transformed by new forms of writing, distributing and consuming literature.
We are inviting submissions of no more than 7000 words. Possible topics include but are by no means limited to the following:
• Literature of industrialisation
• Victorian (global) spaces of production, forms and practices of consumption
• Images of the industrial city, the factory, factory workers, and machines
• Consumption as spectacle, the rise of the department store and the advertising industries
• Changing concepts of literary production and new agents in the literary marketplace: publishers, editors, book sellers
• Celebrity authors, audiences, and self-marketing in the literary sphere
• Economic theory, finance, and nineteenth-century literature
• Leisure, spare time and other modes of ‘unproductiveness’
• Productivist and consumerist ideologies and the politics of social class
• Reassessing Marxist perspectives on Victorian literature and culture
All submissions should conform to MHRA style conventions and the in-house submission guidelines. The deadline for submissions to our next issue is 30 September, 2011. Contact:victoriannetwork@gmail.com
Thackeray in Time, 1811-2011
Conference: THACKERAY IN TIME, 1811-2011
School of English, University of Leeds
Saturday 1st October 2011
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:
Professor Judith Fisher (Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas), author of Thackeray’s Skeptical Narrative and the ‘Perilous Trade’ of Authorship (2002)
Professor Richard Pearson (National University of Ireland, Galway), author of W.M. Thackeray and the Mediated Text (2000)
2011 marks the bicentenary of the birth of William Makepeace Thackeray. This conference offers an opportunity to reassess Thackeray’s place in Victorian culture and in the history of novel, as well as the development of his critical reputation over the past two centuries. The conference will examine both Thackeray’s position within time and the importance of time – including questions of temporality, history, and modernity – within his writings. The concept of ‘time’ proposes a focus – with numerous permutations – for enquiry into Thackeray’s works and cultural status. By interpreting the relationship between Thackeray and time in different ways, we anticipate that scholars will be able to consider his writing in challenging and exciting ways, to reposition Thackeray on the map of Victorian studies, and to build on the existing body of scholarship.
For registration and programme details visit:
http://victorianleeds.wordpress.com/
Registration Extended: BAVS 2011
BAVS Annual Conference: Birmingham 2011
‘Composition and Decomposition’
1-3 September 2011
NEW registration deadline: Wednesday 24th August
To account for holiday times and Bank Holidays, registration for the BAVS 2011 Conference has been extended to Wednesday 24th August. The Conference website is here:
http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/edacs/departments/drama/events/bavs.aspx
There you’ll find the Conference programme and Delegate Information (downloadable) with details of arrival arrangements, accommodation, travel, and WiFi. We expect to be able to post Conference abstracts of all papers within the next few days.
For those delegates arriving on Wednesday, there will be an informal meeting — drinks and a meal (pay as you go) — at the Selly Soak, 556 Bristol Road, in Selly Oak, at 7pm on Wednesday 31st August.
A Google map of Conference locations (including the Selly Soak) is here:
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=212294809852835789335.0004aa36166af9aef5daf&msa=0&ll=52.450308,-1.929646&spn=0.013234,0.036306
You can register via the online shop here:
https://www.bhamonlineshop.co.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=2&prodid=333&deptid=17&catid=3
Categories of registration:
Standard registration (at full or PG rate) with accommodation includes all meals from morning tea/coffee on Thursday to afternoon tea/coffee on Saturday, including the Friday night reception in the Muirhead Tower, plus accommodation (en suite, with breakfast) on Thursday and Friday nights. This registration includes the Conference dinner on Friday night.
Standard registration (at full or PG rate) without accommodation includes all meals from morning tea/coffee on Thursday to afternoon tea/coffee on Saturday, including the Friday night reception in the Muirhead Tower, but not campus accommodation. This registration includes the Conference dinner on Friday night.
Day registration at full or PG rate include morning & afternoon tea/coffee and lunch on the day/s of registration, including the Friday night reception in the Muirhead Tower, but NOT accommodation or evening meals. This registration does NOT include the Conference dinner on Friday night.
For delegates opting for the Day rate for Thursday and/or Friday, evening meals can be purchased separately by the registration deadline:
Dinner: Thursday night £15
Conference dinner: Friday night £35
All delegates must be financial members of BAVS. Registration for the 2011 BAVS Conference does not include membership of BAVS. To arrange membership subscription, please click on this link:
http://www.bavsuk.org/membership.htm
The first event on Thursday 1st September is a welcome for postgraduate students at 11:00, followed by Professor Tucker’s opening keynote at 12 noon.
G. K. Chesterton and the Paradox of the City
SYMPOSIUM: G. K. Chesterton and the Paradox of the City
UCL
22 September 2011
G. K. Chesterton’s writing about London bristles with a sense of the contradictions endemic to urban life and, perhaps as a result, it is stimulatingly difficult to pin down politically or in terms of the history of ideas. Cities inspired some of his most apposite and illuminating comments about modernity but also provoked many of his most problematic and reactionary pronouncements. This symposium, on 22 September 2011, held at University College London, where Chesterton was briefly a reluctant student, is hosted by the City Centre, UCL English Department’s cross-disciplinary urban research forum. ‘G. K Chesterton and the Paradox of the City’ will mark the 75th anniversary of the author’s death by exploring the complex role of the urban in his work.
This event is free-of-charge, and is funded by the UCL English Department. Please contact Dr. Matthew Beaumont m.beaumont@ucl.ac.uk
to reserve a place.
chesterton-2011-programme
Funding Website: ‘Student Cash Point’
Useful link when searching for funding?
Student Cash Point
(www.studentcashpoint.co.uk<http://www.studentcashpoint.co.uk/>) is a
free site which allows current and future students to search
thousands of funding opportunities available for a wide range of purposes
relating to study and other activities. Users can also register to receive
automatic funding alerts informing them when funding opportunities matching their needs become available.
This website seems mainly aimed at undergraduates, but it does have information on graduate opportunites and could be a useful place to visit if you are on the hunt for funding.
Help make history with Dickens Journals Online
The DJO project is looking for volunteers to help complete the digitisation of Dickens’s journals, making them available for free public access in time for the celebration of Charles Dickens’s bicentenary (born 7th February 1812).
A huge chunk of Dickens’s work as a writer, reporter, and magazine editor is preserved in the two weekly journals he edited for over twenty years, and in which he published hundreds of articles as well as some of his best known serial novels: Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations. The rest of the contents – which were published anonymously – he helped commission, plan and copy-edit, from offices in Wellington Street, Covent Garden. A blue plaque opposite the Lyceum Theatre commemorates the spot.
These two journals—Household Words and All the Year Round—have never been republished or indexed in an integral form, although they remain a treasure trove of great writing that deserves to be better known (ProQuest make them available on a subscription basis). To this end, an open-access digital edition, giving authorship details from two out-of-print indexes, as well as new attributions, scholarly and educational materials, has been under development for the past 5 years. It’s funded by the international Dickens Fellowship, The Leverhulme Trust, the University of Buckingham, and many individual supporters. The site shows over 30,000 pages of vintage Victorian journalism as digital images, together with a legible transcript, produced by the automated process known as ‘OCR.’ However, inevitably, there is a sprinkling of mistakes on each page (5 to 25), so in order to unlock the full potential of the data, these mistakes are being removed by a team of volunteer ‘sub editors.’ Since January of this year, correction work on 15% of the archive has been completed to a high degree of accuracy.
Aiding this national endeavour is easy: simply go to www.djo.org.uk and create an editing account. There are FAQs, a Glossary, and an online editing tutorial to support you, and volunteers can choose to have their work acknowledged, or kept anonymous. The project is happy to supply reference letters to those involved.
