NENC (North East Nineteenth Century) Summer Speaker series
NENC Summer Speaker series
The first session of the NENC Summer Speaker series will take place at 4.00pm on Friday 8 June. The session will be held at Newcastle University, in Seminar Room 1 on the first floor of the Percy Building.
In the first half of the session, Harriet Briggs will give a paper entitled ‘Playthings and Puritans: Pleasure and Coercion in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Walter Scott’s Kenilworth‘.
In the second half Nicole Bush will give a paper entitled ”Given up to Kalleidoscopism’: Shifting the Vision of the Kaleidoscope in the Nineteenth Century’. There will be time for questions and discussion afterwards.
Opportunities to present work to peers in a supportive environment are valuable for postgraduates and hopefully many of you are able to attend.
Details of the July and August sessions will be circulated closer to the time; the full schedule of sessions can be found on the blog.
http://www.northeast19thcentury.org
Launch of the Edwardian Cultural Network
The Edwardian Culture Network, an interdisciplinary project designed to bring together scholars working on various aspects of culture in Britain between the years 1895-1914, has just been launched. The Network will provide an online database of researchers and resources, updates on current exhibitions and publications, and a platform for discussion and organising events. They are also working towards the creation of an online journal.
The inaugural conference, ‘Beyond the Garden Party: Re-Thinking Edwardian Culture’, will held at the University of York in April 2013, for which further details will be circulated this Autumn. In the meantime, they are developing a website, which can be found at:http://www.edwardianculture.com. Key to the success of this site is a directory of researchers in the field. If you would like to join this list, please e-mail a short ‘blurb’ consisting of 100 words about your research, your institutional affiliation, a list of keywords for your project, and a contact e-mail address (for examples please see http://www.edwardianculture.com/researchers). The team will update the website regularly with news of events, exhibitions, publications, and interviews with researchers. If you come across anything that might be of interest to scholars of Edwardian culture, please let them know! Please also forward this e-mail to anyone who might benefit from it. You can e-mail the project at edwardianculture@hotmail.co.uk
The Edwardian Culture Network was founded in 2011 by early career researchers at the University of York and the University of Durham, including Dr Samuel Shaw (History of Art, University of York), Sarah Shaw (English, University of York) and Naomi Carle (English, University of Durham).
‘Robert Browning and Victorian Poetry at 200’, Nov 1-3, 2012. Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University.
‘Robert Browning and Victorian Poetry at 200’, Nov 1-3, 2012. Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University.
To celebrate Robert Browning’s bicentenary in 2012, the Armstrong Browning Library is hosting an international conference that will focus on Browning’s importance within the broader field of Victorian poetry and poetics, and within Victorian studies more generally. Proposals are invited for short position papers, to be circulated in advance and discussed in seminars, on the themes detailed below. In addition to these theme-based seminars, conference attendees will also have the chance to participate in seminar discussions centered around particular Browning texts, led by notable Victorian poetry scholars.
Confirmed speakers and seminar leaders include Herbert Tucker, Yopie Prins, Isobel Armstrong, Daniel Karlin, Joe Phelan, Linda K. Hughes, Marjorie Stone, Donald Hair, Tricia Lootens, Warwick Slinn, Mary Ellis Gibson, Matthew Campbell, Charles LaPorte and Erik Gray.
The Armstrong Browning Library is an internationally renowned research center for the study of the Brownings and nineteenth-century literature and culture, located on the campus of Baylor University in Waco, Texas:
http://www.browninglibrary.org/
To assist graduate students and early career academics to attend the conference, the ABL is offering 5 bursaries of $200, open to participants who are either currently graduate students or are within five years of receiving their PhD. Staff holding tenure-track positions are unlikely to be considered for these bursaries unless there are special circumstances. If you wish to apply, please state this clearly when you submit your proposal and attach a 1-page CV.
2-300 word proposals should be emailed to browning2012@baylor.edu. Please specify in your email which seminar you wish to participate in.
Deadline for proposals: 30 June 2012
Deadline to submit 5-page position paper: 1 October 2012
Further details will be available on the ABL’s website in due course. Any queries should be sent to the lead organizer, Kirstie Blair, at the conference email address: browning2012@baylor.edu.
SEMINARS
‘Browning’s Beginnings and Endings’ with Mary Ellis Gibson.
This seminar invites participants to reflect on beginnings and endings. How does Browning begin and end a career? or a volume of poetry? or an individual poem? From large to small, from the shape of a career, to the shape of a volume, to the shape of a particular poem, what can we learn when we reflect on beginnings and endings in Browning’s work? What kinds of disjunctions, what kinds of coherence, what kinds of surprises do we come upon by focusing on beginnings and / or endings? Participants will pre-circulate 5-page papers in which they reflect on some feature of beginning or ending in Browning’s poetry.
‘Browning’s Contexts’ with Charles LaPorte.
How does Browning look from the vantage of the twenty-first century?
This seminar will address the importance of historical, cultural, and social contexts for understanding this most canny and modern of Victorian poets. It invites participants to consider Browning’s poetry in relation to Victorian politics, economics, religion, science, secularization, transatlanticism, globalization, etc. Participants will circulate a 5-page paper that addresses a specific historical context and some theoretical reflections for our discussion of its importance to Browning studies today.
‘The Sound of Browning’ with Matthew Campbell.
Alfred Tennyson said to William Allingham, ‘it doesn’t matter so much in poetry written for the intellect – as much of Browning’s is, perhaps; but in mine it’s necessary to know how to sound it properly’. This panel will suggest that this seemingly-hoary topic is never incidental to the reading of Browning. Participants are invited to circulate 5-page papers which might address how it relates to old and new thinking about voice and performance as well as Victorian and contemporary phenomenologies of rhythm and rhyme. The panel will think not just about the sound of Browning’s verse but also broader matters of intellectual matter and poetic form. It may suggest new ways to sound Browning properly, testing his innovations against the still-pertinent matter of Browning’s technique and its vexed aesthetic relationships with experiment, proportion and sense.
‘The Brownings and Love’ with Erik Gray.
A hundred years ago, both Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were thought of largely (and in EBB’s case, primarily) as love poets. But the situation now is entirely different. Partly in reaction to a surfeit of sentimental or biographical readings, Browning criticism has for many years consciously downplayed the significance of love in their poetry. And yet it is not only biographical curiosity that might lead a reader to take an interest in this topic. Love – divine, familial, but above all erotic – forms the central concern of many of the Brownings’ most important poems, and both poets made original and transformative contributions to the rich tradition of English love poetry. In the seminar, we will reconsider the Brownings’ treatment of love, with the aim, if possible, of tracing their mutual influence, as well as their response to the wider tradition. Participants will pre-circulate 5-page position papers relating to this topic.
BAVS Funding Grant Reminder
BAVS Funding Grant Reminder
The British Association for Victorian Studies would like to bring to the attention of its members the approaching deadline for the BAVS funding Grant, which is 5pm on May 31st, 2012. The BAVS Funding Grant is a revised grant scheme which replaces the former Open Conference and Postgraduate Conference grants. It is designed to be flexible in its support for members, and the maximum grant amount has been increased from £200 (£250 for the former Postgraduate Conference Grants) to £400. The Association and its Executive remain committed to the development of postgraduate students, and it is anticipated that two postgraduate organised/led events will be funded each academic session. You can download the application from the BAVS website: http://www.bavsuk.org/funding.htm As indicated on the application form, funding applications should be submitted to the BAVS Secretary, Holly Furneaux (hf35@le.ac.uk).
Call For Articles/Contributions: The Eighth Lamp: Ruskin Studies Today
Call For Articles/Contributions: The Eighth Lamp: Ruskin Studies Today
The Eighth Lamp: Ruskin Studies Today (ISSN 2049-3215) invites contributors to submit scholarly papers (8,000-10,000 or 3500-4000 words), ideas for book reviews, exhibition reviews, news and events, titles of publications and projects in progress, and creative work and abstracts related to John Ruskin and related nineteenth century scholarship. Scholarly papers should be submitted at least six to eight months in advance to allow for the refereeing and revisions process.
The Eighth Lamp is an online and double blind refereed journal published by Rivendale Press, UK. It is led and managed by Dr Anuradha Chatterjee (Founding Editor and Co-Editor), Lecturer in History and Theory in Architecture and Design, University of Tasmania, and Dr Laurence Roussillon-Constanty (Co-Editor), Senior Lecturer in English, Paul Sabatier University, Toulouse, France. The journal is also complemented by a ten strong Editorial Board that provides intellectual and pedagogical support and leadership to the journal. It is part of The Oscholars group of journals (www.oscholars.com) edited by David Charles Rose.
The scope of The Eighth Lamp is multidisciplinary and it welcomes submissions related to art, religion, historiography, social criticism, tourism, economics, philosophy, science, architecture, photography, preservation, cinema, and theatre. The Oscholars site has a monthly audience of over 45,000. The journal is circulated to over 100 scholars and academics internationally. The journal is listed in key Victorian studies and nineteenth century literature, culture, and visual studies forums. Previous issues of The Eighth Lamp can be accessed via the following link: http://www.oscholars.com/Ruskin/index.htm
Please email submissions directly to the editors at theeighthlamp@gmail.com.
Call For Articles: Victorian Periodicals Review
Call For Articles: Victorian Periodicals Review
Essays of 6,000-7,000 words are sought for a special number of *Victorian Periodicals Review* on the theme of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals.
Much of the Victorian Press was built on an interdependency of work and leisure.
Several questions arise from this statement. They include, but are by no means limited to, the following.
What was the leisure that the press promoted and how different was it from work? Reading (as opposed to writing for) the press is obviously an insufficient answer: even reading fiction could be work for teachers, reviewers or those trying to entertain children or colleagues. To what extent, indeed, was the very concept of leisure a ruse? How far did the Victorian press inscribe women’s domestic labour as a form of leisure, or male work as pleasurable? More generally, how did the press fit into the wider context of the entertainment industry: the theatre, travel, music, exhibitions, sport – and shopping?
Not all of the press was devoted to leisure and its limits. What of that enormous sector that unashamedly named its focus as work-related: the trade and professional press, newspaper pages devoted to the stock market and commodity prices, articles worrying over women in the workplace, over the masculinity of the civil servant, or over the demands of labourers on strike?
Finally, what of the cultural work of the Victorian press? What was the function of the press in society? How might that cultural work relate to the pleasures of leisure?
As was seen at the 43rd Annual Conference of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals last year, the topic is a rich one that can be addressed in a multitude of ways.
Please submit completed manuscripts by 30 June 2012 (for publication in 2013) in Word (no PDFs please) to a.king@greenwich.ac.uk
New Issue of 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century
New issue of 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century
Now avaialble at: http://19.bbk.ac.uk/index.php/19/issue/view/82/showToc
Launch event: Wednesday 16 May, 6 pm (for 7.30 reception), Room 101, Clore Management Centre, Torrington Square, London WC1. For booking details, see below.
This issue, guest edited by Bethan Carney and Catherine Waters, re-examines the notorious Trollopian critique of Charles Dickens as ‘Mr Popular Sentiment’, investigating both the complex affective power of his writing and the strong and divided emotional responses it has elicited. As well as essays exploring fiction, journalism, letters, memoirs, portraits, and a range of other forms of material culture, it includes a Forum on ‘Bicentennial Sentiment: Dickens and Feeling Now’. The contributions to this issue invite us to reconsider how we feel about Dickens and about Dickensian feeling 200 years after his birth.
19: INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES IN THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY
NO 14 (2012): DICKENS AND FEELING
Bethan Carney: ‘Introduction: “Mr Popular Sentiment”: Dickens and Feeling’
Catherine Waters: ‘Materializing Mourning: Dickens, Funerals, and Epitaphs’
Gail Marshall: ‘Popular Sentiments and Public Executions’
Wendy Parkins: ‘“Wot larx!”: William Morris, Charles Dickens, and Fatherly Feelings’
Valerie Sanders: ‘“Joyful convulsions”: Dickens’s Comings and Goings’
Daniel Tyler: ‘Feeling for the Future: The Crisis of Anticipation in Great Expectations’
Jonathan Buckmaster: ‘“A man of great feeling and sensibility”: The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi and the Tears of a Clown’
Catherine Malcolmson: ‘“A veritable Dickens shrine”: Commemorating Charles Dickens at the Dickens House Museum’
Forum: ‘Bicentennial Sentiment: Dickens and Feeling Now’ (Contributors: John Drew, Holly Furneaux, Ian Higgins, Juliet John, John O. Jordan, Catherine Malcolmson, Gail Marshall, Kris Siefken, Tony Williams, and Ben Winyard)
Launch event: To mark the publication of ‘Dickens and Feeling’, we will be holding a small launch event at Birkbeck on the evening of Wednesday 16 May, following Holly Furneaux’s Arts Week lecture, ‘Dickens’s Gentle Soldiers: Fiction and Journalism of the Crimean War’. Wednesday 16 May, 6 pm (for 7.30 reception), Room 101, Clore Management Centre, Torrington Square, London WC1. The lecture is free, but registration required at <http://gentlesoldiers.eventbrite.com>
Further details about Birkbeck’s fifth annual Arts Week can be found at <http://www.bbk.ac.uk/arts/about-us/our-events/arts-week-2012>
Call for Articles and Contributions
Call for Articles and Contributions
Victorians Journal of Culture and Literature marks the bicentenary birth-years of Robert Browning and Charles Dickens. New work addressing any aspect of their writing, careers, and contributions to literary and cultural history are invited for consideration. Please send electronic submissions to
deborah.logan@wku.edu<mailto:deborah.logan@wku.edu>
Deadline for submissions: June 30, 2012. Notification: August 2012. Publication: December 2012.
Questions are welcome, as are illustrations (b/w, no copyright issues).
CFP: ‘NOBLER IMAGININGS AND MIGHTIER STRUGGLES’: OCTAVIA HILL AND THE REMAKING OF BRITISH SOCIETY
‘NOBLER IMAGININGS AND MIGHTIER STRUGGLES’: OCTAVIA HILL AND THE REMAKING OF BRITISH SOCIETY
A centenary conference organised by the National Trust and the University of Oxford, with the support of Octavia Housing
SUTTON HOUSE, LONDON – 27-28 SEPTEMBER 2012
In September 2012 an interdisciplinary conference at Sutton House in London will mark the centenary of the death of Octavia Hill. Best known for her housing reform, Hill was also instrumental in founding such diverse present-day institutions as the National Trust, the Chartered Institute of Housing, the Army Cadet force, and Family Action (originally the Charity Organisation Society). In a political climate which once again emphasizes the kind of privately-financed social action that Hill applauded, and where the preservation of open space and the provision of homes are again contentious, a re-evaluation of her life and legacy seems particularly timely.
The two-day conference will incorporate talks from invited speakers Gillian Darley, Jane Garnett, Lawrence Goldman, Astrid Swenson, Robert Whelan, and William Whyte. William Whyte will also lead participants round some of the Southwark housing projects established by Hill. To complement these events, submissions are invited for academic papers to make up a day of interdisciplinary panel sessions exploring Hill’s life, work, writings, and legacy; as well as her contemporaries, and the contexts in which she worked.
Topics might include (but are not limited to):
• Housing reform: slum clearance and the model dwelling movement
• Mapping the slums
• ‘Professional beggars’ and the Charity Organisation Society
• ‘Lady visitors’: women in the slums and women’s voluntary work more widely
• Social work and the professionalization of relationships with the poor
• Conservative feminisms: anti-suffrage and maternal philanthropy
• Working-class leisure and the right to open spaces
• The Kyrle Society and culture for the poor
• The National Trust and the preservation/conservation movement
• Hill’s intellectual and social circle (including John Ruskin, Samuel and
Henrietta Barnett, and F.D. Maurice)
• ‘Teaching en-masse’: Octavia Hill and Victorian women writers
• The Army Cadet force: its history and influence
Submissions are encouraged from graduate students, early-career academics, and senior academics, from any academic discipline, and from independent scholars. Hill’s influence and interests were extremely wide-ranging and our conference will reflect this diversity. 300-word proposals (for 20-minute papers) carrying a name and institutional affiliation, should be submitted to octaviahill2012@gmail.com by 1 June 2012.
English: The Journal of the English Association Special Issue on Dickens
English: The Journal of the English Association Special Issue on Dickens
*All articles are freely available online until 30 May 2012*
Table of contents available at: http://english.oxfordjournals.org/content/61/232.toc
DICKENS AND BEN JONSON
Jeremy Tambling
DICKENS, ILLITERACY, AND ‘WRITIN’ LARGE’
Gavin Edwards
‘A FRESH LOOK FOR OLD PUPPETS’: MARCUS STONE, CHARLES DICKENS, AND AUTHORSHIP
Jasper Schelstraete
SINGING CHRISTMAS CAROLS: THE DICKENSIAN MUSICAL VS. THE DICKENSIAN MEGA-MUSICAL
Marc Philip Napolitano
ROMANTICISM AT THE DEN
David Parker
*About the journal*
English is an internationally known journal of literary criticism, published on behalf of The English Association. Each issue contains essays on a wide range of authors and literary texts in English, aimed at readers within universities and colleges and presented in a lively and engaging style. There is a substantial review section, in which reviewers have space to situate a book within the context of recent developments in its field, and present a detailed argument. English is unusual among academic journals in publishing original poetry. This policy embodies the view that the critical and creative functions, often so widely separated in the teaching of English, can co-exist and cross-fertilise each other.
