Call for Contributions: Textures in Nineteenth-Century Material and Literary Cultures

Eds. Ariane de Waal and Anja Hartl

SUNY Press

We invite additional contributions to an edited collection on Textures in Nineteenth-Century Material and Literary Cultures, which is under contract for publication in the series Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (series editor: Pamela Gilbert) at SUNY Press.

The deadline for detailed proposals (up to 700 words) for this volume is 1 July 2024, with delivery of completed chapters by 1 November 2024.

Overview

The volume provides a systematic and interdisciplinary exploration of textures in British nineteenth-century material and literary cultures. Drawing on the etymological meaning of texture as a web, we conceptualize texture as a complex category that encompasses both structural and surface properties and the sensory arrangement of material objects. Texture complicates the relation between inside and outside, surface and substance, as well as subject and object. As ground-breaking progress in the natural sciences exploded the Victorians’ interest in the textural distinctions between (and within) species and geological strata, the texture of material objects became increasingly meaningful in light of Britain’s colonial expansion and rising consumer culture. The collection shows how textural evaluation turned into a vital skill in the consolidation of new consumer identities as well as class-based and racialized distinctions.

The volume argues that texture not only served as a key category for stratifying the material world in the long nineteenth century but also allowed for sensuous experiences of materiality through visual and tactile explorations of artworks, texts, and other artefacts. Pursuing an interdisciplinary approach, the chapters focus on the definition, description, and construction of textures in diverse scientific fields and in textile cultures, architecture, aesthetic theory, philosophy, and poetics. By tracing textural thinking across these areas, the volume aims to elaborate the significance of textures to the history of ideas and to elucidate their role as a crucial evaluative and aesthetic tool.

Methodology

The edited collection explores textural methodologies to reveal the intricate and complex layering of literary and material artefacts in the long nineteenth century. In literary studies, texture has so far mainly been deployed to analyze the formal, medial, and affective surface qualities as well as the reception of literary texts (Stockwell 2009; Reinfandt 2016). Queer theory has also drawn on texture as a tool of literary interpretation (Bora 1997; Sedgwick 2003). The volume extends these approaches by using the notion of texture for a systematic investigation not only of literary but also of material culture.

By introducing texture as an analytical category and critically productive terminology, the collection expands methodological approaches in the field of Victorian material culture studies. Since the “Material Turn” (Pykett 2003) in Victorian Studies, scholars have moved away from reductive views of material culture as commodity culture, offering more complex engagements with ‘things’ outside of circuits of production and consumption (e.g. Freedgood 2006; Plotz 2009). What these approaches tend to share is an understanding of material culture as constructed and perpetuated by human agents; only rarely are humans themselves considered as part – rather than as the recipients or designers – of material culture (Boehm 2012; Hartl 2022). Following up on these developments, the volume uses the concept of texture to explore the material properties of human and nonhuman matter. Problematizing binary views of surface-depth relations, the volume demonstrates how meaning is often produced ‘in between’ the internal and external dimensions of texts and objects.

Structure

Across three sections, the contributors establish the methodological potential of textural analysis through a comprehensive examination of textures in literary texts, material culture, and crafts and consumer culture. The chapters address the following fields of enquiry:

Section I: Literary Culture: Poetics and Aesthetics

• Textural writing: which techniques serve to render textures tangible or perceptible in poetry and prose? How do literary texts evoke attributes of “elasticity, bounciness, sponginess, hardness, softness, consistency, striatedness, sogginess, stiffness, or porousness” etc. (Bora 1997, 99)? In what ways does texture work “as a principle of characterisation” (Hartl 2022, 111)?
• Textural composition: how is poetic or prose writing texturally composed? To what extent can literary patterns and structural aspects be described through textural terminologies, such as distinguishing the smooth from the striated (Conte 1997)? 
• Textural aesthetics: how do authors describe or mediate the aesthetic experience of texture? How do the formal, medial, and affective textural qualities of texts shape the aesthetics of reception (Stockwell 2009; Reinfandt 2016)?
• Textural phenomenology: to what extent is sense perception a textured phenomenon? Are textures primarily captured in their visual or in their tactile, haptic quality? How does the link between textures and “affect, touching and feeling” foreground literature’s “irreducibly phenomenological” aspects (Sedgwick 2003, 21)?
• Textural analysis: which methodology needs to be applied to apprehend literary/material textures? What are the narrative/structural/affective possibilities of texture?

Section II: Material Culture: Skin and Hair

• Textural classification: how do medical or scientific writers establish texture as an evaluative tool? Which race-, gender-, age-, and class-based distinctions do textural classifications normalise? How do these distinctions intersect with imperial and economic systems of meaning?
• Textural corporeality: in which contexts is the human body approached as textured? To what extent are textures, rather than bodily surfaces or depths, constitutive of social identity, health, and disease? How does the evocation of texture relate to the production of desire and aversion?
• Textural materiality: how does the textural likeness between human skin and hair and nonhuman objects or structures complicate ontological distinctions between Victorian “bodies and things” (Boehm 2012)?
• Textural pathologies: how do differentiations between porous or sealed, fixed or detachable, static or flexible textures serve to distinguish healthy from pathological bodily structures (de Waal 2020; Mathieson 2022)?

Section III: Crafts and Consumer Culture: Textiles

• Textural webs: in what ways do authors extend the meaning of texture from “a craft name” to the overarching sense of “the world as a woven one” (Silver 2020, 169)?
• Textural temporalities: how do textures mediate the relationship between past, present, and future? Does the “self-referential” quality of textures encourage reflection on the “history” of an object’s production and circulation (Green-Lewis 2017, 63)?
• Textural commodities: what is the role of textures in determining an object’s desirability or market value, especially in imperial settings?
• Textural consumption: which textural aspects are valued and experienced in processes of consumption? How did the ability to differentiate ‘rough’ and ‘coarse’ from ‘smooth’ and ‘fine’ properties of consumer products become an economically salient skill for the rising middle classes?

Chapter Proposals

Detailed proposals (up to 700 words) for full chapters (7,000-8,000 words, due by 1 November 2024), as well as a short biographical note (max. 100 words), should be sent to the editors by 1 July 2024: Ariane de Waal (ariane.de_waal@uni-leipzig.de) & Anja Hartl (anja.hartl@uibk.ac.at).

Your proposal should indicate the following:

• Which section of the volume would your chapter be included in, and which key questions does your chapter address?
• Which aspect(s) of texture/textural thinking/textural analysis in nineteenth-century Britain does your chapter examine?
• How does your chapter contribute toward developing textural methodologies?

The volume employs Chicago Style and American English conventions for spelling.

Bibliography

Boehm, Katharina (ed.). 2012. Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bora, Renu. 1997. “Outing Texture.” Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 94-127. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Conte, Joseph. 1997. “The Smooth and the Striated: Compositional Texture in the Modern Long Poem.” Modern Language Studies 27 (2): 57-71.

De Waal, Ariane. 2020. “Looking Both Ways: Middlemarch, True Skin, and the Dermatological Gaze.” Victorian Network 9: 101-122.

Freedgood, Elaine. 2006. The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. University of Chicago Press.

Green-Lewis, Jennifer. 2017. Victorian Photography: Literature and the Invention of Modern Memory. London: Routledge.

Hartl, Anja. 2022. “Experiencing Textures: The Materiality of Illegitimacy in Wilkie Collins’s No Name.” European Journal of English Studies 26 (1): 105-123.

Mathieson, Charlotte. 2022. “‘Stimulated by These Agents to Vigorous Action’: The Language of Suntanning and Materiality of Skin in Victorian Culture.” European Journal of English Studies 26 (1): 124-144.

Plotz, John. 2009. Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Pykett, Lyn. 2003. “The Material Turn in Victorian Studies.” Literature Compass 1: 1-5.

Reinfandt, Christoph. 2016. “Reading Textures.” Theory Matters: The Place of Theory in Literary and Cultural Studies Today, edited by Martin Middeke & Christoph Reinfandt, 319-334. London: Palgrave.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Silver, Sean. “The Emergence of Textures.” Journal of the History of Ideas 81.2 (2020): 169-194.

Stockwell, Peter. 2009. Texture – A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.