VSAO Conference 2024

The 56^th Annual VSAO Conference will take place on April 27, 2024, at Glendon College, York University. The topic for this year’s conference is: “The Victorian World [as] a Space of Invention”: Returns to and Revisions of the Nineteenth-Century Past. The full Call for Papers is listed below. Please consider submitting a proposal!

“The Victorian World [as] a Space of Invention”:

Returns to and Revisions of the Nineteenth-Century Past

This year’s conference proposes to interpret the Victorian world as a space of invention, one that continues to offer opportunities for innovation and transformation for nineteenth-century creators and creators that followed.

Nineteenth-century writers, artists, and thinkers returned to past figures, narratives, and forms to define themselves in their contemporary moment and sometimes to reform their own disciplines during the Victorian period. As such, the past frequently offered a lens through which artists and creators could look at and critique their present moment. In Romola, for instance, George Eliot provides a detailed study of Florentine life during the Italian Renaissance, one that shared parallels with the philosophical, religious, and social turbulence of Victorian England. Likewise, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites worshipped the abundance of detail typical of Quattrocento Italian art in the development of a new aesthetic that openly flouted the conventions of the Royal Academy of Art.

This tendency to look to the past to define one’s self and one’s aesthetic continues, while providing some insight into more contemporary concerns. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century creators continue to return to the nineteenth century and to particular Victorian art forms and narratives to reinvent, reform, or remediate them. A glance at a list of modernist and contemporary music, art, books, films, or television series confirms that a preoccupation with Victorian narratives is ubiquitous across media.

If, as Kate Mitchell suggests, “the Victorians continue to have meaning for us today because we continue to grant them meaning,” some of the questions that this conference looks to answer will include: What is it about Victorian source texts that preoccupy modern and contemporary adaptors? How is a Victorian aesthetic remediated in and by the adapted text(s)? What insights do these remediations and adaptations provide about contemporary preoccupations that are in turn projected onto the Victorians? VSAO invites proposals for papers on Victorian adaptations and their relationship with the arts and with daily life.

Papers might consider topics including, but not limited to:

• The act/art of revision, return, and/or reform
• Art and appropriation
• Victorian medievalism and a fascination with the Renaissance
• Return narratives; textual and aesthetic returns to the nineteenth century
• Victorianism, Neo-Victorianism, and 21^st-century Revisions of the Victorian
• Reframing and reinterpreting (the) Victorians
• Art as adaptation
• Intertextuality and parody
• Victorian invention and/or reinvention
• Transposing the Victorians across time, space, and genre
• Gender, Adaptation, and Postfeminism
• Media Afterlives of the Victorians
• Adaptation and Evolution
• Inventors and authors, artists, or musicians

The one-day conference will be held on Saturday 27 April 2024, at Glendon College, York University.

Please send a 300-word proposal and 50-word bio (as MS Word documents) by 15 January 2024, to Alison Halsall, ahalsall@yorku.ca

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CALL FOR PAPERS – ACCUTE 2024

Congress 2024: Sustaining Shared Futures

“THE COMING UNIVERSAL WISH NOT TO LIVE”: VICTORIANS AND THE FUTURE

McGill University – Montreal/Tiohtià:ke – June 12-15, 2024

The 2024 Conference CFP for the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE) is now OPEN. Please use the Online Submission Form on the ACCUTE website to submit your proposal.

DEADLINE: NOVEMBER 17, 2023

Joint Sponsored with Victorian Studies Association of Ontario (VSAO) Organizer: Jo Devereux, Western University, jdevereu@uwo.ca

During the nineteenth century, owing at least in part to revolutions in scientific and religious thought, many writers engaged with questions of the past and the present, often expressing deep concern about the impending turn of the millennium and what unknown and perhaps terrifying changes it might bring. While scientists such as Lyall and Darwin reframed ideas of the old earth and its inhabitants, novelists and poets envisioned a strange new world, one that could be virtually unrecognizable to the “modern” Victorian. We invite proposals on Victorian fin-de-siecle malaise and/or nineteenth-century fears of the future, as well as those that consider a more optimistic Victorian vision of what’s to come. Topics might include but are not restricted to:

• Past and present
• Modernity
• Science fiction
• Dystopian fiction
• Utopian societies
• Race or gender futurities
• Genetics and eugenics
• Omens and prophecies
• Spiritualism
• Scientific and other revolutions
• Exploration
• Medicine
• Religion and the future
• Clothing and the future
• Inventions
• Climate death
• Extinction
• Photography
• New ways of communicating
• Apocalyptic visions

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VSAO-Sponsored ACCUTE Joint Session–“Eco-Victorians: Water, Land, and the World”–for the Humanities Congress at the University of Western Ontario, May 30th-June 5th, 2020.

From Charles Dickens’s ecopoetical rivers, to the wondrous route across the sea to Treasure Island, the Victorian era was resplendent with images of water, seafaring, and global travel. At the same time, as J.M.W. Turner’s visceral abolitionist painting Slave Ship attests, society was literally kept afloat by the oceanic trade routes which forcibly moved both human (slaves) and inhuman cargo (colonized resources) throughout what Paul Gilroy has famously coined “the Black Atlantic.” The word “ecology” was coined by Ernst Haeckel in 1866, ushering in the formal study of diverse ecosystems, terrain sites and watery worlds which were then being transformed by industrial capitalism and imperialism. Indeed, Victorians saw the power of “the Anthropocene” unleashed during that grave epoch in which the human species became, and has remained, the dominant influence on our planet’s climate and environment.

This panel invites papers that examine the way in which water, land, and the ecological world connecting them was constructed in this era.

Possible themes might include but are not limited to:

• representations of seas, landscapes, and ecosystems
• eco-writing, eco-criticism, print culture, illustration
• tourism, parks, maritime histories, leisure activities
• decolonial representations, anthropocene studies, global Victorian literatures
• histories of imperialism, colonization, migration, diasporic communities and slavery
• genre fiction and ecologies
• spatial histories, environmental architecture in urban, rural, domestic and cultural spaces

https://accute.ca/accute-conference/accute-cfp-jointly-sponsored-panels/#VSAO

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VSAO-Sponsored ACCUTE Joint Session
“Victorian Fun, Amusement and Delight”
For the Humanities Congress at the University of British Columbia
June 1-7th, 2019

From Edward Lear’s owl-and-pussycat elopement, the Queen’s laughable rage in Wonderland, to the visual wit found in illustrations by Phiz and the Punch artists, the Victorian era was no stranger to delight and merry-making. In one sense, the Victorian era was a bastion of prudish puritanical “no nonsense,” of earnest rationalism in its documenting positivism and nascent naturalist sciences. In another sense, this historic moment also saw the flowering of imaginative merriment through the emergence of leisure time for working and bourgeois classes, which inspired a myriad of humorous and nonsense artistic forms to proliferate. Such forms made for a rich tapestry of fun: from fashionable séances, picnicking in garden cemeteries, to circuses, vaudeville, drawing room revels, sartorial joys and circulating erotica. In short, the Victorians took fun seriously, and the results were alternately paradoxical, unexpected, grotesque or outright entertaining. From their overt etiquette manuals comingling with sexual discourses, to emerging police forces emerging alongside sensational tales of Jack the Ripper and popular crime novels, “fun” in the Victorian era could be both trivial and political.

This panel invites papers that examine, broadly speaking, the ways in which fun was imagined, represented and conceived in this era. In addition, papers might inquire as to how the imagined and lived amusements of Victorians could be seen as cultural representations of the following: their hidden anxieties, their emotional histories, their desires for escapist revelry (and, for some, a fleeting chance to seek ephemeral moments of agency), of carnivalesque fun, or as responses or abstractions of looming concerns pertaining to various others’ daily struggles for survival. Possible themes might include but are not limited to:

• print culture and the emergence of humour writing, editorials and comic illustration
• landscapes of merriment, from theme parks and circuses, to concert halls, vaudevillian culture, cartographies of fun and amusing voyages
• literary representations of fun, leisure, laughter, play, silly joy, wordplay, nonsense, absurdity, puns, or the amusingly bizarre
• Empire’s imperial amusements
• revisiting theories of the carnivalesque and counternarratives of historic revelry
• feminist/cultural/queer/intersectional theories exploring representations of fun
• narratives of pleasure: erotica, pulp, penny dreadfuls, celebrity, children’s fiction, speculative fiction, detective fiction, romance fiction
• visual representations of fun (advertising, illustrations, comics, etc.)
• interior design histories and/or design print culture (catalogues, pamphlets, journals, magazines) which informed spaces of fun in domestic and childhood culture

Please prepare a 300-to-500-word paper proposal, without personal identifying marks, and follow the instructions available here: https://accute.ca/accute-conference/proposal-submission-form/ to submit your proposal for this panel by November 15, 2018.