CFP: Special Issue “Longevity Networks” Victoriographies, A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing, 1790-1914 Expected: Fall 2015 Deadline: June 30, 2014Essays are sought for a special number of Victoriographies inspired by the concept of textual longevity. There is a great deal of energy in media studies, new materialism, and print culture around questions of textual longevity. The editors understand longevity to mean the iterability of text, broadly conceived: reprinting, versions, editions, revisions, translation, interpretation, appropriation, the readymade, intermediality, homage, modernization, spoof, and parody.
Scholars in textual studies challenge us to consider the variability of the text over time, historical eras, national borders, print format, and genre. At the same time, Caroline Levine’s suggestion of "birth-time" in a recent issue of Victorian Studies (Summer 2013) begs the related question whether there is also a "death-time" for texts. She argues that we should turn to form, and specifically to networks, to understand literary history in ways that nation-focused approaches overlook. Texts moving through time and space develop relational networks, which raises a number of productive questions: If we consider networks of textual circulation as organic forms (networks as organisms), what might such readings yield? What might readings of the "birth-time" or "death-time" (or lack thereof) for a text teach us about how we define a text? About nationalist claims and canonization? About authorial and textual identity? About generic distinctions and ways of reading? Or about crafting a more expansive, interpenetrative literary history that extends beyond a critical reliance on place of origin or periodization?
The editors seek contributions to this special issue that generate a discussion on the iterable textual body as an object that simultaneously resists decay and requires human intervention to assist its regeneration, as that which is at once inanimate and living, embodied and disembodied, singular and networked. They invite articles invested in Victorian literature and in interrogating, recharting, reinscribing, and retracing the long nineteenth century.
Possible topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Genre and periodization
- National identification, borders, boundaries
- Publication formats, print culture, the literary market place
- Recycled narratives, interpretations, versions, fan fiction
- Artifacts, archives, special collections, the museum, digitised treasures
- Chronotopes, memory, preservation, and nostalgia; deep time readings
- Literary aesthetics of death and afterlives
- Translations, intermediality, circulation, appropriation
- Media studies, history of the book
- Matter and meaning-making; materialist poetics
- Literary assemblages, paratextual matter
- Possibilities/limitations of new materialism in literary studies
- History of science and technology, the posthuman
- Neo-Victorian, steampunk
Please submit essays of 5,000-7,000 words (inclusive of end notes), a 250-word abstract, a brief biographical sketch, and 5-6 keywords (preferably not words used in the title) for online searches to Guest Editor Amy Kahrmann Huseby (University of Wisconsin-Madison) at huseby@wisc.edu by June 30, 2014. Please do not submit a manuscript that is under consideration elsewhere.
Victoriographies, A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing, 1790-1914 seeks to invent afresh the long nineteenth century. Returning to the text as text, Victoriographies explores, as if for the first time, those canonical texts and authors that seem familiar, and interrogates the understudied, those authors and publications which demand a response. The journal is concerned with writing of the long nineteenth century and writing about the nineteenth century. Victoriographies invites articles which address philosophical, epistemological, and ideological concerns, as these are embedded in the surface and texture of the text itself. The emphasis is on Victorian writing, about literary texts, poetry, prose fiction, and prose non-fiction in the period 1790-1914.
Website: http://www.euppublishing.com/journal/vic Twitter: @akhuseby