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:
- Productivist and consumerist ideologies and the politics of social class
- Victorian (global) spaces of production, forms and practices of consumption
- Changing concepts of literary production, authorship and the reading audience
- Biological and physiological models of productivity, attrition and idleness
- New agents in the literary marketplace: publishers, editors, book sellers
- Economic theory and nineteenth-century literature
- Reassessing Marxist perspectives on Victorian literature and culture
- Idleness, spare time and other modes of ‘unproductiveness’
- The effects of industrialisation: mechanization, work routine and ‘human motors’
All submissions should conform to MHRA style conventions and the in-house submission guidelines. Please note the extended deadline for submissions to our next issue is 15 August, 2011. Contact: victoriannetwork@gmail.com