This conference seeks to assess the state of contemporary neo-Victorian literature, film, television and other media, with papers offering new readings of neo-Victorian texts. The conference also seeks to interrogate the critical field surrounding the notion of the neo-Victorian by asking how we, as scholars, understand this genre and its allied politics. Does the current cultural interest in the “new Victorian” imply a resistance to post-modernism, post-structuralism or post-humanism? Or, can neo-Victorianism help us interrogate these terms? How does our post-Victorian landscape accommodate and manipulate the neo-Victorian urge?

We encourage papers that question the ethics, aims and cultural implications of neo-Victorian trends, and which attempt to understand this genre in light of our own political climate and our scholarly resistance to the liberal humanist subject. We also hope to receive papers that playfully link the Victorian and the contemporary, as in Joy De Lyria and Sean Michael Robinson’s reimaging of The Wire as a Victorian serial or Anna Maria Jones’ connections between the workings of the Victorian sensation novel and contemporary Victorian scholarship. Submissions from graduate students are welcomed.

Keynote Speakers:
Christine Ferguson (University of Glasgow)
Mark Llewellyn (University of Strathclyde)

Please send 250 word abstracts, together with a 100 word biographical note, to Joyce Goggin (J.Goggin@uva.nl) and Tara MacDonald (T.C.MacDonald@uva.nl) by February 1, 2012.

Organizing Committee: Joyce Goggin (University of Amsterdam), Tara MacDonald (University of Amsterdam), Monika Pietrzak-Franger (University of Siegen), Eckart Voigts-Virchow (University of Siegen), and Antonija Primorac (University of Split)