CFP
The Victorian Popular Fiction Association
Institute of English Studies, Senate House, London
July 13-15, 2015
Deadline: February 2, 2015
“Victorian Authenticity and Artifice”
Keynote Speakers:
- Prof. Linda Dryden “Stevenson and H. G. Wells: Monomaniacs, Duality and Evolutionary Science”
- Prof. David Glover “Styles of Populism in Victorian and Edwardian Popular Fiction”
Guest Speaker:
- Prof. Vanessa Toulmin from the National Fairground Archive
The Victorian Popular Fiction Association conference is recognised as an important event on the annual conference circuit and offers a friendly and invigorating opportunity for established academics and postgraduate students to share their current research. The Victorian Popular Fiction Association remain committed to the revival of interest in understudied popular writers, which is pivotal to the reputation this conference has established.
The organisers invite a broad, imaginative and interdisciplinary interpretation of the topic and its relation to any aspect of Victorian popular literature and culture, which might address literal or metaphorical representations of the theme.
The organisers welcome proposals for 20 minute papers, or for panels of three papers, on topics which can include, but are not limited to:
Authenticity and/or Artifice in relation to:
- Publication: Pseudonyms, Anonymous Writing, Imitation, Attribution, Public/Private Personas etc.
- Genre Boundaries: Realism, Melodrama, Gothic, Sensation, Detective, Fiction/Non-Fiction, etc.
- Textual (Re)Writings: Translation, Adaptation, Plagiarism, Intertextuality, Metatextuality etc.
- The Stage and Showmanship: Theatre, Circus, Freak shows, Performance, Theatricality, Costume, Make-up, Setting, Mise-en-scene etc.
- Performativity: Sex, Gender, Class, Nationality etc.
- Science and its Practitioners: (Pseudo)Science, Adulteration, Séances, Mesmeric displays; Quacks, Fakes, Phonies etc.
- Crime and Detection: Going undercover, Fraud, Deception, Theft, Murder, Poison, Amateur and Professional Detectives etc.
- Cultural Constructs: Race, Social Purity, Disability, Miscegenation, Degeneration, Eugenics, Nationality etc.
- Reconstruction and Reinvention: Neo-Victorianism; Auto/Biography, Self-Representation and Promotion; Historical Fiction; the Victorians and Shakespeare, the Classics, the (new) canon etc.
- Popular Fiction as an authentic subject for study/research
Special topic panels:
Following last year’s success, there will be a recreation of the special panels which will be hosted by guest experts; therefore papers about the following themes are especially welcome:
Topic 1: The Stage, hosted by Beth Palmer
Topic 2: Fakes and Frauds, hosted by Ruth Heholt
Topic 3: Genre Boundaries, hosted by Jessica Cox
Papers in previous years have also discussed authors such as:
J. M. Barrie
Mrs Beeton
Anne Brontë
Charlotte Brontë
Emily Brontë
Rhoda Broughton
Lewis Carroll
Mary Cholmondeley
Arthur Conan Doyle
Charles Dickens
George Eliot
Elizabeth Gaskell
George Gissing
Thomas Hardy
Jerome K. Jerome
Rudyard Kipling
Eliza Lynn Linton
Edith Nesbit
Margaret Oliphant
Olive Schreiner
Robert Louis Stevenson
Bram Stoker
William Makepeace Thackeray
Dinah Craik
Anthony Trollope
Mary Augusta Ward
H.G. Wells
Ellen Wood
Charlotte Yonge
For more information: http://victorianpopularfiction.org
Please send proposals of no more than 300 words and a 50 word biography in Word format to Drs Janine Hatter, Helena Ifill and Jane Jordan at: vpfamembership@gmail.com