Of Victorian Interest

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CFP: “Travel, Translation and Communication” (4/15/2017; 7/19-21/2017)

"Travel, Translation and Communication"
VPFA 9th Annual Conference
Institute of English Studies, Senate House, London
19th-21st July 2017

Keynote Speakers: Anne-Marie Beller (Loughborough), Mary Hammond (Southampton), Catherine Wynne (Hull)

Exhibition: ‘Picturing The Mass Market: Popular Late Victorian Periodicals’ Curated by John Spiers

Reading Group: ‘Travels of the Mind and Body’ Hosted by Chloé Holland and Anne-Louise Russell

The Victorian Popular Fiction Association is dedicated to fostering interest in understudied popular writers, literary genres and other cultural forms, and to facilitating the production of publishable research and academic collaborations amongst scholars of the popular. Their annual conference is integral to this aim and brings together academics with interests in Victorian popular writing, culture and contexts. The conference has a reputation for offering a friendly and invigorating opportunity for academics at all levels of their careers, including postgraduate students, to meet, connect, and share their current research.

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.

They welcome proposals for 20 minute papers, or for panels of three papers, on topics which can include, but are not limited to:

  • Textual travel: syndication (national and international), railway bookstalls, Mudie’s boxes, international/colonial editions (Tauchnitz), international copyright, piracy, serial publication / triple decker / single volume
  • Genre crossings: Realism, melodrama, sensation, detective, adventure, science and speculative fiction, fiction/non-fiction, high to low brow
  • Forms of communication: verbal, technological (telegraphs), written, epistemological, spiritualism, telepathy, mesmerism
  • Translation: languages, adaptation, cultural adaptation, Neo-Victorianism, intertextuality, metatextuality
  • Migration: transportation, immigration, expatriotism, diaspora, empire, race and colonialism, slave narratives, agency, freedom, dislocation
  • Tourism: Grand Tours, leisure cruise ships (P&O), watering holes, accommodation, sanatoriums, travel writing, holiday reading, the seaside, cosmopolitanism
  • Trade and commerce: money, speculation, business, postal service
  • Crossing boundaries: North and South, border controls, diplomatic exchanges, Europe, America, globally
  • Transport: trains, trams, buses, ships, bicycles, carriages, on foot (flâneur, voyeur)
  • Travel plans: maps, cartography, Bradshaw’s Guides, packing, travel diaries
  • Religious movements: pilgrimage, religious processions
  • Communication between the classes: class mobility, exploring other classes (Dickens, Mayhew, etc), reform literature
  • Communication between genders: Romance literature, secrets and lies, miscommunication
  • Education and transmission of knowledge: lectures, Working Men’s Clubs, conduct literature, temperance movement, pedagogical approaches, journalism, exposés
  • Movement and performance: travelling fairs, the circus, touring theatrical companies, cross dressing
  • Travels in time, space and place: histories, time travel, reincarnation, transmigration, space travel, journeys to the centre of the earth
  • Life stages: birth, ageing, death, crossroads, mobility and immobility
  • Digital humanities: travel and space intersections, network analysis, flow modelling, GIS-based research
  • Following VPFA's successful formula, they are continuing the special panels which will be hosted by guest experts; therefore they especially welcome papers about the following topics:

    Topic 1: Transport, hosted by Charlotte Mathieson
    Topic 2: The Sea and the Seaside, hosted by Joanne Knowles
    Topic 3: Travel and Archives, hosted by Nickianne Moody

    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 by Saturday 15th April 2017.

    For more information, please visit: http://victorianpopularfiction.org.

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