Of Victorian Interest

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CFP: Victorians Journal Special Issue on Victorian Hospitality (5/15/23)

Victorians Journal Winter Issue 2023

Victorians Journal announces a special topics CFP on Victorian Hospitality for their Winter 2023 issue, guest edited by Kristen Pond.

Submissions Due: May 15, 2023

The Victorians saw changing patterns to major areas of their lives, including travel, housing, leisure, religious belief, and class and gender relations. This corresponded to the growth of a railway system, legislation governing working hours and holidays, specialization in fields of work, and general reform movements throughout the period. These changes brought Victorians into contact with strangers more than ever before. The ambiguity of the stranger is captured in the Latin roots for two related words: hospitality, from the Latin word hospes meaning guest or stranger, and hostility, from the Latin word hostis meaning enemy. The etymological proximity of these two words represents the choice Victorians had: to show hostility or hospitality to the strangers they encountered. Walled off gardens around suburban homes and the Great Exhibition of 1851 represent just two of the varied responses of Victorians to strangers.

As a core concept that illustrates how the Victorians grappled with their changing world, and the ethics of relationship at the center of those changes, this special issue invites papers to consider hospitality as a crucial ethical issue for the period. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: 

  • Different spaces that encourage or complicate hospitality (the home, railway carriages, international events and exhibitions)
  • Tourism and travel
  • Different forms of hospitality (food practices, nursing, public and/or private charity, rooted and local vs. global and cosmopolitan)
  • Social challenges to hospitality (class, race, etc.)
  • Explorations of how Victorians defined hospitality (What actions or feelings counted?)
  • The act of reading Victorian texts as an act of hospitality
  • The reader as guest/host
  • The narrator as host
  • the classroom as a space for hospitality, teaching as an act of hospitality

Initial submissions are due May 15, 2023. MLA formatting, 7500-10,000 words, sent as email attachment in Word to Kristen_pond@baylor.edu

Please direct questions to editor Deborah Logan at deborah.logan@wku.edu

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