Beyond Binaries: Victorian Literature in Transnational Contexts
NAVSA-ACCUTE Conference
Concordia University
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
June 4-7, 2026

Proposal Deadline: November 21, 2025

The view of Victorian literature as primarily ‘national’ obscures the depth of its cross-cultural engagements beyond Europe, engagements that were never just one thing—neither purely appropriative nor purely transformative, neither simply imperial nor simply personal, but irreducibly multiple in approach, execution, and impact. This complexity registered across Victorian literary culture: in translation practices that blended scholarly rigour with commercial ambition, in aesthetic movements that drew on non-European forms for genuine experiment, cultural distinction, or gesture of resistance, and in the careers of writers whose encounters with other traditions served at once personal, artistic, and professional ends. To recognize this complexity is to see that cross-cultural engagement was not supplementary to Victorian literary culture but constitutive of it, to understand that what we now call “Victorian literature” took form in, and depended upon, these multiple encounters with non-European traditions.

This panel seeks papers that can hold this complexity in view: work that examines how Victorian writers engaged with non-European traditions across multiple registers, receiving, representing and reproducing them in ways that resist categorization within binary theoretical or analytical models. Submissions that combine literary analysis with approaches from cultural history, translation studies, comparative methodology, or material culture are encouraged, as are those that go beyond familiar interpretive frameworks (e.g. power and agency; authentic and imitative; civilized and primitive) to consider how cross-cultural encounters encompassed contradictory impulses and effects, how they entailed complex processes of aesthetic and cultural mediation (i.e. translation, adaptation, conscious allusion), how they transformed both source traditions and receiving contexts.

Possible avenues of inquiry may include:

• Translation practices: What strategies, negotiations, or distortions characterized the translation of non-European works into English, and how did these shape Victorian literary culture?

• Aesthetic theory and criticism: How did encounters with non-European traditions alter Victorian debates about taste, beauty, or the purpose of art?

• Comparative analysis of form:  How did encounters with non-European literary traditions reshape Victorian narrative techniques, poetic structures, or dramatic conventions?

• Networks of mobility: How did travel, migration, and exile facilitate literary exchanges across borders?

• Reception and readership:  How did Victorian audiences interpret, adapt, or resist texts shaped by cross-cultural encounters?

• Identity formation through difference: How did engagement with foreign texts complicate Victorian constructions of selfhood, nationality, or religious belief?

• Material studies of circulation: How did publishing networks, periodicals, and libraries facilitate cross-cultural literary exchange?

• Contemporary methodological questions: What can digital humanities, postcolonial theory, or translation studies contribute to our understanding of these historical intersections?

This panel is co-sponsored by the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) and the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE). It will take place at the ACCUTE 2026 Conference, hosted by Concordia University, 4-7 June 2026.

Please submit a 250-word proposal, including a 50-word abstract and a brief biographical note, by Friday, 21 November 2025, via ACCUTE’s Online Submission Form.

Panelists need not be ACCUTE members provided they are members in good standing of NAVSA; however, only ACCUTE members will be eligible for travel funding. Proposals not accepted for this joint panel will still be considered as part of ACCUTE’s General Call for Papers.

For any enquiries, please contact Dr. Reza Taher-Kermani (Concordia University, Montreal): reza.taherkermani@concordia.ca