Call for papers
Joint NavSA-ACCUTE Panel, Victorian Nostalgia/Nostalgic Victorians
York University, Toronto, ON
May 28-30, 2027

 Abstract Deadline:

By the turn of the twentieth century, writes David Lowenthal in The Past is a Foreign Country, “all Britain seemed bent on a nostalgic quest,” building Tudor-style pubs and penning English Ballads. The Victorians lived through seismic shifts in technology, science, and empire that destabilized not only the presumptive supremacy of Britain on the world stage, but the centrality of the human race itself within the large sweep of history; it is little wonder, perhaps, that they took comfort in a more insular past, from Thomas Carlyle’s medieval monks to William Morris’s agrarian utopias. Nostalgia is often contradictory: fueling xenophobia, suppression, and even fascism, but also fostering conservation, creativity, and community. This panel will consider papers that approach nostalgia in Victorian literature and culture with curiosity and originality.

Possible questions to pursue include: How does the impulse to look backward complicate Victorian ideals of progress and expansionism? What are the social/political/nationalist implications of (re)creating imagined British pasts? How do aesthetics of nostalgia shape form in Victorian art and literature? And, what might twenty-first-century nostalgia for the Victorian period, in Britain, Canada, and beyond, reveal about our own precarious present?

Email abstracts to: Nicole Dufoe, University of Toronto, nicole.dufoe@utoronto.ca