ACCUTE (Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English) occurs from May 31 to June 3, 2008 at the U of British Columbia, Canada

CFP: Green Victoria (deadline: 11/12/06; NAVSA/ACCUTE, 5/31/07-6/3/07)

Panel organized by Dennis Denisoff (Ryerson U)

Selected Panel Members

• Danielle Coriale (Brandeis), "Charlotte Brontë's Naturalist Imagination"
• Susan Hamilton (Ryerson), "The Power of Failure: Frances Power Cobbe and the Anti-vivisection Press"
• Eddy Kent (U of British Columbia), "Green London and Nature's Triumph over Alienated Labour in William Morris's News From Nowhere"

The relationship between Victorians and their natural environment was entangled among many other issues involving such things as ethics, aesthetics, science, industrialization, imperialism, and religion. In recent years, scholars have begun cultivating hybrid theorizations and readings of Victorian literature and culture in order to gain more nuanced understandings of this era’s green views. The 2008 NAVSA/ACCUTE panel organizer invites proposals of 250 to 500 words by November 12, 2007 for 20-minute talks that address issues related to Victorian perspectives on nature. Of particular interest is scholarship that addresses elements of environmentalism explicitly or explores the green implications of related issues. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• urban planning, sanitation, green space
• Victorians and other animals
• exploration, exotic landscapes, and ethics
• organic/natural form and literary form
• women’s writing and the gendering of nature
• industrialization, meat, and machines
• socialism and nonhuman life forms
• paganism, the individual, and liberalism
• animals’ rights and roles
• post-Romantic politics of nature
• green visions of a sustainable future
• atavism, criminality, decadence, and notions of the natural

new aesthetics and poetics of nature