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NVSA 2017: The Question of Victorian Literature\nGeorgetown University
\nWashington, DC
\nApril 21-23, 2017<\/p>\n
NVSA 2017: The Question of Victorian Literature
\nGeorgetown University
\nWashington, DC
\nApril 21-23, 2017<\/p>\n
The Northeast Victorian Studies Association invites papers for its annual conference. The topic this year is \"The Question of Victorian Literature.\"<\/p>\n
The plenary panel this year will feature:
\nLauren M. E. Goodlad (Illinois)
\nGauri Viswanathan (Columbia)
\nCarolyn Williams (Rutgers)<\/p>\n
Victorian? Literature? Where do the questions start? Where can they end?\u00a0\u201cVictorian literature\u201d is a concept as old as our field of study and yet never more provocative than today. NVSA welcomes papers that think creatively about this fraught pair of terms\u2014the ways that they come together of fall apart\u2014and on the historical, methodological, and theoretical questions that arise when we try to define an object of study as capacious as \u201cVictorian literature.\u201d<\/p>\n
The subject allows the opportunity at once for a strong historical focus on the Victorians\u2019 own attitudes toward \u201cliterature,\u201d and a contemporary theoretical focus on our own period\u2019s relation to literature and to the \u201cVictorian.\u201d What are the cultural implications of an overt valuing of \u201cliterature\u201d? Is there a necessary relationship between the Victorians\u2019 elevating and professionalizing of the literary; our own modes of canon-formation; and the various forms of oppression associated with the period (classism, racism, sexism, homophobia)? Are form and periodization ever free from politics? What national boundaries and international networks are generated, reinforced, and blurred by the history of \u201cVictorian literature\u201d as a field of study, or by our own attempts to reconceptualize and reshape that field of study? How did Victorian culture orient its literature in relation to that of other European nations, the Americas, and the colonies, and how far can (or must) we stretch the category of Victorian literature in order to render its reach and complexity accurately?<\/p>\n
NVSA is particularly interested in papers addressing the relationship between period definition and the study of form. What were the edges or limits of literature in the Victorian period? What are they today? Do we share the Victorians\u2019 sense of the work that literature can and cannot do, and how does it relate to other forms of collective belonging, including religious practices and identities? (Arnold thought poetry would replace religion, after all.) Where does literature stand as a distinct mode of writing today\u2014not sociology, anthropology, psychology, etc., but \u201cliterature\u201d? Does a sense of that field as distinct from other subjects exist for the Victorians, or for us? Is Victorian literature essentially poetic, or novelistic, or theatrical? What is the role today of the nonfiction prose that was so important to the Victorians: of the essays and treatises of Darwin, Eliot, Martineau, Arnold, Mill, or others that were at one time taken as fundamental to our understanding of the period and its literariness? What are the Victorian sources for high modernism\u2019s contempt for Victorian literature, and to what extent does this contempt inflect our current response to the Victorian period? Have we been and are we still apologists for the imperfections (aesthetic, ethical, political) of the literature we call Victorian?<\/p>\n
What is the source of the appeal of the term \u201cVictorian,\u201d given the many problems with which the adjective has been associated, and even its anomalous place within the discipline? What might be gained by alternative ways of imagining the historical period from the perspective of the present? Is \u201cstrategic presentism,\u201d a term from the V-21 Manifesto, a useful new orientation to our historical work? Would this orientation be one way of renewing our field? Thirty years ago various critical movements urged us to move beyond prior forms of categorization. What about New Historicism, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and other theoretical commitments and formations today? In what ways have they troubled the idea of \u201cVictorian literature\u201d as a coherent or self-sufficient category, and in what ways have they helped to maintain it?<\/p>\n
Potential topics might include, but are in no way limited to, the following:<\/p>\n
\u2022 Literature about literature (David Copperfield, Aurora Leigh, The Doctor\u2019s Wife, New Grub Street,<\/em> \u201cThe Aspern Papers,\u201d Pendennis<\/em>)<\/p>\n \u2022 The quasi-literary and the para-literary<\/p>\n \u2022 The locations of literature (\u201cVictorian literature\u201d from outside Britain, Victorian literature circulating outside Britain, foreign literature in Victorian Britain)<\/p>\n \u2022 Victorian literary criticism<\/p>\n \u2022 Literature and the University<\/p>\n \u2022 The business of literature (circulating libraries and booksellers, hack writing and the business of the periodical, the triple-decker and other formats, plagiarism and copyright, Walter Besant\u2019s Society of Authors, bestsellers)<\/p>\n \u2022 What counts as literature?<\/p>\n \u2022 Contemporary theorizations of \u201cVictorian literature\u201d<\/p>\n\n
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