NAVSA/ACCUTE

 

For the fifth consecutive year, the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE) conference will feature a panel co-sponsored by NAVSA. For more details, see the 2008 NAVSA/ACCUTE page.

Dennis Denisoff (Ryerson University), has organized a session under the rubric of "Green Victoria."

• Danielle Coriale (Brandeis University), "Charlotte Brontë's Naturalist Imagination"
  

  This essay examines Charlotte Brontë's 'green' sensibility by studying her second novel, Shirley (1849), which imagines a vibrant rural community in Yorkshire as an ecosystem in which interdependent species communicate, defend their respective territories, and collide in spite of their mutual dependence on one another. By mobilizing a naturalist imagination, I argue, Brontë managed to represent a pluralized English community, and to find a place to exercise her environmental interests. The novel thus becomes a textual repository for the naturalist practices that, in Brontë's view, had no place in an industrialized world that must progress and move forward.

• Sue Hamilton (Ryerson University), "The Power of Failure: Frances Power Cobbe and the Anti-vivisection Press"
  

  Using materials from the Zoophilist, the specialized paper Cobbe oversaw as the Honorary Secretary of the Victoria Street Society, her own work in such established journals as the Contemporary Review and the Theological Review, the many pamphlets and leaflets produced by the society, and writing in such anti-vivisectionist journals as the Home Chronicler, this paper asks what current theorizations of the press can bring to our understanding of the constitution, circulation and maintenance of an audience for one strand of 'green' thinking in Victorian England. In particular, this paper queries the 'failures' of Victorian anti-vivisection. Exploring the relationship between Cobbe's professional understanding and negotiation of the newspaper and periodical 'audience' for anti-vivisection, this paper considers how Cobbe's writings address and constitute audiences for anti-vivisectionist discourse.

• Eddy Kent (University of British Columbia), "Green London and Nature's Triumph over Alienated Labour in William Morris's News From Nowhere"
  

  William Morris's News From Nowhere (1890), which presents London transformed by nature, is typically understood as characteristic of his ineffective, nostalgic brand of socialism. This paper argues that such a conclusion is contingent on perceiving nature as pastoral, idyllic, and anti-modern—which is difficult considering Morris's emphasis on cultivation or the presence of beneficial mechanized technology in his utopia. By showing that his green vision has as much to do with contemporary debates about Garden Cities and the emerging discipline of urban planning as with any bias against modernity, I position Morris as a radical, rather than a conservative, environmentalist.