News from Other Organizations

"Politics and Propaganda"

The 29th Annual Conference of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association (NCSA) will be held at Florida International University, Miami, Florida from April 3-5, 2008

Sally Mitchell, Emerita Professor of English and Women's Studies, Temple University, will present the keynote address: "Political Women: The First Generation"

An international group of scholars will approach aspects of politics and propaganda during the long nineteenth century, including political figures, movements, parties, campaigns, immigration, imperialism, suffrage, gender politics, war, slavery, nationalism, uprisings, and revolutions. Papers will also examine forms of propaganda such as advertising, periodicals, promotion, news, campaign materials, songs, slogans, cartoons, souvenirs, paraphernalia, monuments, posters, and public art.

The conference will include a reception and tour at the Wolfsonian Museum-FIU, a leading museum of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century design. Conference participants will also have an opportunity to take an excursion to the Everglades National Park to experience the unique environment and to learn about Everglades history and the politics of preservation.

Please visit our website for more information: http://www.english.uwosh.edu/roth/ncsa/index.html

For Local Arrangements matters, contact Lauren Christos, Local Arrangements Chair, FIU: christol@fiu.edu

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Seminar: Political Theory for Victorian Studies?

The University of Notre Dame will host a one-day colloquium treating this theme on March 28, 2008 (the Friday after Easter). The event features lectures by Regenia Gagnier and Amanda Anderson and panels with papers and formal responses by Colene Bentley, Lauren M.E. Goodlad, Elaine Hadley, Jock Macleod, Daniel S. Malachuk, Andrew H. Miller, John Plotz, David Wayne Thomas, and Julie M. Wise. The aim of the gathering is to facilitate debate concerning current work by Victorianist literary and cultural historians who have been rethinking the field's recourse to concepts from political theory. The trend is especially apparent in work on Victorian liberalism. Drop-in observers are most welcome. Please contact the organizer if you would like to attend, as it will help for planning space and refreshments to have some idea of the headcount. Sessions begin at 9:00 a.m. and conclude at 6:15. Direct an RSVP or any inquiries about the event to David Wayne Thomas (dthomas6@nd.edu). The University of Notre Dame is in South Bend, Indiana.

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Call for Submissions: INCS Essay Prize

Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies invites nominations for its fifth annual essay prize. The $500 prize recognizes excellence in interdisciplinary scholarship on any nineteenth-century topic or world region. We encourage members of INCS to submit or nominate an essay written by a current member of INCS and published in a book or journal dated 2007. The winner will be announced at the 2008 conference. Please send three paper copies of the nominated essay to Professor Alexandra K. Wettlaufer, National Humanities Center, 7 Alexander Drive, PO Box 12256, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-2256 no later than February 15, 2008. For more details about the essay competition, the conference, or the organization, we invite you to visit the INCS website at http://www.nd.edu/~incshp/.

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CFP: A Return to Catherine Cookson Country (2/15/2008)

Hailed as the "Dickens of the North," Catherine Cookson returned time and time again to the Victorian past, writing what she called the "social history" of the area around the River Tyne in her 100-plus novels. In a writing career that spanned the aftermath of World War II, the rise of the welfare state, second-wave feminism and sexual revolution, and Thatcher's booming Heritage Industry, Cookson used the setting of England's industrial northeast to explore class and gender conflict, and the effects of poverty, illegitimacy, and violence on its men and women. Almost ten years after her death, fans on Cookson websites still claim that her stories of women overcoming hardships saved their lives, and the museum and trails that make up "Cookson Country," luring thousands of tourists a year, attest to her legacy as a champion of women and the working class in England. Yet despite two adoring biographies and an occasional subchapter in literary anthologies, Cookson remains sadly neglected by academics. Romance scholars typically ignore Cookson, who herself resisted the label of romance novelist in favor of social historian, while historians are too eager to discredit the accuracy of her largely Victorian settings and plots. It is time to revisit Cookson Country and assess Cookson's legacy as a publishing phenomenon.

This call for papers for an academic volume on Cookson welcomes essays from any disciplinary or theoretical perspective. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• Cookson as a distinctly "British" novelist
• Representations of femininity, masculinity, and sexuality, especially homosexuality and lesbianism, in Cookson's novels and life
• Cookson Country and the Heritage Industry (includes the museum, trails, on-line websites by and for fans, and TV movie versions of her novels)
• Re-evaluations of her texts: Feminist? Conservative? Subversive?
• Historical fiction or romance--do such labels really matter?
• Re-imagining Victorianism
• Class and gender politics in the historical/romance novel

Detailed abstract and a short CV are due by February 15, 2008. Please send in electronic format as Word attachment to taddeo@mail.umd.edu. Thank you!

Dr. Julie Taddeo
Visiting Associate Professor of History
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742

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Facing the Late Victorians

Facing the Late Victorians:
Portraits of Writers and Artists
from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection
at the Grolier Club
Feb. 21 - April 26, 2008

The Grolier Club will soon present an exhibition that examines noted Victorians through portraits. Facing the Late Victorians: Portraits of Writers and Artists from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, curated by Margaret D. Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Delaware, will provide the opportunity for visitors to come face to face with famous British poets, painters, novelists, playwrights and illustrators.

Facing the Late Victorians features portraits of dozens of well-known figures such as George Bernard Shaw, J. M. Barrie, H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and John Singer Sargent, who dominated the world of the arts, along with pioneering children's book authors and illustrators, such as E. Nesbit and Kate Greenaway. Many of these are rarely seen images, such as the unpublished sketches of themselves that Rudyard Kipling and Aubrey Beardsley included in letters to friends; the comical drawing of William Morris that the painter Edward Burne-Jones added to his guest-book; or Max Beerbohm's savage caricature of Oscar Wilde's head, which seems to decay before our eyes faster than did Dorian Gray's face. But the show ranges widely to include photographs and drawings of many lesser lights whose work was important in advancing British art and literature­once celebrated writers such as the feminist novelist Olive Schreiner and the Catholic poet Alice Meynell, as well as the artists Walter Sickert and William Rothenstein.

The show draws its eighty items from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, which has been assembled over the past thirty years by one of the premier authorities on nineteenth-century book history. That collection of first editions, presentation copies, authors' correspondence, and works of art and design is on loan to the University of Delaware Library. Margaret D. Stetz, the exhibition's curator, is the Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and Professor of Humanities at the University of Delaware.

Facing the Late Victorians is accompanied by a lavishly illustrated book by Margaret D. Stetz, published by the University of Delaware Press. Copies are available on site at the Grolier Club or may be purchased from Associated University Presses, 2010 Eastpark Boulevard, Cranbury, NJ 08512; Phone (609) 655-4770, e-mail aup440@aol.com, web: http://www.aupresses.com/ ($49.00. ISBN: 978-0-87413-992-1).

Location and times: Facing the Late Victorians: Portraits of Writers and Artists from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection will be on view at the Grolier Club from Feb. 21 - April 26, 2008. Hours: Monday-Saturday, 10 AM - 5 PM. Open to the public free of charge. For more information call the Grolier Club at (212) 838-6690.

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Three Panels by the MLA's Victorian Division

These are the three sessions sponsored by the Victorian Division of the MLA for the 2008 MLA Program in San Francisco. The general topic is "Victorians and the Sea." The Victorian Division encourages submissions of proposals. Please send them to Professor Ann C. Colley, Dept. of English, SUNY College at Buffalo, 1300 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, NY 14222-1095 or submit them electronically: colleyac@buffalostate.edu by March 15. The proposals may be one or two pages long.

Victorians and the Sea

Session 1: "Rule Britannia"
In fiction and non-fiction the sea is a source of wealth and power as well as a source of the nation's vulnerability and isolation; it is, moreover, a boundary and gateway to adventure/discovery.

Session 2: Sea Crossings
Cross-cultural currents and voyages of thought: national identity, the passage of humanistic and scientific ideas, the shipping of goods, scientific collections, and people (e.g. civil servants, émigrés), and the journeys of tourists and settlers.

Session 3: Seasides
The British who didn't travel across the sea went to the seashore: a gateway/boundary between land and sea, a site of escape, disaster, conflict, aesthetic and sensual pleasure, humor, and knowledge (e.g. natural history).

Please send one- or two-page proposals to Professor Ann C. Colley: Department of English, SUNY College at Buffalo, 1300 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, New York 14222-1095; proposals may also be sent electronically: colleyac@buffalostate.edu
Deadline: March 15, 2008.

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Two Dickens Society Panels at MLA

Dickens and Science: Significance of science in the novels; essays on science in Household Words and All The Year Round; Dickens and Darwinism; Dickens and Technology; Dickens and Medicine/Sanitation/Health. Abstract and brief c.v. by 1 March to Sally Ledger (s.ledger@bbk.ac.uk)

Victorian Vulgarity: Were the 1800s a "century of vulgarity" as Gilbert Osmond claims? Consider vulgarity in contexts such as: class and race relations; decorum, taste, and language use; the body, dirt, sexuality and disgust; assessments of verbal, visual and performance art. Abstract and brief c.v. by 1 Mar. to Elsie B. Michie (enmich@lsu.edu)

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Two Panels by the MLA's Late-19th/Early-20thC Division

1. Aesthetic Mobility How did urban mobility, media circulation, and travel shape late-Victorian aestheticism? How might we trace aestheticism's fluid, mobile constructions of gender, sexuality, class, nationhood, consumerism, cosmopolitanism? Abstracts by March 15 to Talia Schaffer. 2.Dance Revolution What role does the kinetic body play in modernist expressive culture? How does an experimental aesthetic of embodied movement revise modern constructions of experience, affect, otherness? 250-word abstracts by March 10 to Janet Lyon.

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CFP: VISAWUS Annual Conference

The 2008 VISAWUS (Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies of the Western United States) conference will be October 2-4, 2008, at the University of Washington, Seattle.

The conference theme is "The Public and Private Politics of Victorian England." Papers are invited on all relevant topics, ranging across such fields as culture; political science and economics; pedagogy; personal politics; urban life, travel, and public institutions; education and social services; identity politics; social changes; and the periodical press.

EMAIL a 300-word abstract and one-page CV by MARCH 15, 2008 to julie.codell@asu.edu.
Julie Codell, School of Art, MC 1505, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85283-15

The conference hotel is the Watertown Inn, and registration information is available at the VISAWUS website: http://www.visawus.org

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Call for Submissions to the VanArsdel Graduate Student Essay Prize

Victorian Periodicals Review and the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals invites graduate students to submit essays for the 2008 VanArsdel Prize for the best graduate student essay on, about, or extensively using Victorian periodicals. Manuscripts should be 15-25 pages and should not have appeared in print. The winner receives a plaque, $300, and publication of the prize essay in VPR. Send paper submissions by mail, postmarked by 1 April 2008, to Kathryn Ledbetter, Department of English, 601 University Drive, Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas 78666-4616. Please include a description of current status in graduate school.

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Bric-à-brac

Derived from the French for 'at random,' the phrase 'bric-à-brac' was first introduced to the English language in 1840 by Thackeray who used it to describe a visit to the Palace of Versailles. The purpose of this conference is to use Thackeray's expression to debate the nature of the impact of the curious, exotic and downright odd on Victorian literature and culture.

Bric-à-brac firstly suggests medley and clutter without apparent purpose, and one of the themes of the conference will be to explore sites of unusual concurrence (for example freak shows, carnivals, pawn-shops, auction houses or even 'the city'). We also want the conference to explore the ways in which bric-à-brac might bring the alien into everyday settings, the past into the present, or the wild into the domestic. Commercial exchange, buying and selling, the meeting of poverty and wealth also underwrite the notion of bric-à-brac. As such the title lends itself equally well to a discussion of Victorian economics and capitalism. But we also want to focus on writing - clashes of character, idiom and taste within literature and the miscellaneous nature of Victorian magazine culture.

Victorian literature and society invites scrutiny of the ways in which small objects or activities come together to signify larger cultural concerns. We invite papers that engage with and celebrate the spirit of this diversity in Victorian writing.

Suggested topics for papers include:

• The usage of particular objects within the writing of certain authors
• Objects and the uncanny
• Consumerist culture and literature
• The recycling of objects in literature
• Victorian design and literature
• Wunderkammers and Collectors and literature
• Pawn Shops, Museums, Freak-shows, in literature
• Science, empirical data collection, and literature
• And anything else that brings the material into collision with literature!

Please send abstracts of 300-500 words along with a brief biography to: bricabrac@aber.ac.uk, or by post to: Jon Shears or Jen Sattaur, c/o Department of English, University of Aberystwyth, Hugh Owen Building, Penglais Campus, SY23 3DY.

Deadline for submissions is April 1, 2008.

URL: users.aber.ac.uk/bricabrac

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THE OSCHOLARS

With a much expanded Editorial team and a dedicated website, THE OSCHOLARS, while still giving pride of place to Wilde studies, has broadened out to cover other key figures of the Fin de siècle and the decadent and symbolist movements, covering theatre and the visual arts as well as literature. This is being particularly reflected in our review section, but also throughout the website. New journals devoted to Vernon Lee (edited by Sophie Geoffroy of the Université de la Réunion) and George Moore (edited by Mark Llewellyn of the University of Liverpool) are now part of our mix, and the French fin-de-siècle has its own journal twinned with THE OSCHOLARS and sharing many of the same contributors, called Rue Des Beaux-Arts. For inscription on our mailing lists and further information please contact oscholars@gmail.com
D C Rose
Editor
1 rue Gutenberg
75015 Paris

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CFP: The Brontës and Influence

In March 2007, Stevie Davies, Patricia Duncker and Michele Roberts gathered around Patsy Stoneman at Haworth in Yorkshire to talk about the influence that the Brontës had had on their evolutions as authors, and more generally, about the source of inspiration that the most famous family of writers in England could represent. Patsy Stoneman had already tackled the topic by publishing a book entitled The Brontë Influence in 2004 with the help of Charmian Knight. The issue of LISA e-journal, Re-Writing Jane Eyre: Jane Eyre, Past and Present, is further evidence of Charlotte Brontë's influence on the writers of the following decades or centuries. So far, these studies have been quite limited and this field of research, "the Brontë influence," offers a wide range of possible developments.

Moreover, if the four authors' poetry and novels have already been the object of numerous studies, there is much left to write about the influences which were exerted on the Brontës, whether religious, literary, philosophical or cultural. Taking account of the context of a work is often a good way of understanding the issues underlying a text: the path taken by the Brontës, their journeys, their stays abroad, the books they read, etc. could prove to be very enlightening. Besides these external factors, one could also consider the interactions between the three sisters, who wrote in the same room and who read passages from their works aloud.

A final aspect to identify and study could be the influences which are exerted within the Brontës' works themselves. How can one account for the progress of the heroes and heroines? How is the influence that characters have on one another expressed? What role does nature play in the destiny of characters? Which other elements intervene in the novels?

This dossier devoted to the Brontës intends to analyse the works through the perspective of influence and three different fields of research can thus be considered:

• influences on the Brontës
• the idea of influence in the Brontës' works
• the Brontë influence on the writers of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries

Please send your proposals (one A4 page maximum) to:
Dr. Élise Ouvrard (ouvrard_elise@hotmail.com)

Accepted articles will be published in the thematic dossier, "The Brontës and the Idea of Influence" in the "Writers, writings" section of LISA e-journal: http://www.unicaen.fr/mrsh/lisa/publicationsGb.php?p=2&numId=0&it=dossiers

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The Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies Publishes Online Issue

The Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies has just published its first online issue (vol 12.1) at http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/AJVS.  Previously a print-based annual, AJVS is a fully refereed international journal now published in May and November each year.  AJVS is supported by AVSA, the Australasian Victorian Studies Association.  The current issue has pieces by Lyn Pykett on Victorian beginnings, Kieran Dolin on symbolic revolution in Dickens, Abigail Dennis on self-starvation in Sarah Grand and Graham Law on problems with the publishing history of Gissing's A Life's Morning.  The journal is actively seeking contributions on any aspect of Victorian Studies, and particularly encourages work on interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary topics.  For further information about AJVS, please visit our website or contact the editor, Jock Macleod, direct at J.Macleod@griffith.edu.au.

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