NAVSA Prizes

NAVSA awards two competitive prizes each year: the Donald Gray prize, for best essay on a Victorian topic, and the graduate paper prize, for the best paper read by a graduate student at the annual conference. (NAVSA also makes available travel grants, based on financial need.)

The Donald Gray Prize

Congratulations to the winners of the 2007 Donald Gray prize! Honorees were chosen from essays published in journals during the 2006 calendar year.

NAVSA is delighted to announce the winners of the Donald Gray Prize for the Best Essay published in the field of Victorian studies in the previous year. Named after Donald J. Gray, Culbertson Professor Emeritus in the English Department of Indiana University, the Donald Gray Prize is awarded to the best essay that appeared in print in journals from the previous calendar year on any topic related to the study of Victorian Britain. It carries with it an award of $1000. Essays are self-nominated and are also submitted by journal editors and members of the NAVSA Advisory Board.

• Winner: Professor Martin Hewitt (Director of the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies). "Why the Notion of Victorian Britain Does Make Sense." Victorian Studies 48.3 (2006): 395-438.
  

  This is a deft, judicious, and learned essay that mounts a persuasive case for the designation "Victorian Britain" as a useful category of historical and literary analysis. In establishing a set of configurations—institutional forms, legal frameworks, and regimes of knowledge—it offers compelling evidence that the period from 1840 to 1890 shared more common features than the periods before or after it. Hewitt's essay impressed the Gray Prize Committee with its scholarly reach and theoretical sophistication, its nuance and innovation, and its argumentative lucidity. Without question a significant contribution to Victorian studies, this essay will undoubtedly become essential reading for anyone embarking on work in the period.

• Honorable Mention: Professor Caroline Levine (English, U of Wisconsin). "Strategic Formalism: Toward a New Method in Cultural Studies." Victorian Studies 48.4 (2006): 625-57
  

  In the view of the Gray Prize Committee, this essay seems destined to become a touchstone in the ongoing discussions about the possibilities of pursuing formalist analyses in the context of cultural studies—the "struggle to articulate links between literary forms and social formations," as Levine puts it. As it interrogates the assumption that the literary text reflects, perpetuates, and constructs dominant ideologies, the essay shows that literary forms often collide with social hierarchies. Levine's reading of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "The Cry of the Children" provides supple demonstration of her argument: in an original unpacking of this poem, we see its complex mix of formal technique and ideological contradiction. Theoretically informed and conceptually astute, this essay provides a rich (and encouragingly portable) set of interpretive tools for scholars of Victorian literature and culture.

2008 Gray Prize

The North American Victorian Studies Association is now seeking nominations for the annual Donald Gray Prize for best essay published in the field of Victorian Studies. The prize carries with it an award of $1000 and will be awarded to essays that appeared in print in journals from the previous calendar year, on any topic related to the study of Victorian Britain. (The prize is limited to journal essays; those published in essay collections are not eligible.) Anyone, regardless of NAVSA membership status, is free to nominate an essay that appeared in print between 1 January 2007 and 31 December 2007. Self-nominated essays are welcome; nominations will also be solicited from the Advisory Board of NAVSA and the prize committee judges. Authors may be from any country and of any institutional standing.

To nominate an essay, please submit by Monday, 12 May 2008 (that's a receipt deadline, not a postmark deadline):

1. a brief cover sheet with complete address and email information for both the essay's nominator and its author, and
2. four hard copies of the essay to the Executive Secretary of NAVSA at the following address:

   Melissa V. Gregory
   Department of English
   Mail Stop 925
   University of Toledo
   Toledo, Ohio 43606

Questions may be directed to melissa.gregory@utoledo.edu. Further information about the prize may be found at http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/navsa/Prizes/GrayPrize.cfm

• Winner: Paul Fyfe (English, U of Virginia), "Accidents of a Novel Trade: Insurance, Industrial Catastrophe, and Mary Barton"
  

  One might expect a paper reflecting on the shared writerly practices of Elizabeth Gaskell and Victorian actuaries to be safe, perhaps even a little dry. As this essay shows, however, one would be mistaken. Fyfe's sophisticated, elegant paper points up how much actuaries and novelists have in common, particularly the need for accurate description and the need to interpret, or even anticipate and ward off, chance. This essay identifies a surprising "turf war" between these two disciplines over who could best capture a "non-quantitative, subjective probability." The graduate prize committee was particularly taken with the paper's charged argument that Victorian novels were written through accident."

• Honorable Mention: Maeve Adams (English, NYU), "Commendable Objects: Marginal Utility, Financial Realism, and the Novel in 1870s England"
  

  The graduate prize committee deeply admired Adams's engagement with economic history, and with the essays' commingling of neoclassical theories of marginal utility with novelistic realism. Arguing that the auction scene in Middlemarch "theorizes a relationship between realist narrative strategies and the production of value as a type of knowledge about the material world," Adams suggests that it is perilous to ignore realism's role in finance as well as literature. Like fictional realism, financial realism comes to be a way to comment on desire, value, and narrative itself. This paper impressively extends recent work on economics and realism, suggesting the work's ongoing theoretical promise.

• Honorable Mention: Jesse Rosenthal (English, Columbia U), "Gamblers' Fallacies: Materialism, Realism, and Daniel Deronda at Play"
  

  This essay mounts the surprising view that Daniel Deronda's familiar hatred for gambling is less a grimace of moral revulsion than it is a fully worked-out argument about the relationship between statistics and persons. The novel's formal innovation arises, Rosenthal argues, from an analogy between narrative meaning and probability. The prize committee valued this essay's refusal to treat Eliot's hatred of gambling as a biographical accident, but rather as (or also as) an engagement with Victorian arguments over chance.

Congratulations to all five winners of the NAVSA prizes!