News from Other Organizations

• The Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies is sponsoring a conference on "The Verbal and the Visual in Nineteenth-Century Culture" (23-24 June 2006; deadline: 1 March 2006) {More}
• The Society for Textual Scholarship will hold its 2007 conference at NYU from March 14-17. Proposals are due by 31 October 2006. {More}
• The Thomas Hardy Association will hold its 2007 conference at Yale University from June 14-17. Proposals on "'A Phantom of His Own Figuring': Thomas Hardy and Fetishism" are due by 15 December 2006. {More}
• CFP for NINETEENTH-CENTURY DOMESTICITY: An interdisciplinary graduate student conference, Columbia University (Friday, 5 May 2006). CFP deadline is March 20. {More}
• Ashgate announces a new series, the Ashgate Series in Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Studies. {More}

The Visual and the Verbal in Nineteenth-Century Culture

Two-Day Conference, 23-24 June 2006
Institute of English Studies, Senate House, London

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS INCLUDE STEVEN BANN, KATE FLINT, MICHAEL HATT, BRIAN MAIDMENT, LYNDA NEAD, LINDSAY SMITH

We invite proposals for 20 minute papers on the interplay between the verbal and the visual in nineteenth-century culture. Suggestions for panels are also welcome. Topics might include: Ekphrasis; Spectators, Viewers, Readers, Observers; Optics; The Virtual and the Real; Graphic Satire; The Illustrated Press; The Culture of Periodicals; Imaginary Galleries; Narrative Painting; Advertising; New Technologies; Then and Now.

Convened by Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies.

Proposals to s.ledger@bbk.ac.uk by 1 March 2006.

Conference Organisers: Hilary Fraser (h.fraser@bbk.ac.uk), Sally Ledger (s.ledger@bbk.ac.uk) Ella Dzelzainis (e.dzelzainis@bbk.ac.uk), Nicola Bown (n.bown@bbk.ac.uk)Patrizia Dibello (p.dibello@bbk.ac.uk)

To download the flyer, click here.

Thomas Hardy Society at Yale

To download the conference announcement, click here.

CALL FOR PAPERS

HARDY AT YALE (June 14-17, 2007)
Conference organized by The Thomas Hardy Association
Yale University, New Haven, CT.

"A Phantom of His Own Figuring": Thomas Hardy and Fetishism

In his critique and qualification of Marxist constructions of commodity fetishism Jean Baudrillard argues that "if fetishism exists it is...not a fetishism of the signified, a fetishism of substances and values....it is a fetishism of the signifier....It is not the passion (whether of objects or subjects) for substances that speaks in fetishism, it is the passion for the code, which, by governing both objects and subjects, and by subordinating them to itself, delivers them up to abstract manipulation." Hardy's poetry and fiction provide numerous instances in which such a process is both revealed and reproduced through explorations of the abstracted desires that fixate his characters and, at times, Hardy himself. Baudrillard's decision to use "the [female] body and beauty" to illustrate his theory, and his insistence that the "fascination of this fetishized beauty is the result of this extended process of abstraction, and derives from what it negates and censors through its own character as a system," connects neatly with some feminist analyses of Hardy which assert the scopophilic quality of his writing, but it is also possible to contend that he employs the tropes of fetishism to expose the "codes" and "systems" which act as the ideological drives behind late-Victorian culture.

Papers and proposals are invited exploring the ways in which conceptualizations of fetishism contribute to the understanding of Hardy and his works. Possible topics might include (but are not limited to):

• Fetishism and obsession in Far From the Madding Crowd
• Tess Durbeyfield as fetish
• Class aspiration as fetishism in the novels and short stories
• The fetishized female body in the novels and short stories
• The fetishized male body in the novels and short stories
• Emma Gifford as fetish in Poems of 1912-1913
• Fetishized historical figures (Napoleon, Nelson, Wellington)
• Artistic/sexual fetishism in The Well-Beloved
• Phantoms and specters as fetishized loss in the short stories and poems
• "Thomas Hardy" as cultural fetish

Proposals should be 300-500 words in length, completed papers should be no longer than 10 double-spaced pages (delivery time maximum of 20 minutes). Electronic submissions are encouraged.

Papers or proposals should be received by December 15, 2006, and sent to:

Richard Nemesvari
Department of English
St. Francis Xavier University
Antigonish, Nova Scotia
Canada   B2G 2W5
rnemesva@stfx.ca

NINETEENTH-CENTURY DOMESTICITY

An interdisciplinary graduate student conference

Columbia University

Friday, 5 May 2006

Nineteenth-century Britain is generally associated with "the rise" of a number of phenomena: the burgeoning of the middle classes, the growth of industrial capitalism, the rapid expansion of empire, the increased investment in nationalism (and cosmopolitanism), and the popular rhetoric of "separate spheres" for male and female activity. But, at the same time, domesticity was experienced more widely and intensely by both genders than ever before: not only did the population of England and Wales double between the 1801 and 1851 censuses, but by 1861 nearly one third of the population was under the age of 15.

We seek papers from graduate students in nineteenth-century studies (history, literature, anthropology, political science, women's studies, art history, etc.) that consider domesticity and domestic experience broadly construed—not only papers that address the nuclear family in Britain, but those that consider domestic arrangements of other kinds, both in the UK and globally during the nineteenth century. We are particularly interested in papers that draw connections between some of the rising phenomena described above.

Possible topics might include, but are not limited to, the following:

• sympathy, sentimentality, and other domestic affections
• domestic anxieties and losses
• relations between parents and children: legal, emotional, social; family travel and leisure
• inter-generational households
• marital and other domestic partnerships
• domestic interiors at home and abroad
• national and class constructions of the family
• family values
• colonial domesticity
• domestic advice literature
• parental life writing
• separation, divorce, and child custody
• the overlapping or collision of public and domestic spheres: the private made public; government and charitable interventions
• illness, death, and mourning
• homes and homelessness
• domestic economy: household management and financial investments
• family health, nutrition, and medical practices
• childrearing practices: discipline and punishment
• professional domesticity: servants, nurses, governesses, tutors
• child education: moral, religious, physical, and intellectual

Two-page proposals (anonymously submitted) accompanied by cover sheet (containing name, affiliation, and contact information) via email, to neb2112@columbia.edu, due March 20.

Ashgate Series in Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Studies

Series Editors:

Kevin Hutchings, Canada Research Chair in Romantic Studies and Associate Professor of English, the University of Northern British Columbia

Julia M. Wright, Canada Research Chair in European Studies and Associate Professor of English, Dalhousie University

This series offers a forum for the publication of scholarly work investigating the literary, historical, artistic, and philosophical foundations of transatlantic culture. A new and burgeoning field of interdisciplinary investigation, transatlantic scholarship contextualizes its objects of study in relation to exchanges, interactions, and negotiations that occurred between and among authors and other artists hailing from both sides of the Atlantic. As a result, transatlantic research calls into question established disciplinary boundaries that have long functioned to segregate various national or cultural literatures and art forms, challenging as well the traditional academic emphasis upon periodization and canonization. By examining representations dealing with such topics as travel and exploration, migration and diaspora, slavery, aboriginal culture, revolution, colonialism and anti-colonial resistance, the series will offer new insights into the hybrid or intercultural basis of transatlantic identity, politics, and aesthetics.

The editors invite English language studies focusing on any area of the period ca. 1750-1900, including (but not limited to) innovative works spanning transatlantic Romantic and Victorian contexts. Manuscripts focusing on European, African, US American, Canadian, Caribbean, Central and South American, and Native or Indigenous literature, art, and culture are welcome. We will consider proposals for monographs, collaborative books, and edited collections.