CFP: Green Victoria
(11/15/06; NAVSA/ACCUTE panel, 5/31/08-6/03/08)

Panel organized by Dennis Denisoff (Ryerson University)

The relationship between Victorians and their natural environment was entangled among many other issues involving such things as ethics, aesthetics, science, industrialization, imperialism, and religion. In recent years, scholars have begun cultivating hybrid theorizations and readings of Victorian literature and culture in order to gain more nuanced understandings of this era’s green views. The 2008 NAVSA/ACCUTE panel organizer invites proposals of 250 to 500 words by November 12, 2007 for 20-minute talks that address issues related to Victorian perspectives on nature. Of particular interest is scholarship that addresses elements of environmentalism explicitly or explores the green implications of related issues. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• urban planning, sanitation, green space
• Victorians and other animals
• exploration, exotic landscapes, and ethics
• organic/natural form and literary form
• women’s writing and the gendering of nature
• industrialization, meat, and machines
• socialism and nonhuman life forms
• paganism, the individual, and liberalism
• animals’ rights and roles
• post-Romantic politics of nature
• green visions of a sustainable future
• atavism, criminality, decadence, and notions of the natural
new aesthetics and poetics of nature

The conference of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English will be held at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, B.C. from May 31 – June 3, 2008.