CALL FOR PAPERS

Note: Neo-Victorian Studies accepts submissions for forthcoming general issues throughout the year. Please see the general CFP further below. For forthcoming special issues, please observe the relevant posted deadlines.

Volume 3:1 of Neo-Victorian Studies will be a special issue on Steampunk, Science, and (Neo)Victorian Technologies, guest edited by Rachel A. Bowser (rachel.bowser@gmail.com) and Brian Croxall (b.croxall@gmail.com), forthcoming late Summer 2010 (CFP closed). Volume 3:2 of Neo-Victorian Studies will be a general issue, forthcoming Autumn/Winter 2010.

Call for Papers (Special Issue):

Spectacles and Things:
Visual and Material Culture and/in Neo-Victorianism

Neo-Victorian Studies invites essays for a 2011 special issue, which aims to investigate a hitherto under-explored aspect of neo-Victorianism: visual and material culture and the complex relationship between the 20th/21st and 19th centuries in neo-Victorian products and productions.

Deadline for submission of completed papers: 30 December 2010

The re-entry of the 19th century into 20th and 21st-century culture tends to be both highly visual and material, making its appearance, as it does, on a contemporary capitalist market and packaged to appeal to a wide consumer base. Neo-Victorian visuality and materiality take centre stage on numerous levels, ranging from memory as haunting, ghostly appearances and intertextualities, and biofiction of iconic figures from the period, through prevalent tropes of photography, microscopes, dioramas, exhibition and museum spaces, to the construction of scopic and panoptic regimes, as well as complex narratological perspectives. Processes of marketing and consuming Victoriana likewise pertain to the visual, as do constructions of an academic point of view that seeks to understand the relationship between the 19th-century past and the contemporary moment in terms of re-vision.

Literary descriptions of the 19th Century, as well as cultural presentifications (Gumbrecht) of all things Victorian, try to make the past as tangible as possible – via depictions or reproductions of Victorian interiors and fashions, steampunk culture, or re-enactments of one-time living conditions – presenting the 19th Century in commodity form. Theoretical approaches to this current renegotiation of the past include deconstructionist theorisations and Marxist approaches such as Cultural Materialism, which deem the neo-Victorian project deeply ideological, since it allegedly fetishises Victorian culture and nourishes a nostalgia for the values, social structures and accomplishments of the past.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

- materialism, commodity culture, and consumerism
- the world of the senses
- neo-Victorian representations of painting and other visual arts
- fetishised objects: collections and exhibitions
- fashion
- scientific vision and the physical world
- photography and image culture
- other ways of seeing: spiritualism and spectrality
- comics and graphic novels
- Victoriana in film and television

This special issue derives from the international conference ‘Fashioning the Neo-Victorian: Iterations of the 19th Century in Contemporary Literature and Culture’ (April 2010, Erlangen, Germany), but is not limited to submissions by conference participants. Articles between 6000-8000 words should be submitted by e-mail Word Document attachment to the guest editors Nadine Boehm (nadine.boehm@angl.phil.uni-erlangen.de) and Susanne Gruss (susanne.gruss@angl.phil.uni-erlangen.de), with a further copy to the General Editor, Marie-Luise Kohlke (neovictorianstudies@swansea.ac.uk). Please address enquiries or expressions of interest to the guest editors. For submission guidelines, please consult the journal website (www.neovictorianstudies.com).

Call for Papers (General Issues):

The editors of Neo-Victorian Studies invite creative and scholarly submission from established and early career researchers and creative artists on any topic related to the exploration of the nineteenth century from a twentieth/twenty-first century perspective. Contributions on the period’s cultural legacies in non-British contexts, e.g. Asian, African, North and South American frameworks, are equally welcome.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

- theorising the neo-Victorian novel
- intertextual / intervisual negotiations with the past
- cultural traumas and practices of commemoration
- refracting or ‘queering’ narratives of nation and empire
- tracing patterns of environmental impact and destruction
- the legacies of nineteenth century sexual politics
- the heritage of Victorian law and social policy
- rewriting histories of science and medicine
- the biographical imagination
- re-conceptualising children and childhood
- the fascinations of criminality
- spectrality, spiritualism, and the occult
- the space of cultural memory / the sense of place

Submissions may include:

- scholarly theoretical/critical articles of 6000-8000 words (plus bibliography)
- creative pieces (any genre of creative writing or creative arts)
- polemical pieces
- interviews
- notices of work in progress
- reviews of relevant critical/creative publications in the field
- (for future issues) critical/creative responses to previous contributions

Please direct enquiries and send electronic submissions via email with Word Document attachment to the General Editor, Marie-Luise Kohlke at neovictorianstudies@swansea.ac.uk. Please consult our submission guidelines, prior to submission.