Victorian Popular Fiction
righttop‘VictorianInclusionandExclusion’Victorian Popular FictionAssociation13th Annual Conference14 – 16 July 2021Abstracts and BiographiesHosted online by the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Greenwich, London30480186690‘Religious and racial differentiations within the category of women in Miranda Canavarro’s writings’Jessica AlbrechtMiranda or Marie de Souza Canavarro (died 1933), also called Countess Canavarro or Sister Sanghamitta, was a theosophist, teacher and feminist who went to Ceylon at the end of the 19th century to become the principal of a Buddhist Girl’s School founded by the Buddhist reformer Anagarika Dharmapala. She was also a writer. After she returned to the United States in 1900, she began to write romance novels. They developed into a combination of autobiographies and romance novels, such as Insight Into the Far East (1925), The Poison Orchid (1930), The Aztec Chief (1931) and The Broken Vase (1933). Especially in Insight Into the Far East, Canavarro drew heavily on her experiences in Ceylon at the turn of the century. In all of her literary accounts, she used narratives of karma as a fictional protagonist and imaginations of religions which concur with her theosophical orientation. Canavarro used these to establish fictional and autobiographical women portraying versions of late Victorian femininity. Insight Into the Far East and The Aztec Chief show the implicit adaptations of colonial and esoteric imaginations of the other as one’s exotic counterpart. Canavarro uses differentiations of religion and race to create literary female figures and deal with her experiences of colonial Ceylon. In this time, Ceylon was in the middle of religious reform movements within which conceptions of gender and sexuality were re-conceptualized. Canavarro’s writings bear witness to these changes through the lens of her autobiographical rewriting. This paper will engage with these topics by dealing with questions of autobiography, fiction and identity; in particular, the relationship between exclusion and differentiation in the process of identification. Central to this is the comparison of images of womanhood as they constitute Canavarro’s own identity as well as that of her other protagonists.BiographyJessica Albrecht is a PhD student and research fellow at the University of Heidelberg. Combining gender history and the Study of Religion, her research interests lie in the interrelation between religion, esotericism and feminism in the late Victorian period from a global perspective.Twitter: @flumminism‘Aesthetic Exclusivity: The Monks of Thelema and the emergence of the Aesthetic Novel’Anne AndersonAs a genre the Aesthetic novel was often used as a platform by the ‘philistines’ to voice their anxieties. There were many aspects of Aesthetic culture that were worrisome, physical degeneration and sexual inversion being as contentious as the ‘democratizing’ of high culture. As Linda Dowling observes, Mr Rose in William Hurrell Mallock’s New Republic?or Culture, Faith and Philosophy in an English Country House (1877) was ‘the first in a long line of popular depictions of effeminate English aesthetes such as?Gilbert's?Bunthorne?and?Du Maurier's Postlewaite and Maudle’. The same homophobia is apparent in Walter Besant and James Rice’s The Monks of Thelema (1878). This popular novel offers us the first satirical portrait of Oscar Wilde as Paul Rondolet a fellow of Lothian College who writes ‘mystic and weird’ poems. Rondolet leads a set of ‘unhealthy and even morbid prigs’ who were ‘not loved by any men... but are greatly believed in by certain women.’ While Rondolet is a ‘Paterian’, the character of Alan Dunlop is ‘Ruskinian’, his mission inspired by participating in a road building exercise that echoes the famous Hinksey Road project. Throughout the novel the ‘selfish’ and ‘self-less’ actions of Rondolet and Dunlop are contrasted, with Dunlop’s philanthropic ambitions equally scorned. Convinced he should be a leader and reform his ‘peasants’, Dunlop’s attempts to open a lending library and establish a co-operative both end in failure. Although Ruskinian Missionary Aestheticism forms the basis of Besant’s later novels, All Sorts and Conditions of Men; an Impossible Story (1882) and The Alabaster Box (1899), in The Monks of Thelema the goal to ‘Bring Beauty Home to the Poor’ appears misguided and arrogant.BiographySenior lecturer in Art and Design History at Southampton Solent University for 14 years, Anne has pursued a career as an exhibition curator since 2008. She has curated four national exhibitions, most recently Beyond the Brotherhood: the Pre-Raphaelite Legacy (2019/20). Anne has held several prestigious American fellowships and was awarded a Curran Fellowship Research Grant in 2021. She has numerous publications to her credit.Twitter: @AnneAnd58022760‘Between Inclusion and Exclusion: Immersive Embodiment in Wilkie Collins’ Fiction’Natasha Audrey AndersonDelving into a world of intrigues, immorality, and immersive descriptions, readers continue to be captured by Wilkie Collins’ fiction The Woman in White and The Moonstone in part due to the narrative activation of embodiment. From flushed faces to fevers, from fingers upon a piano to footsteps of companionable amblers, details of corporeality in Victorian popular fiction not only kindle reader’s interest but also serve as a means of exclusion and inclusion. The body functions as both a boundary separating invalids from hale peers and a bridging element between characters and the audience. On the one hand, physiological justifications facilitate attempts at physically confining female characters in Collins’ writing such as in The Woman in White, when mental illness serves as an excuse to institutionalize Laura Fairlie, while her sister Marian Halcombe is hidden away during a bout of fever. Likewise, haptic actions of playing the piano emphasize divisions between characters by revealing undisclosed secrets in the domestic sphere or foreign origin in transnational encounters. On the other hand, acts of kinesthesia highlight connections between family members in The Moonstone, ranging from shared strolling to musical affinity to similar muscular movements in facial expressions. Moreover, the audience can imaginatively share multiple characters’ somatic awareness through various written testimonies documenting aural and tactile aspects of walking, talking, and traveling in both of Collins’ literary works. Multisensory descriptions serve as the most elementary and enthralling tool of reader engagement with the narrative since, according to the theory of the prominent French philosopher of phenomenology Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the body filters experience. As shifting between different perspectives amid Collins’ mosaic of somatic elements demonstrates, characters’ embodied struggles and deceptions in Victorian popular fiction draw readers’ attention to how states of health, illness, and physical exertion serve simultaneously as a basis of division and connection.BiographyNatasha Audrey Anderson is a Doctoral Research Fellow funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany, where she earned her M.A. in American Studies. She attained her B.A. in English and History at the University of Stuttgart, attended IWL 2019 at Harvard University, and recently organized a virtual international workshop.Twitter: @N_A_Anderson‘Disability and exclusion in Sensation Fiction: the case of Ellen Wood’Salvatore AsaroAs noticed by some present-day critics (Michel Foucault, 1963; Susan Sontag, 1978), illness, though being a part of human experience, has never been a main theme of literature, like the more intriguing subjects of war and love. Illness is indeed a thorny question in writing, and things get worse when disease turns into disability. The latter condition tends to be marginalized in novels, sometimes forgotten, most frequently mistreated through the use of negative clichés which are evident in nineteenth-century literature. Considering how common diseases are, it is strange, according to Virginia Woolf (On Being Ill, 1930), that illness has not played a central role in literature, as is the case of love, battle, and jealousy.The marginality of disability is partly accounted for by the fact that, in nineteenth-century society, disabled people lived in a hostile environment. Often disparaged by society, they rarely had chances to express their views and were, consequently, assigned a minor role in most novels’ plots. Still, there were writers who represented the sufferings and the yearnings of disabled people around the middle of the century. A well-known case is that of Dinah Mulock Craig, whose Olive (1850) challenges stereotypes of disability, showing how a deformed woman strives to develop her artistic talents and eventually becomes a fulfilled wife and mother. Other exceptions are found in sensation novelists, who gave more visibility to ailing figures swerving from the norm. If Collins’s portrayals of disabled characters have received critical attention, Ellen Wood’s ill and infirmed figures still demand to be fully explored. This paper aims to investigate Wood’s depiction of the trials of diseased and disabled people, especially women. Herself suffering from poor health, Wood was nonetheless a strong person, a businesswoman, a successful writer, a traveller, determined to live her life fully both the domestic and in the professional sphere. As will be shown, her characterisation of ailing women aims to restore their dignity, to give them new visibility and thus counterbalance their exclusion from social life. In particular, I intend to focus on the character of Margaret Sumnor featured in Within the Maze (1872), a bedridden girl who is, nonetheless, endowed with the ability to interpret worldly affairs. Depicted as a bearer of truth and understanding, Margaret influences the main events of the novel with her words, helping the heroine make important decisions about her marriage. Sometimes cynical, Margaret knows the truth of life. Her wisdom and acumen surprise the reader encouraging him/her to rethink of the ontology of disease. A kind of alter ego of Mrs Wood, this character also draws attention upon the mysterious health afflictions of the author and her efforts to overcome the double marginalisation to which she was destined, both as a woman and as an unhealthy person.BiographySalvatore Asaro earned his PhD in Comparative Literature at Roma Tre University (2021). His areas of research focus on the principal literary authors, mainly from the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as themes such as literature and masculinity, the cultural exchanges between Italy and England, Classicism and the concept of the classical. He has published articles on Victorian and Modernist literature and culture (Elizabeth Gaskell; E.M. Forster; W.H. Auden). He is currently working on Ellen Wood’s novels.‘Class and the City: Wilkie Collins’s Basil and social exclusion in the new suburbs’Kath BealBy the mid-nineteenth century London was the most populous city in the world. Spurred by industrialisation and the unprecedented growth of service businesses the population swelled from one million at the beginning of the century to 6.5 million by 1900. This Paper will consider a cultural rather than an economic view of urbanisation in the capital. Much was written by authors such as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and Arthur Morrison, about the appalling housing conditions of the poor: forced to live in the overcrowded and insanitary ‘rookeries’. Some brief descriptions of Victorian slums will be provided from well-known fictional accounts. These accounts are intended to act as a contrast to the new housing estates that appeared on city outskirts during the mid to late nineteenth century. However, the main focus will be on one of the new middle-class suburban estates described by Wilkie Collins in in his 1852 novel Basil. The eponymous narrator of Basil is at great pains to inform readers that he comes from an ancient, proud and very wealthy landed family. On his first visit to the suburbs, taken on a whim, the area is described in scathing terms. What follows in the novel emphasises the way in which the anonymity of the new housing allows individuals to ‘hide in a crowd.’ The family history and lives of suburbanites is frequently unknown to their immediate neighbours, to an extent that had previously proved difficult in more established neighbourhoods. This environmental change provides an opportunity for a new social construct. Able to conceal past ignominy and to flout conventional behaviour the suburbs provide an ideal setting for crime and immorality – issues that were widely deemed to be located in the ‘rookeries’. Collins’s descriptions of the new suburbs is both insightful and entertaining.BiographyKath Beal. I am a third year PhD candidate at the University of Hull. My MRes focused on the fate of the ‘fallen woman’ and her child in the Victorian novel. My thesis is on Wilkie Collins and the way in which disability and the ‘unnatural’ body is portrayed in his novels.Training Session: ‘Doing Things Digitally: An Introduction to Digital Resources and Text Mining Methods’Emily BellBiographyDr Emily Bell is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Leeds on the Leverhulme Trust project ‘The Society of Authors, 1884-1914’, with publications on Dickens, Collins, and auto/biography, and on digital approaches to nineteenth-century newspapers. She is co-editor of the Curran Index, and incoming editor of?The Dickensian.Twitter: @EmilyJLB‘Sensationalizing Slavery: Melodrama and Miscegenation in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Octoroon’Anne-Marie BellerMary Braddon’s 1861-62 serial for the Halfpenny Journal, The Octoroon, was published at a time of heightened awareness of racial issues and exclusionary practices and discourse in Britain. Public interest in the American Civil War intensified the debates around abolition in England and Braddon exploited this topicality, to the extent that she timed her serial to coincide with the London opening of Dion Boucicault’s popular play, The Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana. Braddon’s novel has much in common with Boucicault’s play, not least in the way that it uses melodrama as an affective tool to convey its abolitionist message.In this paper, I argue that Braddon’s appropriation of abolitionist rhetoric and the text’s indictment of the horrors of slavery implicitly work to assuage British colonial guilt. Written in a decade shaped by two significant imperial events – the 1857-8 Indian Mutiny and Governor Eyre’s brutal suppression of Jamaican ex-slaves in 1865 – Braddon’s serial participates in contemporary debates around race, empire, and slavery. In adopting a patriotic tone, through which Britain is extolled as liberal, enlightened, and superior, while the American south is othered and demonised, I argue that the representation of race and exclusion in Braddon’s novel seeks to displace and allay British guilt over its own imperialist acts of oppression. Moreover, in her representation of two key mixed race characters, who are ostensibly used to provoke empathy and support for the abolitionist cause, Braddon actually reproduces racist assumptions about whiteness and Britishness. Both characters, through their inter-racial romantic relationships negotiate contemporary pseudo-scientific theories about miscegenation, rendering Braddon’s ultimate ‘message’ a complex one. While slavery is condemned and racial equality and inclusiveness paid lip-service, these ideals are nevertheless reliant on the extent to which both characters are able to ‘pass’ as white.BiographyAnne-Marie Beller is Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature at Loughborough University. She has published on Sensation Fiction, New Woman Writing, and Neo-Victorian Fiction. Current research includes a study of Victorian and Neo-Victorian asylums and a chapter on race and disability in sensation fiction for The 1860s, ed. Pamela Gilbert (CUP).Twitter: @amb1860‘Gender, Genre and Canonicity: Detecting the Second-Generation New Woman’Huzan BharuchaLaurel Young was one of the few academics to directly associate Golden Age detective fiction with the 19th century New Woman in her essay ‘Dorothy L. Sayers and the New Woman’ (2005), where she emphasised Sayers’ academic credentials to align her with figures like Sarah Grand and Olive Schreiner. This paper will build on Young’s work by positing that Sayers’ contemporary, Agatha Christie, was similarly a successor to the New Woman tradition, and in doing so highlight the diversity of style, thought, and agenda that promulgated amongst the ranks of the New Women.In reading Christie’s early novels alongside Catherine Louisa Pirkis’ Loveday Brooke series (1893-4), distinct thematic parallels emerge that demonstrate how these seemingly conventional narratives confront and manipulate a growing number of social anxieties common to both fin de siècle and post-World War I Britain – specifically, the potential volatility of gender roles and a fear of the “other”. If Brooke is the androgynous New Woman from the pages of Punch, then Poirot is the dandy that featured alongside her. When it comes to their performance of gender and conformity to traditional mores, neither pass muster. They are infiltrators in their own right – one by virtue of her gender, the other by his nationality.In highlighting the social parallels between the two time periods, this paper will demonstrate the ways in which conventions of New Woman fiction have evolved going into the 20th century, thereby positioning them, and Christie, within a broader literary tradition. Additionally, by contrasting Young’s critique of Sayers as a radical scholar with Christie and Pirkis’ mainstream fiction, I will be exploring the means by which we ascribe cultural value to literary works and the ways in which these arbitrary goalposts function as a gatekeeping tool with regards to expanding the literary canon.BiographyHuzan Bharucha is a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh. Her thesis examines the influence of the New Woman movement on the writings of Agatha Christie. She has served on the committee for the Postgraduate Gender Research Network of Scotland (PGRNS) since 2019.Twitter: @HuzanB‘Locating Method in His Madness: Traversing Anarchy, Crime, and Class Exclusions in Japanese Neo-Victorian Anime, Moriarty, the Patriot’Preeshita BiswasThis paper analyses the representations of crime and anarchy in Kazuya Nomura’s Moriarty, the Patriot – a twenty–first century Japanese neo–Victorian anime adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series – to argue how the text offers a sharp critique of exclusionary class stratification in the Victorian society, that was premised on depriving the lower social classes of their livelihood, as well as of social, economic, health, and political benefits. However, while on the surface, the narrative of Moriarty seems to present an indictment of the social and class evils present in Victorian England, on a more symbolic level, the text retrospectively questions the ideas of patriotism, anarchy, and class structures in nineteenth–century Japan, then a colonial power and political rival of Britain, during the period of transoceanic militarization. In doing so, this paper claims, the text engages in a ‘palimpsestuous’ and a reverse-projective dialectic with British imperial past that re-produce Victorian colonial histories, and their connection to present-day Japan.Chronicling the rise of Sherlock’s archnemesis, Professor James Moriarty, the anime depicts its titular character as a “crime consultant”, who is utterly repelled by the rigid class hierarchy prevalent in nineteenth–century Britain. Thus, Moriarty (and his adopted brothers in the text) take it upon themselves to dismantle the prejudiced class system in the Victorian society by abetting crimes committed by working class men and women, to expose in turn, the manifold forms of corruption predominant within the aristocratic class. In doing so, Moriarty desires to jolt the common people into recognizing the rampant corruption prevalent in the Victorian society, which, according to him, is rotten to the core. Through a close reading of the ways in which Moriarty attempts to expose the moral bankruptcy of the aristocratic class, this paper argues that the text represents anarchy as a constructive force of effecting a social reformation. I argue that the text by using a turbulent historical period as a backdrop, echoes the problems of the contemporary society such as geopolitics, the military-industrial complex and community policing, and further redefines neo-Victorianism as a global and a transcultural phenomenon.Keywords: Class exclusions, Neo-Victorianism, Anarchy, Sherlock Holmes, Crime, Anime, MoriartyBiographyPreeshita Biswas holds a Master’s Degree in English from Presidency University, Kolkata, India. She has been the recipient of the gold medal award for completing her Bachelor’s degree at the top of her class. Preeshita has presented papers at British Women Writers Conference hosted by Texas Christian University, and European Master in Migration and Intercultural Relation conference hosted by University of Oldenburg, Germany. Her research interests include Victorian and Neo-Victorian literature, postcolonial literature, race and sexuality studies, and popular culture.‘Making Sense: The Body and Communication in the Long Victorian Period’Rosie BlacherThis paper will explore the inclusion and exclusion integral to transcultural communication, with particular attention to sensory experience and understanding, in W. H. Hudson’s 1904 text Green Mansions.Despite the late nineteenth century experiencing the “decline of exploration into mere tourism” (Brantlinger, 238), the stylistically stereotypical imperial romance written by naturalist Hudson showcases a protagonist with a thirst for understanding. Sensory experience is integral to protagonist Abel’s engagement with his surroundings as well as his attempts to understand native Rima.With an unplacable heritage and uncertain relationship to her fellow jungle dwellers, Rima subscribes to Bhabha’s acknowledgement in The Location of Culture that the individual occupying the colonial contact zone has the ability to “estrange the basis of its authority – its rules of recognition” (Bhabha, 162). Rima is heard before she is seen by Abel and her singing is an intriguing, non-human “low, warbling note, or succession of notes, which might have been emitted by a bird” (Hudson, 31). The ethereal voice is characterised as “infinitely sweet and tender” (20) and despite the avian connotations, the true power lies in its recognisability as “its greatest charm was its resemblance to the human voice” (Hudson, 20). The knowable quality of the unknown noises aligns to Bhabha’s ideas of colonial hybridity resting upon the “reimplication” and “revaluation” (Bhabha, 162) of displaced familiar attributes.I will explore Abel’s relationship with Rima and the physical jungle space alongside understanding of the senses at both the time of writing and the modern day.BibliographyBhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Print.Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988. Print.Hudson, W. H. Green Mansions. Marston Gate: Amazon, 2016. Print.BiographyAfter completing an undergraduate degree at Kingston University and a postgraduate degree at the University of Exeter in English Literature, I am currently working at the University of Plymouth. I am particularly interested in transcultural literature and the relationship between communication and the physical body.Roundtable Title: “Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom”: Teaching Interventions on Caribbean AuthorsPanelists: Kira Braham, Heidi Kaufman, Breanna Simpson, and Indu OhriModerator: Adrian WisnickiRoundtable DescriptionHow might Victorian Studies be destructured and reimagined to address its historical racial biases and establish a sustained intimacy with Critical Race, Critical Ethnic, Postcolonial, Feminist, Queer, and Disability Studies? In 2020, a group of scholars from across the United States began Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom (), a digital humanities project that provides open access to teaching materials that model antiracist pedagogy. The participants in this roundtable represent one small part of this larger effort. As the Caribbean Studies working group, we are collaborating to create model teaching pathways, sample assignments, and other materials to serve as resources for instructors who want to integrate more Caribbean authors and transimperial perspectives into their syllabi.This roundtable will discuss our current work creating teaching plans and materials for Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857) and similar work we will perform this spring around The History of Mary Prince (1831). As popular readings with major socio-political importance in the context of the transatlantic slave trade and the Crimean War, these two works have the potential to play a central role in students’ understanding of the nineteenth century. We will share the ongoing process of collectively creating lesson plans that address the complexities of nineteenth-century constructions of race and gender and encourage intersectional analysis. We will also discuss how we mobilize commitments to interdisciplinarity and strategic presentism to link these nineteenth-century texts to contemporary issues, from structural disparities in healthcare to debates about public memorialization. This roundtable hopes to address scholars, instructors, and groups looking to engage in similar efforts to “undiscipline” Victorian Studies. In a 30-minute video of our roundtable, we will discuss our method of creating these lesson plans and answer questions from audience members who have watched it during the live conference Q+A.Biography: Kira Braham received her Ph.D. in 2020 from Vanderbilt University. Her book project, Victorian Vita Activa: Work Ethics and Prowork Politics, looks to nineteenth-century philosophies of work for new perspectives on twenty-first century labour policies and politics. She currently works as a project manager for the Engine for Art, Democracy and Justice.‘Redressing the status of long-excluded texts: the Neo-Victorian recovery of penny bloods and penny dreadfuls’Manon Burz-LabrandeThe serialised cheap fiction sold for one penny from the early Victorian era famously gave rise to extremely critical discourses denouncing their supposedly immoral content and arguing that they posed a threat to the well-being of their contemporary society. In spite of such discourses of exclusion, the tremendously successful circulation of penny bloods and penny dreadfuls points towards the fact that these publications were in constant movement over the span of a few decades of the nineteenth century. However, as the end of the century approached, characters and format alike disappeared from the literary page: though some of them survived through late nineteenth-century stage versions or twentieth-century relatively obscure screen versions, the realm of literature and of fiction seemed to perpetrate the strongly advocated exclusion of these texts – until recent Neo-Victorian texts. In this paper, I will analyse the numerous references to penny bloods and penny dreadfuls which seem to circulate and multiply within recent Neo-Victorian works belonging to a five-year time span (from 2016 onwards) and interpret the function of this emerging additional pattern of circulation within this limited time period, by focusing on E. S. Thomson’s Beloved Poison (2016), Vivian Shaw’s Strange Practice (2017) and Laura Carlin’s The Wicked Cometh (2018). I contend that such appearances display how various Neo-Victorian fiction works attempt to recover penny bloods and penny dreadfuls and to bring them back into cultural memory, though raising the question of a paradoxically problematic status of such references. Through various forms of reference or inclusion, whether by using the phrases “penny blood” or “penny dreadful” or by helping different characters or genre codes to circulate diachronically, contemporary authors of Neo-Victoriana question the longstanding canon and begin to (re)consider the value (whether narrative or cultural) of the traditionally ignored cheap publications.BiographyManon Burz-Labrande is a doctoral researcher and lecturer at the University of Vienna, Austria. Specialising in Victorian popular literature and culture, her PhD focuses on the exploration of the concept of circulation in and of the penny bloods and penny dreadfuls, through a literary and cultural analysis of their content, the discourses they triggered in nineteenth-century criticism, their place in the Victorian literary landscape and their diachronic circulation.Twitter: @MLbrnd‘Vilifying the Venus: Artistic Exclusion in Rhoda Broughton’s Not Wisely but Too Well’Emma Butler-WayThis paper will use Rhoda Broughton’s Not Wisely, But Too Well (1865) to examine how artwork excludes the protagonist Kate Chester from the realms of ‘sensation heroine’ inhabited by other full-bodied characters such as Wilkie Collins’s Marian Halcombe and Magdalene Vanstone. In particular, I will be looking how Broughton achieves this through aligning Kate with artworks depicting the Roman goddess Venus.There has been significant critical attention paid to the role of illness in sensation fiction, and how it forces full-bodied sensation heroines into more conventional roles by the end of their respective novels. In this paper however, I examine how, in aligning her heroine Kate Chester with artworks which depict the goddess Venus, Broughton ensures that her heroine is unable to follow this narrative trajectory. Not only this, but Kate is introduced to the reader as an artwork in herself, not just alike to pieces of art. Bearing in mind the observer of art and the inherent possession therein (as discussed by John Berger in Ways of Seeing [1972]), this paper will consider how the role and opinion of the observer-owner impacts upon the reader’s understanding of Kate, and her dubious status as a sensation heroine, especially when her identity is inextricably tied to the goddess of love and sexuality. Central to this consideration, and thus this paper, is the question: by including Kate in the gallery of deities and artistic excellence, does Broughton exclude her – and Not Wisely as a whole – from the realms of sensation fiction?BiographyEmma Butler-Way is currently pursuing her doctoral degree in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University. Her research is centred on representations of dress and the female body in British sensation fiction.Twitter: @butler_way‘Michael Field’s Queer Collaboration in Works and Days’Brooke CameronPanel: “Speaking of my oddity”: Inclusive Spaces in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Life WritingThis paper will look at the conference theme of “Victorian Inclusion and Exclusion” through a study of Michael Field’s multi-volume journals, Works and Days (1888-1914). Writing together under this shared pseudonym, lovers Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper (aunt and niece, respectively) experimented with a queer aesthetics that undermined the idea of a singular (phallocentric) author and that instead celebrated the idea of plural or mutual (lesbian) collaboration. This collaborative approach would prove especially important to journals on their tour of European art galleries between 1890-92, in which the poets draw from a long tradition of women’s travel writing and artistic connoisseurship.Scholars such as Linda H. Peterson (“Collaborative Life Writing as Ideology”) and Allison Booth (How to Make it as a Woman) have persuasively demonstrated that Victorian women’s life writing—including journals and diaries—is inherently interpersonal or collaborative. This challenges modern readers’ expectations of the singular subject who develops into the present narrating “I” (Philippe Lejeune On Autobiography). Field’s Works and Days—with its insistence upon pleasurable collaboration—must be read as a response to late-Victorian discourses on aesthetics and subjective expression, especially the call for a singular, impressionistic subject in works by critics and friends Bernard Berenson and Walter Pater; but whereas many of these male aesthetes insist upon (what Field critiques as) the masculine “I,” Bradley and Cooper instead use a variety of techniques, from collage to translation and transcription, to create a queer subject position that is multi-voiced and truly playful in its expression of identity formation. Through their experimental journals 1890-92, in particular, Bradley and Cooper claim a place for queer women’s participation in art tourism as well as emergent theories of aestheticism at the fin de siècle.BiographyBrooke Cameron is Associate Professor of English at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. She is the author of Critical Alliances: Economics and Feminism in English Women’s Writing, 1880-1914 (University of Toronto Press, 2020), as well as multiple articles and book chapters on gender and economic themes in Victorian literature.?‘Gender inclusion in neo-Victorian literature: Rosie Garland’s The Night Brother’Emma CatanNeo-Victorian literature is often associated with mirrors and dual imagery; simultaneously depicting Victorian settings and events, whilst reflecting twenty-first century issues and anxieties. While Neo-Victorianism frequently celebrates marginalised identities and tells hidden histories, many works reinforce Western-centric, cis-normative ideologies through their narrative voice. This paper draws on my PhD research into cross-dressing and ‘criminality’ and shows how Rosie Garland’s work disturbs this trend. As a novelist, poet and performer, Garland defies categorisation, and this is also reflected in her neo-Victorian works. In The Night Brother (2017), I argue that Garland actively centres marginalised identities through her use of first-person perspective; this allows the protagonists to tell their own stories, rather than being voiced by third-person narrators. This consequently becomes an important tactic in providing ‘othered’ identities with their own voice, rather than their perspectives being excluded. Moreover, Garland’s refusal to abide by socially defined boundaries extends to bodily existence, gender identity, and sexuality. Her works actively celebrate and centre gender fluid characters, whilst challenging gender essentialist views and contemporary discourses surrounding ‘normative’ appearance. Her depiction of Edie and Gnome – two souls in one body – enables Garland to explore their struggle against contemporary Victorian and Edwardian gender discourses, while reflecting on twenty-first century debates about gender identity and exclusion. Finally, I contend that Garland’s neo-Victorian fiction is exemplary of a contemporary work which reflects and challenges twenty-first century views on the body and gender identity.BiographyI am a second-year (part time) PhD candidate at Northumbria University. My thesis explores cross-dressing and ‘criminality’ in the neo-Victorian city. My research interests include gender, sexuality, class, and policing spaces in contemporary, Victorian, neo-Victorian, crime fiction, and fantasy literature.Twitter: @academicmeeple‘Ann Radcliffe, Vampire Hunter: An Exploration of Paul Féval’s Vampire City (1875)’Susan CivaleFictional portraits of real-life authors abounded in the nineteenth century (think: Lord Ruthven as Byron), but appearances of real-life authors as themselves did not. Paul Féval’s Vampire City (originally La Ville-Vampire in French), however, features Ann Radcliffe as an intrepid adventure heroine who leaves her fiancé at the altar in order to rescue her friends from vampires on the Continent. Published in France in novel form in 1875 but likely written in 1867, Vampire City offers a parody of the gothic novel, displaying all the graphic violence and supernatural peril that Radcliffe herself eschewed, along with a wry humour that takes aim at English ideas about class, gender, nation, and literature. As Féval playfully fills in the gaps in the narrative of Radcliffe’s personal life, a source of much speculation during her lifetime and afterward, he both imitates and interrogates the mechanics of her plots. This paper explores Féval’s inclusion of real authors – Ann Radcliffe, as well as Sir Walter Scott – in an outlandish gothic romance that deconstructs the boundaries between high and popular fiction, fact and fantasy, and originality and piracy. It argues for Vampire City as an important intervention in Radcliffe’s European afterlife and also as a commentary on the vampiric aspects of the cross-channel literary marketplace in the Victorian period.BiographySusan Civale is Senior Lecturer in Romanticism at Canterbury Christ Church University. Her research interests lie in women’s writing of the long nineteenth century, life writing, and authorial and textual afterlives. She recently published a monograph titled Romantic Women’s Life Writing: Reputation and Afterlife (2019) and co-edited a special issue of Romantic Textualities on ‘Romantic Novels 1817 and 1818’ (forthcoming 2021).Twitter: @susancivale‘The rebranding of the rural working-class in the nineteenth century: from exclusion to inclusion’Claire Cock-StarkeyThis paper will argue that towards the end of the nineteenth century the persistently marginalised rural working classes were rebranded as ‘the folk’ – a designation which gave their ‘lore’ cultural value. This resulted in rural workers, who had previously been decried as backward and devoid of culture, becoming central to folklorists’ attempts to build an English national identity tied to the land. The term ‘folklore’ was coined in 1846 by W. J. Thoms in the first of a series of columns for the Athenaeum in which he asked the public to help him collect ‘popular superstitions’ from around England. This saw the start of a new area of study – folklore studies – overseen by middle- and upper-class folklorists who decided what was classified as ‘folklore’, and who was designated as ‘the folk’. Numerous books, pamphlets and journals of collected regional folklore were produced, becoming increasingly popular amongst the educated middle classes, transforming the ‘lore’ of the common people into a product of cultural value.In the early nineteenth century, rural workers had been characterised as rough and backward – their only value deriving from their physical strength. Using the writings of key nineteenth-century folklorists such as George Laurence Gomme and Edwin Sidney Hartland, this paper will show how the Nationalistic motivations of the folklorists harked back to a pastoral idyll of ‘Merrie England’. This recast rural workers as ‘keepers of lore’ and positioned them as a counterpoint to the degenerate, untethered urban working classes. I will argue that by the end of the nineteenth century previously excluded rural working-class peasants were adopted by folklorists and included as an essential link to England’s distant past, their knowledge, rituals and traditions tied to the ebb and flow of the agrarian year providing an important building block in the creation of an English national identity.BiographyClaire Cock-Starkey is a first year PhD student at Birkbeck, University of London working on the folklore of death and dying in nineteenth-century England.Twitter: @nonfictioness‘Representations of African Slaves in Nineteenth-Century Melodrama’Mariaconcetta CostantiniThe nineteenth century was marked by racializing discourses and practices. Colonization compelled Europeans to encounter populations living in remote lands, whose different phenotypes and cultures became objects of interest and, often, revulsion. Interracial relations were complicated by the consequences of the Atlantic slave trade. Though abolished by the British Parliament in 1833, slavery continued to be practised in Caribbean colonies and in North America, where the tensions between owners and slaves sharpened after abolition.As Edward Said famously demonstrated, the racialization of what disturbed order and sameness was a leitmotiv of Victorian popular literature and culture. Novels like Jane Eyre (1847) bear evidence of this process of stigmatization, silencing and exclusion. In representing the threats posed by racial difference and miscegenation, writers often drew upon melodrama. The mode’s excess was ideal for conveying the strong emotions produced by racial conflicts. The Manichean world it featured, moreover, enabled writers to describe the exclusion of otherness in binary terms, equating whiteness with virtuosity, blackness (and especially métissage) with evil.These mechanisms have been widely studied by scholars, who have proved that most popular writers espoused dominant racial prejudices. Less attention, instead, has been paid to a few nineteenth-century works that express pity and curiosity for racialized subjects. My paper focuses on two little studied texts (one fictional, one theatrical) that have slaves as protagonists: “The Mulatto” (1837), a short story published in French by the American-born free person of colour Victor Séjour, and Black and White (1869), a play written by Wilkie Collins in collaboration with Charles Fechter.Both set in the Caribbean, the two works use melodramatic strategies to challenge, rather than confirm, the age’s prejudices. Unlike Harriet Beecher Stowe, who makes a large use of sentimentality popularizing racial stereotypes in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1859), Séjour and Collins represent the tragic condition of chattel slavery in all its vivid crudeness. Both expose the double marginalization of their slave protagonists who, stigmatized for their ethnicity, are also reified as chattels. My intention is to examine some strategies deployed by the two authors to make the reader feel for their protagonists’ traumas. I will also investigate how Séjour and Collins blur Manichean boundaries by endowing their slaves with virtues typical of white free men, thereby raising questions of identity that problematize mechanisms of racial exclusion.BiographyMariaconcetta Costantini is professor of English Literature at G. d’Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara. She has published monographs, articles and books chapters on Victorian and neo-Victorian literature and culture. Her publications include the volumes Venturing into Unknown Waters: Wilkie Collins and the Challenge of Modernity (2008), Sensation and Professionalism in the Victorian Novel (2015), and Mrs Henry Wood (2020). She is a VPFA Executive and co-editor of the VPF journal.‘Excluding the Maternal Body in Victorian Popular Literature’Jessica CoxIn Karen Hearn’s 2020 exhibition, Portraying Pregnancy: From Holbein to Social Media (Foundling Museum, London), there is a noticeable lack of images from the Victorian period, reflecting the era’s effacing of the maternal body in popular art and literature. Maternity is frequently central to Victorian popular fiction: the plots of countless novels are propelled by maternal mortality, or by legitimate and illegitimate births, whilst heroines often conclude their stories as new mothers. In more sensational literature, babies die or are murdered, unscrupulous baby farmers neglect their duties, women are raped and forced to endure unasked for pregnancies, and mothers experience postpartum depression or psychosis. Yet, as with Victorian artistic representations, the maternal body – pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding – is largely excluded. This paper considers the exclusion of representations of maternity in Victorian popular literature and culture, examining the obscuring of the maternal body in art and fiction in relation to the expectations placed upon women. Childlessness was frequently construed as failure – a state to be pitied or mocked. Women were encouraged to fulfil their biological ‘destiny’ and become mothers, but the maternal body was persistently obscured. Whilst popular advice literature from the period often offers detailed and prescriptive information on pregnancy and infant care, implying that the maternal body needed to be closely monitored and policed, childbirth itself is notably excluded or obscured in many of these works. Here I examine the maternal gaps in Victorian popular fiction and advice literature, and explore the links to wider nineteenth-century gender ideologies which, paradoxically, persistently worked to devalue the maternal experience, even as it was constructed as women’s natural destiny.BiographyJessica Cox is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Brunel University London. She has research interests in the Bront?s, Victorian sensation fiction, neo-Victorianism, and maternity, and has published widely in these areas. Her most recent book, Neo-Victorianism and Sensation Fiction, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2019. She is currently working on a project on representations of maternal bodies in nineteenth-century literature and culture.‘Institutionalisation, Incarceration, and Dissection: From Workhouse to Anatomist’s Table in E.S. Thomson’s Beloved Poison’Rosalind CrockerThe ability of neo-Victorian fiction to draw on a historical overview of social and legislative developments enables writers to present clear, causative links between them. This is certainly true of neo-Victorian writing concerning early-nineteenth-century medicine, wherein key pieces of legislation, including the 1832 Anatomy Act and the New Poor Law of 1834, can be seen to instigate several major changes for various social and medical institutions. E.S. Thomson’s Beloved Poison, set in an infirmary and centring around the subversive anatomical practices of its medical men, explores the relationship between institutions which excluded the poor from wider society, including the workhouse, asylum, prison, and, eventually, dissecting room.This paper argues that Thomson’s novel explores the ideological work of ‘othering’ done by these institutions, affirming the deliberate, legislative link between poverty, institution and dissection. The destabilising of pauper identity enabled by changes to the law – especially the Anatomy Act which allowed teaching hospitals to use the bodies of workhouse poor – demonstrates a concerted effort to justify the use of these bodies for dissection by undermining the individuality and autonomy of the pauper, particularly as the New Poor Law placed greater restrictions on day-to-day life in the workhouse. In this way, these institutions are shown to anticipate and aid the ideological mission of the anatomical trade, supporting Ruth Richardson’s claim that ‘the Anatomy Act was in reality an advance clause to the New Poor Law’.I will look at the ways in which Beloved Poison explores this practical and ideological journey through the system of state-supported institutions, arguing that the novel focuses on these exclusionary practices towards the poor in order to emphasise the ways in which this othering contributed to medical/anatomical misdemeanour in the mid-nineteenth century, and explain the wider culture of support which protected the medical man from scrutiny.BiographyRosalind Crocker is a doctoral researcher at the University of Sheffield, with a project about the neo-Victorian ‘medical man’ and clinical spaces in fiction. Her research, funded by the AHRC through the White Rose Consortium, is also concerned with resurrectionism, contagion, and the patient narrative.Twitter: @rosiecrocker98‘Old is the New Young: Ageing Masculinity in Victorian Fiction’Alice CrossleyIn the nineteenth-century, the primacy of youth is evident: from the romantic child to the symbolic figure of the fin de siècle adolescent, the young were often constructed as desirable, and youth as the most vital, dynamic stage of life. Such a view excludes and marginalises later life in literature and culture. However, a number of novelists revise this stance, adopting instead a more positive, inclusive view of ageing as a period of particular pleasures and consolations. In examples drawn from diverse narrative traditions – the fiction of Machado de Assis (Brazil), Israel Zangwill (UK), and Anthony Trollope (UK) – old age becomes instead a profitable vantage point for retrospection, and a repository for knowledge, as well as an opportunity for self-indulgence, increased autonomy, and freedom from social constraints. Through analysis of texts that offer realistic accounts of male old age, and also novels that use strategies of fantasy to re-imagine old age from a perspective beyond the grave, this paper will conduct close readings of textual examples to establish some of the ways in which aged, fictional masculinity in these texts turns away from the shiny promises of youth to an alternative, restorative model of senescent masculinity. This paper will therefore acknowledge ways in which male old age is effectively recuperated from the exclusionary, ageist tendencies of nineteenth-century culture. In doing so, this paper will begin to reimagine old age through an ameliorative framework, and to therefore reorient the significance of fictional age construction in Victorian age discourse.BiographyDr Alice Crossley is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature (University of Lincoln), and is Secretary of BAVS. Her research focuses on intersections between age and gender in Victorian and modernist fiction. Her work includes Male Adolescence in Mid-Victorian Fiction (Routledge, 2018), edited special journal issues for Age, Culture, Humanities (2021 with Amy Culley) and Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies (2017), and an article for 19 on aging queerly in the short fiction of Israel Zangwill (forthcoming, 2021). She is currently working on a new book, Old Fashioning: Aging and Masculinity in Western Fiction, 1840-1930. She also works on nineteenth-century valentines.Twitter: @Alice_Crossley‘Metaphors of in/visibility and dynamics of gender in Ellen Wood’Maria Luisa De RinaldisThis paper aims at building on existing criticism on Ellen Wood (1814-1887) that strives to reassess the value of her work as well as of other popular novelists who have been excluded from the canon in the post-Victorian period. Wood’s production has been analysed in terms of generic categories and sensationalism, as well as from the perspective of gender theories. Drawing on these approaches, the present paper will focus on Bessy Rane (1870), a novel that has not received much critical attention, in order to highlight dynamics of inclusion and exclusion on an individual and collective level. The representation of subjectivity will be analysed looking at strategies of visibility and invisibility, in order to explore how these relate to received notions of value. Bessy Rane’s willing fake death in order to support her husband’s ambitions through a financial fraud crystallizes meanings related to the figurative spectralization of female identity. Tensions are projected in the text by the challenging gaze of Fanny Jelly (“Did you see Mrs Rane after she died?”), the inquisitive servant who exposes the falsity of the plot contrived by the Ranes. Jelly’s provocative ‘belief in seeing’, reversing supposed truths in the novel from her socially subordinated gaze, seems to be crucial in representing Wood’s alternative visions of identity, gender and authority. What Jelly opens up are new ways of rethinking female invisibility in a critical light, setting against it the desire (and in part the research) for new visibility that also means greater social inclusion.BibliographyWood, Ellen, Bessy Rane (1870)Costantini, Mariaconcetta, Mrs Henry Wood, EER, Brighton, 2020Costantini, Mariaconcetta, Sensation and Professionalism in the Victorian Novel, Peter Lang, 2015Gagnier, Regina, Subjectivities. A History of Self-Representation in Britain 1832-1920, Oxford University Press, 1991Steere Elizabeth, The Female Servant and Sensation Fiction: ‘Kitchen Literature’, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013Berger, John, Ways of Seeing, London, Penguin Books, 1972Mangham, Andrew, ‘I see it; but I cannot explain it’: Female Gothicism and the Narrative of Female Incarceration in the Novels of Mrs Henry Wood’, in Karen Sayer and Rosemary Mitchell, eds, Victorian Gothic, Leeds University, pp. 81-98Aughterson, K., D. Phillips, eds, Women Writers and Experimental Narratives: Early Modern to Contemporary, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021BiographyMaria Luisa De Rinaldis is an Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Salento (Italy). Her research includes work on Shakespeare and Shakespearean criticism and interpretation in the late nineteenth century, on Walter Pater, on Anglo-Italian relations and translation in the early modern period. More recently she has investigated the reception of Shakespeare in Italy.‘“I was a genuine boy”: Angelica Hamilton-Wells and James Miranda Barry in The Heavenly Twins’Angela DuIn a section titled “The Tenor and the Boy.—An Interlude” of Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893), Angelica Hamilton-Wells temporarily escapes her bourgeois marriage by cross-dressing as “the Boy,” her invented male persona. When her ruse is uncovered, Angelica delivers a feminist diatribe in which she posits a lineage of gender-variant women connecting her to the real-life doctor James Miranda Barry. Critics read this section as a cross-dressing fantasy; once Angelica’s “real” identity is unveiled, we return to Grand’s New Woman Bildungsroman. But almost no one has considered Angelica’s insistence “I was a genuine boy” in terms of a trans* identity, an oversight that parallels the normative view of Barry as a cross-dressing woman rather than an undetermined identity (see Ann Heilmann).I argue that Angelica’s inclusion of Barry in her lineage suggests a radical reconsideration of representing gender in late nineteenth-century British culture—beyond the conservatism of Grand’s New Woman politics (see Teresa Mangum). Centring Barry in Angelica’s polemical speech allows us to glimpse unnarrated possibilities in The Heavenly Twins. I focus on the relation between Angelica’s narration and the novel’s realism. Drawing on feminist narratology (Alison Case, Sue Lanser), I show that Angelica seizes a speaking authority that destabilizes her plot’s closure, in which she submits to her husband’s guidance. Furthermore, I examine how Angelica’s reference to Barry undermines the narrative authority of Dr. George Galbraith in the novel’s final section. Through Angelica, The Heavenly Twins indicates that gender subversion is not restricted to an “interlude” but constitutes an ongoing negotiation at the heart of an inclusionary feminism.BiographyAngela Du is a PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto’s English department. Her work examines how Victorian novelists imagined futures not-yet-here for female protagonists. Her interests include feminist narrative theory, temporality, character, and periodical studies. She also trains graduate teaching assistants, and her pedagogical interests include online accessibility.Twitter: @ang_y_du‘Including Queensberry: Mike Tyson Mysteries and the Lavender Marquess’Aaron EamesJohn Sholto Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry (1844-1900), is chiefly remembered for two things: the eponymous rules that govern the sport of boxing and the downfall of the Irish wit and author Oscar Wilde. His third son, Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas, was Wilde’s lover. Out of both homophobia and a desire to save his son from homosexuality, Queensberry succeeded in forcing a courtroom confrontation that led to Wilde’s eventual imprisonment for ‘gross indecency’. Wilde referred to him as the ‘Scarlet Marquess’ on account of his explosive bouts of fury. The most well-known on-screen portrayals of Queensberry, The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960), Oscar Wilde (1960), and Wilde (1997), follow this pattern.However, Queensberry’s incarnation in the Adult Swim animation Mike Tyson Mysteries (2014-2020) is altogether different. In this surreal comedy, Queensberry’s ghost, as a spiritual antecedent of former world heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, assists ‘Iron Mike’ and his friends in solving various bizarre mysteries. He is modelled on the historical Queensberry but, at the same time, he is homosexual and depicted as a stereotype of a modern gay man: a ‘Lavender’ Marquess in comparison to the man Wilde knew. In one episode, ‘The Gift’ (Season 3 Episode 18), he even returns to Victorian London to make things right with Bosie and Oscar.I will explore this neo-Victorian reversal of Queensberry’s sexuality and how it transforms him into a recognisable but antithetical character. I will compare the portrayal in Mike Tyson Mysteries to the presentation of Wilde in Gyles Brandreth’s neo-Victorian novel series ‘Oscar Wilde Murder Mysteries’ (2007-2012), which sees Wilde solving crimes rather than simply finding himself on the wrong side of the law. I will consider why Queensberry, a man notorious for his exclusive attitude towards homosexuality, has been reimagined for inclusion in a modern TV show.BiographyAaron Eames is a doctoral researcher at Loughborough University. His thesis is supervised by Dr Nick Freeman and Dr Sarah Parker and explores biographical literature on Oscar Wilde. Aaron is also a committee member of the Oscar Wilde Society, UK, for which he edits Oscariana, a regular e-newsletter.Twitter: @aaroneames2 Reading Group: ‘Against the Grain: Reparative Readings for Victorian Popular Fiction’Jesse EricksonIn her landmark essay, “Paranoid, Reparative, or You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You” queer theorist and gender studies scholar Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick laid the groundwork for understanding the anti-homophobic impulse to position paranoia as the prevailing hermeneutical interpretive model for critical textual analysis. In that same essay, however, Sedgewick pointed toward reparative reading as an alternative framework for contending with the violence of heteronormativity. The premise for this reading group posits that Victorian literature, which, through the hermeneutics of suspicion, is rightly known for its history of colonialism, imperialism, and racial violence, can be engaged with in concomitant ways that are reparative, specifically by pairing Victorian readings with Neo-Victorian counterparts. By doing so, we will seek new constructive insights for comprehending and confronting present day iterations of some of these same destructive forces.BiographyJesse R. Erickson is Coordinator of Special Collections and Digital Humanities, Assistant Professor in the Department of English, and Associate Director of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center at the University of Delaware. He previously worked as a bibliographic researcher in the Charles E. Young Research Library at the University of California, Los Angeles. A member of the American Antiquarian Society, he has served on the editorial board of the University of Delaware Press and on the board for the American Printing History Association. His research specializations include ethnobibliography, Black print culture studies, and the transnational publishing history of Ouida.Twitter: @Bibli_be_Us‘Nomadic Subjectivities and Transnational Female Agency: Disruptions of Empire in Harriette Gordon Smythies’ and Ellen Wood’s Sensation Fiction’Felipe Espinoza GarridoThe complexities of Britain’s exoticized imagination of the Indian subcontinent, particularly post-1857, have long been the subject of academic scrutiny. Mid-nineteenth-century popular fiction, as this paper posits, allows for a particular focus on the literary functions of Anglo-Indian “nomadic subjectivities” (Braidotti) – represented here by women who spatially or by ancestry inhabit multiple localities in Britain and India – whose presences have the potential to disrupt hegemonic, colonial discourses of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’. With recourse to sensation novels such as Harriet Gordon Smythies’s A Faithful Woman (1865) and Acquitted (1870), or Ellen Wood’s Bessy Rane (1870), this paper seeks to unravel the formative impact of such exoticizations, and asks in how far the transposition of imperial horrors onto Britain’s social fabric lies at the heart of their sensationalism. A Faithful Woman’s self-reflexive racializations of its Anglo-Indian (alleged) villainess unmasks the Indian rebellion’s origins and its popular representations and can be understood as a counterpoint to Britain’s dominant imperial discourse in the early 1860s. Equally disruptive, bigamy in the form of unlawful marriage in India continuously unsettles Acquitted’s rigidly classed hierarchies and is symbolically overlaid with episodes of domestic violence and the spectre of a disintegrating aristocracy. Bessy Rane’s too, establishes between the villainess’s first marriage in India and the death of her virtuous husband, i.e, her colonial past, and the ways in which this disrupts structures of empire at home, represented by the decline of an entire English in the novel. These novels use “nomadic subjectivities” in the form of transnational female agency and its failures to betray a profound unease about the domestic impact of Empire itself. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates that the sensational qualities of these novels thus need to be understood as distinctly imperial in nature.BiographyFelipe Espinoza Garrido is Assistant Professor for English, Postcolonial and Media Studies at the University of Münster. He is co-editor of Locating African European Studies: Intersections, Interventions, Conversations (Routledge, 2020) and Black Neo-Victoriana (Brill, 2021, forth.), and is currently working on a monograph on empire in Victorian popular women’s writing.Twitter: @FelEspinoz‘Under Many Flags: Ouida’s European Cosmopolitanism’Helena EsserOuida and her work have had a complex relationship with canons. Although a bestselling author for more than fifty years, she has been excluded from dominant canons of Victorian literature. Her political ideals and unusual writing of gender disqualified her from being seen as an 1890s New Woman writer and consequently excluded her from 1980s feminist literary histories. Conversely, she has been more or less successfully included in a variety of canons; sensation fiction, aestheticism, Italian novels, ‘French novels written in English’, and more broadly, popular fiction. This begs the question: How useful are these neatly drawn categories in accounting for her work?Where does Ouida sit within a framework of ‘the Victorian’, and how do her life and work complicate or defy our understanding of that highly contested, anglo-centric term? Considering her French father, ‘French’ morals, her relationship with her German publisher, and her emigration to Florence, as well the choice of cosmopolitan settings and themes in such novels as Idalia (1867), Under Two Flags (1867), In a Winter City (1876), or Moths (1880), how useful is it to consider her a ‘Victorian’, that is, a British writer?In this essay, I want to examine Ouida’s relationships with canons and categories drawn within the field of Victorian literature and debate whether it might not be more productive to theorise her as a European writer. Whereas this might be a provocative approach in the current political climate, I hope this will prove a productive approach to ‘the Victorian’ as, not a fixed and isolated idea, but as embedded within trans-European socio-cultural networks.BiographyDr Helena Esser completed her PhD in English Literature at Birkbeck College, London, in 2020. Her thesis examines how steampunk fiction re-purposes shared urban imaginaries of Victorian London. She has published on various aspects of steampunk and neo-Victorian popular fiction. Her continued fascination with Ouida will be channelled into her post-doc project.Twitter: @EsserHelena‘Discarding the Licentious Past – Victorian Historical Novelists and the Restoration Period’Dorothea FlothowThough nineteenth-century historiography is renowned for the emergence of 'scientific history', for most of the century, British historians were unashamedly partisan. This was mainly the result of the prevailing 'Whig interpretation', which read British history as the rise of democracy, freedom and Protestantism. This reading also dominated Victorian historical novels, which judged historical figures and periods according to how far they furthered or hindered this tale of progress.The Restoration period, i.e. the reigns of Charles II and his brother James II and VII, which ended with the 'Glorious Revolution', was thus considered one of the less successful eras of British history: its monarchs were criticised as unpatriotic (secret) Catholics striving for absolutism, and as infamous libertines surrounded by a like-minded court. Nevertheless, the period proliferated in historical novels, both by canonized authors (like Sir Walter Scott) and popular writers (like W.H. Ainsworth, George W.M. Reynolds, or Frederick Smith). In particular popular novelists painted the Restoration period as 'other' – an era less civilised, less moral, and less secure than the Victorian present. To this end, they often used Gothic features, highlighting the continued relevance of a supernatural Catholic past, of dangerous nuns and evil priests. Moreover, they set their stories in Restoration London's criminal quarters (like the District of Alsatia) and focused on the period's two calamities, the Plague and the Fire. At the same time, however, they reveal a distinct fetish fascination with a historical period more colourful and more exciting than the present.Thus, popular Victorian authors created the Restoration past as a time they were glad to have left behind, an era which highlighted the merits of their own age, but which also evoked a distinct nostalgia for what they had lost.BiographyDr. Dorothea Flothow is Associate Professor at the Department of English and American Studies, Salzburg University. She has an MA degree in English Literature and Modern History (University of Tübingen) and in her PhD project examined war imagery in British children’s novels. Her research interests include historical drama and fiction, crime fiction, and nineteenth-century theatre. She has just completed a book-length study of the Restoration period in popular historiographies.Panel Title: “Speaking of my oddity”: Inclusive Spaces in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Life WritingPanelists: Sarah E. Maier, Emma McTavish, and Brooke CameronPanel Organizer: Rachel M. FriarsBiographyRachel M. Friars is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Her work on Sarah Waters has been published with Palgrave Macmillan, and her co-authored writing on Anne Lister has recently been included in?The Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies.?Rachel’s work on twenty-first-century women’s true crime is forthcoming from Crime Fiction Studies and Edinburgh University Press.Twitter: @RachelMFriars‘Beyond the Sickroom: Inclusion, Exclusion, and Discourses of Illness in Maria Graham’s Travel Journals’Patricia FrickThis paper examines discourses of illness in the travel writings of Maria Graham, especially her Journal of a Residence in Chile, During the Year 1822. Like many of her generation, Graham contracted tuberculosis in her youth, suffered from recurrences throughout her life, and eventually died from the disease in 1842. But while illness was a fact of her life, she initially excluded any references to it in her first published journal of India (1812), perhaps considering it one of the “private matters” she wished to avoid in favour of providing informed observations about India’s culture and history. As she travelled more, however, illness became more prevalent in Graham’s life, and her later South American journals reflect her need to make this subject more public. Both in her Brazilian journal, where she candidly describes the strange and “sadly enfeebling” fever that strikes her husband’s ship, as well as her in her Chilean journal, where she provides a poignant account of her husband’s sudden death, Graham finds it increasingly hard to omit illness from her travel writings.Recent scholarship on Graham’s Chilean journal in the year following her husband’s death interprets it as a chronicle of a woman’s recovery from grief and her movement towards greater independence, agency, and intellectual fulfilment. Curiously, however, the journal also includes many references to illness, particularly through Graham’s multiple allusions to her cousin, Glennie, a young sailor who survived the fever that killed her husband, and whom she describes as “My poor G.” and “my invalid”(294). Whether she is dealing with a major earthquake, engaging with Chilean revolution, or expanding her botanical expertise, Graham is eager to nurse Glennie and dutifully records his “increased sufferings” (277). I will argue that Graham’s inclusion of Glennie and his invalidism within her journal performs important psychological and narrative work, allowing Graham to speak more openly about her own compromised health, and reassuring her readers that despite the freedoms that travel has afforded her, she can still uphold the Victorian ideal of the selfless and nurturing woman, who protects the weak and presides over the “sickroom,” even in another hemisphere.BiographyPatricia Frick is Professor of English at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio, where she has taught courses on the Victorian and Neo-Victorian novel; Victorian popular culture and history; Victorian literature and science; and the Victorians on Screens. Her publications, panels, and presentations have focused largely on the writings of Wilkie Collins, 19th-century women writers, Victorian monster narratives, detective fiction, and Neo-Victorian literature. She has participated in national and international conferences for NAVSA (NYU/Purdue in Firenze) and Project Orion (University of Malaga). Her current sabbatical research focuses on the travel writings of Maria Graham (Lady Callcott).‘“Love Came Down at Christmastime”: Pedagogical Purpose and Religious Devotion in Rossetti’s Christmas Poetry’Christian GallichioIn a 1929 article for The Elementary English Review titled “Christmas-Tide in Poetry”, Katherine W. Watson, a children’s librarian, attempted to collate a respectable list of Christmastime poetry, noting “The spirit of poetry is perhaps more in the air at Christmas time, then at any other season of the year” (264). That she dedicates a significant portion of her overview to the Victorian poet Christina Rossetti is unsurprising, given that Rossetti had, by the early twentieth century, become a model for the overly religious Christmas hymnal.In fact, her poems “Love Came Down at Christmas” (1885), and “The Shepherds Had an Angel” (1886), and “A Christmas Carol” (1876) were transformed by the composer Harold Darke into holiday-themed carols that explicitly played up their devotional underpinnings. At odds with generic trends in Christmas fiction that favoured secularization both within the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Rossetti’s poetry created a counter-narrative, returning back to what Tara Moore calls a “scriptural touchstone” that defined holiday poetry within a biblical context (121). Moore, however, glosses over Rossetti’s importance within this religious reclamation of Christmas.Rossetti models the type of poetry that became codified as Christmas carols within the early twentieth century, Devotional lamentations on Christ’s birth were the thematic preoccupation for these poems. Thus, this paper aims to explore how Rossetti’s poems enacted the type of faith-based performance typical of nineteenth Christmas poetry and, also, how they were transformed within a early twentieth century context. By becoming the earliest examples of outwardly religious poetry turned into yearly carols, through Darke’s musical adaptations, the paper will explore how these three texts became benchmarks for the type of Christian pedagogical repurposing led by Watson, among others, that reoriented Rossetti’s Christmas hymnals and created a counter-narrative against secularized Christmas fiction. Pushing them from lamentations of Christ’s birth, as they were seen in nineteenth century reception, to teaching tools that reaffirm the “effect that the appreciation of even one beautiful poem will have upon [a] child’s mind” (Watson 264).BiographyChristian Gallichio is a PhD Candidate in English Literature at the University of Georgia. He is currently working on a dissertation focusing on the historical lineage of Puritan conversation narratives in nineteenth century transatlantic Christmas literature. ‘Imageless Imagetext: Illustration Excluded from Collected Late-Victorian Periodical Fiction’Madeline B. GangnesPeriodical fiction is bound up in a network of paratextual and imagetextual meaning-making. Laurel Brake argues that the “relation … of the parts and the whole … bonds the Victorian serial and the Victorian book theoretically, formally, and historically.” Likewise, James Mussell calls periodicals an “alternative form” of publication that offers a view into a novel’s “absent context.” Illustrations, photographs, essays, poetry, cartoons, advertisements, and other periodical materials inform readings of serialized novels and periodical short stories that are occluded in collected volumes.The material contexts that Mussell describes have been made “absent” through a deliberate exclusion of paratextual content that occurs when a text is extracted from its periodical environment. The Victorian practice of first publishing a novel or series of short stories in a periodical and then revising and collecting it/them in a volume creates textual and contextual disconnects among various presentations. The effects of this disconnection are most visible—or perhaps invisible—in the exclusion of images. The volume-only reader, quite literally, cannot see the “whole picture.”This paper explores visual absences in several popular works of late-Victorian periodical fiction from which illustrations have been excluded. I show, for example, 1) the ways in which H. G. Wells altered the text of The War of the Worlds to directly respond to illustrations by Warwick Goble; 2) how William Boucher’s illustrations for R. L. Stevenson’s Kidnapped enable a particular reading of the novel; and 3) an identifiable visual idiom for detective fiction by Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur Morrison, C. L. Pirkis, L. T. Meade, and their contemporaries that is rarely seen in collections of detective short fiction. My analyses of these texts make clear that excluding images from collected volumes of periodical works divorces such works from crucial cultural and aesthetic meanings.ReferencesBrake, Laurel. “The ‘Trepidation of the Spheres’: The Serial and the Book in the 19th Century.” Serials and Their Readers 1620-1914. Edited by Robin Myers and Michael Harris. St. Paul’s Bibliographies, 1993, pp. 83-101.Mussell, James. “Teaching Nineteenth-Century Periodicals Using Digital Resources: Myths and Methods.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 45, no. 2, Summer 2012, pp. 201-209.BiographyMadeline B. Gangnes is an assistant professor of English at the University of Scranton. Her research and teaching lie at the intersections of nineteenth-century British literature, visual studies, and digital humanities. Her scholarship appears in Victorian Periodicals Review, Studies in Comics, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, and Inks.Twitter: @maddohere‘Disability in Dickens: Crutches, Prosthetics and Wheelchairs’Katerina García-WalshThis paper explores Charles Dickens’ depictions of mobility disabilities, spanning characters from the early Pickwick Papers (1837) to Our Mutual Friend (1865). Walking in Dickens’ novels serves as a symbol of freedom from hardship (for instance, Nell or David fleeing London in The Old Curiosity Shop [1841] and David Copperfield [1850], respectively) or offers solace in the urban crowds (Master Humphrey’s flaneurism in Old Master Humphrey’s Clock [1840]). Persons with mobility disabilities, meanwhile, are excluded from participating or living fully in the Dickensian fictional space. For Dickens, such characters consequently lack a proper identity, remaining an incomplete and Gothic image of the decadent urban scene.These disabled characters fall into three categories: first, those who rely on crutches; second, those with wooden prosthetic legs; and third, those who use wheelchairs. Reviewing these distinct manifestations of mobility disability, we see how Dickens differentiates among the three types of characters, associating crutches with pitiable children, peg-legs with working class men and wheelchairs with wealth and exploitation. I intend to analyse instances of each, drawing textual examples from Mrs Lirriper’s Legacy (1864), Bleak House (1853) and Little Dorrit (1857) before turning to Jenny Wren in Our Mutual Friend (1865), in which Dickens combines and replicates the central tropes of all three categories. Ultimately, I argue that Dickens, across all of these examples, produces a Gothic trope wherein the disabled body, defined largely by lack of mobility and therefore by an inability to advance, becomes a symbol of stagnant ruin. His disabled characters represent a decadent environment and address class inequalities, though confined to marginal roles and excluded from the dignity afforded to his protagonists.BiographyKaterina García-Walsh is a PhD candidate at St Andrews working on spectral memory and trauma in Margaret Oliphant’s Gothic. Her previous education includes an MA in Literary Studies from the Complutense University of Madrid, an MSt (1830-1914) from Oxford and a BA (summa cum laude) from Georgetown University.‘Unloving parents and incorporeal children: familial exclusion and corporeality in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911)’Anna GasperiniMy paper explores issues of familial exclusion, physical health, and nurture in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s novel The Secret Garden (1911). Mary Lennox and Colin Craven, the novel’s protagonists, suffer from exclusion from their respective parents: Mary’s mother is a beautiful socialite who ‘did not want a little girl at all’, and Colin’s father cannot suffer to see Colin after his mother died in childbirth. Mrs Lennox and Mr Craven shut their children out of sight and earshot, entrusting them to strangers who never bond with them. Removed from their role in the family circle, Mary and Colin become matter out of place: unwanted, unlikable, and unhealthy, they turn into incorporeal ghostly presences haunting the respective domestic spaces.Drawing from Pasi Falk's theory of corporeality, which considers the body, not solely a biological entity, but a ‘sensory and sensual being’ that is impacted by, and connected with, a network of ‘social and cultural liaisons’, my paper reads The Secret Garden as a narrative of corporealization, where dissolution and reconstruction of emotional ties impacts on the two protagonists’ corporeality. Reading the novel in the light of coeval popular child health literature, I trace Mary and Colin's evolution from a state of physical and social non-entity caused by parental rejection, to a physically present and aware state coinciding with the reconstruction of emotional links with their family and/or parental figures. My analysis centres especially on food’s role in the corporealization process: eating and nurture are crucial to the creation/dissolution of emotional links and mark the protagonists’ in/corporeal state. Initially, having experienced lack of nurture, Mary and Colin reject food, which contributes to impairing their health; as they connect with nurturing parental figures and partake of genuine home-made food in the inclusive environment of the eponymous garden, thetwo children reacquire appetite and health.BiographyDr Anna Gasperini is a Marie Sk?odowska-Curie Fellow at Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia (Italy). She researches intersections between nineteenth-century literature and medical history, and her current research project is a transnational comparison of nineteenth-century children’s literatures as related to child nutrition. She received her PhD in 2017 from the National University of Ireland Galway and she is the author of Nineteenth Century Popular Fiction, Medicine and Anatomy – The Victorian Penny Blood and the 1832 Anatomy Act (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).Twitter: @AnnaGDreadful‘Sociopolitical Revolution in Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”’Jesse GauthierCritical readings of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” tend towards historicization, treating Lizzie, Laura, the goblins, and the market as signifiers of an historical signified. Though this approach is valid and fruitful, it fails to appreciate the poem’s philosophical and poetical exploration of economic systems. My paper connects gender and economics through Gale Ruben and Luce Irigaray’s texts which address the patriarchal exchange of women in capitalist marketplaces, thereby facilitating my project’s assertion that the goblin market is a fundamentally capitalist patriarchy. This is not to say that the market is capitalist and patriarchal. Rather, it is a mutually constitutive system that relies on capitalism to sustain the patriarchy and on the patriarchy to sustain capitalism. The goblin men reify their power by trading with insolvent women, demanding that women be traded as capital and commodity; the poem depicts a system that incorporates women into the public sphere, only to exploit them and, ultimately, expel again.As I explore in my paper, the goblin men’s euphonic advertisement constitutes a poetical seduction which they use to entice maids into entering their predatory marketplace. I engage in a formalist analysis of the goblins’ language, exploring how rhythm, rhyme, caesura, and enjambement tease, satisfy, and overwhelm maids as well as readers. This seduction is the goblins’ primary method for drawing women out of their private spaces and into a public one.Upon establishing that the goblins’ market is a sexually predatory capitalist patriarchy, I discuss Lizzie’s revolutionary resistance of the market’s socio-political status quo. Lizzie render’s the capitalist patriarchy ineffectual by engaging in a kind of sisterly labour that is selfless, passively resistant, and nonhierarchic. As my paper articulates, Lizzie engages with the goblins as equals, stripping them of the inequitable social and economic relations required to dominate women.BiographyJesse Gauthier is a PhD student at Queen’s University’s Department of English Language and Literature. His primary research interests are literary modernisms, poetics, queer theory, Marxist theory, and the history of antifascist political thought. His proposed doctoral project articulates a queer antifascist philosophy in queer Spanish Civil War poetry.Twitter: @Jesse_jwg‘“Into myself”: Homoeroticism and internality in Algernon Blackwood’s The Centaur’Billie GavurinThis paper will examine the relationship between homoeroticism and internality in Algernon Blackwood’s critically underexamined 1911 novel The Centaur. The novel centres upon a lonely and isolated young man, O’Malley. During a journey to Russia by steamer, he becomes fascinated by a mysterious fellow-traveller, who is ultimately revealed to be the titular centaur trapped in human form.I will begin by offering a reading of the novel as including a homoerotic subtext, and go on to explore how this latent homoeroticism is repeatedly linked with ideas of ‘inwardness’ throughout the narrative, with O’Malley withdrawing into himself in response to an outside world that he experiences as exclusionary and alienating. I will focus on the contemporary (and deeply problematic) pseudo-scientific theory of ‘inversion’ to suggest that, at the fin de siècle, same-sex attraction was often figured as a turning-inward of the sexual drive, and that this trope is subconsciously mirrored in Blackwood’s novel.Ultimately, however, I will argue that The Centaur is as much a narrative of hope as of exclusion. Even as he depicts a world currently inhospitable to those who do not subscribe to its rigid social and sexual mores, Blackwood, drawing upon the optimistic writings of Edward Carpenter, offers the possibility of a future in which ‘outcasts’ such as O’Malley will function as the guides and teachers of the world.BiographyBillie Gavurin is a final year PhD researcher at the University of Bristol. Her thesis focuses on the relationship between mythic animal-human hybrids and contemporary evolutionary thought in fin-de-siècle literature.Twitter: @BGavurin‘An Anthropological Figure: Classification, Categorization, and the Nineteenth-Century Prostitute’Hollie Geary-JonesThe paper will examine how the prostitute was framed as an anthropological figure during the nineteenth century. To do so, it will explore how leading male, medical voices created and perpetuated a series of ‘prostitute’ stereotypes. To analyse the construction of this newfound ‘cultural’ creature, the paper will review the influential work of two physicians: Alexandre Parent-Duch?telet’s De la Prostitution dans la ville de Paris (1836) and William Acton’s Prostitution, Considered in Its Moral, Social, and Sanitary Aspects (1857). Tracking the progression of this new taxonomy, the paper will analyse the bodily and behavioural typecasts thrust upon the prostitute. Moving forward, it will demonstrate how stereotypes became embedded in cultural ideology. The paper will reveal why the dominant social body eagerly adopted and employed the typecasts. Providing examples from literature and artwork, it will illustrate how the prostitute was unable to escape her ‘stereotypical’ identity. Furthermore, it will analyse the impact of the prostitute’s status as an anthropological figure. To do so, it will examine how prostitutes were verbally categorized throughout the century. Having collected labels and phrases from contextual resources such as newspaper articles, memoirs, novels, and slang dictionaries, it will review the vast variety of ‘prostitute’ labels. With categories covering all social hierarchies, it will explore how classification disclosed dress, occupation, class, and clientele. The paper will reveal how language varied from suggestive to straightforward. Finally, the paper will expose how this classification process justified the prostitute’s social exclusion.BiographyHollie Geary-Jones is a PhD candidate and Visiting Lecturer at the University of Chester. Her research is titled: ‘Dressing the Self: Infectious Performance and the Nineteenth-Century Prostitute’. Her thesis examines the extent in which French and English prostitutes were able to mislead society through clothing, body, and behaviour.Twitter: @HollieGJ1‘Written in and out of fashion: storytelling, taxonomy, and amateur botany in the nineteenth century’Alina Ghimpu-HagueIn addition to its renowned Herbarium, living specimens, archives, and book collection, the Royal Botanic Garden, Kew is also home to a small number of nineteenth century exsiccata albums created by amateur plant-collectors. These albums vary considerably in both format and focus: they range from small notebooks containing minimally-annotated specimens collected on European trips to professionally-bound albums focused on carefully labelled native British flora. While a strong argument can be made that these albums fulfil different functions, a closer look at their authors’ aesthetic choices, technical skill, and approach to recording relevant data reveals a common core of practices and abilities that successfully mirror those embodied by their official scientific counterparts. Furthermore, their accession to the RBG Kew Library and their subsequent retention suggests they had and still have a degree of scientific or cultural significance in the field of botany.This paper aims to contribute to the discussion regarding the rise and fall of participatory science in the nineteenth century by undertaking a comparative analysis of four types of work: personal albums such as those in the RBG Kew collection, commercially available specimen albums, privately printed monographs, and publications by official scientific bodies. It will pay particular attention to collecting and displaying practices, as well as to the presence or absence of framing narratives to further substantiate the claim that, in the Victorian period, the growing discrepancy in status between amateur and professional botany has been amplified to a considerable extent through rhetorical, rather than technical, means.BiographyAlina Ghimpu-Hague is a postgraduate researcher based in the School of Humanities at Royal Holloway, University of London.?Twitter: @victorian_tales‘Whaling’s Exclusion from Chicago and the White City’Daniel GiffordOn July 27, 1892 an incongruous visitor joined the local maritime traffic crisscrossing Lake Michigan. A fully-rigged whaling bark from New Bedford had just arrived in Chicago. The bark Progress should have been New Bedford’s paean to American whaling—an authentic whaler transformed into a whaling museum for Chicago’s 1893 World Columbian Exposition. Few in New Bedford questioned the assumption that the whaling industry would be gloriously displayed at the most important world’s fair in the nation’s history.But the Progress and the whaling industry it represented were excluded from the Windy City’s narratives of modernity. A small whaling industry still existed in New Bedford; however, in Chicago these whalers were confined to a series of tropes and archetypes that drew from dime novels and popular fiction. Inspired by theatrical stagecraft and popular culture, the local owners of the Progress ultimately created a maritime fantasia aboard the Progress that had very little to do with whaling. In doing so they kept whaling separate from the workings of the modern world. Even the whaleship’s New Bedford crew were replaced with freshwater sailors from Chicago’s schooners, an ultimate act of exclusion that left the crew stunned.This paper will explore the tensions between these two visions of whaling in a late nineteenth century museum—one that attempted to include whaling as part of a larger and still-relevant piece of Gilded Age American enterprise and ingenuity; and one that forcefully excluded it to a distant past. It was a conflict that spilled beyond the Columbian Exposition into the founding of Chicago’s Field Museum, and onwards to museums throughout New England. The case-study of the Progress reveals important points of discussion about Victorian popular culture and the discursive practices of display, exhibitry, and exhibitions in the late nineteenth century.BiographyDaniel Gifford teaches at several universities in Louisville, Kentucky and focuses on American popular and visual culture, as well as museums in American culture. He received his PhD from George Mason University in 2011. His career spans both academia and public history, including several years with the Smithsonian Institution.?‘Scandal and calumny: Kate Marsden and the nineteenth-century popular press’Betty HagglundIn 1891, Kate Marsden returned to England from her one-woman journey across Siberia to celebration and acclaim. With endorsements from Queen Victoria, the Empress of Russia and many others, her achievements in drawing attention to the plight of Russian lepers and raising money for a leper hospital in Yakutsk delighted the nation; so too did the account of her adventurous and dangerous trip. She was lauded as a heroine and praised almost as a saint. She was invited to Balmoral Castle, made a Fellow of the Geographic Society (one of the first female fellows), gave lectures across the country and was invited to present at the Chicago Worlds Fair.All this ended in 1893 when the journalist Isabel Hapgood published a damning article about Marsden, accusing her of financial fraud, raising money under false pretences, falsifying her book and being involved in immoral activities with women.Hapgood continued her attacks with a letter-writing campaign to all who had previously supported Marsden, and continued her attacks with a lengthy ‘Exposure’ article in the New Zealand Evening Post in 1894.The result was ostracism and disgrace for Marsden. The popular press that had extolled her now condemned her, including W.T. Stead who had been an enthusiastic supporter in the beginning. She was no longer welcome in Russia. She was dropped from various committees and the Bexhill Museum, which she had helped to establish with donations of her Siberian artefacts, cut off all connection with her.Using Kate Marsden as a case study, this paper explores the role of the popular press of the late nineteenth century in both creating and destroying reputations and the fickle nature of celebrity.BiographyBetty Hagglund is Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Research in Quaker Studies, University of Birmingham, and librarian of Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre. She has published widely on women’s writing, travel writing and the history of the book and has a particular interest in the 19th-century periodical press.Twitter: @BettyHagglund‘“This horrible Stave They howl”: John Callcott’s Settings of Supernatural Songs fromThe Monk’Roger HansfordThe circulation of supernatural themes between vocal music and the gothic novel around 1800 is a type of intersectionality between art forms that highlights questions of inclusion and exclusion in the long-Victorian period. Music and literature were both consumed in the domestic setting, by individuals and socialising groups, and the figures of ghosts, fairies and witches were included across both. These mythical figures of otherness, often associated with the subversive nature of the gothic, show how some forms of entertainment – hitherto understudied – helped to negotiate boundaries of acceptability and unacceptability at a time when growing rationalism informed moral values and social mores. Against this background, I investigate John Callcott’s musical settings of two songs from Matthew Lewis’s controversial gothic romance, The Monk (1796), both of which position supernatural characters as rival suitors and murderers of married women. Callcott’s settings for three voices animate Lewis’s figures of Water King and Skeleton-Knight; they balance the need for drama and a sense of narrative against the appeal of unifying features like recurring refrains and common melodic motifs. My literary and musical analysis of the way the Water King and the Skeleton-Knight are portrayed demonstrates the tight link between fictions and songs of exclusion, more obvious when investigating these specific figures than with the ghosts, fairies and witches in general circulation. Paradoxically, my analysis presents the case for a positive reception of The Monk through vocal music, which promoted demonic figures but in live performance made them more palatable and accessible to a wider drawing-room audience. As harmonic and rhythmic expectations are purposely defied in the songs, performers and listeners may consider the implications for gothic characters’ disruption to the natural order, as they endangered national laws and identities, the institution of marriage, religious observance and social respectability for men and women.BiographyDr Roger Hansford is author of the monograph, Figures of the Imagination: Fiction and Song in Britain, 1790–1850 (Taylor & Francis, 2017). His research was funded by the A.H.R.C. and the British Association for Romantic Studies. He is an Editor for University of Southampton’s journal, Romance, Revolution and Reform.Twitter: @r_hansford‘Shame and Social In/Exclusion in Wilkie Collins’s No Name’Anja HartlIn Wilkie Collins’s No Name, the law and its manifestations in wills, secret trusts, letters, and other official documents excludes Magdalen and Norah Vanstone from a legitimate existence, property ownership, and the right to bear their name. The revelation following their parents’ death that they were born out of wedlock turns their life into a shameful one in the eyes of the Victorian public – a sudden reversal of fortune that in itself is enough to expose the fluid boundaries of notions of (il)legitimacy, decency, and status. Signalling an awareness of transgression, the experience of shame represents the affective core of Collins’s novel. Located on the threshold of the (un)acceptable, shame is an affect of both exclusion and inclusion that serves vital functions in the individual’s relation to the collective. In No Name, however, Collins probes the potential of shame as an empowering affect, as Magdalen shamelessly appropriates and instrumentalises society’s shame scripts to claim her rights by deliberately excluding herself from the community and refusing to conform.In this paper, I propose to explore how the protagonist navigates the fault-lines between social exclusion and inclusion by analysing the performative workings of shame both in the text itself and in its affective interaction with the reader. For this purpose, I will pay particular attention to the materialisation of the shame affect in the novel’s narrative structure and in its generic texture, as No Name’s transgression of sensational, theatrical, and realist conventions can be assigned specific affective affordances. Ultimately, through its complex engagement with shame(lessness), the novel stages not only the protagonist’s defiance of social norms, but also negotiates its own in/exclusion from the Victorian canon and its literary conventions on an affective level.BiographyAnja Hartl is an assistant professor of English at the University of Konstanz. Her research interests include 19th-century fiction, contemporary British theatre, Shakespeare and adaptation studies. Her monograph Brecht and Post-1990s British Drama was published by Bloomsbury in 2021; she also co-edits Bloomsbury’s Methuen Drama Agitations series. Her post-doc project addresses shame in the Victorian novel.‘Subculture, Counterculture, or Culture?: Victorian Penny Press Plagiarisms and Piracies, Histories of Transmedia and Fandom, and Class’Erica HaugtvedtPenny press plagiarisms and cheap theatre piracies were undertaken with an explicit profit motive instead of the sharing culture that now dominates fan works. At the same time, penny press narratives asked audiences to accept “further adventures” of characters who are represented by another artist’s hand. In this way, the British popular entertainment market is evidence for fundamental aspects of receptive practices that undergird nearly all transfictional fan practices, while also exhibiting key similarities to transmedia franchises. In this paper, I will discuss the methodological challenges of studying historical reception of literary and popular culture events that may arguably be characterized as “fannish.” When we treat the penny press “hacks” and their audiences as predecessors to fandom, what are the constitutive elements of the “fan” that we draw backward? One challenge to the Victorian period as predecessor to fan practices today is whether Victorian working-class audiences can be characterized as part of a subculture, counterculture, or part of the mainstream. Juliet John recently observed that canonized literary fandoms of today urge us to rethink the adequacy of notions like subculture and counterculture, which depend upon a monolith concept of culture and do not capture the cultural dynamics at work when twenty-first-century Dickens “enthusiasts” dress up as Victorians and participate in a Pickwick Bicycle Club (2018, 772). John acknowledges that there are still class implications to “the fact that so few lovers of Dickens seem keen to define themselves as ‘fans’” (2018, 773). I want to suggest that there may be a parallel kind of blindness working when we look back into history, before fans called themselves fans.BiographyErica Haugtvedt is an Assistant Professor of English and Humanities at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology. Haugtvedt specializes in nineteenth-century British literature, media and advertising history, and popular culture. She is currently working on her book, Transfictional Characters and Storyworlds in the British Long Nineteenth Century.Twitter: @EHaugtvedt‘“Like them, yet not with them”: Mary Ward’s legacy of exclusionary language in Anne Bront? discourse’Adelle HayAnne Bront? was described in Charlotte’s ‘Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell’ (1850) as ‘long-suffering,’ ‘self-denying,’ and ‘milder and more subdued’ than their sister Emily. The idea of Anne as meek, mild, and the least talented Bront? has persisted into the present, even after the second wave of feminism inspired renewed interest in her work in the 1970s. The negative effect of Charlotte’s ‘Biographical Notice’ is well known within Bront? Studies, but the influence of later critics of Anne’s work is not. This paper will argue that one of those critics, Mrs Humphrey (Mary) Ward, created a legacy of exclusionary language that continues to influence discourse about Anne’s place in the Victorian canon and the Bront? mythology.Ward was approached by Charlotte’s publisher Smith, Elder & Co. to write introductions for each of the Bront?s’ novels. These Bront? Prefaces first appeared in the Haworth Edition of The Life and Works of Charlotte Bront? & Her Sisters (1901). The Haworth Edition was popular, and Ward’s introductions were reprinted in new editions through the 1920s. In The Bront?s: The Critical Heritage (1986), Miriam Allott wrote that Ward was ‘still their most discerning critic.’ Ward’s introduction to Wuthering Heights in particular has been recognised as influential. In contrast, Ward’s introduction to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall makes frequent use of infantilising and exclusionary language, and compares Anne to her sisters: ‘She is the measure of their genius—like them, yet not with them.’ Ward chose not to write an introduction for Anne’s first novel Agnes Grey, and it was included without one.Ward acknowledges Anne’s ‘considerable narrative ability’, but never allows Anne to reach the greatness of Charlotte and Emily. This is a trend that can be seen in the language of later criticism; acknowledgement of her skill as a story-teller, with an apologetic caveat that ‘she may not be quite the match of her sisters’ (Lucy Hughes-Hallett, 2012). By beginning to evaluate the legacy of early twentieth-century critics like Mary Ward, we can develop a better understanding of current attitudes towards Anne Bront? and other neglected Victorian women writers.BiographyAdelle Hay is a PhD candidate at Loughborough University. She is writing her thesis on the editing history of Anne Bront?’s works and its effects on her literary reputation. Her research interests include the Bront?s, genetic criticism, AI and digital archives. She is the author of Anne Bront? Reimagined: A View from the Twenty-first Century (Saraband, 2020).Twitter @AdelleLHay‘The Woman I Am Trying To Imagine: William Sharp, Fiona Macleod, and Transphobic Critical Space’Molly HeatonThe Victorian writer William Sharp is a peculiar figure. Sharp cultivated a mildly successful career in the 1880s and 90s as a writer under his birth name, but halfway through his career began to write under the name Fiona Macleod. Macleod achieved the critical and artistic success Sharp had longed for throughout his career. What little critical attention has been paid to Sharp/Macleod has focused on this identity shift.Sharp’s “double identity” has been explained as the result of an internal struggle with childhood trauma that results in a desire to access a female victimhood. It has been alternately suggested that the Macleod identity provides Sharp with a female narrative gaze through which he can explore his same-sex desire. Virginia Blain is the first, in 2004, to suggest any kind of gender/queer or trans element to the Sharp/Macleod relationship, though Blain does not take such an element seriously.This paper explores the development of Fiona Macleod and discusses critical responses to Sharp that have been largely mired in structural and institutional transphobia. I explore the central paradox of critical work on Sharp, wherein Sharp/Macleod has never been seriously considered within transgender paradigms but is still very much subject to transphobic rhetoric.It must be said that this paper does not accuse any one critic of transphobia. This paper is instead about the ways in which we have been taught to "read" individuals with a non-normative relationship to femininity or masculinity. This has largely been done through presumptions of homosexuality. Sharp’s relationship to femininity is less easy to mark as a sign of homosexuality, which leaves Sharp's relation to womanhood open and undefined. This paper explores this undefinition, and the ways in which transphobic rhetoric is a response to undefinable gender-nonconformity.BiographyMolly Heaton is a third year PhD student at Bangor University. Their research combines social network theory and critical biography to analyse how literary networks were built, and how those networks supported literary production. Their previous research involved an exploration of the country house as ecogothic space in 20th century women’s fiction.Twitter: @maliciaheaton‘Stark Mad and Stark Naked: The Debilitating “Fall” of Catherine Crowe’Ruth HeholtOn 26 February 1854 the extremely popular author and collector of ‘real’ ghost stores Catherine Crowe, by then in late middle age, was found wandering the streets of Edinburgh naked. Carrying a card-case in one hand and a handkerchief in the other, she was in a state of psychosis and believed herself to be invisible and haunted by spirits. This paper argues that Crowe’s case exemplifies many issues associated with mental health issues both at the time and also more recently. In the first place Crowe’s gender and age seemed to make it easier to ridicule and mock her. Her most famous detractor was Dickens, who, ignoring the fact they used to be friends, wrote to his friend: ‘Mrs. [Crowe] has gone stark mad — and stark naked — on the spirit-rapping imposition. […]. She is now in a mad-house, and, I fear, hopelessly insane’ (7th March 1854). Crowe herself was unconventional and her interest in spirits and Spiritualism had led to detractors mocking her. Although Crowe recovered, her reputation did not and although she continued writing she dropped out of sight. This paper argues that this dismissal of an ‘hysterical’ Victorian lady has extended beyond her own time and writing and that an exclusion of Crowe from the canon of popular Victorian writing (until very recently) is also a legacy of her mental health problems. Thus for example Crowe’s entry in Elaine Showalter’s “Biographical Appendix” in A Literature of Their Own reads: ‘Interested in education reform, women’s rights and phrenology. Went mad in 1859’ (1978, p. 329), while later Jarlath Killeen wrote: ‘Crowe had a nervous breakdown and, in one of the last references to her while she still lived, Charles Dickens reports that she was spotted running through London naked, apparently confirming the link between the occult, femininity and madness (2009, p. 139)’. Arguing that Crowe’s exclusion from both the canon and from serious literary enquiry stems from her breakdown, this paper asks if things have really changed.BiographyDr Ruth Heholt is senior lecturer in English at Falmouth University in Cornwall. Her most recent book is a full-length work: Catherine Crowe: Gender, Genre, and Radical Politics, (Routledge, 2020).‘From Seeds to Subjects: The London Missionary Society, Religious Education for Africans, and the Civilizing Process in Southern Rhodesia, 1898-1923’Marcus HibbelnWithin the discipline of settler colonial studies, Victorian English missionaries occupied an ambiguous position that demands speculation and invites curiosity. Writing on Southern Rhodesia (1898-1979), Carol Summers argued that Rhodesian settler institutions defined ‘civilizing’ as a moral imperative, inseparable from Christianizing, to simultaneously marginalize, change, and profit from conquered Africans. As such, Protestant missionaries are often understood as cultural imperialists who defined their presence through the same civilizing rhetoric. However, missionary entanglement in this narrative is complicated by their self-proclaimed goal of establishing voluntarist communities of indigenous converts. This evangelist project defined all missionary activity as they sought African material and spiritual assimilation into Christendom, primarily through the institutions of mission schools. There, prospective converts engaged a theology of progress and traversed a binary from ‘uncivilized’ to ‘civilized’ status in the eyes of their teachers. Questioning the inclusive extent of the civilizing process defined by missionaries in their African educational projects and how it relates to settler colonial realities, I consider the work of the London Missionary Society (LMS) between 1898 and 1923, a period largely neglected by historians of Zimbabwe. As the oldest Protestant group in Rhodesia, the LMS left extensive records which I use to trace the history of three distinctive schools established at Hope Fountain, one of the oldest mission stations in the country. Therein, I argue that LMS educational projects and their civilizing rationale were defined by a missionary ability to impart material benefits and succeeded only by investing evangelical authority and spiritual autonomy in African converts. This inclusive necessity distinguishes the civilizing language of missionary education from early, informal settler uses of civilizing rhetoric to subdue conquered Africans. However, missionary educational success directly influenced the consolidation of the formal Rhodesian state by motivating its support and pursuit of ‘civilizing’ education designed to structurally segregate Africans.BiographyMarcus Hibbeln is currently pursuing an MA in Cultural Studies of the Near and Middle East at SOAS, University of London and holds a BA in religious history from Reed College. His present research evaluates the philosophies of Islamic time and multiple modernities in the works of Muhammad Iqbal and Taha Abdurrahman.?‘Victorian Art as Politics: Lady Audley’s Pre-Raphaelite Portrait as an Expansion of Rancière’s The Distribution of the Sensible’Emma HorstMy paper contributes to the conference theme primarily through my discussion of Jacques Rancière’s political-aesthetic theory: the distribution of the sensible. Rancière’s “distribution of the sensible” addresses how aesthetics, or what is “sensible,” delimits how narrowly or widely the dignity of political recognition is “distributed” or shared across a population, so it is centrally concerned with how aesthetics shapes inclusion and exclusion. The “distribution of the sensible,” Rancière writes, establishes what is “shared,” “common,” and thus included, thereby underwriting an “exclusive” politics (Rancière 7). Thus, central to Rancière’s theory is the discussion of inclusion and exclusion not just in art as well as politics, but in politics as aesthetics, as art. In my paper, I utilize Rancière’s political-aesthetic theory to analyze the function of the fictional Pre-Raphaelite portrait that is featured in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. I will demonstrate the political and aesthetic significance of Braddon’s allusions to this exclusive society of young male artists, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, by arguing that Braddon’s Pre-Raphaelite portrait of the criminal heroine, Lady Audley, ultimately expands Victorian aesthetic and political conceptions of the identities, groups, and individuals that are represented and included in art and thus politics. It does so, I argue, by portraying not the ideal Victorian woman but instead a mad, bigamous villain, someone who was typically socially, politically, and aesthetically excluded from Victorian society but whose rendering in the Pre-Raphaelite mode makes her newly “sensible” and thus politically included. In featuring such a dangerous and disturbing woman in a Pre-Raphaelite manner, Braddon’s work, I argue, expands the distribution of the sensible among the nineteenth-century audience for popular fiction.Works CitedRancière, Jacques. “The Distribution of the Sensible.” The Politics of Aesthetics, edited and translated by Gabriel Rockhill. Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.BiographyEmma Horst is a Ph.D. student at Loyola University Chicago, specializing in nineteenth-century British literature. She’s currently interested in feminist and gender studies, disability studies, Victorian art, aestheticism, and sensation fiction. Emma has a background teaching high school English, and an M.A. from Loyola University Chicago.‘A Man’s World: Charlotte Riddell’s Women of Business’Helena IfillAlthough now best known as a writer of ghost stories, Charlotte Riddell was primarily recognised by her Victorian readers as a novelist of the City, whose stories depicted bankers, clerks, small businessmen and the financial troubles they experienced in the competitive, individualist world of Victorian London. While many of her novels focus on male characters, she was also concerned with the experiences of women who found themselves, intentionally or otherwise, involved in business pursuits and had to learn to operate in a “man’s world”. This paper will look at the examples of Mortomley’s Estate (1874) in which a woman must try to save her husband’s business after he is struck into incapacity by the shock of bankruptcy, and A Struggle for Fame (1883) in which a female author learns to negotiate the publishing industry. I will explore Riddell’s depiction of the barriers her female characters face, and the adjustments they have to make in order to be included in the male-dominated worlds they find themselves in. While this is sometimes depicted as sacrifice of femininity or security, it is also an opportunity for self-assertion and resistance against the expectations placed on middle-class Victorian women. Alongside this analysis, I will look at the way Riddell – a woman writer who specialised in depicting male social spheres, and who deliberately presented herself as first the gender-ambiguous F. H. Trafford, and then the decidedly respectable Mrs Henry – negotiated her professional public identity in order to be accepted by readers and reviewers who at times classed her as an ‘indefatigable chronicler of city life’ (Saturday Review, 1866), but at other times declared that ‘it is scarcely possible that any woman can know much of the way in which business is carried on in the City.’ (Saturday Review, 1874)BiographyHelena Ifill is a lecturer at the University of Aberdeen. She specialises in sensation fiction, the Gothic and Victorian science and medicine. She has published on authors such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins (Creating Character, MUP, 2018), Florence Marryat and Charlotte Riddell. She is the Secretary of the VPFA and co-editor for the Key Popular Women Writers series.‘The Fin De Siècle Monster That Never Dies: Dracula In Neo-Victorian Adaptation’Theadora JeanThis paper evaluates the adaptations of the novel Dracula in mainstream Anglo-American neo-Victorian film and televisual mediums in the twenty-first century. This paper will take an interdisciplinary and anti-racist approach, considering particularly the depiction of people of colour on screen. This paper considers Dracula as a text which straddles the divide between high-culture / popular culture, having emerged from both a theatrical tradition of villainy and drawing on a literary heritage of penny bloods such as Varney The Vampire. The focus however will be on racial inclusion/exclusion, emerging from an imperial practice of eugenic thought. I will also be problematizing the definitions of ‘Neo-Victorian’ and reflect upon the nostalgic legacies of conservative and discriminatory practices from the period which seem to be echoed uncritically into our own. I will be applying concepts and values from Critical Race Theory to explore the normative geographies of racialized construction via the story of Dracula. Rather than subverting the anxieties of the fin de siècle period, these Victoriana adaptations instead routinely reflect the racialised hierarchies and prejudices of the current time. I suggest the literary fin-de-siècle monsters of Bram Stoker’s ur-text have, in the visual mode, conformed to ideologies of racialised discrimination and biased preoccupations. With reference to Baudrillard’s concept of the ‘copy’, this paper seeks to challenge the white hegemonic lack of investigation into the racial tropes presented. In the condemnation of such frameworks, the paper will consider the ramifications of these strategies of racialised monstrosity. While these monsters are made corporeal on screen, this paper considers how the pedagogical response may reimagine the critical interpretations of the text. In the conclusion of this paper, I will be reflecting upon the difficulties and potential opportunities this radical anti-racist work by attending to themes of inclusion / exclusion can offer practice/s within the academy.BiographyTheadora Jean achieved a first-class BA in English Literature at the University of Liverpool and an MA in Critical & Creative Writing at the University of Sussex. Her current project at Royal Holloway, University of London is a critical-creative thesis on Bram Stoker’s Dracula in relation to the ‘New Woman’.‘“Adding Woman”: Jessie Boucherett’s Hints on Self-Help; A Book for Young Women’Maria JukoWhile his neglect of women in the guidebook has been noted by scholars (cf. Tyrrell 2002), the “constitutional” or “cultural blindness” (Sinnema 2008) of the Victorian Samuel Smiles towards women was challenged by his contemporary Jessie Boucherett who remains largely unnoticed. In her Hints on Self-Help: A Book for Young Women (1863) she introduced a female version of self-help. Whereas her work focussed on woman’s access to the capitalist market, Smiles’s emphasised individual moral reform. Yet, following Boucherett’s argument, it is possible “to add mentally the word ‘woman’ wherever ‘man’ appears” (57) in Smiles’s concept.Jessie Boucherett’s work has of yet not been analysed extensively. No book-length study exists on the writer and besides a look into her “‘feminist life’” by Jordan and Bridger (2006) and her membership in the Langham Place, an early feminist organisation, her writing is only looked at in the context of the 1851 Census and the “surplus woman” issue (Worsnop 1990; Zaborszky 1985).Despite academic oblivion, Boucherett’s Hints on Self-Help merits a closer examination for various reasons: as a response to Smiles’s Self-Help it demonstrates that although Smiles’s text might have been addressed to young men it was not only read but also dissected by female readers; Boucherett’s response moreover presents a precise and acute analysis of the contemporary British social and gender system encapsulated by the capitalist paradigm; and lastly her text highlights the urging need for female representation of success in the industrial society, evolving from Mary Wollstonecraft’s call for the improvement of woman’s position in society.My paper will thus argue for a critical recovery of Boucherett for the analysis of early feminist movements and particularly within the female self-help discourse.BiographyMaria Juko completed her B.A. and M.Ed. in English and Biology (Secondary Education) with a focus on Victorian Literature at the University of Hamburg. She currently holds a scholarship by the university where she is working towards her PhD on female self-reliance in 18th and 19th-century novels and Jessie Boucherett’s Hints on Self-Help.‘Into the Light: Emancipation and Scottish National Identity in Margaret Oliphant’s Kirsteen’Leonie JungenThis paper discusses Margaret Oliphant’s critical engagement with Jacobitism and the double-marginalisation of Scottish women in the Victorian era in her novel Kirsteen (1890). Oliphant paints a contrary picture to the prevailing portrayal of Highland culture as established by Sir Walter Scott and the perception of Scottish national identity. Through Oliphant’s metaphorical use of light and darkness, this paper outlines Kirsteen’s pilgrimage from the private sphere of her family home in the Highlands to her own independence as a successful businesswoman on London’s streets. By connecting Carole Pateman’s Sexual Contract (1997) with the marriage plot in Kirsteen, I demonstrate how Oliphant contextualises the “New Woman” as an English concept which collides with the patriarchal structure of Calvinist Highland communities: By maintaining the right over her own body, Kirsteen maintains the right over her self-determination and does not access the public sphere through a husband like her sisters, but on her own through a business partnership with a fellow Scotswoman.In search of her own identity and her entrance into the public sphere, framed by the novel’s opening question “Where is Kirsteen?” and the closing reference to “Miss Kirsteen”, Kirsteen is confronted with the clash of English and Scottish national identity as well. Oliphant’s subtle criticism of the English predominance and her portrayal of English mockery of Highland culture call Scotland’s identity within the British state into question. Drawing on theories by Anthony Smith (1991) on national identity and Maureen Martin’s (2009) approach of Highland masculinity, I suggest that Oliphant’s portrayal of Highland femininity contrasts the artificial image of Jacobitism as envisioned by Sir Walter Scott. Rather than keeping the dying flame of Scott’s staged Highland culture alive, Oliphant’s protagonist discovers her own light of independence and returns to Scotland not only as a changed woman, but also as an advocate for change.BiographyLeonie Jungen has recently completed her Master thesis on gender as an aspect of Scottish national identity in the works of Sir Walter Scott and Margaret Oliphant. She studied at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany and the University of Edinburgh. Her research focusses on gender studies, Scottish Literature, and surrealism.Twitter: @leoniejungenRoundtable Title: “Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom”: Teaching Interventions on Caribbean AuthorsPanelists: Kira Braham, Heidi Kaufman, Breanna Simpson, and Indu OhriModerator: Adrian WisnickiRoundtable DescriptionHow might Victorian Studies be destructured and reimagined to address its historical racial biases and establish a sustained intimacy with Critical Race, Critical Ethnic, Postcolonial, Feminist, Queer, and Disability Studies? In 2020, a group of scholars from across the United States began Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom (), a digital humanities project that provides open access to teaching materials that model antiracist pedagogy. The participants in this roundtable represent one small part of this larger effort. As the Caribbean Studies working group, we are collaborating to create model teaching pathways, sample assignments, and other materials to serve as resources for instructors who want to integrate more Caribbean authors and transimperial perspectives into their syllabi.This roundtable will discuss our current work creating teaching plans and materials for Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857) and similar work we will perform this spring around The History of Mary Prince (1831). As popular readings with major socio-political importance in the context of the transatlantic slave trade and the Crimean War, these two works have the potential to play a central role in students’ understanding of the nineteenth century. We will share the ongoing process of collectively creating lesson plans that address the complexities of nineteenth-century constructions of race and gender and encourage intersectional analysis. We will also discuss how we mobilize commitments to interdisciplinarity and strategic presentism to link these nineteenth-century texts to contemporary issues, from structural disparities in healthcare to debates about public memorialization. This roundtable hopes to address scholars, instructors, and groups looking to engage in similar efforts to “undiscipline” Victorian Studies. In a 30-minute video of our roundtable, we will discuss our method of creating these lesson plans and answer questions from audience members who have watched it during the live conference Q+A.BiographyHeidi Kaufman is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Oregon. She works on nineteenth-century British culture, with a special interest in Jewish studies, colonial and postcolonial literature (especially the Caribbean), and DH. She is completing a book and corresponding DH project on archives of the nineteenth-century East End of London.‘You Are What You Speak: Speech and Social Acceptance in George Gissing’s?New Grub Street’Hye Hyon Kim?This paper examines the concept of linguistic insecurity, the fear of misspeaking in 19th?century England that led to a prescriptive upkeep of conversation etiquette, a defined marker of class and social acceptance in Victorian society. Before understanding what someone was saying, hearing their tone and enunciation acted as a fast process of elimination and exclusion as one’s choice of verbal articulation was a gateway revealing their past and education. A missing syllable was enough to determine one’s lack of social conduct and were often ostracized as being vulgar. Correct speech did not only become a pride, but an open area of public criticism, and a marketable commodity for those who wished to enhance their speech, social circle, and belonging. Similarly, George Gissing’s?New Grub Street?(1891) portrays characters from different classes where their speech manners decide their fate in relationship dynamics, career success, and love and marriage. Mrs. Yule, being from a lower class is forbidden by her husband to interact with their young daughter in fear of infecting her verbal habits and sabotaging their child’s future. On the other hand, Jasper Milvain, a fearless young writer finds quick success with his charming words and deliberate calculated social circles of intellects. The goal of this paper is to operate an interdisciplinary research on literature and sociolinguistics on codification of politeness, class inclusion, and exclusion. It will address the variation of pronunciation, grammar, and speech manners in characterization of fictional individuals and their social outcome. Furthermore, this paper investigates association of language usage and representation of ideals and morals that appear in history via self-help manuals and correction proposals that resurface in literature through Gissing’s fictional characters.BiographyHye Hyon Kim is a doctorate student and instructor at Illinois State University from South Korea. Her focus is 18th?and 19th?century British literature in body politics, criminality, and sexual agency.‘“Embarrassed by being mistaken for a woman”? Magic Gender Two Ways: Selbit/Joad Heteb’Andrew KingIt may seem surprising at first that a project devoted to histories of the conception of “work” as mapped by the nineteenth-century periodical press (BLT19.co.uk) would be able to offer a paper for a panel on “queering the Victorians” but it is only surprising if one regards the queer as outside the mainstream or hegemonic. In the world of stage performance, and particularly Victorian and Edwardian music hall, the gender ambiguities of cross dressing were entirely standard. This paper takes as its representative case study a famous magician, Percy Thomas Tibbles, who was active from around 1898 to the 1930s, and who from the 1920s onwards became involved also in the gambling industry. The paper will suggest that the queerness that one of Tibbles’s stage personae embodied was a pro-imperialist, capitalist apology, far from a radical undermining of hegemonic beliefs and practices. The paper seeks thereby to complicate a too general celebration of queerness as inherently subversive.Tibbles had two stage names: the British gentleman “Selbit” (Tibbles backward with the central b removed and the name by which he is usually remembered now), and the “Wizard of the Sphynx,” “Joad Heteb,” a sexually ambiguous figure sometimes, as Selbit’s own periodical The Wizard tells us, “mistaken for a woman”. The two personae sometimes shared the same billing (see e.g. Torquay Times, and South Devon Advertiser, 13 March 1908, p. 4), and had complimentary but related functions in the entertainment industry. Selbit’s magic tricks often performed a mock violence on women – he is most famous for having invented the trick of sawing women in half; dressed as a European capitalist, he performed on stage the magic of capital (as Francesca Coppa has sagely pointed out) including various disappearing and reappearing coin tricks. Ultimately Tibbles as Selbit apologises for capital and misogyny by showing that all their problems are imaginary. Joad Heteb, by contrast, represents an older tradition of magic coming from an elsewhere: in a black wig and dark makeup, Tibbles as Joad Heteb dressed after “the quaint old-world appearance of his ancestors who wore skirts and their hair long.” (The Wizard, vol. 1 no. 5, January 1906, p. 79). His tricks involved domestic items associated with the feminine, but he was also famous for his “Egyptian bricks” which seemed to teleport across space. I will argue that, as the figure of Joad Heteb who flaunts sexual ambiguity, Tibbles becomes an apologist for extractionist imperialism and the consumption of colonial imports. Unlike Selbit, Joad Heteb disappears by 1910, the anxieties he addresses either dissipating or becoming too great to be dealt with in this manner.BiographyAndrew King is Professor of English at the University of Greenwich. He has published widely on nineteenth-century media history and popular fiction: examples include the Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century Periodicals and Newspapers and Researching the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press (both edited with Alexis Easley and John Morton), Ouida and Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture (edited with Jane Jordan), Victorian Print Media (with John Plunkett) and The London Journal: Periodicals Production and Gender. He runs the open-access Nineteenth-Century Business, Labour, Trade and Temperance Periodicals project (BLT19.co.uk), is co-editor of the open-access journal Victorian Popular Fictions and is President of the Victorian Popular Fiction Association.Twitter: @andrewking2904‘Women Constructing Texts in the Fiction of Richard Marsh’Roshnara KissoonThe problem of women in Victorian crime fiction has been written about extensively—female characters are so often silenced and sacrificed, reified into British racial and socio-sexual ideals, while simultaneously excluded and even vilified. Often women in this genre, like many of the female characters in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, are vanished entirely and their textual inscriptions must be read by the traces of their (enforced) absence. Many scholars, notably Karen Beckman, have linked these problematic representations to anxieties surrounding nineteenth century population crises and the increasingly visible “New Woman.”The fiction of Richard Marsh is remarkable, in that as much as these historical anxieties can be detected, Marsh imbues his female characters with energetic physical presences and narrative authority. This is most evident in Marsh’s fictional detective Judith Lee, who utilizes the skill of lip-reading—learned from her mother, who is deaf, and her father, a teacher of the deaf. Lee’s lip-reading, born of a place of perceived disability, allows her, quite literally, to construct texts in a quietly exceptional way. Nonetheless, Judith Lee’s largely first-person narratives remain exhilaratingly corporeal and Marsh’s body of work becomes exceptional in the genre for its more substantial and nuanced female characters.BiographyI am a librarian at Baruch College, City University of New York. I was previously an MA student in interdisciplinary studies at NYU and just graduated with an MLS in December 2020 from Queens College, City University of New York. In addition to library science, I study Victorian literature.‘The Unstable Gothic Museum’Jordan KistlerThe “Museum of the Future”, according to George Brown Goode of the Smithsonian (1891), would be “one of the principal agencies for the enlightenment of the people.” The masses would be educated not through text but through objects, as “our own proverb, ‘To see is to know,’…expresses a growing tendency in the human mind. In this busy, critical, and sceptical age, each man is seeking to know all things, and life is too short for many words.” In theory, the museum was rendered legible to even the least educated member of the public through the “technology of the series” (Fisher, 1991), the application of the structures of narrative to history, science, art and culture. Through the series, Britain’s museums attempted to reshape miscellaneous objects into a complete and coherent narrative of the whole of human knowledge, which would serve as “definite instruction to the public in general” (J.C. Robinson, director of the South Kensington Museum, 1863).Yet, Gothic texts of the late-nineteenth century reveal anxieties about the construction of knowledge in monolithic institutions like the British Museum and their role in public education. In both H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) and Guy Boothby’s Pharos the Egyptian (1899) our heroes turn to museums for answers, yet find none. The Time Traveller’s encounter with the Green Palace reveals the illegibility of these narratives to those excluded from their construction, while the Egyptian Museum in Pharos functions as more of a private gentleman’s club than a public educational institution. In both, museums are sites of instability which threaten not just the coherence of the knowledge they purport to display, but the very cohesion of the texts in which they appear.BiographyJordan Kistler is a lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Strathclyde. Her work focuses on the nineteenth-century British Museum, looking at the public perception of the institution’s role in education, politics, empire, and more. Her book, Arthur O’Shaughnessy: A Pre-Raphaelite Poet in the British Museum was published in 2016.Twitter: @drjordankistler‘“Attractions for better-class visitors”: taste and distinction in 19th-century seaside brochures’Joanne KnowlesResearch on the social and cultural history of the 19th-century seaside holiday has noted the shift from its earlier status as a middle-class experience to one much more characteristically working-class by the end of the century. However, notions of taste and class continued to remain important in positioning the holiday experience and its integral leisure and consumer elements as one where notions of taste and taste-making were conveyed by holidaymakers’ choices of goods and services like ‘superior ices’ and ‘high-class photographers’. This paper examines representations of the attractions on offer in commercially-focused pamphlets and guidebooks about particular seaside resorts, such as Breezy Blackpool (1899) and John Heywood’s Illustrated Guide to Ilfracombe (c.1903) to see what is included and what is excluded from the ‘tasteful’ seaside experience.BiographyJoanne Knowles is a Senior Lecturer in Media, Culture, Communication at Liverpool John Moores University. She has published on James, Dickens and Braddon. Current research projects address the garden in popular nineteenth-century fiction, representations of animals in 19th-century texts, and the changing cultural experience of the seaside in Victorian culture. Twitter: @JoanneKnowlesUK‘Remembering the Future – Queer Temporalities in Natasha Pulley’s Neo-Victorian Novels’Anne KorfmacherPasts and futures collide in Natasha Pulley’s neo-Victorian fantasy novels The Watchmaker of Filigree Street (2016) and The Lost Future of Pepperharrow (2020), which follow the lives of clairvoyant watchmaker Keita Mori, his partner translator Thaniel Steepleton and their ‘adopted’ neurodiverse daughter ‘Six’.Set in London and Japan of the mid- to late-1880s, Pulley’s novels are organised by queer temporalities which literally come to haunt the characters in the second novel. As a clairvoyant, Mori can see and influence possible futures, changing the course of history by carefully planning his interactions with those around him. “Remembering the future” as more or less likely potentialities, he impacts linear temporal order by manoeuvring both himself and those around him through history. When Japanese political leaders try to forcefully harness Mori’s ability to ‘see’ and affect possible futures for Japan’s war effort against invading Russia through electrical currents, however, the characters begin to see ghostly visions of figures from other, non-present times. The war effort thus disrupts regular time structure, causing inexplicable spectres to appear in Japan which create confusion and fear among the population, illustrating Freeman’s argument that “whereas queer time elongates and twists chronology, war simply forecloses it”. These spectres-of-futures-remembered come to haunt Mori who keeps seeing Thaniel’s ghost until the electric storms causing the disruption pass. Considering the interruptions to temporal order that these spectres and Mori’s clairvoyance embody, I will draw on Freeman’s notion of queer temporalities to explore how Pulley’s novels reimagine (or remember) the Victorian past to include the representation of queer kinship arrangements historically excluded or marginalised.BiographyAnne Korfmacher is a doctoral candidate in English Philology at the University of Cologne, Germany. She is currently working on a dissertation on fan commentary podcasts and her research interests include gender and queer studies, fan studies, podcast studies and Gothic and neo-Victorian fiction.‘Beyond the Great Divide: Rereading the City and the Country in Anthony Trollope’ Julia KuehnAnthony Trollope’s novels were immensely popular at the time of publication – but have, as a consequence, and because of the crude equation of the popular with the conservative – been dismissed by reviewers as not critical-analytical or ‘modern’ enough. Add to this the fact that Trollope, in his Autobiography, declared his writing as the product of labour and effort rather than genius – he rose early and wrote an allotted number of pages a day, before his day with the postal services – and Trollope does not have a good starting point for analyses that claim him to be ‘complex’, ‘interesting’ or, indeed, ‘paradigm-shifting’. This, however, is exactly what this paper proposes to show with regard to his portrayal of space and, specifically, the country-city ‘divide’. Most of Trollope’s novels move between London and the countryside where the gentry and aristocracy have their country estates or where minor characters associated with the wealthier class but from the lower socio-economic stratum encounter their own (romantic, economic, moral) trials and tribulations. Taking Raymond Williams’s landmark study The Country and the City (1973) as its theoretical starting point, the paper argues that Trollope’s novels, in fact, complicate the views of a backwards, traditional but morally wholesome countryside in contrast to the progressive, competitive and corrupt(ing) city. Williams sees Trollope as someone who does not engage with complication or end with the same ‘awkward, stubborn, unappeased resignation’ as his contemporary George Eliot (173). This is a conservative view that, in my mind, does not hold. Rather, I support the view that is also Jonathan Farina’s, who has suggested in ‘“As a Matter of Course”: Trollope’s ordinary Realism’ (2017), that, while Trollope’s novels ‘of course’ seem to support a particular and established order, a straight morality and ‘the way we live now’, they are always a little ‘off course’ within that perspective, leaving the reader with a reading and thinking experience that goes beyond the straightforwardly affirmative. This paper elaborates on these in-between places and ideologies.BiographyJulia Kuehn is Professor of English Literature at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests are Victorian literature and culture, travel writing and critical theory. Julia’s current projects are a comparative study of nineteenth-century German and British realist novels and a critical enquiry into how the travel genre informed the form of the nineteenth-century novel.‘Knighthoods and Empty Benches: The Late-Victorian Culture Industry’Robert LaurellaIn 1890, when novelist George Moore was arguing for the creation of an independent theatre free from the overdetermining economic concerns of the commercial London stage, he modelled his ideal theatre on the French Thé?tre Libre. He claimed that such a theatre in England would produce only plays “which a manager of a regular theatre will not produce, not because they are bad, but because he thinks there is no money in them.” The issue, for Moore, was the provenance of such plays. Inundated with farces, melodramas, and piracies of French works, presided over by despotic actor-managers, and navigating an increasingly commercialised business model, the English stage had, in Moore’s view, demonstrated an inability to attract native playwriting talent. Such talent did exist, however; it simply did not write the stage. “Were I the founder of the Thé?tre Libre,” wrote Moore, “I would apply to all the novelists: gold is found in the most unexpected places.”In the late-Victorian theatre, one of the conflicts between a nascent, market-driven popular culture and the intellectual sphere of a bourgeois intelligentsia reached its apex. As Ibsen’s works played to empty benches in London, Henry Irving was to become the first actor to receive a knighthood. In considering the dramatic writing of popular novelists, this paper, which is an excerpt from a longer article in progress, considers the early stages of Horkheimer and Adorno’s ‘culture industry’ half a century before they would articulate it in such terms, and argues that the adaptation of popular novels on the nineteenth-century stage is both an important and understudied locus of the intersection between cultural production and a market economy.BiographyRobert Laurella is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Oxford. His current research focuses on the adaptation of popular novels on the Victorian stage, and the ways in which that process reveals larger concerns with the politics, economics, and social dynamics of cultural production.Twitter: @RobertLaurella‘The Excluded Beetle of Richard Marsh: An Outsider Because of Race, Religion and Species?’Janette LeafRichard Marsh’s 1897 bestseller, The Beetle concerns a shapeshifting creature who is both Egyptian and insect, both of which attributes cause her to be excluded from the Imperial power source. This paper posits that the Beetle, for whom the novel is named – and whose image is emblazoned on the front cover of the first edition as well as most subsequent reprints – is therefore both the central character, yet also strangely peripheral. Her metamorphosing from one form to another, combined with her giant size when she manifests as a scarab prevents her being sited within a clearly delineated taxonomic rank. This means she is not only foreign to her Christian, London environment in human terms of race, religion and nationality, but even in zoological terms is outside the natural order of things. I shall lightly touch upon this latter aspect, but shall in the main be discussing Marsh’s reinforcement of the Beetle as an outsider by his denying her a narrative voice; limiting the instances of her direct speech; placing her in a plot in which she metamorphoses into a creature without facial expression; and making her so nauseating that characters instinctively shun her. This is effectively an authorial positioning of the one around whom the story pivots as an entity on the outside. I shall then be contrasting this with the presence of the othered insect woman at the metropolitan heart of Empire where she finds a way through exclusionary barriers, infiltrates a range of interior spaces actual and psychological, and comes to occupy them as an alien force. Finally I shall suggest that even if the Beetle gets inside and apparently is in charge, this is not to imply she is included.No prior knowledge of the text is required, and no faint-hearted delegate need have any fear!BiographyJanette is a PhD candidate at Birkbeck supervised by Roger Luckhurst. Her thesis is ‘Locating the Sympathetic Insect: Fin-de-siècle Cultural Entomology and Egyptology in The Beetle’. She is co-editor of Crawling Horror: Creeping Tales of the Insect Weird (British Library Publishing, 2021). She reviews animal related 19th-century texts for BSLS, and holds Masters from Cambridge and UH.Twitter: @janetteleaf1‘“I would prefer a sandwich to the biscuit”: Pregnancy and Childbirth in Ellen Wood’s Lord Oakburn’s Daughters’Mary Elizabeth Leighton & Lisa SurridgeJanice Allan remarks that Ellen Wood’s Lord Oakburn’s Daughters (1864) includes “an unusually frank representation of pregnancy.” Indeed. Although many Victorian writers excluded depictions of pregnancy and childbirth, Wood depicted gestation and childbirth with vivid detail, in both mimesis and what we term quasi-diegesis.We begin by discussing the novel’s “unusually frank” labour scene. Wood cast off the restraint of domestic fiction that occluded women’s experience of childbirth, vividly rendering the bodily sensations of labour that other writers excluded from narrative. In Ruth (1853), for example, Elizabeth Gaskell portrayed her protagonist’s extramarital relationship but tactfully presented her giving birth in an ellipsis between paragraphs. Wood has no such compunctions, depicting Mrs. Clare’s hunger (“I would prefer a sandwich to the biscuit”) as well as her pregnant figure (“I took you for a young unmarried lady,” says the landlady as she descends from a carriage) and her emotional turmoil during early labour (“I am in great pain.... Do you think I shall die?”). An 1863 review noted that the sensation novel as a genre exhibited an “impatience of old restraint,” and clearly Wood’s sensationalism included an unusual explicitness about the body in labour.Next, we examine the novel’s depiction of childbirth involving characters peripheral to the main plot. Mrs. Clare’s mysterious death (which turns out to be murder, not postpartum mortality) is juxtaposed against casual references to childbirth’s everyday nature: doctors and midwives discuss who is expecting or delivering, which babies are expected to live or die. Childbirth, Wood intimates, is quotidian and—contrary to the views of contemporary reviewers—should be included in narrative. Not until the end of the nineteenth century, with novels such as Somerset Maugham’s Liza of Lambeth (1897), would other novelists take up this challenge of narrativizing labour and delivery.BiographyDrs.?Leighton and?Surridge?(University of Victoria)?co-edited?The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Prose 1832-1901?and?Victorian Review?(2006-16),?co-wrote?The Plot Thickens: Illustrated Victorian Serial Fiction from Dickens to Du Maurier?(2019),?and co-published?numerous?book?chapters and articles.?Their new project is?Great Expectations: Pregnancy in Victorian Fiction.Twitter: @c19_pregnancy‘“Vanished off the Face of the Earth”: The return of forsaken women in the 1890s Ghost Stories of Lettice Galbraith’Emma LigginsLettice Galbraith’s ghost story collections are excluded from histories of the Victorian supernatural. Despite writing within a genre popular in the 1890s, little is known of her biography, her literary circle or her influences (Edmundson, 2020). As her stories are beginning to appear in new anthologies of the weird and fantastic, it is timely to consider her contribution to the history of Victorian women’s ghost stories and to contemporary debates about spiritualism, hypnotism and criminality.The crossovers between crime narratives and the Victorian ghost story have recently been investigated by critics of popular fiction (Clarke, 2020; Heholt, 2020). Like contemporaries such as Marie Belloc Lowndes, Galbraith capitalised on public fascination with the tropes of crime narratives – the foggy London streets, the sensational newspaper snippets, violence and suppressed scandal – to reinvigorate and ‘urbanise’ the ghost story genre. The ghosts are often ‘forsaken’ women whose lower social status excludes them from marrying controlling middle-class men. Male decadent behaviour is punished by the ghostly return of such women, who have been ‘unidentified’, lost, ‘wrapped in mystery’, their murders staged as suicides or disappearances. In the stories ‘In the Séance Room’ and ‘The Missing Model’ (1893) the wronged woman, abandoned, mistreated and objectified, returns as a terrifying spirit, who manifests in public urban places to shame professional men. The séance room and the art gallery admit the excluded woman who silently petitions for her lost story to be told: the drowned Kitty Greaves breaks ‘the rules of the séance’ to negate her false identity as ‘determined suicide’, the missing artist’s model Violet Lucas is buried in quicklime, not ‘vanished off the face of the earth’. Borrowing from the crime narrative with its mysteries, clues and fake identities, Galbraith refashions the Victorian ghost story to hold men accountable for their deception and violence, bringing vanished lower-class women back from the dead for revelation rather than consolation.BiographyDr Emma Liggins is Senior Lecturer in English Literature in the Department of English at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her recent publications include Odd Women? Spinsters, Lesbians and Widows in British Women’s Fiction, 1850-1939 (Manchester University Press, 2014) and The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories, 1850-1945: Gender, Space and Modernity (Palgrave, 2020). Her research interests include ghost stories, haunted heritage and Victorian cemeteries. She is currently working on the American ghost stories of Shirley Jackson and the graveyard as a Gothic space in the fiction of Susan Hill and Tracy Chevalier.‘Time May Crown Her: Depiction of the Lady Macbeth Figure in Victorian Discourse’Sally LukenIn a digital corpus analysis of 215 nineteenth-century publications between 1820 and 1901, I investigate depictions of Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth as a way to identify how Victorians may have conceived of their own period’s violent, duplicitous, and ambitious literary figures. Contemporary reception of mid-nineteenth-century depictions of women in novels who embody a frightening dedication to a premeditated plan such as Madame Defarge in A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Lady Audley/Helen Talboys in Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) has previously been of interest to literary critics. However, an approach that links these driven women with their Shakespearean counterpart in Lady Macbeth remains heretofore unexplored. I begin by demonstrating the comparable aspects among Lady Macbeth, Madame Defarge, and Lady Audley through an application of traditional close reading. After establishing the latter two characters as Lady Macbeth figures, I move to a discourse analysis of period monographs and periodicals collected from the Nineteenth Century Collections Online database. Concordance and collocation results from these publications suggest that Victorian discourse surrounding Lady Macbeth was oriented toward her marriage to Macbeth. Further, the sentiment in the discourse grows progressively more sympathetic toward the Lady Macbeth figure as the period progresses from 1820 to 1901. This trend, due to the strength of the textual comparison, can be extended to the characters that resemble Lady Macbeth. I conclude by suggesting that because Victorians had a tendency to humanize and even psychologize literary characters, female figures, like Lady Macbeth, Lady Audley, and Madame Defarge, did not plot for the plot of their story’s sake. Rather, they had real human reasons. Victorians reading fiction with more and more ambitious, duplicitous, and potentially violent women, correlates to growing sympathy toward the formerly excluded and demonized Lady Macbeth figure, evidencing a growing curiosity in fictional women’s personal experiences and motives.BiographySally Luken is a PhD student at UMass Amherst studying early modern literature and digital humanities. She is one of the authors of the forthcoming Harvard Data Science Review article, “Convergence in Viral Epidemic Research: Using Natural Language Processing to Define Network Bridges in the Bench-Bedside-Population Paradigm.”Twitter: @sally_luken‘“Unburdening my mind on paper”: Linguistic Practice in the Diaries of Anne Lister’Sarah E. MaierPanel: “Speaking of my oddity”: Inclusive Spaces in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Life WritingThis paper will examine the linguistic diary practices of Anne Lister (1791-1840), an early-nineteenth-century landowner, lesbian, and prolific diarist. Specifically, this paper aims to interrogate the ways in which Lister crafts an active and inclusive desiring space within her expansive diaries. Expanding upon Phillip LeJeune’s (2009) notion of “the private diary [as] a practice,” this paper will interrogate the extent to which the journal operates as both a companion to and a by-product of Lister’s sexual life by crafting private linguistic spaces that work in opposition to dominant heterosexual discourses (31).The paper will operate on two levels. The first will examine the use of Lister’s code. Written in her own private ‘crypt-hand,’ Lister’s diaries detail her lesbian relationships and expressions of lesbian desire. The diaries oscillate between encoded writing and English, creating a tension in-text between the speakable and unspeakable, the included and excluded, heterosexuality and queerness. The first section of this paper will examine Lister’s use of the code as both a practical device of concealment and an inclusive space in opposition to patriarchal language constructions.The second section of the paper will focus on Lister’s exploration and examination of her sexuality and sexual practice over the course of her diary keeping. Lister developed her own sexual idioms to express the acts she performed with other women. In some instances, she appropriates known words and changes their meanings. In other cases, Lister adapts entirely new phrases to describe her sexual life. This process of (re)developing language contributes to Lister’s understanding that, as Sarah Waters (2013) points out, “desiring other women wasn’t just a question of sexual acts; it made [Lister] a certain kind of person” (137). Lister’s engagement with language and diaristic practice as an avenue of self-understanding signals a crucial and revolutionary development in lesbian history.BiographySarah E. Maier is Professor of English & Comparative Literature at the University of New Brunswick where she is the Director of Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies. Her recent works include several pieces on the Bront?s, Anne Lister, neo-Victorian vampires as well as?Neo-Victorian Young Adult Narratives?(Palgrave), and four collections co-edited with Brenda Ayres:?Neo-Victorian Madness?((Palgrave),?Neo-Gothic Narratives?(Anthem),?Animals and their Children in Victorian Culture?(Routledge), and?Reinventing Marie Corelli for the Twenty-First Century?(Anthem).‘“The Diary of Anne Rodway”: Wilkie Collins and the Repression of a Young Woman’s Voice’Michela MarroniMy analysis will focus on Wilkie Collins’s short story “The Diary of Anne Rodway” (1856) to show how a young woman is forced to move from the centrality of her role as a female detective to the marginalized status of a married woman, thereby undergoing a process of silence and social death. In particular, the story narrates how the killing of a young seamstress (Mary Mallinson) transforms her best friend, Anne Rodway, into a shrewd detective whose investigation will lead to the solution of the mystery and the conviction of the guilty “monster”. From a narratological angle, it is through the diary that, day after day, emerges a portrait of a heroine whose actions are, as it were, against the grain: Anne is rational and practical in her detection, and strategical in her pursuit of the witnesses hidden in the London underworld. Indeed, as a heroine she is by no means in line with Victorian orthodox typology. Nevertheless, Anne’s role is gradually reduced to conventional normalcy when her fiancé, Robert, comes home from America after his professional failure. Once in London, Robert takes the lead of the detection until the mystery is solved. At the same time he is given the opportunity to accomplish himself thanks to Mary Mallinson’s brother who turns up as a rich man living in Assam (a state of India) after a long silence. Mallinson is touched by Anne’s love for her sister and, as a result, he will find a good job for Robert. In brief, from their geographical distance and cultural periphery, both Robert and Mallinson come to the diegetic centre in order to reaffirm masculinity, while the heroine’s life delineates a gendered transition from inclusion to exclusion, from an active role in society to a passive role at home as a good wife and, presumably, a tender mother.BiographyMichela Marroni is Associate Professor of English at the University of Tuscia (Viterbo, Italy). She has published numerous articles on Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, etc. She sits on the editorial board of Rivista di Studi Vittoriani, Merope and Traduttologia and is a member of the Centre for Victorian and Edwardian Studies (Chieti, Italy).‘A sideways look at the canon: the alternative world of temperance fiction’Annemarie McAllisterTemperance novels, serials, and short stories represent an important and under-explored aspect of popular Victorian fiction. They were not only a staple of the many high-circulation temperance magazines and newspapers but were among the highest-selling titles in publishers’ catalogues. However, were these stories as dull or formulaic as is now commonly assumed? Were they preaching to an uncritical audience who asked little in the way of sensation, ingenuity, or quality? And who wrote them? This paper will present a brief tour through this alternative world, a journey in which we will encounter some familiar names such as Clara Lucas Balfour or the Hocking siblings, but also learn of the extraordinary variety of authors and publications. I will argue that this field richly deserves study, and has much to offer modern readers in terms of themes, content and style. For the thousands of people writing from the desire for reform as well as to entertain, authorship was part of their life’s purpose, a life in which they also gave public lectures, edited periodicals, took part in public events and voluntary service, and in some cases also had to earn their living by completely unrelated work. I am currently writing a study exploring the complex interplay of conviction, writing, and gainful employment in seven such writers, and the paper will end with a case study of the extraordinary life and writing journey of the author and editor Mary Magdalen Forrester. Many of her serialised novels are magnificent examples of sensation fiction, including ‘He is Your Brother’ (1894-5), ‘The Woman and I’, and ‘By the R?ntgen Rays’ (1897-8), all serialized novels from the “Temperance Companion,” which do not deserve their current oblivion.BiographyDr Annemarie McAllister is Senior Research Fellow in History at the University of Central Lancashire, working on the cultural history of temperance movements, their material and visual cultures, and their social impact. She has published widely on this area and is currently working on ‘Conviction and Career: Writing for Social Change in Temperance Periodicals’.Twitter: @demon_drink‘Women of Genius and Women of Grub Street: Challenging the Division between Braddon and Grand’Helen McKenzieBraddon’s and Grand’s fictions were written, published, and read in intimate proximity through the 1880s and 90s, even into the twentieth century. However, they are repeatedly used to stand for distinct genres and time frames, by which other authors’ inclusion and exclusion are measured. At the fin de siècle, which saw the rise of the New Woman, there was, an opposition and interdependence between the Woman of Genius and the Woman of Grub Street, continuing the earlier nineteenth-century divisions between aesthetic and commercial writing, which were particularly pronounced in reviewers’ gendered treatment of women novelists. Mary Elizabeth Braddon is typically the Queen of Sensation Fiction and Sarah Grand as the writer who named New Women; accordingly Grand’s The Beth Book (1897) is seen as an exemplary New Woman novel and Braddon’s The Infidel (1900) an anti-feminist historical novel, Grand’s Beth the Woman of Genius and Braddon’s Antonia the Woman of Grub Street. I argue that none of these associations are as straightforward as these oppositions suggest.The paper will centre around a comparative case study of Grand’s Beth and Braddon’s Antonia, focusing on facets including marriage, a room of one’s own, and education. Published only three years apart, the novels tackle the confrontation between femininity and professionalism, particularly being an economically-independent woman, which was at the heart of New Woman fiction. Beth’s and Antonia’s presence as fictional authors help Grand and Braddon to confront these dichotomies. It is important to consider how and why these novels work to confront, and perhaps reconcile, the conflict between femininity and the independent working-woman. The Beth Book and The Infidel are indicative of a conscious choice to enter the conversations on marriage, professionalism, independence, constructions of femininity, and modernity filling New Woman novels.BiographyHelen McKenzie has recently passed her PhD from Cardiff University, entitled ‘Miniature Literary Marketplaces: Constructions of Authorship in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Fiction’. She is also an Associate Lecturer for the Open University.Twitter: @H_McKenzie_‘“I shall always by thy own servant wife”: Filth, Class, and Sexuality in Hannah Cullwick’s Diaries’Emma McTavishPanel: “Speaking of my oddity”: Inclusive Spaces in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Life WritingThis paper will examine Hannah Cullwick’s mid- to late-Victorian diaries as a space that reveals mirrored tensions between forced and voluntary authorship, and the constructed and enacted roles in her sadomasochistic relationship with her secret husband Arthur Munby. I argue that because Munby, a middle-class man, commissioned these diaries from Hannah, his lower-class servant/wife, her life writing acts as a metonymic extension of her body as the spectacle, where the physical labour she exerts with her hands extends to the forced labour of writing her diaries. However, the paradox of Hannah’s writing must be noted: she gives an unprecedented voice to her lower-class and reveals agency in communicating her pleasure or displeasure with Munby and her work.I argue that Hannah’s diaries begin as a voyeuristic venture for Munby, but become a space in which Hannah subverts her master by constructing her own sense of female sexuality through ‘dirty’ and ‘disgusting’ rituals of her own devising that both shocks and titillates her private reader/master/husband. I will look at written representations of Hannah’s “dirty” body to see how her gender and lower-class position invites both fascination and disgust through her imagined sexuality. Ultimately, this paper will investigate how the form and content of Hannah’s diaries reveal the symbolic and physical liminal spaces she inhabits; her gendered inclusion in the domestic sphere of marriage is in tension with her classed exclusion of a publicized, middle-class marriage.BiographyEmma McTavish is a PhD Candidate in English Literature at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. She holds a BA and an MA in English Literature and her work examines mid-Victorian ideas of physical and moral pollution and its intersections with cross-class desire and slumming. Her dissertation focuses on working women and noseless women as ‘dirty’ and ‘disgusting’ fetishized objects in Arthur Munby’s archival collection of diaries and photographic albums. Emma serves on the editorial board of the international literary journal, The Lamp.‘Heterotopic Spaces and Evolutionary Narrative: Examining the Rhetoric of Liminality in Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species’Arya MohanThe obstacles Charles Darwin faced while articulating his theory of evolution by means of natural selection include the prevalent definitions of ‘species’ which were rooted in the ‘likeness’ preserved in a progeny and hence significantly constrained a theory about the origin of species based on variations in the offspring. His strategy for overcoming this non-evolutionary preconditioning was not by proposing an evolutionary re-definition of species but by emphasizing the indefinability of species. To this end, he denied any essence of species and exposed the arbitrariness of the classifications of living beings into species and varieties. In doing away with definite categories, Darwin, I speculate, employed the rhetoric of liminality that is maintained throughout The Origin through the metaphorical use of transitional and paradoxical spaces. For example, with the phrase ‘my garden’ appearing four times in the book, and the copious mention of gardeners’ observations, the garden —a site of negotiation between the wild and the civilized— emerges as an important element of Darwin’s liminal rhetoric. Then, his powerful imagery of a ‘tangled bank’ where all beings that have ever existed on earth are moving in a complex web of interdependence could be construed as a Foucauldian heterotopia in the paradox of it being a timeless and placeless space and still containing within it the whole of the time accumulated. In this paper, I examine the Darwinian rhetoric of liminality as reflected in certain implications of his theory, say, the continuity with the past and indefinability of species, as well as in the heterotopic spaces used metaphorically in The Origin.?Keywords: Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species,?liminality, rhetoric, heterotopia.BiographyArya Mohan S is a third year PhD Research Scholar at the Department of English Literature, The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India. She is working on Darwinian Rhetoric, focusing on the socio-cultural constraints under which Charles Darwin articulated his theory after delaying it for almost twenty years. Her MA Dissertation “Evolution and Storytelling: A Darwinian Approach to Literature” examines the theory and practice of the Darwinian school of literary studies. Her areas of interest include Darwinism, Nineteenth century British literature, the subfield of Literature and Science and the post- Positivist Philosophies of Science.‘Victober 2020: Democratizing the Canon with Social Media Reading Analysis’Abigail MoresheadDespite the continued flourishing of Victorian fandom, democratization of the literary canon continues to struggle, falling victim to what Mandell characterizes, for women writers, as “being recovered and forgotten in cycles” (512). While scholars such as Bourrier and Thelwall are studying trends in Victorian authors on Goodreads and in college syllabi to understand current reading trends, research on how the Victorian literary canon circulates on social media is limited. Building on Bourrier and Thelwall’s work, my study examines one specific manifestation of Victorian fandom in the digital era: Victober, which “is a month-long celebration throughout the month of October just celebrating all things Victorian literature, whether it’s novels, poetry, short stories, non-fiction”; any genre of writing in the Victorian era and published in Great Britain between 1837 and 1901 (Howe). This event is led by three YouTube (or “BookTube”) influencers and takes place across multiple platforms, including YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and Goodreads. Using a hybrid quantitative and qualitative analysis, my paper studies Tweets and YouTube content from Victober 2020 to gain insight into what Victorian authors are being discussed among the readers and what trends exist in how those authors are discussed. My findings suggest that while canonical Victorians, like the Bront? siblings and Charles Dickens, dominate the conversation, readers are always steered toward relatively obscure authors as well, by one another or by the event leaders. My findings also show patterns in how readers came to awareness of various Victorian authors, such as through their school or local library. Ultimately, I argue, in order to understand how to democratize the canon and break the cycle of women authors being “recovered and forgotten,” we must look to what social media reveals about contemporary reading trends and how modern readers relate to and become aware of Victorian texts.Works CitedBourrier, Karen and Mike Thelwall. “The Social Lives of Books: Reading Victorian Literature on Goodreads.” Journal of Cultural Analytics, 2020, pp. 1-34, doi: 10.22148/001c.12049. Accessed 4 Oct. 2020.Howe, Kate. “Victober 2020 Announcement Video #victober.” YouTube, 1 Sept. 2020. , Laura C. “Gendering Digital Literary History: What Counts for Digital Humanities.” A New Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth, Wiley Blackwell, 2016, 511-23.BiographyAbigail Moreshead is a PhD student in the University of Central Florida’s Texts & Technology program, specializing in digital humanities. She researches digital archival practices, women’s writing and publishing history, canon formation, intellectual/literary networks and intellectual labour. Abigail teaches literature and is an intern with the Johnson’s Dictionary Online project.Twitter: @ARMoreshead‘Popular Fictions of Emigration in 1850’John MortonThis paper will consider the idea of exclusion, desired or otherwise, by way of the discussion of the issue of emigration in popular fiction (prose and poetry) published in 1850, considering its relation to and engagement in wider debates of the time, beginning with a brief consideration of the issue in Dickens’s David Copperfield.My primary focus will be the story ‘Lucy Dean’, from Eliza Cook’s Journal of that year, which is attributed to ‘Silverpen’ (Eliza Meteyard). In this quasi-utopian story, emigration is seen as a solution to many of the societal woes of the time, with life in Australia painted as providing an idyllic new beginning for the suffering of Britain. I will consider this text in relation to other accounts of emigration in poetry and prose written that year, which are typically less didactic and more measured on the appeal of life in Australia and California.I will also situate these narratives in relation to the often highly-charged debates on emigration in the comment sections of newspapers, as well as the ‘general interest’ stories on, for instance, Christmas in Australia.BiographyDr John Morton is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Greenwich, UK. He is Deputy Editor of the Tennyson Research Bulletin.Twitter: @drjmorton‘Energy problems, Science Fiction and the Late-Victorian World’Pablo MukherjeeIf scholars like Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer have pointed out that “to be modern is to depend on the capacities and abilities generated by energy”, others like Allen Macduffie and Barri J. Gold have shown that energy itself was, and continues to be, a contested concept. This is in part due to its emergence in the 19th-century from a dissonant consolidation of a number of “disparate observables” – heat, light, electricity, gravity, mechanical and bio-physical work; but it is also in part to do with the various (and contradictory) cultural, social and political cognitive frames used in that era of globalization and empire. The field of Energy Humanities has been defined by scholarship that detects and decodes the “energy unconscious” of modernity with the aim of initiating a decisive break with capital, bio-power and energo-politics. But this task of cultural, socio-economic, and political renewal cannot begin without a reckoning with the persistence of empire and imperialism. In this paper, I suggest that science fiction of the late-Victorian world provides us with an excellent resource for such a reckoning. The global popularity of the genre allowed writers located across the imperial and colonial divide to take up a number of interrogative positions on the relationship between energy and empire. I survey authors such as Jules Verne, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein, and Jagadish Chandra Bose to map out some of these positions and what they may have to say about our “energy unconscious” today.BiographyPablo Mukherjee is Professor of English at University of Warwick. His recent books include, Natural Disasters and Victorian Imperial Culture: Fevers and Famines?(Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), (with WReC)?Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature?(Liverpool University Press, 2015), and?Final Frontiers: Science Fiction and Techno-Science in Non-Aligned India?(Liverpool University Press, 2020). He is currently working with Warwick Research Collective (WReC) colleagues on a volume of?Keywords?in World-Literary Studies and guest-editing an issue on 'Energy Humanities' for?Revue Etudes Anglaises.“‘[N]othing of an improper character [should obtain] admission”: Garrison Libraries, and the Nineteenth-Century British Soldier’Sharon MurphyThe British army harboured reservations about the official provision of books and libraries to soldiers well into the nineteenth century, believing it was for a number of reasons dangerous to promote literacy among rank-and-file forces. Despite this, the government eventually granted funds to facilitate the setting-up of garrison libraries from the late 1830s, and these rapidly found favour with the troops. This paper will briefly explore the early history of these libraries, and demonstrate that it has much in common with that of the free public libraries in Britain: namely, that they, too, were viewed as sites of contested culture from the very first, with advocates insisting they would contribute to the education, wellbeing and discipline of soldiers and non-commissioned officers, and opponents declaring they would promote inappropriate attitudes and, possibly, behaviour on the part of the men. In tracing the motivations of those responsible for the establishment and/or day-to-day operation of the garrison libraries, the paper will concentrate in particular upon the ways in which such individuals tried to regulate the reading that was facilitated by the institutions; in particular, upon their efforts to ensure that works of “an improper character” were excluded. In so doing, the paper will further demonstrate that the soldiers who used the libraries resisted such regulation, and increasingly demanded that their preferred works be admitted to the institutions’ shelves.BiographyDr. Sharon Murphy is an Assistant Professor in the School of English, Dublin City University, where she is also the Research Convenor. She is the author of The British Soldier and his Libraries, c. 1822-1901 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and of Maria Edgeworth and Romance (Four Courts Press, 2004). She has also published in Book History and the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, and her most recent article is forthcoming in The Lion and the Unicorn. Dr. Murphy has also published in essay collections.‘Reinventing the Excluded City in Richard Warlow’s Ripper Street (2012-2016)’Emilia MusapRichard Warlow’s television series Ripper Street (2012-2016) is set in April 1889, six months after Jack the Ripper’s murders. Despite Ripper’s absence, Whitechapel’s H-Division’s detectives are vigorously policing the part of the metropolis where the murders and mutilations of Mary Anne Nichols and Annie Chapman transpired. In Warlow’s re-conceptualization of the contemporary myth, women are still murdered and mutilated in East End’s abject streets and alleys. The paper opens up with the discussion on whether fin de siècle’s formulaic subscriptions spatialize East End as a threatening, disorderly district by focusing on its opening scene, the portrayal of the police as ineffectual, and the well-established antithesis of its West and East End. Still, in his seminal study on the 19th-century city, Wolfreys writes that there was another world in London, often overshadowed by the attention provided to the polar extremes and emblematic exoticism that are at the heart of historicized fin-de-siècle analysis (Inventions of the City 94). This “other world” is persistently excluded from predominant fictionalizations of the East End that are principally interested in asserting poverty and accompanying criminality as the city’s constituent elements. Instead of adopting an iconography that merely degrades East End into a decidedly eerie setting, the paper aims at arguing that the series does not simply reconstruct but partially reinvents the city, producing an alternative articulation that transcends the fixity of its fin-de-siècle’s form. Arguably, this is achieved by forgoing the Ripper myth as a major factor in the creation of the end-of-century city, by portraying East End during daylight that demystifies its inarticulability, and by positioning both the individuals traditionally introduced as abject and the innocent casualties of the predominant 19th-century problems front and centre.Works citedWolfreys, Jonathan. Writing London. Volume 3: Inventions of the City. Palgrave McMillan, 2007.BiographyEmilia Musap was born in 1989 in Zadar, Croatia. She graduated in English Language and Literature and Russian Language and Literature from the University of Zadar in 2014. In 2015 she started her postgraduate studies of Humanities, in the field of philology (Dissertation title: Space and the Articulation of Monstrosity within Popular Culture). She is currently employed as a teaching assistant at the University of Zadar.‘Internationalist Radicalism and Exclusion in The Sepoys, a Tale of the Present Indian Revolt (Reynolds’s Miscellany, 1858)’Rebecca NesvetRecently, several critics have pointed out that on a theoretical level, George W. M. Reynolds embraced an internationalist vision of political reform, arguing in fiction and non-fiction prose that the struggles of workers and disenfranchised populations in Britain are analogous to struggles in France, the Russian Empire, and other regions around the globe. In this paper, I will identify this sort of internationalist radical rhetoric in a very successful serial fiction that Reynolds commissioned for?Reynolds’s Miscellany:?The Sepoys, or, Highland Jessie: A Tale of the Present Indian Revolt?(1858). Written by James Malcolm Rymer (inventor of Sweeney Todd and ‘Varney the Vampire’) under his regular pseudonym “M.J. Errym,”?The Sepoys?was serialized while the Indian Revolt was in progress and covered by Reynolds’s journalism. Inspired by the pseudohistorical British imperialist legend of Jessie Brown at the Siege of Lucknow,?The Sepoys?depicts colonized India as a society very like Britain and presents the Revolt as a popular response to many of the same social ills that fueled Chartism, complete with a fictional Indian leader who plays a role in relation to the struggle akin to Reynolds’s own. However,?The Sepoys?also depicts the Revolt as a game-like situation in which two British nabobs learn intellectual maturity and responsibility for others, arguably earning back political authority over India. This rhetoric, I argue, combined with the representation of that Indian hero, his British beloved, and the notorious Indian leader Nana Sahib, combine to exclude the people of India from the international political awakening that the serial outwardly aims to foment.?BiographyRebecca Nesvet’s research, primarily about Victorian popular fiction (“penny dreadful”) author James Malcolm Rymer and his contexts, has been published in journals including?Victorian Popular Fictions Journal, Nineteenth Century Studies, Victorians Institute Journal, Victorian Network,?the?BRANCH Collective Timeline,?and?Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing,?as well as in COVE Editions and edited volumes from Liverpool UP, Bloomsbury, Macmillan, Routledge, Palgrave, and Salem presses. She is writing about Rymer for the Oxford Bibliographies of Victorian Literature (2021) and, with Dr. Stephen Basdeo, co-editing a volume of?Victorian Popular Fictions Journal?on “Reappraising Penny Fiction” (2022).?Twitter: @R3b33cca?Roundtable Title: “Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom”: Teaching Interventions on Caribbean AuthorsPanelists: Kira Braham, Heidi Kaufman, Breanna Simpson, and Indu OhriModerator: Adrian WisnickiRoundtable DescriptionHow might Victorian Studies be destructured and reimagined to address its historical racial biases and establish a sustained intimacy with Critical Race, Critical Ethnic, Postcolonial, Feminist, Queer, and Disability Studies? In 2020, a group of scholars from across the United States began Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom (), a digital humanities project that provides open access to teaching materials that model antiracist pedagogy. The participants in this roundtable represent one small part of this larger effort. As the Caribbean Studies working group, we are collaborating to create model teaching pathways, sample assignments, and other materials to serve as resources for instructors who want to integrate more Caribbean authors and transimperial perspectives into their syllabi.This roundtable will discuss our current work creating teaching plans and materials for Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857) and similar work we will perform this spring around The History of Mary Prince (1831). As popular readings with major socio-political importance in the context of the transatlantic slave trade and the Crimean War, these two works have the potential to play a central role in students’ understanding of the nineteenth century. We will share the ongoing process of collectively creating lesson plans that address the complexities of nineteenth-century constructions of race and gender and encourage intersectional analysis. We will also discuss how we mobilize commitments to interdisciplinarity and strategic presentism to link these nineteenth-century texts to contemporary issues, from structural disparities in healthcare to debates about public memorialization. This roundtable hopes to address scholars, instructors, and groups looking to engage in similar efforts to “undiscipline” Victorian Studies. In a 30-minute video of our roundtable, we will discuss our method of creating these lesson plans and answer questions from audience members who have watched it during the live conference Q+A.BiographyIndu Ohri is the Echols Fellow in the University of Virginia’s English Department. Her current book project examines how the ghosts in women’s supernatural fiction reflect various unspeakable social concerns of late Victorian and early twentieth-century Britain. Her research and teaching interests include Victorian women’s ghost stories, global literature of the nineteenth century, and neo-Victorian adaptations.‘“What the wicked actually practice”: Analyzing the Monstrous Queer in The Blood Spattered Bride’Blake OvermanSpanish horror films of the 1960s-1970s had a unique role in providing a space for directors of the time to comment and critique the authoritarian regime of Francisco Franco. Vicente Aranda’s 1972 film, The Blood Spattered Bride, is an example of a Spanish mondo film created during Francoist rule that offers critical messages that have remained mostly unexamined by scholars. A loose-adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’, the film is part of a broad influx of lesbian vampire films of the late 60s and early 70s. The queer elements of the film, particularly its portrayal of a lesbian relationship between its main character, Susan and the vampire Carmilla, are void of any scholarly discussion. Like Carmilla, the film features ambivalence towards the homosocial relationship between two women. The film adapts these emotions to suggest a desire to support a queer relationship, one that symbolizes liberation from an oppressive political space. It is reflective of navigating a critique of the fascist Francoist regime, during a time “where a disapproved film could send a young filmmaker into exile.”Scholars such as Baker and Thompson have explored the gender dynamics but have averted from incorporating the explicitly queer elements of The Blood Spattered Bride. This distance from queer discussion has concealed a discussion of the status of the portrayal of queerness during the 1960s-1970s, and the more specific cultural context of Francoist Spain. By contextualizing the film, understanding how Le Fanu’s text has been adapted, and analysing how the queer and monstrous elements overlap in the film, I will unveil the ambivalence that is an abject desire for liberation from fascism, sexism, and heteronormativity.BiographyBlake Overman is a graduate instructor and English Literature MA candidate at Wichita State University in Wichita, KS. His areas of interest primarily focus on the intersectionality of queerness and monstrous characters found in media, and the fears and anxieties that these figures represent.‘Snark: Gatekeeping in The Lady’s Newspaper, 1847-1856’Leanne N. PageThe Lady’s Newspaper (TLN) began its run in 1847 and eventually merged with The Queen in 1863. In addition to its coverage of fashion, literature, theatre, and current events, it included a section titled “The Work-Table” that provided illustrated instructions for domestic handicrafts such as needlework, crochet, and beading. In its second month of publication, the magazine began featuring responses to readers’ requests and queries alongside the patterns and images. This side-by-side presentation of the “To Correspondents” subsection was standard from February 1847 until December 1855, when TLN began producing “The Work-Table” as a supplement under the supervision of Matilda Pullan. The format of “The Work-Table” during this period allowed readers not only to benefit from the additional instructions provided to confused subscribers but also to take heed of the criticisms volleyed at wayward readers.My paper argues that the “To Correspondents” subsection of “The Work-Table” offers a fruitful site for investigating how both contributors to and readers of TLN negotiated the expectations associated with middle-class domestic femininity. I examine how the women who ran “The Work-Table” during this period (Riègo, Dufour, and Pullan) used snark as a creative and sometimes subtle rhetorical approach to gatekeeping. I begin with a close reading of Pullman’s deliciously vicious response to a reader using the name “Verdant Green” in a November 1854 issue. I then take a broader look at readers’ requests for more explicit instructions and personalized patterns, which I contrast with Riègo’s, Dufour’s, and Pullan’s varied responses. While these contributors to TLN often provided useful tips and instructions to loyal subscribers, they also used their authority to identify and exclude readers whom they perceived as either non-subscribers or women lacking the skills and knowledge required and expected of a certain “class” of gendered periodical readership.BiographyLeanne Page an independent researcher based in Vancouver, British Columbia, on the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. I’ve published and presented work on dress, pockets, and bodily boundaries in sensation novels; the imperial loafer in late Victorian fiction; and “high performance technology” in Stoker’s Dracula (1897).‘Ageing, Inclusion and Collaboration in the Career of Eliza Winstanley’Beth PalmerThis paper makes a case for including Eliza Winstanley in our research as a significant writer of Victorian popular fiction. Her career was a varied one; she emigrated from England to Australia (and back again), worked as an actress, and edited her own periodical as well as writing popular fiction. From 1863 to 1880 Winstanley published 53 serials across John Dicks’ stable of publications (Mills, 39), some of which were adapted for the stage. Like many Victorian popular authors, the prolific nature of her writing has not helped her reputation to endure and her vast body of work remains little read.As a novelist she certainly drew on her experience of dramatic life to add detail and incident to her fiction. We see this in her first novel Shifting Scenes in Theatrical Life (1859) which fictionalises some of her contemporary actors, notably the Keans, and in later sensational novels such as Desmoro: or the Red Hand (1866) and Entrances and Exits (1868). More than this direct narrative usage, Winstanley was able to re-work and include her skills as an actor within her later careers as editor and writer through her creation of intensely visual literary effects, through narrative devices such as the tense switching at moments of key dramatic interest, through her broader understanding of writing as a collaborative process rather than an individual endeavour.This paper argues against a biographical reading of Winstanley that situates writing and editing as secondary careers for an ageing woman after acting roles had dried up. Such a narrative of exclusion omits a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which Winstanley’s experience in the theatre overlapped with and informed her diversified career in fiction.Catriona Mills, ‘Adapting the Familiar: The Penny-Weekly Serials of Eliza Winstanley on Stage in Suburban Theatres’ Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film (2009) 36:1, 37-60.BiographyBeth Palmer is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Surrey. Her publications include?Women's Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture: Sensational Strategies (2011),?A Return to the Common Reader: Print Culture and the Novel, 1850-1900?(co-ed with Adelene Buckland, 2011) and Sensation Drama, 1860-1880: An Anthology (2019).?‘Which Guests are Most Welcome?: Moving from Sala’s Conversational Club to Braddon’s Sensational Enterprise in the Welcome Guest’Jennifer PhegleyWhen Henry Vizetelly launched the Welcome Guest: A Magazine of Recreative Reading for All in May 1858, he hoped to appeal to readers across class boundaries by creating a hybrid of the London Journal and All the Year Round. As owner and editor, he envisioned a mass-market magazine that would sell for a penny but still provide high-quality reading material with lavish illustrations. In the preface to the first volume of the magazine, he argues that instead of rushing to join the other “trumpeters of literature for the million, or impertinent would-be improvers of the ‘mental condition of the lower classes,’” his magazine holds its readers in high esteem, refusing to “write down” to them, but rather asking them to “read themselves up.” The founding celebration of the Welcome Guest was a lively Bohemian affair that included potential contributors and staff from Vizetelly’s Illustrated Times. George Augustus Sala was anointed the star contributor for the new magazine.Sala’s eclectic and conversational style in Twice Round the Clock, a non-fiction series about life in the London streets, would set the tone for the magazine. His engaging yet rambling approach was also put to good use in his fiction serials Make Your Game and Lady Chesterfield’s Letters. However, Vizetelly grew dissatisfied with Sala’s erratic behaviour and inability to meet deadlines. Despite reportedly reaching a circulation of 120,000, he doubted the magazine would ever turn a profit and abandoned his literary experiment after just over a year, selling it to John Maxwell in July 1859. Maxwell employed a familiar bevy of Bohemian editors, subeditors, and contributors over the next few years, including Sala, Edmund Yates, Robert Brough, Robert Buchanan, Lascelles Wraxhall, and Blanchard Jerrold. While the revolving door of editors made it difficult to settle on a coherent identity for the magazine, one new contributor emerged to offer a way forward: Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Indeed, Braddon’s work for the Welcome Guest would determine the trajectory not only of her career as an author, but also of Maxwell’s as a magazine publisher.This presentation will explore how Braddon’s early contributions to the Welcome Guest quickly became the driving force behind the publication as it evolved from Sala’s conversational men’s club into a vehicle for domestic sensationalism and tales of true-crime. As the Preface to the 1860 volume of the Welcome Guest declared, the new version of the magazine would be crowned by Braddon’s Lady Lisle, a work “of intense and thrilling interest, at once dramatic, effective, and absorbing.” Her sensation novel ran alongside Wraxall’s series on Criminal Celebrities, focused on notorious European criminal trials, and E.P. Rowsell’s Recollections of a Relieving Officer, which explored crimes investigated by a government official doling out relief under the New Poor Laws. The Welcome Guest juxtaposed Braddon’s sensation fiction, in which women were often the victims of crime but could also become the heroines of justice, with non-fiction narratives that sometimes glorified and sometimes vilified the masterminds who escaped the law. I argue that both forms were united in their frequent if subtle exploration of the extenuating circumstances that could entice people into criminal activity. Ultimately, the inclusion of Braddon’s short stories slowly built toward the magazine’s new identity, culminating in the serialization of Lady Lisle and catapulting the Maxwell-Braddon partnership into a new realm.BiographyJennifer Phegley chairs the English Department at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She is the author of Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation (2004) and Courtship and Marriage in Victorian England (2012) as well as several edited collections and numerous articles on authorship, publishing, periodicals, and pedagogy. Her current book project, Magazine Mavericks: Mary Elizabeth Braddon, John Maxwell, and the Emergence of New Readings Audiences in Mid-Victorian England, has been supported by a Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship (2015), a Curran Fellowship (2019) and an NEH Summer Stipend (2019). She currently serves as President of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals.‘“A great dense semicircle”: Performing Magic in Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson’Christopher PittardMax Beerbohm’s novel Zuleika Dobson (1911) satirises two Victorian genres: the heroic romances associated with Ouida, and the university novel (most famously conceptualised as a genre of inclusion and exclusion in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure). But while these generic parodies dominate the novel, it also satirises another Victorian popular genre; the fashion for conjuring. The heroine of Beerbohm’s novel is herself a conjuror, and the performance of her show in the quadrangle of Judas College is one of the novel’s central scenes, embodying the underlying themes of performance, the sexualised gaze, and the presentation of the supernatural. Dobson’s magic show, represented as a kind of voyeuristic encounter with the female magician, includes routines that are simultaneously surreal and psychoanalytically banal (Zuleika produces a barber’s pole from her mouth); her repeated claim of every trick that “this is rather queer!” undercuts any singularity to her feats.On one level, then, this paper considers the representation of stage conjuring in Beerbohm’s novel, and its relation to earlier appearances of the art in fiction (for instance, Dickens’ representations of magicians, and the Victorian trope of author as conjuror). But Zuleika Dobson also illustrates a tension between sleight of hand conjuring (what Simon During defines in Modern Enchantments as ‘secular magic’; that is, magic that makes no recourse to the supernatural in its explanation) and events portrayed as genuinely supernatural. Zuleika Dobson is not a realist novel – its cast includes numerous ghosts and inanimate objects that come to life – yet conjuring has always had a close relationship to the rationalist project and the ultimate rejection of the supernatural. Drawing on a theoretical consideration of stage magic and its theorisation as narrative, this paper thus considers how a novel with rationalist stage conjuring at its centre deals with the inclusion of the supernatural, without undermining such incidents as mere tricks. In other words, are the terms on which Dobson enchants the same as those on which we are enchanted by Beerbohm?BiographyChristopher Pittard is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and course leader for the MA Victorian Gothic at the University of Portsmouth. His publications include Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction (2011), the co-edited Cambridge Companion to Sherlock Holmes (2019), and the forthcoming Literary Illusions: Performance Magic and Victorian Literature.Twitter: @CAPittard‘“A Fly on the Wheel” or a “Guardian Angel?” Ella D’Arcy’s creative ambivalence as assistant editor of The Yellow Book’Camilla PrinceThe rapid expansion of the periodical press in the late nineteenth century led to an increase in opportunities for women in publishing at all levels. In the 1891 census, 660 women listed themselves as an author, editor, or journalist, a huge increase from just 15 in 1840. Though there were a considerable number of women in editorial roles during this period, their influence and contributions have often been neglected. For example, much has been written about the influential fin de siècle literary periodical The Yellow Book (1894-97), and the roles its male editor and publisher (Henry Harland and John Lane respectively) played in its creation. However, the significant role played by The Yellow Book’s female assistant editor Ella D’Arcy remains overlooked.This paper will explore how Ella D’Arcy influenced and shaped the Yellow Book through her commissioning and editorial work, as well as through her short stories which were featured in the magazine. Examining D’Arcy correspondence with her publishers, as well as closely analysing her editorial choices, sheds light on the influence she had over the writers they commissioned, the subject matter featured, as well as the artistic direction of the magazine.However, this power came at a price, and D’Arcy’s desire for greater autonomy ultimately led to her dismissal from the periodical. D’Arcy’s brief editorial career at the Yellow Book gives us a glimpse into how women operated in the male dominated publishing landscape, which required women to downplay their power even as they wielded it. As D’Arcy’s quite literal powers of inclusion and exclusion as assistant editor have ironically led to her exclusion from the history of this famous periodical, this paper seeks to restore the narrative and raise awareness of the significance of her editorial role.BiographyCamilla Prince is a PhD student at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research examines how women writers and editors shaped the development of the short story in British periodicals and how this new form intersects with the emergence of feminism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.Twitter: @MissPrints_89‘“Half-Man, Half-Chair”: Humanity and Mechanisation in Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady’Esther ReillyBecause of their bodily difference, disabled nineteenth-century people were subject to cultural exclusions and exploitation, and they were often labelled as freak spectacles in society. Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) was fascinated with ‘freak bodies’ and in his fiction frequently drew analogies between the freak body and socially marginalised bodies that were “Othered” by discourses of disability, an intersection central to Collins’s 1875 novel The Law and the Lady, where we find the extraordinary and sensational Miserrimus Dexter. Disabled and without legs since birth, Miserrimus’s disfigured body is one of Collins’s most shocking and confusing characters. He describes himself as “half-man, half-chair” and his wheelchair is a visual indicator of his disability.There were significant debates about what it meant to be a human being during the second wave of industrialisation and “the rise of the machine.” Collins uses the overlapping concepts of “human” and “machine” in Miserrimus’s character by fusing him with a wheelchair. At one point, Miserrimus exclaims, “My chair is me…,” and in many ways his character represents the increasingly complicated relationship between humans and machines in the period, and the social anxieties and fascination generated by the fusion of these identities. In this paper, I will read Miserrimus as a freakish cyborg, caught between humanity/machinery to explore the intersection of disability and freakishness in Victorian culture, and how Collins intervenes in these debates. This paper will address how Miserrimus’s physical limitations are overcome by uniting his body with a machine, however, as his identity becomes so completely bound up with the mechanism he uses to move about, Collins depicts him becoming less human and unhinged. Collins’s novel seems to lean more towards warning about the dangers to human identity of the rise of technology rather than the transhuman possibilities offered in The Law and the Lady.BiographyEsther Reilly is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin. Her doctoral research investigates freak bodies and marginalised identities in the fiction of Wilkie Collins (1824-1889), who drew parallels between unusual characters and the freak show performers of the nineteenth century who transgressed normative physical boundaries.Twitter: @ejreilly28‘After Beardsley: The Inclusion of Women Illustrators in The Yellow Book’Michelle ReynoldsAs art editor, Aubrey Beardsley had excluded women from The Yellow Book’s art section until the publication of volume IV, which includes the magazine’s first artwork clearly attributed to a woman: ‘Plein Air’ by Margaret L. Sumner. Scholarship has focused on Beardsley’s role in shaping The Yellow Book’s visual representation of women and his cultivation of the magazine’s association with the New Woman. The Yellow Book had included the work of women writers, in particular New Woman writers, since the first volume. Starting with ‘Plein Air,’ women artists also shaped the New Woman’s representation in The Yellow Book. After Beardsley was fired as art editor in 1895, women were even more readily included in the magazine’s art section. Out of the thirty-seven artworks attributed to women over the course of The Yellow Book’s run, twenty-seven depicted women or girls. Illustrators contributed the bulk of this work, with twenty-four out of the thirty-seven artworks being pen and ink or graphite illustrations or drawings. While women illustrators were excluded from expanding the New Woman’s iconography in Punch and other popular periodicals, The Yellow Book offered a space for women to become active participants in the creation of New Woman imagery. This paper explores the New Woman’s visual representation in The Yellow Book contributed by women illustrators. I argue that women were just as crucial as Beardsley in shaping this representation. Women illustrators worked to craft a counterimage of the New Woman that subverted the caricatures created by male illustrators.BiographyMichelle Reynolds is a second year PhD candidate at the University of Exeter. Her current research project looks at the New Woman’s visual representation and how women illustrators contributed to this representation. She completed an MA in Art History and Museum Curating with Photography at the University of Sussex.Twitter: @lovelymydear‘“Reward the Accomplished Lady”: How female botanical illustrators of the 1860s utilised the colonised landscape to obtain entry into the Royal Society of London’Ann-Marie RichardsonThe exclusionary traditions of elite scientific establishments often restricted the access of women. Society charters were written in a way that precluded female admission. Hence, women were excluded – seldom or never admitted into these fraternities. Networking events, such as the Royal Society of London’s annual “soirée”, which displayed items from the natural sciences and exhibited the latest scientific discoveries, were closed to women. Such multi-disciplinary expositions allowed the Fellows and other elite – strictly male – guests to socialise while sharing knowledge. Female guests would not officially be admitted until 1876, when botanist – and Royal Society President – Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911) initiated the creation of a second yearly soirée known as ‘Ladies’ Night’.Despite this, there is new evidence that the work of women was being displayed as early as the 1860s. These initial exhibitors were British military wives – Ellen Toynbee (1829-1881) and Margaret Read Brown (1816-1868), as well as Dutch widow Bertha Hoola Van Nooten (1817-1892). The three women were artists who spent most of their lives exploring the landscapes of the British and Dutch Empires. Toynbee and Brown studied the topography of India while Nooten lived in Java. This paper will explore how these women utilised this “unique selling point” of having lived amongst the flora and fauna of the colonized landscape, to appeal to the leading scientists of London.These artists helped to bridge the gap in contemporary botanical knowledge by transferring technically accurate images of empire back to metropolitan societies. By exploiting their circumstances – in addition to some useful social connections – the work of these women entered the masculine, strictly scientific domains, formally closed to them.BiographyAnn-Marie Richardson’s AHRC funded project is in collaboration with Lancaster University and the Royal Society of London. Her research focuses on the temporary exhibitions held annually at the Royal Society during the mid-nineteenth century – known as scientific “soirées” – and how they permitted female scientists to exhibit their work.Twitter: @RichardsonA_M‘“An Incongruous Bill of Fare”: Popular and Classical Music in Trilby’Victoria C. RoskamsThis paper will study the inclusion of surprising, non-canonical music in performances by La Svengali, in George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894). La Svengali’s performances blur the distinctions between ‘popular’ and ‘classical’ music, still entrenched in modern musical discourse, even as Du Maurier’s novel testifies to the emergence of this dichotomy in the late nineteenth century. Trilby is valuable evidence of Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital, dramatizing the reactions of the public to pieces of art which could be classed as high and low culture. But the eclecticism of the novel’s music complicates Bourdieu’s suggestion that social groups organise themselves through certain cultural choices. Challenging conventions of authorship, performance, and context, La Svengali includes mid-Victorian songs such as ‘Ben Bolt’ and ‘Malbrouck s’en va-t’en guerre’ in her repertoire alongside works by Chopin, Schumann, and Gounod. The narrative’s public responds not to neatly grouped high- and low-value music, separated into different venues or by different performers, but witnesses cultural diversity within one performance. This unpredictably inclusive repertoire, which contrasts the exclusivism commonly associated with classical music, is in fact more typical of nineteenth-century music programming and practices than we might assume – but tracing the contexts of these more diverse repertoires reveals a raft of class associations within music, with which Trilby is provocatively in dialogue. The inclusion of popular music alongside works composed by well-known musical ‘geniuses’ is just one instance of the novel’s repeated questioning of the validity of Victorian standards of authorship and value, along with its blending of performative roles in Svengali and Trilby. Through generically unexpected inclusions within its musical narrative, Trilby provides a key to its own interpretation as a novel which induced mania on its publication but now has a reputation as sub-canonical (and indeed, surprising and unpredictable).BiographyVictoria C. Roskams is a second-year DPhil candidate at Mansfield College, University of Oxford. Her thesis studies the representation of musical composers in nineteenth-century novels, primarily George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and George du Maurier’s Trilby, alongside lesser-known novels about music, and music (auto)biography and journalism.Twitter: @VRoskams‘The Forgotten Pre-Raphaelite: Unearthing the life and works of Rebecca Solomon (1832-1886)’Alex RoundMy research examines how Pre-Raphaelite art subverts Victorian patriarchal institutions. Despite the Brotherhood’s growing publicity and controversy surrounding their painting’s subjects, the female Pre-Raphaelites’ own artistic contributions have long been overlooked, which is reflective of nineteenth-century societal attitudes towards the women’s sphere. My thesis turns to Rebecca Solomon, who despite living in the shadow of her artist brothers Abraham and Simeon, actively sought to subvert the heteronormative ideals of gender and sexuality. My project investigates the historical amnesia that has resulted in the negligence surrounding Solomon’s life and work, thereby restoring Solomon’s status as a Jewish Pre-Raphaelite artist and significant figure in feminist history.BiographyMy name is Alex Round. I am currently an A-Level Literature teacher at Sandwell Academy, whilst studying for my MRes Humanities at Newman University. Also, I am currently a trustee of the Birmingham and Midland Institute and an aspiring candidate in Pre-Raphaelite studies. My research also concerns Victorian poetry and Nineteenth century psychology.Twitter: @alexxr97_Blog: ‘The Law and the Lamp-Post: The Police and Street-Lighting in Mid-Victorian Popular Crime Fiction’Samuel SaundersThis paper explores and isolates a hitherto understudied connection between Victorian-era police officers and the growth of street-level public illumination, as characterised in mid-Victorian popular crime fiction.It is generally understood that the uniformed police officer, still a new and curious figure on the street throughout the mid-nineteenth century, was characterised as a supreme observer of a chaotic society – a mobile watchtower that was able to ‘see’ more clearly into the shadowy depths of the city itself than the often-ignorant general public. However, this ideological perspective on social regulation has not yet been connected to actual measures that were taken to effectively make the city itself more ‘observable’, and nor has it been effectively examined with regard to how this was reflected in the pages of popular fiction. However, both the police and the lamp-post remain stalwart images of the Victorian era in the contemporary consciousness even today, and are often ideologically connected together.The paper thus explores the growth of uniformed policing, in both physical and ideological terms, alongside both the expansion of the city itself and the emergence of public illumination programmes that were designed to render the city more visible. Indeed, these two innovations were closely linked from an early point; both contemporary discussion of law enforcement and contemporarily-published popular fiction consistently placed the police officer alongside or near to the lamp-post. The paper then specifically looks at how this was reflected in popular fiction, exploring the connection between the police-detective and the street-light, and the effect this has had on the development of the wider popular detective genre.BiographySamuel Saunders holds a PhD in English from Liverpool John Moores University, and is currently Higher Education Teaching and Learning Coach at University Centre Reaseheath, a strategic partner of the University of Chester. He has written extensively on nineteenth-century print culture, Victorian crime and detective fiction, and contemporary popular fiction.Twitter: @samfordsaunders‘The Inclusivity of Neo-Victorian Horror in Emily Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines’Shannon ScottIn Plain Bad Heroines, Emily M. Danforth sets her neo-Victorian Gothic novel in two different eras: the Gilded Age, which chronicles the romance between two women, Alex and Libbie, who start the Brookhaunts School for Girls, then shifts to their students, Flo and Clara, who fall in love and meet their tragic deaths (via wasps) at Brookhaunts School. The second timeline takes place in 2020 as a film based on the horrific events at Brookhaunts is being shot on location, where three young women, in a shifting love triangle, recreate Flo and Clara’s demise on haunted ground. Most of the novel, in both timelines, features spaces that exclude men and subsequently create more sexual options and outlets for the female characters. In addition, while the 2020 timeline allows for more openness and acceptance of LGBTQIA identities, it is constantly haunted, not only by ghosts, but by the smothered identities of the past that still permeate and lurk in the present.Through the use of Gothic aesthetics and atmosphere, body gore, classic found footage horror film tropes, and humour, Danforth creates an engaging experience for all readers—as long as they don’t mind a few sleepless nights. My paper, “The Inclusivity of Neo-Victorian Horror in Emily Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines” examines the how the horror genre, particularly neo-Victorian horror, tells stories that may not have made it to print in the nineteenth century, but it tells them in a way that effectively absorbs today’s audiences with curses and spiritualists and murderers and ghosts and lots of laughs and some snickers. Horror and humour unite to form inclusive spaces, leading to broader acceptance of LGBTQIA identities through the physical engagement of the body through laughs and chills.BiographyShannon Scott is an adjunct professor of English at several Twin Cities universities.?She has contributed scholarly essays on wolves and werewolves to?She-Wolf: A Cultural History of Female Werewolves?(Manchester UP, 2015) and?The Company of Wolves Collection?(Manchester UP, 2020). She was also co-editor of?Terrifying Transformations: An Anthology of Victorian Werewolf Fiction, 1838-1896?(Valancourt, 2012).?More recently, her?short story, “American House Spider,” came out in Nightscript?in 2019. Her novelette, “Swing a Dead Cat,” was published in?Coppice and Brake: A Dark Fiction Anthology?in March 2020. Her short story?“Dead Bread Head” was published in December 2020 in?Oculus Sinister?and “The Bump” will be coming out in?Vastarien: A Literary Journal?in 2021. In addition, her novella?Joyride?will be published in?Midnight Bites?in 2021 through?Crone Girls Press. She is currently working on “Wolves and Werewolves in History and Popular Culture” for Audible Originals to be released for Halloween 2021.?‘“We are dangerous”: Excluding the Deviant Feminine Code in Neo-Victorian On-Screen Narratives’Alessandra SerraEither interpreted in conventional frames or in non-conformist directions, women in neo-Victorian on-screen fictions often epitomize deviant disruption. Representations of discomfort and uncertainty characterize this narrative area where women significantly embody destabilizing figures and are perceived as a menace to be stopped. Even when they are assigned leading parts, and even when they are endowed with (albeit illusory) positions of influence and control, these non-standard women are usually condemned for their disturbing femininity. Portraits of powerful, assertive and determined women recurrently foreshadow a punishment pattern made of seclusion, exclusion, rejection and, eventually, unfulfillment of life plans.Putting a methodological emphasis on close textual analysis (Bednarek 2018) and on feminism (Kristeva 1982, Creed 1993), I will examine examples from popular TV series such as Penny Dreadful (2014-2017) and The Frankenstein Chronicles (2015-2017), and from the film Crimson Peak (2015), focusing on the practices of exclusion imposed on the leading woman figures featured in these works. As I will try to demonstrate, their marginalization, resulting from an intentional defiance of a reassuring feminine role, is enacted at several levels: assigned to out-groups in order to be stigmatized for their irregularity, they are also expelled from domestic and urban spaces and, above all, linguistically isolated. Vanessa Ives of Penny Dreadful speaks the “verbis diablo”, the language of the demons, the only code at her disposal to access power and mastery, while Mary Shelley in The Frankenstein Chronicles and Edith in Crimson Peak are confined to the written text to be heard and acknowledged. Aware of being regarded as “dangerous”, all these women surrender, with their own consent, to a common fate of loneliness, abandon and deprivation of love in an act of conscious self-sacrifice to their subversive feminine code.BiographyI am presently a Senior Lecturer in English Language and Translation at the Università della Tuscia – Viterbo (Italy). My research focuses on Victorian Fiction and Culture, and on Political language with a special interest in Women’s Studies. My translation in Italian of The Frozen Deep by Wilkie Collins is currently in print.Twitter: @AlessandraSerr1‘“Put Her Away. It’s Better for all of Us”: Female Madness as Exclusion in The Crimson Petal and the White’Beth ShermanEver since Gilbert and Gubar wrote Madwoman in the Attic in 1979, Victorian scholars have viewed female madness primarily as a metaphor. Feminist theory continues to decree that women exhibit signs of insanity in 19th century literature because these characters are deprived of their legal, economic, and vocational rights in a patriarchal society. My paper builds on a small but growing movement (Donaldson, Caminero-Santangelo, et al) that pushes back against madness as metaphor, in favour of an approach that takes into consideration the medical humanities and New Historicism. Focusing on Michael Faber’s neo-Victorian novel, The Crimson Petal and the White (2002), I look at how Victorian doctors viewed and treated signs and symptoms of madness in their female patients and the way that a madness diagnosis – whether accurate or not – could result in devastating consequences, excluding women from making decisions about their own bodies and their physical and mental health. Victorian woman faced the very real threat of being locked away by husbands, brothers, and fathers, fuelling a so-called ‘trade in lunacy,’ where reputedly insane or disruptive members of the family were warehoused in asylums. The Parliamentary Select Committee Inquiry into the Care and Treatment of Lunatics and Their Property of 1858-9 was designed to end the incarceration fever that swept mid-Victorian England and sparked what Scull has described as “lunacy panic” (Scull 339), leading to periodic outbursts of rage against the “mad doctors” and commitment laws. In Faber’s novel, I identify several veins of madness, including hysteria, dissociation, childish madness, inconsistent madness, and what I call casual madness, writing back to second wave feminists who are invested in viewing the madwoman as a victim of a patriarchal culture and exploring why such a viewpoint, though central to their argument, can be dangerous.BiographyBeth Sherman is a PhD candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center. She received an MFA in creative writing and an MA in English from Queens College, where she teaches in the English department. Her work has been published in Dickens Studies Annual, James Joyce Quarterly, Newsday and The New York Times and is forthcoming in The Wilkie Collins Journal. She has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and has written five mystery novels.‘Including Theatre in the Novel: the Melodrama of Walter Scott and David Pae’ Juliet Shields This paper brings together two of the most popular authors of the nineteenth century, one, Walter Scott (1771-1832), a literary celebrity, and the other, Scott’s countryman David Pae (1828-884), now virtually unknown. Pae wrote approximately 50 novels that ran first in Scottish newspapers such as the Edinburgh North Briton and the Glasgow Penny Post and later in English provincial weeklies such as the Sheffield Telegraph and the Hamilton Advertiser. Graham Law estimates that each of Pae’s novels would have reached half a million newspaper subscribers. Scott was, according to William St Clair, “by several orders of magnitude, the author whose works had sold the largest number of copies in the English-speaking world,” and innovations in printing made his 32 novels available in increasingly cheaper formats over the nineteenth century. Yet Annika Bautz and David Buchanan have shown that theatrical adaptations played an important part in the “downmarket” reception of the Waverley novels, with working-class audiences more likely to encounter them in dramatic than book form.Pae was also a theatre critic and aspiring playwright, and two of his early novels feature the kind of theatrical performances of Scott’s novels that his readers might have attended. In Jessie Melville; or the Double Sacrifice (1856) a performance of The Heart of Midlothian moves Jessie to renounce the man she loves to another woman, and in Lucy the Factory Girl, or the Secrets of the Tontine Close (1860), a performance of Guy Mannering runs amok, revealing the secret of Lucy’s whereabouts. These performances illuminate the shared melodrama of Scott’s and Pae’s fiction. Although melodrama is usually regarded as a mode belonging to popular culture, Pae locates the origins of his own use of melodrama in Scott’s works. The theatrical adaptations highlight the extent to which Pae’s plots borrow from Scott’s, with both authors employing melodramatic oppositions between good and evil, religion and money, upper and lower class, moments of high drama and comic relief. Jessie Melville and Lucy the Factory Girl not only participate in the downmarket transmission of Scott’s work, but call into question the distinctions between the comparatively elite historical novel and cheap serial fiction. By including these theatrical performances in his novels, Pae claims Scott as his literary forefather. BiographyJuliet Shields is Professor of English at the University of Washington, where she teaches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature. She has two books forthcoming in 2021: Scottish Women Writers in the Long Nineteenth Century: The Romance of Everyday Life, and Mary Prince, Slavery and Print Culture in the Anglophone Atlantic World. Twitter: @julshields1 ‘Luxurious Liberation: The exclusionary correlation between wealth and New Womanhood in Kate Chopin’s short story “A Pair of Silk Stockings” (1897)’Isobel SigleyKate Chopin was certainly ‘in Vogue’ at the close of the nineteenth century, as a popular American writer whose works featured regularly in the early pages of the now-iconic fashion magazine. Her story ‘A Pair of Silk Stockings’ follows Mrs Sommers, a working-class mother whose unexpected windfall of fifteen dollars buys her an afternoon of luxury and, with it, greater bodily autonomy and agency. In this paper, I explore the relationship between the costly commodities of silk stockings, kid gloves, and high-brow magazines purchased by Mrs Sommers and the increased mobility exhibited by Chopin’s heroine thereafter. Through paying close attention to Mrs Sommers’ haptic experience, and thereby her awakening at the touch of silk stockings and the changes in her demeanour once donned in high quality garments à la mode, I demonstrate how the ability to dress and behave in an upper-class fashion fosters a scandalous confidence in Mrs Sommers, who overthrows domestic duties in favour of self-indulgence and self-pleasure in an archetypal ‘New Woman’ way. As a result of this, however, a problematic conflation of class mobility with daring and brave female liberation emerges. I argue that by tying Mrs Sommers’ emancipatory experience to her finite and fleeting fifteen dollars, Chopin depicts a direct correlation between wealth and the New Womanhood of the 1890s, thus exposing the late nineteenth-century feminist movement as exclusionary and less accessible to women of poorer backgrounds. I conclude my paper by considering that Chopin’s story, while depicting the wealth-based (in)accessibility of New Womanhood, nevertheless itself articulates the subjectivity of an impoverished mother, and therefore contributes to the amassing literature of the New Woman phenomenon in a startlingly inclusive way, in effect combatting the exclusivity she diagnoses in her fiction.BiographyIsobel Sigley is a Doctoral Researcher in English at Loughborough University. She researches haptics in women’s fin-de-siècle short fiction. Last year, her VPFA conference paper, ‘Tactile Encounters with the Terra Incognita: Feeling for George Egerton’s Feminism in Keynotes (1893)’ won the Key Popular Women Writers Postgraduate Paper prize.Twitter: @isobelsigleyRoundtable Title: “Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom”: Teaching Interventions on Caribbean AuthorsPanelists: Kira Braham, Heidi Kaufman, Breanna Simpson, and Indu OhriModerator: Adrian WisnickiRoundtable DescriptionHow might Victorian Studies be destructured and reimagined to address its historical racial biases and establish a sustained intimacy with Critical Race, Critical Ethnic, Postcolonial, Feminist, Queer, and Disability Studies? In 2020, a group of scholars from across the United States began Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom (), a digital humanities project that provides open access to teaching materials that model antiracist pedagogy. The participants in this roundtable represent one small part of this larger effort. As the Caribbean Studies working group, we are collaborating to create model teaching pathways, sample assignments, and other materials to serve as resources for instructors who want to integrate more Caribbean authors and transimperial perspectives into their syllabi.This roundtable will discuss our current work creating teaching plans and materials for Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857) and similar work we will perform this spring around The History of Mary Prince (1831). As popular readings with major socio-political importance in the context of the transatlantic slave trade and the Crimean War, these two works have the potential to play a central role in students’ understanding of the nineteenth century. We will share the ongoing process of collectively creating lesson plans that address the complexities of nineteenth-century constructions of race and gender and encourage intersectional analysis. We will also discuss how we mobilize commitments to interdisciplinarity and strategic presentism to link these nineteenth-century texts to contemporary issues, from structural disparities in healthcare to debates about public memorialization. This roundtable hopes to address scholars, instructors, and groups looking to engage in similar efforts to “undiscipline” Victorian Studies. In a 30-minute video of our roundtable, we will discuss our method of creating these lesson plans and answer questions from audience members who have watched it during the live conference Q+A.BiographyBreanna Simpson is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at York University in Toronto. Her dissertation, “In Pursuit of Cupid’s Daughter: The Construction and Control of Desire in Ancient and Victorian Narratives,” interrogates the concept of desire by examining forms and practices of reception, power, subjectivity, and identity.‘Ransoming childish sufferers from pain”: The Late-Victorian Campaign for Child Welfare’Hayley SmithOn 17 August 1895, an appeal was made by Thomas Anstey Guthrie to the readers of Punch: or, the London Charivari in a contribution called ‘The Country of Cockaigne’: a piece presenting a monologue by eight year old Jimmy as he speaks to his friend, Florrie, in an impoverished back street in London. Recalling a pleasant experience provided by the Children’s Country Holiday Fund, a charitable organisation founded in 1884 by Reverend Samuel Barnett and his wife Henrietta, Jimmy describes his joy at the possibility of returning to the blissful countryside for a holiday with his warm and hospitable previous hosts. The Children’s Country Holiday Fund sought to transport children from London’s slums to the seaside for a holiday in the fresh air and?country surroundings, however, their funding depended upon public donations. Consequently, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Jimmy returns to Florrie the following day to deliver the bad news: his application has been rejected on account of the charity’s limited funds. In a plea to the readers of Punch, Guthrie requests that donations should be made to the charity so that they can provide many more suffering children with an opportunity to (temporarily) escape the destitute and dangerous streets of London. Comparing Jimmy’s intended holiday destination to the country of Cockaigne, a medieval and mythological utopia of luxury, comfort, and pleasure in which the harsh difficulties of peasant life no longer pose a threat, Guthrie draws attention to the importance of assisting working-class children marginalised by society as a result of their underprivileged background. This paper will, therefore, explore the work of the Children’s Country Holiday Fund as it strove to offer temporary sanctuaries to socially excluded and disadvantaged Victorian children, whilst simultaneously addressingGuthrie’s Dickensian investment in the contemporary campaign for child welfare.BiographyHayley Smith is a first-year PhD candidate at Canterbury Christ Church University. Her research focuses upon a neglected Victorian writer, Thomas Anstey Guthrie (pseudonym “F. Anstey”). Her research interests include understudied authors and texts from the long nineteenth century, Victorian women writers, Sensation literature, Gothic fiction, and contemporary horror.Twitter: @HayleySmith001‘“No one but an entomologist would understand quite what he felt”: Eccentric Entomologists and Insect-Collecting Kinships in Arthur Conan Doyle and H. G. Wells’ Mystery Fiction’Alyce SoulodreDuring the Victorian period, collecting and classifying insects emerged as a popular practice and became recognised as a legitimate science, though many entomologists were still viewed as hobbyists. I will explore often overlooked late-Victorian insect-collectors and their specimens in H.G. Wells’ “The Moth” (1895), Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Beetle-Hunter” (1898), and the more well-known Stapleton in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901-1902). In these texts, the entomologist is often depicted as eccentric or mad, yet passionate about their subjects, and the habit of collecting reinforces male kinship bonds. Entomological expertise affirms ties between English gentlemen, many of whom engage in the trade of insects at home and abroad.As Wells’ protagonist Hapley suggests, only an entomologist can understand the feelings of another on their subject (308), a sentiment agreed upon by the other collector figures in these texts. Hapley’s intense rivalry with fellow entomologist Pawkins is compounded when Pawkins dies and Hapley begins to be haunted by a new species of moth that he then believes is Pawkins himself. Meanwhile, the eponymous character of “The Beetle-Hunter” will only speak with others who share his interest in collecting insects (in between his bouts of murderous mania). In both stories, there is a tension between rational experts and those who are driven or already mad, reinforcing depictions of entomologists as eccentric. Additionally, Stapleton uses his collecting habit as an excuse to navigate the Moor where he has hidden the eponymous Hound, and the language of collecting shifts to Holmes who must pin him down in the Baker Street collection (183). I will explore these characters’ turns from eccentricity to madness or criminality, how their expertise is used as a form of bonding to reinforce English imperial masculinity, and how entomology was perceived and deployed as an emerging discipline in these texts.Works CitedDoyle, Arthur Conan. “The Beetle-Hunter.” Tales of Terror and Mystery, Doubleday, 1977, pp. 129-145.---. The Hound of the Baskervilles, edited by Francis O’Gorman, Broadview P, 2006.Wells, H.G. “The Moth.” The Complete Short Stories of H.G. Wells, Ernest Benn Ltd., 1966, pp. 302-312.BiographyAlyce Soulodre is a PhD Candidate at Queen’s University, Ontario. Her thesis explores depictions of insects and entomologists in Victorian fiction, particularly in late nineteenth-century horror and mystery literature. She is interested in how creepy crawlies are portrayed as uncanny or terrifying in the context of psychological discourses, empire, and masculinity.‘Depictions of Femininity in Nineteenth-Century Stage Melodrama’Johanna SteinerThe novel is generally perceived to be the genre of the nineteenth century, whereas poetry and drama tend to be dismissed as negligible. However, drama in particular was prolific during that era, which is marked by the rise of a new popular genre: melodrama. Melodrama drew masses of people to the ever-increasing number of theatres, thus forming an early kind of mass medium that was targeted at all strata of society, though it came to be associated mainly with the working and lower-middle classes. The stories portrayed on stage were usually produced rapidly: They were drawn from penny dreadfuls, murder cases (e.g. the Maria Marten case), current affairs (e.g. battles of the Napoleonic or, later, the Crimean Wars), but most significantly from novels, there being no copyright law in place. Thus, almost every major Victorian classic was dramatised, its plot shortened, its character constellation simplified, entire storylines changed. Nonetheless, these stage adaptations guaranteed an even wider dissemination and popularisation of e.g. Dickens’s, Gaskell’s, Braddon’s, Wood’s, and Hardy’s plots and characters, irrespective of how they usually irked the writers of the original novels. Indeed, melodrama was scoffed at and written off as the lesser of the two genres, and this exclusion of one of the most popular genres of the era is reflected in the fact that, to this day, many of these plays are only accessible as manuscripts in archives. Close analysis of them reveals interesting hidden subtexts in the novels and opens up new perspectives of social issues of the time. Most strikingly, despite its perceived conservatism, melodrama drew special attention to the female experience, capitalising on issues such as a woman’s role as daughter and/or wife, the social unit of the family, orphanhood, and prostitution. In so doing, melodrama can give us fascinating new insights into constructions of gender in the Victorian Age.BibliographyBrooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination. London [et al.]: Yale University Press, 1976.Eltis, Sos. Acts of Desire. Women and Sex on Stage, 1800-1930. Oxford: OUP, 2013.T?nnies, Merle. (En-)Gendering a Popular Theatrical Genre: The Roles of Women in c19 British Melodrama. Heidelberg: Winter, 2014.Williams, Carolyn (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama. Cambridge: CUP, 2018.BiographyI did my MA in English and the Creative Industries at Salzburg University (Austria), where I’ve been a lecturer for five years now. I’m doing my PhD on stage adaptations of Victorian classics, and I’ve been to various archives in the UK: the BL, the V&A performance archive, and the Pettingell Collection (University of Kent) – and I hope to be back soon.‘Floral favourites: bloom choices in the Victorian Gothic’Jemma StewartThe publishing phenomenon of the language of flowers anthologies spanned the breadth of the nineteenth century. As a cultural fad and popular form allied to the gift annual, the language of flowers books were well-known and prolific. The floriography of the flower 'vocabularies' became diffused and disseminated within the cultural imagination, yet, the anthologies were marketed primarily at a female, middle-class, 'genteel' readership, with the broad aim of advancing the romantic endeavours of the reader. This paper will discuss occurrences of floral symbolism within the Gothic, another popular cultural form, to uncover just how semiotic floral meanings and interpretations became throughout the long nineteenth century. Consider the function of the cypress, the myrtle and the lily in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s ‘A Revelation’ (1888), the incantatory echo of lavender, camphor and narcissus in Edith Nesbit’s ‘From the Dead’ (1892), or, the representation of ivy, thyme, milkwort, cowslips and hawthorn in W.H. Hudson’s ‘An Old Thorn’ (1911). The paper will make suggestions about wider interpretations of Gothic texts based on the inclusions and exclusions of flora. Which flowers are represented in the Victorian Gothic, and do their meanings and significance adhere to the popular codes established by the language of flowers, or, do traditional meanings become subverted or extended to complement the dark tone of the Gothic narrative??Which flowers appear in the Gothic, and do not appear in the language of flowers? And vice versa? Why might this be? If the language of flowers was associated primarily with women, does floriography also exist in Gothic fictions composed by male authors? Through a consideration of select examples of flowers, Gothic fictions and flower anthologies, this paper will aim to shed light on the significance of floral symbolism in nineteenth-century Gothic fiction.BiographyI am currently a part-time PhD student at Birkbeck College, University of London, where I also completed my MA in Victorian Studies in 2016. My thesis considers the language of flowers, floriography and the Victorian Gothic. Previous publications include ‘“She shook her heavy tresses, and their perfume filled the place”: the seductive fragrance of “that awful sorceress”: H. Rider Haggard's femme fatale, Ayesha’, Gothic Studies, 22: 3 (2020), 246-265 and ‘Blooming Marvel: The Garlic Flower in Bram Stoker's Hermeneutic Garden’, Gothic Studies, 20: 1-2 (2018), 326-345.‘The Vampire That Time Forgot: Inclusion/Exclusion of Florence Marryat and The Blood of the Vampire (1897) in Vampire Studies’Rachel StewartIn the literary history of the vampire, 1897 is a much-celebrated year, due to the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a novel that would forever taint the creature’s reputation and the works that would come after it—for better or for worse. Its popularity and influence means that no good vampire scholar could, or should, rip it out of the canon of vampire literature. Later that same year, another vampire novel, The Blood of the Vampire by Florence Marryat, was published and similarly found exceptional worldwide popularity while also being an important early example of a different type of vampire, the spiritual vampire. The spiritual vampire widely refers to vampires that do not suck blood, and Marryat is an essential part of that history. Many years later, however, Bram Stoker is a household name, whereas Florence Marryat is a name widely known only in some Victorianist circles. While renewed interest in Marryat within Victorian studies more broadly has become evident within the past decade and The Blood of the Vampire is her most popular work amongst contemporary scholars, we must also consider how this novel specifically is situated within the history of vampire literature as well. Stoker is considered an important part of both overall Victorian literary history and the literary tradition of the vampire, and Marryat deserves that same treatment. In this paper, I aim to both participate in the ongoing effort to include Marryat as a significant figure in the study of Victorian popular fiction as well as trace the ways in which The Blood of the Vampire, through its obsession with lineage in various forms and engagement with key vampire literature conventions, consciously situates itself in the burgeoning vampire literary tradition of its present, only to be excluded in the future.BiographyRachel Stewart is a PhD student at The Ohio State University, studying Victorian popular fiction/culture. She is interested in monstrous figures and the Gothic, especially vampires. Her current work involves tracing the history of the spiritual vampire in order to develop a “vampire lens” and recovering understudied Victorian vampire texts.‘Inclusion and tolerance in Emma Orczy’s The Emperor’s Candlesticks’Agnes Strickland-PajtokThe Emperor’s Candlesticks, Emma Orczy’s first novel, was published in 1899. On one level it is a typical fin-de-siècle piece displaying stereotypical traits, yet, after closer examination, it also signals intriguing social-cultural phenomena, which deserve attention. Re-reading the novel from the perspective of inclusion, three thematic clusters can be discovered. The inclusion of the immigrant: Orczy arrived into Britain at the age of fifteen, without speaking the language. This talk aims to scrutinise the circumstances which enabled the success of a Central-European Baroness in the British popular culture scene. The inclusion of women: the central female characters, Maria Stefanowna and Madame Demidoff are from very different social backgrounds, one of them represents an Angel in House character while the other is a manifestation of New Women, yet, the behavioural patterns they display show similarity. They are both independent, confident female characters, who – unlike Marguerite Blakney, the heroine of Orczy’s iconic The Scarlet Pimpernel – manage to preserve their integrity throughout the entire novel. The inclusion of ideological diversity: Baroness Orczy is often considered to be the unequivocal mouthpiece of European aristocracy, which belief is underscored by her Scarlet Pimpernel series. However, by observing her additional works, a more nuanced social view can be delineated. In this novel, for instance, a nihilist group is in the centre of the events, who are not portrayed without criticism, but a certain level of acceptance towards them can be traced. Even though this talk is going to focus on The Emperors Candlesticks, it also aims to tackle whether popular culture can become more than mere entertainment, and emerge a sphere of “interpretation and evaluation and the space to be excited, frightened, enthralled” (Hermes, Re-reading Popular Culture, 2005, p. 10).BiographyAgnes Strickland-Pajtok PhD, is an assistant professor at Eszterha?zy Ka?roly University, Hungary. Her main fields of interest include the analysis of gender in popular culture; intercultural studies – with emphasis on the representation of immigrants and minorities in various media and cultural products. Currently, she is a visiting researcher at Oxford Brookes University.‘“I would prefer a sandwich to the biscuit”: Pregnancy and Childbirth in Ellen Wood’s Lord Oakburn’s Daughters’Mary Elizabeth Leighton & Lisa SurridgeJanice Allan remarks that Ellen Wood’s Lord Oakburn’s Daughters (1864) includes “an unusually frank representation of pregnancy.” Indeed. Although many Victorian writers excluded depictions of pregnancy and childbirth, Wood depicted gestation and childbirth with vivid detail, in both mimesis and what we term quasi-diegesis.We begin by discussing the novel’s “unusually frank” labour scene. Wood cast off the restraint of domestic fiction that occluded women’s experience of childbirth, vividly rendering the bodily sensations of labour that other writers excluded from narrative. In Ruth (1853), for example, Elizabeth Gaskell portrayed her protagonist’s extramarital relationship but tactfully presented her giving birth in an ellipsis between paragraphs. Wood has no such compunctions, depicting Mrs. Clare’s hunger (“I would prefer a sandwich to the biscuit”) as well as her pregnant figure (“I took you for a young unmarried lady,” says the landlady as she descends from a carriage) and her emotional turmoil during early labour (“I am in great pain.... Do you think I shall die?”). An 1863 review noted that the sensation novel as a genre exhibited an “impatience of old restraint,” and clearly Wood’s sensationalism included an unusual explicitness about the body in labour.Next, we examine the novel’s depiction of childbirth involving characters peripheral to the main plot. Mrs. Clare’s mysterious death (which turns out to be murder, not postpartum mortality) is juxtaposed against casual references to childbirth’s everyday nature: doctors and midwives discuss who is expecting or delivering, which babies are expected to live or die. Childbirth, Wood intimates, is quotidian and—contrary to the views of contemporary reviewers—should be included in narrative. Not until the end of the nineteenth century, with novels such as Somerset Maugham’s Liza of Lambeth (1897), would other novelists take up this challenge of narrativizing labour and delivery.BiographyDrs.?Leighton and?Surridge?(University of Victoria)?co-edited?The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Prose 1832-1901?and?Victorian Review?(2006-16),?co-wrote?The Plot Thickens: Illustrated Victorian Serial Fiction from Dickens to Du Maurier?(2019),?and co-published?numerous?book?chapters and articles.?Their new project is?Great Expectations: Pregnancy in Victorian Fiction.Twitter: @c19_pregnancy‘Gentlemen and Players in Crime, Cricket, and the Literary Marketplace: E.W. Hornung’s Raffles and the Importance of Being Amateur’Kayley ThomasIn Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman (1899), E.W. Hornung introduces a criminal as his hero. In identifying him specifically as an amateur cracksman, Hornung poses that Raffles steals for the very pleasure of stealing – crime for crime’s own sake. Notably, Raffles is doubly amateur – to the public, he is an amateur cricket player. In cricket, an amateur is a gentleman; playing professionally for pay was seen as sullying the game. Although amateur and professional teams played against one another, professionals were clearly marked as socially inferior. The Gentlemen were artists; the Players, laborers. In his crime and cricket, Hornung carefully presents Raffles as a hybrid rather than a true amateur, however.Raffles is a gentleman by day and a thief by night who cannot maintain either enterprise without the other: his crimes fund his expensive lifestyle, and his society connections keep him from suspicion and supply him with marks. In this double existence, he can serve for readers as a fantasy of class mobility and class revenge alike, as he walks among and steals from the upper classes. At the same time, Raffles might be read as a representation of popular crime fiction writers like Hornung, trying to negotiate literary value for the middle-class periodical writing they plied as their trade – and other highbrow authors looked down upon. Raffles’s crimes are consistently framed in the stories as works of art, admirable for their skill and creativity. I argue that in creating a criminal hero who commits crime for art’s sake, Hornung has offered a fantasy for reader and writer alike – that the reader has the potential for class mobility, and that the writer has the capacity to earn cultural capital. In Raffles, Hornung offers a distinctly turn-of-the-century fantasy of transgressing social boundaries and achieving economic, social, and aesthetic value.BiographyKayley Thomas is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Florida, where she studies Victorian popular fiction authors, readers, and publishing practices. This paper draws upon work from her dissertation, which investigates the complex role of crime fiction in the 1890s literary marketplace.Twitter: @kayleythomas‘The Count in Comics: Adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in Comics and Comic Art’Michael A. TorregrossaBram Stoker’s Dracula is among the most adapted texts of Victorian literature with creative artists, especially those in the United States, producing versions of the story for every conceivable medium. Scholarship on these adaptations has proliferated in recent decades as the academy has become more welcoming of popular culture, and studies of variants of Dracula in drama, fiction, film, and television programming now abound in articles, books, essay collections, and theses and dissertations. However, the comics, an extremely active medium for adaptation, remain largely ignored by scholars of the novel, despite the existence—according to a recent search of the Grand Comics Database—of nearly eight thousand examples of Dracula-inspired comics and graphic novels (of these, over four thousand were produced for American readers). The full depth of the corpus is no doubt much richer when one starts to take into account cartoons and comic strips not readily indexed by sites like the GCD.While it is true that enthusiasts of Count Dracula have long embraced the comics medium and offered some attempts at describing this rich corpus, there has been, to date, no sustained academic inquiry into the material, an omission within Dracula Studies that should not persist. Previous discussions and catalogues of Dracula-based comics, tools like the Grand Comics Database and the Lone Star Comics website, and online repositories like Comic Book Plus and comiXology now allow us to map out a more complete history of the Count’s career in the comics, and it is time to consider a more systematic approach to these works. To accomplish this goal, this study will analyze the general trends in adaptions of Dracula and, using notable examples from the corpus, classify them as retellings, linked narratives (such as a prequel or sequel), and recastings. Such formulations will allow the academic community to better access these texts and begin to use them more profitably in research and teaching.BiographyMichael A. Torregrossa graduated from the Medieval Studies program at the University of Connecticut (Storrs) and now works as an adjunct instructor in English in both Rhode Island and Massachusetts. He also serves as Monsters and the Monstrous Area Chair for the Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association. Michael’s research focuses on the adaptation of literary texts by creators of comics and comics art.‘Communal Space and Spectacle in A Child of the Jago and The Wire’Anita TurlingtonIn both Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago (1896), and David Simon’s HBO television series The Wire, which ran for five seasons between 2002 and 2008, the urban poor protagonists inhabit physical spaces and cultures that are designed to isolate and confine them to a circumscribed dystopian culture. The slums of East London and West Baltimore are geographic spaces subject to social and economic forces that define them as dangerous, subversive, and liminal dystopias. Both the late Victorian novel and the contemporary American television series offer narratives that proceed from the writer’s impulse to portray oppression, suffering, and economic injustice while indicting the white middle class audience for whom the work is intended. Morrison and Simon depict complex, multi-layered cultures with clearly marked hierarchies, cultural codes, technologies, industries, and shared languages.However, both narratives fail to enact lasting change, instead underscoring the intractability of extreme poverty and the social and economic forces that perpetuate it. And both texts reveal the public nature of poverty. Robbed of the middle class privilege of privacy, the desperately poor characters in both texts inhabit built environments that have decayed and degraded, forcing them outdoors, into contested public spaces wherein much of the important action of the two texts take place. I argue that both texts use open, communal spaces as places wherein the urban poor enact both violent spectacle and criminal enterprise for the consumption of a privileged middle class audience or reader, reinforcing their role as “projects” for a larger bourgeois culture.BiographyDr. Anita Turlington is Associate Professor of English at the University of North Georgia, where she teaches undergraduate English majors and directs the Honours Program for the Gainesville campus.‘Criticism and Prejudice: The Issue of Canonicity and Neo-Victorian Works’Jana ValováThe issue of literary canonicity is usually approached through two opposing positions which are either for or against the canon being opened to a greater variety of texts. Harold Bloom in his work The Western Canon strongly argues against such opening as in his opinion this would lead to the canon being destroyed. This selectivity also leads to the exclusion of historical novels which are often described as historically inaccurate works lacking originality and serving only the purpose of escapism. This contempt, however, leads to discrediting of an enormous genre which contains works that deserve further consideration.While historical novels often fail to avoid this prejudice, it seems that neo-Victorian works attempt to differentiate themselves from the former. Arguably, this could be viewed as an effort to avoid some of the criticism and also to prove that works that revisit the past do not chiefly romanticize it. Currently, neo-Victorian works have the advantage of being at the forefront of discussion. Therefore, it is crucial to use this opportunity to look at their strengths and weaknesses and re-evaluate whether the concept of canonicity is something these works can benefit from, or whether such concept is to be refused.The presentation uses John Fowles’s well-known neo-Victorian novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem as illustrative examples of the issues connected to canonicity and the criticism of works that take place in the past. The French Lieutenant?s Woman is one of the first examples of the neo-Victorian genre and therefore often regarded as canonical. Ackroyd?s novel also occupies a notable place in neo-Victorian discourse and both works amply manage to challenge the criticism by surpassing the limiting and often prejudiced description of the historical/neo-Victorian genre.BiographyJana Valová is a first year PhD student at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. Her doctoral research focuses on ostracized and overlooked characters in neo-Victorian works and builds upon the existing research from her master’s diploma thesis which analysed influential neo-Victorian novels. ‘“You might say, sir … that they all were Chartists”: Popular Theatre and Radical Politics in the 1830s and 1840s’Greg VargoIn the 1830s and 1840s, an unprecedented collaboration emerged between political radicalism and popular theatre as labour unions, the Chartists, and other groups hosted theatrical benefits at many of London’s most important stage venues as a way to reach new constituencies and raise money for strike funds, political prisoners and their families, and other organisational expenses. This paper will look at a series of benefit nights for the Dorchester Labourers, a group of agricultural workers sentenced in 1834 to penal transportation for their efforts to form a union, to see what such collaboration tells us about popular stage genres, theatre as an institution, and the theatrical nature of radical politics.BiographyGregory Vargo is Assistant Professor of English at New York University. His research focuses on the literary and cultural milieu of nineteenth-century British protest movements and the interplay between politics, periodical culture, the novel and theater. His first book, An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel (Cambridge UP, 2018), won the 2019 North American Victorian Studies Association’s award for best book of the year in Victorian Studies. It suggests that underground newspapers affiliated with radical movements fostered an experimental literary culture, which stretched the contours of well-known Victorian genres, including the Bildungsroman, melodrama, and social-problem fiction. He has recently edited Chartist Drama (Manchester UP, 2020), a collection of four plays written or performed by members of the working-class movement for social and political rights known as Chartism. A new project focuses on anti-imperialism in nineteenth-century popular culture (across such media as penny novels and stage melodrama) as well as in radical politics.‘Keys to the Ghostly: Domestic Servants, Nannies and Landladies in the Supernatural Fiction of Florence Marryat’Emily VincentFar from serving in the shadows, the nannies, servants and landladies of Florence Marryat’s supernatural fiction work hard to transcend the expected exclusionary boundaries of their professions. In several of Marryat’s critically undervalued spectral narratives of the fin de siècle, including ‘The Invisible Tenants of Rushmere’, ‘Little White Souls’ and ‘“Sent to his Death!”’, Marryat’s domestic workforce have privileged access to supernatural spaces. This access leaves servants driving the narratives’ ghostly activities and straddling the divide between the living and the dead. My paper will use spatial frameworks, including Roger Luckhurst’s ‘Corridor Gothic’, to examine how Marryat’s servants mimic spectres when traversing liminal spaces – across corridors, staircases and passageways – with unannounced arrivals and vanishings, but interact with domestic architecture in a tellingly human manner. Crucially, they hold the keys to the doors that keep ghosts out. Their stealth and adeptness at navigating the haunted domestic space, alongside their attuned supernatural hearing, places them on the frontline of ghostly activity, ensuring they remain literally one step ahead of their employers. Marryat’s servants are both compulsive listeners and gossipers; they acquire, preserve and expose supernatural secrets to destabilise conventional master/servant dichotomies in surprisingly bold demonstrations of agency. Her nannies’ existence within, and sustained access to, child-centric spaces make them the first point of contact with ghostly threats to mother and infant. Marryat’s landladies possess significant agency over their tenants who experiment with the supernatural and, in response, the landladies use hauntings to reinforce their domestic authority: they hold (and withhold) historic information about ghosts and judiciously lend their rooms to facilitate ghost-seeing. As invasive, overbearing, and uninvited as the landladies are, Marryat places them at the centre of haunted spaces to act as authoritative bridges between the historic dead and the uninitiated living.BiographyEmily Vincent is a PhD researcher in English at the University of Birmingham and co-founder of Gothica, an interdisciplinary reading group. Her thesis examines how child loss was confronted in the supernatural works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Florence Marryat and Margaret Oliphant by focusing on spiritualism, maternity and domestic architecture.Twitter: @Emily__Vincent‘Excluding Household Hazards: How to Keep Home Safe in Victorian Print’Tamara S. WagnerThis paper explores the representation of household hazards in Victorian print. Home, in accordance with the domestic ideologies of the time, promised a safe space from which the Victorians strove to exclude risk. Domestic accidents, however, upend the concept of its intrinsic safety, and infectious illnesses demonstrate the infiltration of danger into the most sheltered spaces. A close look at the home as a place of accidents, infection, quarantine, or mismanaged care in popular fiction prompts a salutary recalibration of how we think of the idealisation of well-maintained, safe households in Victorian culture. Drawing on a range of material, this analysis re-evaluates the representation of domestic labour in the context of shifting concepts of infection as well as of everyday risk. The explosions and epidemics in Charlotte Yonge’s novels then exemplify the flexible functions of infectious diseases and domestic accidents in fiction. In Scenes and Characters (1847), an unexpected explosion might facilitate a demonstration of domestic heroism that is linked to imperialist strategies, but as part of a cautionary tale about taking domestic labour too lightly, it also literalises the failure of an experiment in household management. The Clever Woman of the Family (1865), published at the height of literary sensationalism, reworks the juxtaposition of domestic and overseas explosions with an anti-sensational emphasis on long-term repercussions, while connecting them to a mismanaged epidemic that simultaneously symbolises moral corruption or infection. In nineteenth-century narratives, illnesses and accidents frequently serve to make a moral point or attain a symbolic function, even as they feature as everyday occurrences. Yonge self-consciously addresses this twofold narrative potential by pairing practical advice with explicit references to domestic dangers that elevate household work, but which simultaneously depict the home as unsafe.BiographyTamara S. Wagner is Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She has widely published on Victorian popular fiction, domesticity, and settler colonialism. Wagner’s latest book is entitled The Victorian Baby in Print: Infancy, Infant Care, and Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture (Oxford, 2020). ‘Echoes of Exclusion: Sounding the Outcast Child in the Works of Rosamund Marriott Watson’Sarah WegenerThis paper looks at the poetic depiction of the child cast beyond the threshold of the Victorian home as a liminal situation knowable only by sound whilst remaining obscured from cultural sight. Victorian childhood, much like motherhood, is a condition of idealized spatial interiority, its limits firmly bound by the domestic doorstep of the nursery (see Flanders 2006). The threshold, as the ideological passage from innocence to maturity, from nurturing care to orphaned desertion, then, can be made out as a critical and unidirectional space of transition. While the victimized child is a frequent preoccupation in Victorian fiction (Berry 1999), less has been said about the cast-out child in Victorian poetry. Victorian women poets, this paper upholds, tend to employ the threshold to portray the radically heterotopic and unfathomable space of the excluded child.This paper aims to show this by a case study of two poems by Rosamund Marriott Watson, suggesting 1) that the excluded child is represented primarily by sound and 2) that this affective opacity makes the home an impenetrable and exclusive site. The poem "The Open Door," in repeating the sounds of weeping for entry, creates an unnerving resonance of abandonment. In "The Child Alone," darkened alleys cloak tapping firsts and trapsing feet to the parental speaker inside. The home, as the ideological safe-haven of childhood, becomes a place of crisis and blocked passages. The door, in both poems, marks the spatial and sensory boundary of the speaker, barring the sight on the cast-out child. The main premise of this paper is that these poems disclose an otherwise censored state of childhood displacement and liminality by creating an echo of exclusion.BiographySarah Wegener is currently a PhD candidate and has been a teaching fellow at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany since 2018. Her research focuses on the representation of reproduction, maternity and birth in the poetry of female writers of the Victorian period.‘Arthur Morrison’s Mean Streets: Mapping and Linguistic Netherworlds in Slum Fiction’Garth Wenman-JamesThis paper interrogates Arthur Morrison’s Tales of Mean Streets (1894) to identify how it presents the slum space in relation to mapping and a linguistic representation of the poor. I argue that Morrison’s collection of short stories, each set in the poorer streets of London’s East End, aims to satisfy its reader’s desires to go ‘slumming’. As Seth Koven (2004) describes, slumming is a ‘fashionable’ leisure pursuit in the which the middle- and upper-classes garner pleasure from gazing at the poor (p. 1). Morrison caters to this desire for slumming through Tales of Mean Streets, enabling readers to be transported to the slums from the comfort of their homes.This paper also considers the role that fin-de-siècle philanthropic discourses play in Morrison’s Mean Streets; the work of philanthropists such as Charles Booth and Octavia Hill aim to map and reveal the spatial relations underpinning the slums in order to form solutions to poverty. I argue that Morrison’s texts engage with the growing importance of mapping at the turn of the century while also affirming what Michel Foucault (1979) would later define as a ‘raison d’état’ (p. 20). I ultimately argue that mapmaking and slumming come together in Morrison’s visualisation of the slum space to form what I term as a ‘linguistic netherworld’: the slums of London’s East End are mapped throughout his fiction as an other-worldly space in which speech and language are distorted, disrupted and subverted.BiographyGarth Wenman-James is a AHRC funded third-year PhD candidate at the University of Surrey. His current research project, provisionally entitled Poverty Porn in Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Spectacle, Space, Surveillance, and the Victorian Imagination, interrogates the representation of the slums and the poor in the works of several authors.Twitter: @GWenmanJamesRoundtable Title: “Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom”: Teaching Interventions on Caribbean AuthorsPanelists: Kira Braham, Heidi Kaufman, Breanna Simpson, and Indu OhriModerator: Adrian WisnickiRoundtable DescriptionHow might Victorian Studies be destructured and reimagined to address its historical racial biases and establish a sustained intimacy with Critical Race, Critical Ethnic, Postcolonial, Feminist, Queer, and Disability Studies? In 2020, a group of scholars from across the United States began Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom (), a digital humanities project that provides open access to teaching materials that model antiracist pedagogy. The participants in this roundtable represent one small part of this larger effort. As the Caribbean Studies working group, we are collaborating to create model teaching pathways, sample assignments, and other materials to serve as resources for instructors who want to integrate more Caribbean authors and transimperial perspectives into their syllabi.This roundtable will discuss our current work creating teaching plans and materials for Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857) and similar work we will perform this spring around The History of Mary Prince (1831). As popular readings with major socio-political importance in the context of the transatlantic slave trade and the Crimean War, these two works have the potential to play a central role in students’ understanding of the nineteenth century. We will share the ongoing process of collectively creating lesson plans that address the complexities of nineteenth-century constructions of race and gender and encourage intersectional analysis. We will also discuss how we mobilize commitments to interdisciplinarity and strategic presentism to link these nineteenth-century texts to contemporary issues, from structural disparities in healthcare to debates about public memorialization. This roundtable hopes to address scholars, instructors, and groups looking to engage in similar efforts to “undiscipline” Victorian Studies. In a 30-minute video of our roundtable, we will discuss our method of creating these lesson plans and answer questions from audience members who have watched it during the live conference Q+A.BiographyAdrian S. Wisnicki (Associate Professor of English, University of Nebraska-Lincoln) leads One More Voice, a digital humanities initiative, that seeks to recover non-European contributions from nineteenth-century British imperial and colonial archives, and is a co-organizer of Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom, a project that reimagines how to teach Victorian Studies through a positive, race-conscious lens. ................
................
In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.
To fulfill the demand for quickly locating and searching documents.
It is intelligent file search solution for home and business.
Related download
- ap test prep information mccarney classroom overview
- new books rnib see differently
- the international conference of undergraduate
- final report mid atlantic arts
- welcome to white rose etheses online white rose etheses
- mother and child the cia
- victorian popular fiction
- 2016 science and technology engineering curriculum
Related searches
- victorian tea rooms near me
- popular fiction novels
- victorian last names
- most popular fiction books 2020
- victorian language of flowers meanings
- victorian gothic architecture
- latest victorian news
- victorian language of flowers translator
- victorian language of flowers dictionary
- popular fiction authors alphabetically
- most popular current fiction authors
- most popular christian fiction books