New Journal issue - 'Technologies of Fire in Nineteenth-Century British Culture'

19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 25 (2017)

Cultural histories of nineteenth-century Britain have studied the important physical and psychological transformations caused by the industrialization of light. Gaslight, though discovered prior to the nineteenth century, became aligned with the era's narratives of national and industrial progress, an arc that, one might argue, culminated in the growing popularity of electric light at the end of the century. Yet, despite these new technologies of 'artificial light', 'natural' wood and coal fires remained popular in British culture. This issue explores fire as a visual and narrative technology in art, literature, and public displays by examining the ways in which fire evoked competing symbolic values, such as primitivism and modernity, vitality and destruction, intimacy and spectacle. The reading order mixes articles and shorter pieces together to demonstrate the continuities of fire across various sites, including: the domestic fireside, the tallow candle, theatrical conflagrations, Turner's fires, subterranean fire, solar fire, fireworks, funeral pyres, and a coal-ship fire.

• Introduction - Anne Sullivan and Kate Flint
• Animating Flames: Recovering Fire-Gazing as a Moving-Image Technology - Anne Sullivan
• Tallow Candles and Meaty Air in Bleak House - Anna Henchman
• Fire on Stage - Nicholas Daly
• Power, Creativity, and Destruction in Turner's Fires - Leo Costello
• Visions of Volcanoes - David M. Pyle
• Dirty Fires: Cosmic Pollution and the Solar Storm of 1859 - Kate Neilsen
• Fireworks - Kate Flint
• Victorian Imag(in)ing of the Pagan Pyre: Frank Dicksee's Funeral of a Viking - Nancy Rose Marshall
• While the World Burns: Joseph Conrad and the Delayed Decoding of Catastrophe - Jesse Oak Taylor
• Afterword - Fire - Isobel Armstrong

Read or download the articles here. Also see 19's Facebook page for updates.

Call for articles - 'The "Heart" and "Science" of Wilkie Collins and Contemporaries'

Deadline for Abstracts: 28th February 2017; Deadline for Articles: 31st May 2017

‘“Why can’t I look into your heart, and see what secrets it is keeping from me?”’

The protagonist of Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science (1883), surgeon Ovid de Vere, laments the difficulty in deciphering hidden emotions and secrets. Yet the language suggests his medical background, striking a note with the novel’s supposedly anti-vivisection message and highlighting contemporary debates into the nature of experimental medicine, observation and epistemology. What is the best way of uncovering secrets, and what part does knowledge of the body play in this? Can medical training benefit from a thorough understanding of emotion? And does gender play a part in this? Issues of ‘heart’ and ‘science’ reverberate across Collins’s work, from the Major’s collection of women’s hair in The Law and the Lady (1875) to Ezra Jenning’s solution to the crime of The Moonstone (1868). This conference takes as its focus the proliferation of “heart” and “science” throughout Collins’s work.

We welcome both abstracts and full article submissions on, but not limited to, the following topics:

• Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science (1883) and/or any of Collins’s work
• The Body: As a scientific subject, as a site of emotion, bodily representations, and the body in forensics, news reportage and the home.
• The Victorian origin of disciplines: Collins as an interdisciplinary figure, the divide (or not) of “heart” and “science”, the definition of sensation in literature and/or science.
• Medicine and anatomical science: vivisection, taxidermy, anatomical atlases and the nineteenth-century doctor and/or scientist.
• Psychology and psychiatry: the physicality of mental illness, hysteria, the asylum, treatment and therapeutics.
• Gender: the gendered body, representations of gender, the gendered connotations of “heart” and/or “science”.
• Sensation: As genre, as sense or emotion, as subjective.
• Detection: forensics, interrogation, the body as clue, the science of detection, and crimes of the heart.
• Relationships: Romantic, familial, or otherwise.
• Neo-Victorian Approaches to “Heart” and “Science”
• Work by other contemporary sensation writers

Submissions are not limited to papers on Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science but to “heart” and “science” at work in the full range of Collins’s fiction. The WCJ are also interested in related authors and sensation fiction more broadly, hence papers on authors such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Reade, Charles Dickens, Ellen Wood, Florence Marryat and other sensation writers will also be considered. Interdisciplinary perspectives are welcome.

Email abstracts to jo.parsons@falmouth.ac.uk and V.Burke@pgr.reading.ac.uk by 28th February 2017.

CFP - Humanities special issue on James Joyce, Animals and the Nonhuman

Humanities, an international, scholarly, open access journal, and its Guest Editor, Dr Katherine Ebury (University of Sheffield), are seeking proposals for a Special Issue focused on ‘James Joyce, Animals and the Nonhuman’. The Special Issue is scheduled to appear in September 2017, with a manuscript delivery deadline of June 2017.

While ecocritical approaches to Joyce, in particular in Eco-Joyce (Brazeau and Gladwin) and The Ecology of Finnegans Wake (Lacivita), have recently generated interest in Joyce’s environmental imagination, connections between Joyce and animal studies, or Joyce and the ‘nonhuman turn’, have yet to be explored. In Portrait, Temple is credited with the idea that ‘The most profound sentence ever written…is the sentence at the end of the zoology. Reproduction is the beginning of death’. But although excellent critical work on Joyce and animals has certainly appeared, with perennial interests being Tatters of ‘Proteus’, the Blooms’ cat, Garryowen of ‘Cyclops’, and, of course, cattle disease, a sustained volume or special issue certainly seems necessary. Equally, the voice of the printing press, which, Bloom reminds us in ‘Aeolus’, ‘speaks in its own way. Sllt.’ (7: 174–7) has been heard, but not so far in the sense of the ‘nonhuman turn’ which only emerged in 2012. This Special Issue seeks to offer a space for sustained consideration of how Joyce represents the animal and the nonhuman throughout his works. Contributions that suggest how we might feed Joyce’s example into contemporary conversations about animals and the nonhuman are also sought.

We welcome submissions that interrogate and interpret Joyce’s relation to the world beyond the human and are open to a range of approaches, including theoretical, textual, genetic and historical. We also welcome submissions from both emerging and established scholars.

We seek 250–500 word proposals for original contributions and a 100-word biography (included selected publications) by 31 October 2016; please email both the Guest Editor and the journal, as listed below.

Dr. Katherine Ebury
Guest Editor

• Deadline for proposal submissions: 31st October 2016
• Contact email: k.ebury@sheffield.ac.uk, humanities@mdpi.com

BJHS Special Section - Palaeonarratives and Palaeopractices: Excavating and Interpreting Deep History

Group members might be interested in the (open access) special section of the September 2016 issue of the British Journal for the History of Science, on palaeonarratives and palaeopractices, especially guest editor Amanda Rees's 'Stories of stones and bones: disciplinarity, narrative and practice in British popular prehistory, 1911–1935'.

Victorian Network - Issue on 'The Victorian Brain'

The Summer 2016 issue of Victorian Network, entitled "Victorian Brain" and guest edited by Professor Sally Shuttleworth (University of Oxford), is now available.

CFP - Literature and Science: The State of the Unions

JLS/CONFIGURATIONS “DOUBLE ISSUE”: THE STATE OF THE UNIONS

What are the relations between literature, science and the arts within our field today? This special double issue marks a unique collaboration between the Journal of Literature and Science and Configurations. Across two years – 2017 in the JLS and 2018 in Configurations – we aim to enable scholars of all career-stages to debate the nature of the interdisciplinary relations of our field in short and sharp “position” papers of approximately 2000 words.

We therefore invite contributions that make an intervention in our thinking about the field of literature, science and arts. Potential topics for discussion include, but are not limited to, the following:

1. The meanings of interdisciplinarity in the field
2. The place of the study of literature and science within the academy
3. International variations or international synergies
4. Collaborative work between literature/arts and the scientific community
5. How do we (now) define "literature" in the dyad of literature and science?
6. The relationship between cultural theory and historicism in the field
7. How is literature and science evolving in relation to its own splintering (into animal studies, neuroscience, environmental studies, etc.)?
8. Speculations: what is the future of the field?
9. Reflections: where has the field most profited and where has it gone astray?

Submission information for the first issue:

• Length of contribution: 2000 words
• Deadline: December 16th, 2016
• Send to: Melissa Littlefield (mml@illinois.edu) and Martin Willis (willism8@cardiff.ac.uk)
• Publication: JLS 10.1 in June 2017
• Decisions on inclusion in the first issue by February 2017

NOTE: A further call for contributions for the second issue (Configurations, 2018) will go out in the Summer of 2017. It is to be hoped that the second issue will include, among other topics, reflections on the first set of published papers.

CFP - The Literature of the Anthropocene

Special issue of C21 Literature

The concept of the Anthropocene, deemed by Bruno Latour “the best alternative we have to usher us out of the notion of modernization”, blurs the distinction between human and geological history (Dipesh Chakrabarty). It speaks, too, to contemporary fiction’s concern with the place of humans on the planet, the ways in which they shape - and are shaped by - the natural and technological environments through which they move, and the broader relation between the early twenty-first century moment and ‘deep’ time.

Although the value of the Anthropocene as an official geological epoch is still being considered by the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the term is already widely in use to denote the era in which human beings have become a major geological force with significant socio-political implications. Indeed, “In the Anthropocene, social, cultural and political orders are woven into and co-evolve with techno-natural orders of specific matter and energy flow metabolism at a global level, requiring new concepts and methods in the humanities” (Clive Hamilton, François Gemenne, Christophe Bonneuil).

Taking up Hamilton, Gemenne, and Bonneuil’s conceptual and methodological invitation, this special issue of C21 asks: how does literature respond to this new geological era? Are there specific forms, genres, and techniques which are more appropriate than others to represent the temporal and spatial enormity of the era? And how is criticism addressing the Anthropocene?

Possible topics for articles include, but are not limited to:

• Representations of the Anthropocene in fiction, drama, poetry, and non-fiction;
• Anthropogenic apocalyptic narratives, utopias, and dystopias;
• Genre, form, and the Anthropocene;
• Time, temporality, and history in anthropogenic narratives;
• Space and nature in anthropogenic narratives;
• The Anthropocene and literary criticism (e.g. ecocriticism, Marxism, trauma theory);
• Postcolonial literature, diasporas, and the Anthropocene;
• The representation of race, gender, and class in the Anthropocene;
• The Anthropocene and capital;
• Posthumanism, humanism, and the Anthropocene;
• Literature, science studies, and the Anthropocene.

Please send abstracts (500 words max) to Dr Diletta De Cristofaro (ddcristofaro@harlaxton.ac.uk) by 31st October 2016. Final articles of 6,000-7,000 words will be due by 28th February 2017.

Centaurus special issue - Electricity and imagination

Edited by Koen Vermeir

"Electricity is taken here as a specific subject for 'science and imagination studies', an inter- and multidsciplinary perspective that takes into account the history of science, medicine and technology as well as literature, theatre studies and dance studies, among other disciplines. The envisioned approach is inclusive, and the sciences are not considered to have a privileged perspective on electricity. Indeed, I question common diffusionist models and I plead for more methodological exchange between disciplinary approaches to electricity. In this special issue, electricity is analyzed both as a concept traversing a diversity of contexts and as a phenomenon that was carefully staged. [...] I show that the experience of electricity and the gendered body are common themes of the special issue and that their study is indeed crucial for understanding 19th century electrical imaginaries."

Contents:

• Koen Vermeir: 'Electricity and Imagination: Post-romantic Electrified Experience and the Gendered Body. An Introduction'
• Paul Gilmore: 'John Neal's Lightning Imagination: Electricity against Romantic Organicism'
• Iwan Rhys Morus: 'No Mere Dream: Material Culture and Electrical Imagination in Late Victorian Britain'
• Ulf Otto: 'Enter Electricity: An Allegory's Stage Appearance between Verité and Varieté'
• Sam Halliday: 'Electricity and Homosexuality: from 19th-century American Sexual Health Literature to D.H. Lawrence'

 Full issue available here.

Pynchon Notes now online

The archive of Pynchon Notes, which ran from 1979-2009, is now online here. See further information about the digitisation project here.

Science & Education - special issue on Literature, Science and Science Education

The March 2014 issue of Science & Education can be found here.

CFP - Victorian Literature and Science

 The second issue of Victorian Network, guest edited by Dr Ian Henderson (King’s College London), seeks to showcase new research into the connections between Victorian literature and the sciences.

Since the publication of Gillian Beer’s seminal Darwin’s Plots (1983), the study of Victorian science and literature as interrelated cultural practices has risen to be one of the largest and most dynamic fields within Victorian Studies. We are inviting submissions of no more than 7000 words that investigate the ways in which scientific disciplines, debates, practices and venues shaped the Victorian cultural imagination. A prize of £50 will be awarded to the best paper submitted. We reserve the right to withhold the prize.

Topics might include but are not limited to:
The shared forms, aesthetics and poetics of literary and scientific discourses
Victorian literature and nineteenth-century popular scientific entertainment
Gendered scientific practices in Victorian literature and culture
Science as a form of political / social critique in Victorian literature
Literary criticism and science in the Victorian period
Victorian culture and the imperial sciences
Literary and scientific modes of ordering knowledge
Affect and emotion in Victorian literature and science

We are also inviting postgraduates to present their research to a non-specialist readership by submitting short articles of circa 2000 wordsfor our outreach page, Victorian Wire. The CfP and more details about the outreach project can be found on Victorian Wire. We are offering a prize of £25 to the best short article submitted. We reserve the rightto withhold the prize.

All submissions should conform to MHRA style conventions and the in-house submission guidelines as set out here. The deadline for submissions to our next issue is November 1 2009. Please send submissions to: victoriannetwork@gmail.com

UPDATE - EXTENDED DEADLINE OF DECEMBER 1 2009

Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net - Special Issue

SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND THE SENSES

Edited by Sibylle Erle and Laurie Garrison

We are delighted to announce the release of this special issue of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net available here.

Contributors to the volume include:

• Laurie Garrison and Sibylle Erle, Introduction
• Sibylle Erle, Blake, Colour and the Truchsessian Gallery: Modelling the Mind and Liberatingthe Observer
• Kelly Grovier, 'Paradoxes of the Panoscope': 'Walking' Stewart and the Making of Keats's Ambivalent Imagination
• Laurie Garrison, Imperial Vision in the Arctic: Fleeting Looks and Pleasurable Distractions in Barker's Panorama and Shelley's Frankenstein
• Gavin Budge, The Hero as Seer: Character, Perception and Cultural Health in Carlyle
• Verity Hunt, Raising a Modern Ghost: The Magic Lantern and the Persistence of Wonder in theVictorian Education of the Senses

Journal of Literature and Science - Review Possibilities

The Journal of Literature and Science, a peer-reviewed, electronically available journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature and science, is seeking new reviews for its next issues. The JLS reviews journal articles in the broad field of literature and science or the cultural history of science published within the year from one volume of the journal to the next (so presently from early-2008 to the present). The Journal does not publish book reviews (other journals do a more than adequate job of this already). Articles can be submitted without prior solicitation from the editors, should be 500-750 words in length, in MLA style, and should be submitted with a copy of the journal article. Publication of reviews is at the discretion of the editors. Reviews on articles of interest to Victorian scholars would be particularly welcome.

The Editor-in-Chief, Martin Willis, would be glad to receive reviews by email to mwillis@glam.ac.uk