By the end of the Victorian era, the ‘decline narrative’ of ageing (Gullette) seemed firmly established in the zeitgeist, whether in fictional accounts that used the aged figure to personify an exhausted century or in the political usage of younger persons as the symbolic vehicle for progress and futurity. But other instances paint a more complex picture: aged characters rejuvenated by ‘youthful’ love plots; medical accounts that emphasise post-menopausal women’s gains in strength and energy; and social commentaries that view the reproductive capacity of youth as a source of national decline rather than salvation. This one-day workshop aims to explore what is gained for Victorian studies by bringing together topics of age and ageing with those of progress and decline. It is especially interested in cases that ‘write against’ the truisms of old-age loss and youthful gain, and ageing-as-decline, to spotlight a more complicated or contingent reality. The wider aim is to recover and re
Dear colleagues, Today, a brief announcement on our own behalf: together with my colleague and fellow DACH Victorianist Anja Hartl, I (Ariane) am co-editing a collection on Textures in Nineteenth-Century Material and Literary Cultures . The volume is under contract for publication in the series 'Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century' (series editor: Pamela Gilbert) at SUNY Press. The book offers a systematic and interdisciplinary exploration of textures in British nineteenth-century material and literary cultures. It introduces texture as an analytical category and critically productive terminology in the field of (new) materialist and literary studies and shows how textural methodologies can reveal the intricate and complex layering of texts and objects in the long nineteenth century. We are currently seeking additional contributions for the following three sections of the volume: I: Literary Culture: Poetics and Aesthetics II: Material Culture: Skin and