DACH Victorianists

+++UPDATE: Registration is now open on Eventbrite . You can also register by emailing the organiser Dr James Aaron Green .+++ 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...

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 ...

Our fellow DACH Victorianists Josephine Knorn and Stefani Brusberg-Kiermeier from Hildesheim would like to cordially invite you to the Victorian Study Day at the Bühler-Campus of Hildesheim University on Friday 28th June 2024 from 10.30-16.30 hrs. Confirmed keynote speakers are Sally Shuttleworth ("Invalid Literature: Robert Louis Stevenson, Sexuality and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde") and Andrew Mangham ("'With No Language but a Cry': Arthur Hallam’s Apoplexy and Tennyson’s Elegy"). If you are interested in taking part, please contact Josephine Knorn . There is no fee. Do let us know asap if you need help in finding accommodation. We look forward to seeing you in Hildesheim!

+++UPDATE: You can now find our Book of Abstract for the upcoming workshop here .+++ With its burgeoning interest in materialism, physiology, and the body, Victorian culture can be seen as anticipating contemporary critical formulations of the affect concept. Modern affect theory, in turn, has developed an analytical language and a conceptual toolkit which provide, in Elisha Cohn’s words, a “provocative critical vocabulary and approach for Victorian studies.” Whereas the “affective turn” has prompted research in various fields within the humanities and social sciences, Victorianists have only recently begun to explore the potential of affect for the study of nineteenth-century literature and culture. As a series of important articles, book chapters, and monographs by Rachel Ablow, Audrey Jaffe, Tara MacDonald, and others demonstrate, however, affect is emerging as one of the most exciting subjects in the field. This workshop aims to bring Victorian notions of affect and conte...

Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramée, 1839-1908) was a Victorian celebrity, non-conformist, and literary enfant terrible whose life and work conformed neither to dominant literary, cultural, or gendered conventions of the nineteenth century, nor neatly affirms our present-day expectations of Victorian literature. She was an internationally read, self-supporting writer, wholly uninterested in realism or the domestic sphere and sceptical of the New Woman, even as she lived alone, condemned marriage, or wrote happy divorcées. She pioneered the aesthetic novel and the desert adventure, synthesised sensation fiction, French romance, and social satire, mastered the Italian novel, and influenced the emerging Decadent movement. Her literary networks included Robert Browning, Richard Burton, Wilkie Collins, Marie Corelli, Oscar Wilde, and Max Beerbohm, and she drew admiration from John Ruskin, Henry James, and Vernon Lee. Ouida shocked and delighted her audiences with her dandy guardsmen and happy ...

The recent decade has seen a surge in the interest of Decadence studies as a distinct field of enquiry uncomfortably perched at the cusp between late Victorianism and Modernism. In 2019, the editors of the Cambridge Critical Series on Decadence and Literature , Jane Desmarais and David Weir, attest to the temporal elasticity of Decadence studies, claiming that the "study of decadence has been extended well into the twentieth century, and some would argue, […] that the concept has contemporary relevance as well" (1). Indeed, as Kate Hext’s and Alex Murray’s Decadence in the Age of Modernism (2019) finds, Decadence has bled into the following literary periods in a way that prompts the question whether it has ever been truly ‘over’. As a consequence, decadent modes of enquiry prove illuminating in topical 21st-century debates. Similarly pointing to the expansive aftermath of Decadence, Regenia Gagnier has alerted us to its global dimensions and the imperial implications of lite...