+++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