DACH Victorianists

Our fellow DACH Victorianists Sarah Wegener and Wolfgang Funk would like to invite you to join the "Victorian Reproductions" workshop that they will host in Mainz on 24 and 25 March 2023 . Attendance is free of charge. The workshop aims to uncover some of the complex textual and cultural relations and representations of reproduction in the Victorian era. Against the background of the surge of medico-scientific tracts on human anatomy and sexuality (Gray’s Anatomy; Geddes and Thomson’s Evolution of Sex; William Acton’s Function and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs; William Buchan’s Advice to Mothers) and in the wake of Darwin’s evolutionary theories in The Origin of the Species, reproduction saw an increase in currency and relevance in Victorian cultural life. In the field of Victorian literature, reproduction holds a particular fascination, since, as John Holmes notes, literature, and poetry especially, can serve as “a documentary source for understanding the significan

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

In a 2015 article for Victorian Literature and Culture, Jesse Oak Taylor famously asked, “Where Is Victorian Ecocriticism?”, pronouncing that “[t]he most striking thing about [...] the field of Victorian ecocriticism is that there is so little of it” (2015, 877). Since then, a slowly but steadily rising number of monographs, edited volumes, and special issues have attempted to not only answer that initial question but also to expand and subvert our understanding of nineteenth-century environments and ecological relations. This recent turn to ecocritical approaches within Victorian Studies has foregrounded how the Victorian imagination was “engaged with concerns that continue to occupy contemporary ecological discussions,” and how “planetary change requires not only a scientific understanding but a cultural, perhaps even an aesthetic, explanation” (Parkins and Adkins 2018, 11). Scholars have explored how Victorian literature and culture reacted to ever-changing ideas about the relation

Dear DACH Victorianists, With our second workshop now less than a month away, we are excited to announce that we have two new rounds of project presentations lined up and that Katharina Boehm will be chairing a roundtable on "Publishing in Victorian Studies" on this occasion. If you would like to participate in the workshop, please send a short email to both of us by 20 June 2022 so that we can add you to the list of participants. (All speakers and panellists have been registered already.) We will send out the link for the Zoom meeting one week in advance. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to get in touch with us. We look forward to meeting colleagues old and new in July -- feel free to pass our invitation on to any colleagues who might be interested in joining DACH Victorianists. Many thanks! Very best wishes Ariane and Sandra