The peace, that I deem`d no peace, is over and done.
Alfred Tennyson, 1855

CFP: NVSA 2010
FIGHTING VICTORIANS: DISUNION, POLEMIC, CONTROVERSY

Princeton University: April 16-18, 2010

NVSA solicits submissions for its annual conference; the topic this year is FIGHTING VICTORIANS.

The conference will feature a keynote panel including Anna Clark, Elaine Hadley, and Alex Woloch, and visits to Special Collections at the Firestone Library and the Princeton Art Museum.

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This conference will take up the nature and significance of Victorian fighting and disunion, from international warfare to peevishness. What did the Victorians think was worth fighting about? Is there a specifically Victorian culture of argument? In what ways did the Victorians value disagreement and controversy? “The age of equipoise” saw more than its fair share of dust-ups, imbroglios, scraps, and battles. Rather than enumerating the varieties of Victorian belligerence, we seek papers that will reflect upon the ways Victorians experienced, valued, and represented fighting, disagreement, and other modes of disunion. What forms of debate and disagreement did the Victorian public sphere promote or exclude? What are the forms of solidarity and separation not only imagined by British social, political, and evolutionary theory, but also experienced as part of the development of empire or national movements? What is the force of dissension in artistic, literary or political rivalries and movements? What are the sites, genres, and modes of Victorian fighting? What are the forms of representation, visual or textual, most suited to representing violence or controversy? Finally, how do we Victorianists argue now? Do we argue now?

While specificity is welcome and encouraged, the program committee is not looking simply for papers describing particular instances of violence. We are especially eager to see presentations that make a claim about the nature, conception, or representation of disunity or violence in the period.

Arts of Combat

  • Fights in literature: the novel, poetry, drama

  • Warfare in the fine arts

  • Literary forms and social interventions; novel arguments

  • The emotions of Victorian disunion and fighting

  • The styles and affects of refusing to argue: peevishness, grudges, funks, the slow burn, the silent treatment, envy, ressentiment

  • Accommodation and appeasement

  • The belligerence of aesthetic movements

 

When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.
Oscar Wilde, 1891
Thoughtful Belligerence

Does the boxer hit better for knowing that he has a flexor longus and a flexor brevis?
Carlyle, 1831

What is Worth Fighting For? / What is Fighting Worth?

  • The Victorian public sphere: liberalism and the culture of argument

  • Forms of dialectic

  • Political fights: Chartism, Reform, Abolition

  • Class: identity and struggle

  • Religious schism: Dissent, The Oxford Movement, conversion

  • Solidarity and separation: forms of antisociality or social enmity, the transcendence of social bonds

  • Literary forms of solidarity and disunion: the novel and character space, lyric poetry and intersubjective tension

  • Dissension as style in the visual arts

  • Rivalries: literary, political, artistic, athletic

  • Disciplinary formation: competition among the faculties, literature versus science, word versus image

  • Fighting as a way of life: evolution as struggle, struggle and the field of culture

  • Break-ups: empire and disunion, divorce, romantic breakups, fallings out

  • What do Victorianists argue about now? How do we argue?

    •

Say not the struggle nought availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain.
Arthur Hugh Clough, 1855

 
Fight Sites: Spaces of Disunion, Violence, Controversy

  • More is less: one nation or two, Unionism and / or nationalism

  • Imperial violence

  • International warfare

  • Civil war

  • Memories and fantasies of war

  • Domestic violence: gender and the home

  • Venues of fighting and controversy: the periodical press, lecture halls, the university, the boxing ring, the streets

 

. . . as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach” 1867

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Proposals (no more than 500 words) by Oct. 15, 2009 (e-mail submissions strongly encouraged):

Professor Gage McWeeny, Chair, NVSA Program Committee, (gmcweeny@williams.edu)
English Department, Williams College, 85 Mission Park Drive, Williamstown, MA 01267

Please note: all submissions to NVSA are evaluated anonymously. Successful proposals will stay within the 500-word limit and make a compelling case for the talk and its relation to the conference topic.

Please do not send complete papers, and do not include your name on the proposal.

Please do include your name, institutional and email addresses, and proposal title in a cover letter. Papers should take 15 minutes (20 minutes maximum) so as to provide ample time for discussion.

The Coral Lansbury Travel Grant ($100.00) and George Ford Travel Grant ($100.00), given in memory of key founding members of NVSA, are awarded annually to the graduate student, adjunct instructor, or independent scholar who must travel the greatest distance to give a paper at our conference. Apply by indicating in your cover letter that you wish to be considered. Please indicate from where you will be traveling, and mention if you have other sources of funding.

To join NVSA, or to renew your membership for 2009-2010, please return the form below to Prof. Joan Dagle at the address indicated on the form.

Jonah Siegel, President, NVSA
Department of English
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, NJ 08901		 phone: (732) 932-7679
fax: (732) 932-1150
jsiegel@rci.rutgers.edu

 

NVSA MEMBERSHIP

To: Professor Joan Dagle, Secretary/Treasurer. NVSA
Dept. of English, Rhode Island College
Providence, RI 02908

I wish to renew my dues or become a member of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association. I have enclosed a check to NVSA for ___ $15 in U.S. dollars (regular membership) or ___$10 (student)

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