Monthly Archives: May 2013

CFP – Lesser Victorians: Beyond the Canon in Victorian Fiction

Trinity College Dublin, Ireland – 12-13 September 2013

Deadline for proposals: 31 May 2013

“sun destroys/ The interest of what’s happening in the shade” (Philip Larkin)

Scholarly research into the iconic fictions of canonical Victorian writers like Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot and Hardy continues to grow and ramify in rich and often unexpected ways. Thanks however to unprecedented and ever-expanding digital access to works long out of print, as well as ongoing excavations by scholars such as John Sutherland, the issue of non-canonical, ‘minor’ and outright forgotten fictions is now on the agenda of Victorian studies as never before.

This two-day conference will be dedicated very particularly to just such marginalised fictions and their writers. We invite proposals for 20-minute papers whose focus might include but would not be restricted to:

·      close readings of individual texts;

·      critical appreciations of…

Cultural Cross-Currents between Russia and Britain in the Nineteenth Century
Birmingham City University: Program outline, 19th July 2013

9.00-9.30 Coffee and welcome

9.30-10.30 Welcome by the Head of School of English

Keynote speaker: Dr. Stuart Eagles (title tbc)

10.30-11.45 Panel 1: Dickens and Tolstoy
Galina Alekseeva Tolstoy reads Charles Dickens.
Olga Stuchebrukhov “Tolstoy’s ‘Family Happiness’ and Dickens’ Bleak House.”
Mary Olea How Dickens and Tolstoy Shaped Contemporary Views of History

Panel 2: Spiritual Cross-currents
Julia Courtney Listening to Voices from the East: William Palmer, John Mason Neale and the Russian Orthodox Church
Lindy Moore Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas K. Gandhi and Isabella Fyvie Mayo
Tatyana Kovalevskaya Shakespeare and Dostoevsky: The Human Condition and the Human Ambition

11.45-1.00 Panel 3: Dostoevsky
Franziska Kohlt “It simply upsets the nerves”: Dreams, Spectres, Visions and the ‘English Connection’ in the Works of Ivan Turgenev and Fyodor Dostoevsky
Anna Berman Brothers and Sisters, Kinsmen and Countrymen