CFP – Lesser Victorians: Beyond the Canon in Victorian Fiction

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…