Organized by
The Department Of English & Culture Studies (UGC-SAP-DRS-PHASE-II),
Call For Papers:
The Department of English and Culture Studies, The University of Burdwan is going to organize its annual Young Researchers’ Conference on 14-15 September, 2017 on the focal area of Victoriana.
Queen Victoria’s regime in Britain, unlike any other preceding it, stood for paradigm shifts in what constituted Englishness within and without, in the world at large. With imperial Britain ruling the waves, scientific-technological innovations abounding, and exponential industrial growth rate, Britain became something it had never been before and after this moment — a politico-economic superpower and the cultural capital of the world.
The cultural capital generated by long narrative poems, novels, polemical essays, children’s fiction, crime narratives, life writings, women’s writing, writings reproducing alternate sexualities, workers’ narratives, mutiny novels, spiritual narratives, pornography, anthropological writings, juridical writings went hand in hand with extraordinary developments in material cultures. These ranged from printing, publishing, archiving, painting, photography and restoration of art to postal reforms and development of postal material such as pens, writing pads, desks, police reforms, development of technology to detect the criminal, and use of technology to map worlds beyond logic.
The reverberations of these changes were felt around the world that Britain had colonized and had not colonized. We are all, in a certain sense, post-Victorian.
The Conference uses the term ‘Victoriana’ in its broadest possible sense, inviting papers from areas not only from that period but also from our times that consciously recycle and recast Victorian tropes, looking back and beyond at the same time.
Some of the focal areas could be:
- Queen Victoria: Myth and Reality
- Condition of England Question novel
- Christian Socialism and the Victorian novel
- Representations in Art, Restoration and Victoriana
- Crime, Criminology, the Rise of Detective Fiction.
- Uncanny, the Rise of Spiritualism, Ghost Clubs, Spirit Societies, Parapsychology, Spiritual Narratives
- Narrative Poetry, Browning, Tennyson and so forth
- The Narrativized Play, Shaw, Galsworthy, etc
- Print Victoriana
- Neo-Victorianism
- Photography and Victoriana
- Victoriana and Translation
- Victoriana and Pedagogy
- Victoriana and Pornography
- Victoriana and India
- Victoriana and Food
- Victoriana and dress/sartorial specificities
- The Mutiny Novel
- Victoriana and Travel Narrative.
- Children’s Writing
- Women in Victoriana
- Alternative Sexuality and Victoriana
- Postal Reforms and Victoriana
- Colonial Modernity
We welcome young researchers (students, research scholars and young teachers) from different universities and institutions to the conference. They should send their abstracts (not more than 250 words) to the organizers, and, if selected, they will get 15 minutes for their presentations and 5 minutes for questions on their papers.
Last date for receipt of abstracts is 24 July 2017.
The abstracts will pass through a rigorous peer review process. Acceptance will be conveyed by 15 August 2017.
Abstracts should be sent to the following email id: yrcenglishbu@gmail.com.
The names, contact numbers, email ids, and affiliations of those sending abstracts should be clearly mentioned in the abstracts.
There will be no registration fee.
Venue: The University of Burdwan, Golapbag, East Burdwan – 713104. West Bengal.
Special attraction:
The participants may be taken to the Museum and Art Gallery in the premises of Rajbati, the palace of the Burdwan Raj donated to the University of Burdwan in 1960. The Victorian art objects, sculptures, architecture, and other such cultural documents related to the Burdwan Raj, whose history dates back to the 17th century, would be of interest to the researchers in the field of Victorian Studies and also those interested in exploring India’s colonial modernity. To know more about the Museum and Art Gallery, please visit the website: http://www.buruniv.ac.in/campus/museum
Conference Conveners:
Dr Arnab Kumar Sinha
Assistant Professor
Department of English and Culture Studies
The University of Burdwan
Dr Anway Mukhopadhyay
Assistant Professor
Department of English and Culture Studies
The University of Burdwan
