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Contemporary Victoriana: Victorian Literature and Popular and Material Cultures

Contemporary Victoriana: Victorian Literature and Popular and Material Cultures

Publié le par Marc Escola (Source : Xavier Giudicelli)

Contemporary Victoriana

Victorian Literature and Popular and Material Cultures

(Publication)

 

“For most of us, the odour of defunct Victoriana is so unpleasant […] that we are content to leave the past where we find it.” (Ezra Pound, 1918).

“It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.” (Walter Benjamin).

 

In the wake of the one-day conference hosted at the University of Reims (Centre universitaire de Troyes) on March, 16 2018, this volume will seek to examine the persistence of Victorian culture and literature in our contemporary society, from  the reinterpretation of Victorian works, now deemed “canonical”, in popular culture (in such media as comics and graphic novels, fan fictions, films, TV series, video games, and pop music), to the recycling of Victorian cultural practices and artefacts in our society: the success of the serial form, a contemporary adaptation—or recreation—of Victorian serialised narratives, also the influence of Victorian culture on today’s fashion industry, on alternative cultures, architecture, and interior decoration.

Interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged. The aim of the volume is to rethink the notion of “canon,” and to shed light on objects which, until recently, were of little interest in academia.

Beyond the idea of a taste for retro, that of a paralysing backward-looking glance—the binary opposition between nostalgia and critical engagement—, our purpose is to show what the persistence of things Victorian tells us about us, about our contemporary society and ethos, and to highlight the complexity of our relationship to the Victorian past.

Possible topics:

•       Graphic novels and comics (for example, Alan Moore’s From Hell and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen…)

•       TV series and films (for example, Penny Dreadful, Ripper Street…)

•       Video games

•       Pop music, musical (Sweeney Todd, for example)

•       Fan fiction

•       Steampunk fantasy

•       Goths, alternative cultures

•       Fashion, tattoos, body art

•       Furniture, interior decoration

•       Arts and crafts

 

KEY DATES:

June 30, 2018: Deadline for sending a provisional title and a 250-word abstract to Yannick Bellenger-Morvan (yannick.bellenger@univ-reims.fr) AND Xavier Giudicelli, (xgiudicelli@yahoo.fr)

July 15, 2018: Notice of acceptance of the chapters.

November 5, 2018: Deadline for the submission of the full chapters, which should be 6,000 words in length and follow the MLA style, https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/.The rights for the images (minimum of 300 dpi) should be cleared before the submission the manuscript. The chapters should be sent to Yannick Bellenger-Morvan (yannick.bellenger@univ-reims.fr) AND Xavier Giudicelli, (xgiudicelli@yahoo.fr). They will be peer-reviewed. A selection of 12 chapters will eventually be published.