VPFA is pleased to announce a new call for articles: ‘Gender in Victorian Popular Fiction, Art and Culture’, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, special issue edited by Janine Hatter and Helena Ifill
This special issue invites articles on all aspects of the relationship between gender and the “popular”. Popular fiction in the nineteenth century was repeatedly, and often negatively, associated with women and femininity, perceived as a mass of “silly novels by lady novelists” (George Eliot). Existing scholarship (by critics such as Solveig R. Robinson and Jennifer Phegley) has already done much to challenge the old Victorian notion that popular fiction was second-rate literature produced by a second-class gender. We seek papers that will reassess or reinvigorate the relationship between popular fiction and the feminine, but also work that goes beyond this in order to interrogate the interactions between gender and popular genres more broadly. Thus, we encourage engagement with masculinity studies and queer theory, as well as other popular genres, such as magazines, newspapers and other periodical publications, the penny bloods, gothic fictions, detective fiction, fads and fashions, and theatrical engagements. We also welcome submissions that consider gender and sexuality in conjunction with race, class, place and nationality.
Please see here for the full CFA. Please e-mail submissions to j.hatter@hull.ac.uk and helena.ifill@sheffield.ac.uk by 30th April, 2016. Any queries or letters of interest are welcome and should be sent to both e-mail addresses. Earlier submissions are encouraged.