VPFA Annual Conference

If ‘space’ is understood as an area that can be objectively measured or at least conceptualised, the construction of ‘place’ depends on a range of affective and cultural meanings at any given moment.

Victorian writing persistently maps both collective and individual experience onto fully realised ‘spaces’. But the boundaries are often permeable or unstable: actual colonial spaces becoming places of the imagination; the continuing negotiation of domestic space through ideologies of place; the growth of London changing the status of the suburbs; amateur botanists beginning to alter the ecosystem of coastal communities.

Competing ideologies are filtered through the construction of ‘place’ in familiar phrases such as ‘no place like home’ and ‘knowing one’s place’. Place and space together come to embody meaning when a shift in political affiliation is asserted through ‘crossing the floor’ or the lyrical metaphor of ‘crossing the bar’ is used to raise religious questions.

In the nineteenth century, the steamship, the railway, the bicycle and ultimately the motor car, radically altered the experience of moving from one place to another; at the same time new spaces were opened up by social movements and the expansion of telecommunication and the periodical press.

The Victorian Popular Fiction Association is dedicated to fostering interest in understudied popular writers, literary genres and other cultural forms, and to facilitating the production of publishable research and academic collaborations amongst scholars of the popular.

We invite a broad, imaginative and interdisciplinary interpretation on the topic of ‘Place and Space’ and its relation to any aspect of Victorian popular literature and culture that addresses literal or metaphorical representations of the theme. Inter- and multidisciplinary approaches are welcome, as are papers that address poetry, drama, global literature, non-fiction, visual arts, journalism, historical and social contexts. Papers addressing works from the ‘long Victorian period’ (i.e. before 1837 and after 1901) and on neo-Victorian texts/media are also welcome, so long as the links to the Victorian period are clear.

Please send proposals for 20-minute papers, panels of three papers (by individual scholars, or affiliated with another Learned Society), or non-traditional papers/panels, on topics that can include, but are not limited to: