RSVP

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

webmaster@rs4vp.org

In Memoriam: Linda Peterson

Linda H. Peterson, born on October 11, 1948, died peacefully June 25, 2015, on the campus of Yale University, where she was a professor and former chair in the Department of English.  Until days before her death, which ended a multi-year battle against cancer, few friends knew the seriousness of her illness, for she had decided that she wished to focus on the pleasures of her work as an active scholar, finishing her latest book, and as a contributor to university life, which she was, during her 38 years on the faculty.  Her books include Victorian Autobiography (1986), Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography (1999) and Becoming a Woman of Letters (2009). Her work also enriched the teaching of writing nationwide, through her role as general editor of The Norton Reader in five editions published from 1996 through the current edition and in her role as past president of the National Council of Writing Program Administrators.

She will be greatly missed by many colleagues and students; by her mother, Martha Haenlein Boese; by her three younger sisters, Deborah Haenlein Kile, Carla Haenlein Piazza, and Kristy Haenlein Taylor; and by her husband, Fred Strebeigh, her colleague at Yale since 1979.  At her request, there will be no funeral.  Colleagues are creating a fund, in her honor, to support travel by graduate students to conduct research and attend conferences.  A memorial celebrating the publication of her new book, the Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Writing, of which she is editor, with contributions from 17 scholars from around the world, will take place near the book’s publication in late 2015.

CFP Popular Culture – Serial Fictions in Transnational Perspective

CFP: POPULAR CULTURE – SERIAL CULTURE: NINETEENTH-CENTURY SERIAL FICTIONS IN TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE, 1830S-1860s. 28-30 APRIL 2016, UNIVERSITY OF SIEGEN

This call for papers may be of interest for scholars of 19th-century popular print culture. Daniel Stein and Lisanna Wiele (American Studies, Universität Siegen) are inviting submissions for the conference “Popular Culture – Serial Culture”. From the CfP:

Recent publications such as Transnationalism and American Serial Fiction (Okker 2011) and Serialization in Popular Culture (Allen/van den Berg 2014) remind us that serial modes of storytelling, publication, and reception have been among the driving forces of modern culture since the first half of the nineteenth century. Indeed, as studies of Victorian serial fiction, the French feuilleton novel, and American magazine fiction indicate, much of what we take for granted as central features of contemporary serial fictions traces back to a particular period in the nineteenth century between the 1830s and the 1860s. This is the time when new printing techniques allowed for the mass publication of affordable reading materials, when literary authorship became a viable profession, when reading for pleasure became a popular pastime for increasingly literate and socially diverse audiences, and when previously predominantly national print markets became thoroughly international.

The conveners encourage interdisciplinary and transnational approaches that may go beyond the North American context.

250-word abstracts are due on September 1, 2015.

Further information available on the conference website:

http://www.uni-siegen.de/phil/anglistik/news/633570.html

New Publication on Dickens & Print Culture – Discount Available

Out Now: Dickens, Reynolds and Mayhew on Wellington Street: The Print Culture of a Victorian Street
Mary L. Shannon, University of Roehampton, UK
(Ashgate: April 2015)

Following a successful launch event at the Menzies Centre, King’s College London this book is now available to buy. Please do consider ordering it for your libraries!

Dickens, Reynolds and Mayhew on Wellington Street: The Print Culture of a Victorian Street discusses, for the first time, the proximity of the offices of Charles Dickens, G.W.M. Reynolds, and Henry Mayhew, in mid 19th-century London. Wellington Street (home to nearly thirty newspapers and periodicals, as well as a theatre and the musical and theatrical press) was a highly significant location for metropolitan print culture because it was a hub of relationships, influences and connections between writers, booksellers, editors, publishers, theatre managers and audiences, and readers. The book uses archival research, literary criticism, and literary geography to explore Wellington Street at different times of the day and to reveal the ways in which its print networks fostered connections between the discourses of journalism, literature, and drama. It reassesses the intersection between print culture, popular culture, the built environment and urban experience, and reveals the links between Wellington Street and the print culture of colonial Melbourne.
For more details and to download the introduction, go to http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472442048. Use the discount code C15JKW20 at the checkout for 20% off. Valid until 31/08/15.