RSVP

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

RSVP News

Women in Punch 1841 – 1920, 02 Nov 2017, Senate House, London

Registration is now open for ‘Women in Punch 1841 – 1920’, 02 Nov 2017, Senate House, London.

 

Punch: or the London Charivari first appeared in 1841, published as a weekly magazine with a strong political agenda. Although some work has been done on the social reform agenda of Punch, very little is known about women in the magazine. Were there any women contributors? What representations of women appeared in the magazine, both in images and text? Women were certainly a subject for humour and caricature in Punch, but what were the political implications of those comic illustrations? What was the role played by verse in the depiction of women? Did representations of women change significantly between 1841 and 1910, and if so, how and why? How do the caricatures and/or depictions of women in Punch differ or resemble those in other illustrated papers, such as the Comic Almanack (1835 – 1853), The Illustrated London News (1842 – 1989), the Man in the Moon (1847 – 1849), andFun (1861 – 1901)? Queen Victoria subscribed to Punch; did it have many women subscribers and/or readers? How was the ‘New Women’ reported in the pages of the magazine? Was Punch interested in female education or the entry of women into the professions?

 

These are some of the questions to be explored by this one-day conference, which will look at some of the below themes:

  • Women in the literary marketplace
  • Education
  • ‘New Women’ and ‘cartoons’
  • Domesticity
  • Punch and the Intellectual Woman
  • Women and sports
  • Representations of Political Women
  • Punch and female readership
  • Sex, body, and Punch caricatures.

 

The programme for the day can be found here.
Conference organiser: Mariam Zarif, mariam.zarif@kcl.ac.uk.

Dr. Paul Fyfe wins Prestigious Donald Gray Prize

Congratulations to RSVP member Dr. Paul Fyfe winner of this year’s Donald Gray Prize for the best essay published in the field of Victorian studies.

Dr. Fyfe’s article ‘An Archaeology of Victorian Newspapers‘ was published in the Winter 2016 edition of Victorian Periodicals Review.

The NAVSA judging committee – Deborah Denenholz Morse (Chair), Mary Jean Corbett, Martin Danahay, and Peter Hoffenberg  – commented:

Paul Fyfe’s ‘An Archaeology of Victorian Newspapers’ excavates a portion of “the largely hidden history of how Victorian data gets to now” by filling in some of the gaps between then and now.  This fascinating essay, which draws on the methods of book history and media archaeology, as well as practicing a form of “investigative scholarly journalism,” explores the occluded material histories of one large-scale digitization project: the British Library’s massive collection of nineteenth-century newspapers.  He establishes its complex relations to a range of mid-twentieth-century agents, technologies, and institutions, from the preservation efforts undertaken in the aftermath of the second world war to the emergence of (and continuing role played by) microfilm in the collaboration between libraries, micropublishers, and the forerunners of the CIA. Victorian media became digital, Fyfe argues, both by subordinating the provinces to the metropole and by having the techno-labor of its production outsourced to India and Cambodia. In a timely investigation of what now constitute “the enabling conditions of our scholarship,” the essay charts a path forward for thinking about—and critically reflecting on—the digital tools we all use.

 

CFP: Special issue of Victorian Periodicals Review: The Strand Magazine

CFP: Special issue of Victorian Periodicals Review: The Strand Magazine

Described by Reginald Pound as a ‘national institution’, the Strand Magazine (1891–1950) was the foremost British New Journalistic fiction paper of the 1890s. This heavily illustrated monthly promised its readers ‘cheap, healthful literature’, including short and serial fiction, factual articles, human-interest features and celebrity items, by some of the best-known authors of the time. Yet, in spite of its popularity, the Strand has attracted limited scholarly attention and is often dismissed as a prime example of the Victorian middlebrow. This special issue of Victorian Periodicals Review seeks to elicit original essays assessing the nature, role and significance of the Strand in the period 1891–1918. Possible contributions might address, but are not limited to, topics such as:

 

  • The Strand and the short story
  • The Strand and genre fiction
  • The topical Strand
  • The Strand and popular science
  • The Strand and celebrity culture
  • The Strand and the New Journalism
  • The Strand’s editorial policies
  • The Strand and periodical design
  • The Strand and illustration
  • The Strand and its readers
  • The Strand and the middlebrow
  • The Strand and British identity
  • The Strand abroad
  • The Strand and the ‘Victorian’
  • The Strand and the modern
  • The Strand in the digital age

 

Please send a 300-word abstract and a one-page CV to our guest editors Emma Liggins (e.liggins@mmu.ac.uk) and Minna Vuohelainen (minna.vuohelainen@city.ac.uk) by 1 December, 2017. Final essays of 5000-9000 words (including notes and bibliography) will be due by 1 May, 2018 and should be prepared in MS Word according to the Chicago Manual of Style. The special issue will be published in summer 2019.

Registration open: Editing the 20th Century – 5th September, British Library, London

Registration is now open for ‘Editing the 20th Century’

As part of the British Academy funded project, ‘Editing the Twentieth Century’, a one-day conference will take place at the British Library on 5 September 2017 exploring the key role played by the editors of periodical publications throughout the long twentieth century.

Registration is open here.

A PDF of the programme is also available here: Editingthe20thCenturyConferenceProgramme.

Tuesday 5th September 2017, 9.00am-6.45pm. The British Library, 96 Euston Road, London, NW1 2DB.

CFP: Special Issue of Victorian Periodicals Review: The Material Culture of Victorian Domestic Life and the Press

The Material Culture of Victorian Domestic Life and the Press

The Victorian press actively shaped Victorians’ notions of domestic life around several topics: material culture, architecture, interior design, and the gendering of domestic space. In addition to the many studies of Victorian domestic life and coffee table books on Victorian interiors and furnishings are new readings of Victorian authors Isabella Beaton, Charles Eastlake, and Mary Eliza Haweis on domestic taste and furnishings, as well as a neo-Victorian fascination with Victorian design, food, cooking culture, and household management.

Despite this literature, there are many still-understudied areas that are addressed in the periodical press:

  • working-class domestic lives
  • rural home decoration and furnishing in relation to urban design and furnishings
  • the ways Britons recreated British domestic life in the colonies
  • the physical organization of domestic space
  • changes in laws, aesthetics, and gender and class relations (e. g., the 1882 Married Women’s Property Act, the 1870 Education Act, Aestheticism, the department store, the New Woman) that introduced new objects, designs, family relations, gender roles and spatial structures in homes
  • advertising and illustrations of furnishings and the material page

This list is not meant to restrict, but to suggest topics. This CFP seeks to elicit essays on the press’s role in the production of domestic life as an ideal and a set of practices, including across class and the geography of Britain and the colonies. We encourage authors to address the texture of conflicting views on how to conduct and represent domestic life within individual periodicals and across periodicals that contained different ideologies, intentions and readerships in a range of periodicals—the women’s press, architecture journals, general periodicals, the art press and other specialized or trade periodicals.

Please submit a 300-word abstract outlining your proposed contribution and a CV by September 15, 2017 to our guest editor Julie Codell at: Julie.codell@asu.edu Final drafts of essays selected for inclusion in the special issue will be due January 5, 2018. These essays should be 5,000-9,000 words in length (including notes and bibliography) and formatted in Chicago style.

Call for papers: Magazines on the Move – North American Periodicals and Travel

Call for papers: Magazines on the Move: North American Periodicals and Travel

A one-day seminar hosted by the Centre for Travel Writing Studies, Nottingham Trent University, in collaboration with the Network for American Periodical Studies.

Friday 22nd September 2017, Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Campus

Keynote speaker: Professor Andrew Thacker (Nottingham Trent University)

Organisers: Dr Victoria Bazin (Northumbria University); Dr Rebecca Butler (Nottingham Trent University); Dr Sue Currell (Sussex University); Prof Tim Youngs (Nottingham Trent University).

Confirmed speakers include Dr Claire Lindsay (UCL) and Dr Rachel Farebrother (Swansea University).

This day-seminar will focus on the relationship between North American travel writing and the periodical format. Its primary purpose is to facilitate historical and critical discussion of narratives of travel in North American periodicals.

Nottingham Trent invite proposals for twenty-minute papers that examine accounts of travel to, within, or from North America, published in North American periodicals. They also welcome papers on periodicals and travel of Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean.

Topics to be examined in considering the interplay between the travel experience, the written and/or visual record of travel, and the periodical publication of the travel record, may include, but are not limited to:

  • Commercial considerations
  • Editorial policy and interventions
  • Gender and sexuality
  • Periodical context and design
  • Purpose of travel
  • ‘Race’
  • Readership
  • Solo or group travel
  • Technologies of transport/mode of travel
  • Tourism
  • Visual representations

The seminar is a collaboration between Nottingham Trent’s Centre for Travel Writing Studies (CTWS) and the Network of American Periodical Studies (NAPS). It draws on the expertise of both research centres, as well as that of our keynote speaker, Professor Andrew Thacker (NTU), a specialist in modernist magazines and spatial geographies of modernism.

The Centre for Travel Writing Studies (CTWS) was established by Prof Tim Youngs (Nottingham Trent University) in 2002 to produce, facilitate, and promote scholarly research on travel writing and its contexts, without restriction of period, locus, or type of travel writing.

The Network of American Periodical Studies (NAPS) is a research initiative set up by Dr Sue Currell (Sussex University) and Dr Victoria Bazin (Northumbria University). It aims to bring together scholars working on American periodicals (magazines, newspapers and other periodical publications) from a range of historical periods and disciplines.

Papers are welcomed from scholars at any career stage. Postgraduates are strongly encourage to submit a proposal for consideration. Paper proposals of c200 words should be sent to ctws@ntu.ac.uk by 28th July 2017. Early submission is advised.
With grateful thanks to the British Association for American Studies (BAAS) for financial support a limited number of travel bursaries and fee waivers for postgraduate students to attend are offered. Priority will be given to those offering papers. Please state at the end of your proposal if you are a postgraduate wishing to apply for help towards costs.