Journal of Popular Romance Studies

CALL FOR PAPERS

Romancing the Long British 19th Century

The long British nineteenth century (1789-1914) appears to have the long global twentieth century (including the first decades of the twenty-first) in its thrall. Regency and Victorian settings proliferate in popular romance fiction, ranging from scenes of domestic life within the United Kingdom to British espionage in Europe and British colonial settlements. Retellings and “sequels” of Jane Austen’s novels line our (digital) bookshelves and fill fan-fiction websites, spilling over most recently into the YouTube sensation The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. Such adaptations of Austen’s novels, along with film and TV versions of the Brontë sisters’ Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, suggest that modern audiences cannot get enough of stories about Georgians, Victorians, and Edwardians in love.

The Journal of Popular Romance Studies seeks papers on this enduring love affair with 19^th-century Britain. Why does a period that is historically associated with the establishment of the Industrial Revolution, the consolidation of the Empire, and the coalescing of middle-class mores now strike us as a particularly “romantic” era? How do popular and middlebrow media from around the world construct, interpret, and recast the world of 19th c. Britain, broadly construed? What do these interpretations say about our current moment and our modern (or postmodern) thoughts and feelings about romance?

We welcome submissions that explore these and related questions from any disciplinary or theoretical angle. We invite papers that cover different media, including (paper and digital) literature, film, TV, online content, and marketing.

This Special Issue of The Journal of Popular Romance Studies is guest edited by Jayashree Kamble and Pamela Regis. Please submit scholarly papers of no more than 10,000 words, including notes and bibliography, by March 1 2014, to An Goris, Managing Editor, at  managing.editor@jprstudies.org.  Submissions should be Microsoft Word documents, with citations in MLA format. For more information on how to submit a paper, please visit http://jprstudies.org/submissions/

                     in:flux

1845-1945: A Century in Motion

University of Birmingham, 27^th June 2013

Keynote speaker – Dr Matthew Rubery, Queen Mary University of London

Interdisciplinary postgraduate conference – call for papers

How did the rapid period of industrialisation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries help to shape societies and lifestyles in the West? What types of social changes, movements and developments characterise this time period? This interdisciplinary postgraduate conference, in affiliation with the Centre for the Study of Cultural Modernity and hosted by the College of Arts and Law, seeks to explore the various ways in which this century was one of ‘motion’, in every sense of the word. The conference title seeks to encapsulate both the uncertainty and upheaval of this period as well as the physical and cultural movements that occurred at this time. We invite papers addressing these themes from postgraduate researchers and early-career academics working on this period from a variety of backgrounds.

Topics could include, but are not limited to:

Cultural or social movements

·       political movements

·       the Women’s Movement

·       arts movements (musical, artistic, literary)

·       religious and philosophical

·       popular cultural trends (food, fashion, advertising)

Physical movements

·       mass movement of people (mobilisation of soldiers, migration from towns to cities)

·       transatlantic and inter-continental travel (including emigration and immigration)

·       leisure and tourism

·       transport

·       changing landscapes

Development and progress

·       media (cinema, audio technology and radio, print media)

·       scientific and medical advances

·       technology

·       economic growth and/or recession

·       development of nationhood

These headings are suggestions only; we welcome proposals exploring crossovers between these topics, or addressing them from interdisciplinary perspectives. Abstracts of 250-300 words for 20 minute papers along with a short biographical note of no more than 50 words should be sent to pgculturalmodernity@contacts.bham.ac.uk by the 17^th May 2013. We welcome any questions that you may have; please do not hesitate to contact us at the above address.

For more information about the Centre for the Study of Cultural Modernity please visit their website:

http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/activity/culturalmodernity/index.aspx

@pgculturalmod          www.facebook.com/pgculturalmod           http://pgculturalmodernity.wordpress.com