Hidden Histories / Recovered Stories
Victorian Popular Fiction Association
15th Annual Conference
12–14 July 2023
Bishop Grosseteste University, Lincoln, UK
Keynote Speakers
Professor Patricia Pulham (University of Surrey, UK)
Dr Adrian S. Wisnicki (University of Nebraska-Lincoln, US)
Professor Nathalie Vanfasse (Aix-Marseille Université, FR)
Call for Papers
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.
This conference celebrates the ways in which Victorian popular culture, fictions and
artistic productions addressed topics and subjects, and experimented with stories
and genres, that went unacknowledged, were repressed or censored by the
mainstream. We are interested in, on the one hand, the hidden, lost, forgotten, and
on the other hand the recovered, reclaimed, remembered.
The conference seeks to re-centre the popular, from gruesome murder stories to
sensational tales of sexual violence and adultery, discussions of pseudo-sciences
like spiritualism, to addressing miscegenation, and Victorian historical fiction that
reimagines the lives of marginalised figures. It wants to also highlight the ways in
which current scholarship is rediscovering hidden aspects, characters and narratives
of the Victorian period.
We also invite papers exploring the relevance of forbidden or unspeakable themes in
neo-Victorianism. Silenced by Victorian mainstream culture but obliquely voiced in
such popular genres as the sensation novel, the penny dreadful and the bodice-
ripper, these themes have taken centre stage in today’s fictionalisation of a past that
tends to be reimagined in all its deviant, arousing and disquieting aspects.
Possible topics include:
– Forgotten and/or ignored global Victorians
– The ‘lost world’: nature, animals and the environment
– Challenges to the myth of progress, the monstrosity of science
– Rediscoveries in Victorian and Neo-Victorian writing
– Historical fiction (both Victorian and neo-Victorian)
– Disability, diversity, and inclusivity
– Decolonising and undisciplining
– Forgotten aspects of Empire
– Ethnical encounters, rehumanising the Other
– Hidden genders and illicit sexuality
– Translation and the transnational
– Hidden, secret, forbidden spaces
– The unspeakable, violence, and taboos
– Fears of national and imperial weakness
– Theorising the margins, the unspoken and affect
– Censorship, targets of political repression and the spectre of social upheaval
– Life writing, travel writing and the epistolary
– Experimentation with forms and genres
Please send proposals of 250–300 words, a 50-word biography, twitter handle (if you
have one) to Dr Claudia Capancioni, Prof. Mariaconcetta Costantini and Dr Laura
Gill at: vpfaconference@gmail.com. The conference will take place at Bishop
Grosseteste University, Lincoln as an in-person event, but online participation will be
possible for accessibility. Please indicate in your abstract if you anticipate being
unable to attend in person. Proposals for roundtables and reading group meetings
responding to the conference theme are also welcome.
Deadline for proposals: Wednesday 8 th February 2023.
Membership of the VPFA is necessary to attend the conference. To find out more,
please visit the VPFA website: http://victorianpopularfiction.org/vpfa-annual-
conference/.
For up-to-date information, please check the conference page on the VPFA website:
https://victorianpopularfiction.org/vpfa-annual-conference/.