CFP: Call for Papers/Special Issue of Neo-Victorian Studies

From: Anne Morey [[email protected]]

Neo-Victorianism has become a major trend in contemporary literature and
culture. Novels, motion pictures, documentaries and TV series have all
contributed to the persistent re-imagination of the nineteenth century.
While neo-Victorianism in fiction and film has sparked off a lively academic
industry, its impact on children’s literature and contemporary discourses on
childhood has not yet been fully addressed.

The Victorians were obsessed with the Romantic ideal of the innocent child
of nature, an innocence that was thought to be perennially at risk; witness
the centrality of the child victim in Victorian melodrama and the
astonishing popularity of orphan narratives. Victorian constructions of
childhood were also intimately linked to empire. Pauper children were
frequently orientalised as ‘street Arabs’, while the indigenous inhabitants
of the colonies were often portrayed as children, imposing various forms of
maternalism and paternalism upon the coloniser. Both pauper children at the
metropolitan centre and indigenous children at the outskirts of empire were
frequently construed as orphans, even if their parents were still alive.
Orphan narratives framed trafficking in children from the outskirts of
empire to the centre and vice versa, as pauper children were sent abroad to
the settler colonies as cheap labour hands, while ‘orphans’ in the colonies
were removed from their parents in order to be raised at missionary homes or
by Anglo-parents who could not conceive themselves.

This special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies will explore how Victorian
constructions of childhood are re-mediated and renegotiated in contemporary
arts and discourse, from neo-Victorian children’s literature and/or fiction
featuring children, heritage film and television, the media, social policy
making and family politics, to present-day legal frameworks. In particular,
how do revisionary fiction and other contemporary cultural discourses
for/about children and/or young adults rejuvenate, modify, and assist us in
re-thinking the Victorians and associated themes of temporality,
cross-generational continuities, and urgent social issues such as child
labour, trafficking and paedophilia?

Contributions, both academic articles and creative pieces, are invited on
(but not limited to) the following topics:
• rewrites and film adaptations of Victorian children’s/young adults’
classics and/or child-focused fictions (The Little Princess, Jane Eyre,
David Copperfield, The Turn of the Screw, etc.)
• re-imaginings of stock child characters from Victorian melodrama and other
popular genres (orphans, street Arabs, innocent angels, feral and criminal
children, etc.)
• re-inventions of Victorian narrative and dramatic genres for children
(e.g. the adventure story, fairytale, moral tract, Bildungsroman, puppet
play, and pantomime)
• adaptations of neo-Victorian genres for juvenile audiences (cf. steampunk
or graphic novels for children and adolescents)
• continuities/discontinuities between contemporary narratives about
adoption and migration and nineteenth-century orphan narratives
• imagined child readers/viewers
• child illness/death; children and medicine
• neo-Victorian vs. neo-Edwardian children’s fiction and other art forms
• the child victim in socio-legal and political discourse
• colonial vs. postcolonial representations of the child

Please address enquiries and expressions of interest to the guest editors
Claudia Nelson at
[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> and Anne Morey
at
[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> by 31st January 2012,
including a 200 word proposal
with draft bibliography
and brief biographical details.

Completed articles and/or creative pieces will be due 1st April 2012 and
should be sent via email to the guest editors