Victorian Form

A Panel for NAVSA (North American Victorian Studies Association) at ACCUTE (Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English)

27-30 May 2017 at Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario

Two very different sets of last words – the “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful” at the close of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and Captain Hook’s final pronouncement, “Bad form” – allude to the importance of form for the Victorians. Not only in the metre of their verse, but also in the codified language of their courtrooms, the layout of newspaper pages, and in the design of public monuments, they expressed a concern with shape, structure, pattern, and convention.

This call invites papers that address how Victorian authors writing across a range of genres understood and grappled with the significance of form. How and why did form matter to nineteenth-century Britons?

This call invites proposals for 15- to 20-minute papers, especially those that reflect NAVSA’s multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary aims. Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to:

•  rules governing design, literary genres, games, rituals, sports, etiquette, grammar
• the materiality of texts and other media: fonts, format, layout, organization
• the role of form in taxonomies and other classificatory schemes
• words, symbols, graphs
• the use of models for tailors, seamstresses, artists, and displays
• experimental literary, visual, aural, and popular forms
• built spaces, architecture, urban and colonial planning
• movement from one form to another: reproduction, translation, adaptation

Please send 250-word proposals and a brief (50-60-word) biographical statement to Tina Y. Choi <tinayc@yorku.ca>.  Deadline: 11 February 2017.