Victorian Popular Fiction Association
5th Annual Conference: 10-11 July 2013
Institute for English Studies, University of London
‘Bodies’ and Victorian Popular Culture
Wednesday 10th July
2.00-2.10
WELCOME: Greta Depledge and Jane Jordan
2.10-3.30
PLENARY (i)
‘Dying for Victorian Medicine: The business of anatomy, bodytrafficking, and the experience of being poor in popular culture’
Dr Elizabeth Hurren (University of Leicester)
3.30-3.50
COFFEE
3.50-5.10
PANELS A & B
PANEL A: Body of the Other
Rehan Hyder, ‘The Thug in the Drawing Room: Mystery and Miscegenation in Victorian
Fiction’
Tiziana Morosetti, ‘Constructing the Zulus, 1853-1880: The ‘Exotic’ Body and its Narratives’
Fiona Pettit, ‘Periodical Print and Fictional Freaks’
PANEL B: Bodies & Medicine
Greta Depledge, ‘“There’s a dark side in these new discoveries: sacrificing the few whilst
blessing the many.” Chloroform and the death of Lady Oswald in Mrs Henry Wood’s Oswald
Cray’
Janine Hatter, ‘Parasitic Parents: Consuming and Consumable Bodies in Mary Elizabeth
Braddon’s “The Good Lady Ducayne” (1896)’
Jennifer Jones, ‘A Sensible Response to Rendering Bodies Insensible in Charles Dickens’s
Journals’
5.10-6.30
PANELS C & D
PANEL C: Literary Markets and Readerships (i)
Detlef Wagenaar, ‘ “Build up the Savile and draw its best into the Rabelais”: The Literary
Network of the Rabelais Club’
Kirsty Bunting, ‘Collaborative Bodies: The Affair at the Inn and the Mystery of the Minerva
Literary Society’
1
Anna Gasperini, ‘“Like the carcasses in the butcher's shop”: A social reading of the anxiety towards the
commodification of bodies in the Victorian Penny Bloods’
PANEL D:
(5.10-6.40)
‘Getting the better of technology’
Workshop with Catherine Pope
6.45
WINE RECEPTION
Thursday 11th July
9.00
VPFA meeting
9.30 – 10.45
PLENARY (ii)
‘Sentimental Bodies: Victorians and the reading experience’
Professor Pamela Gilbert (University of Florida)
10.45 -11.00 COFFEE
11.00-12.20
PANELS E & F
PANEL E: The Sick Body
Alice Barnaby, ‘Chromotherapy: “Bathing in Light”’
Alice Rowe, ‘ “In the grip of the enemy”: Drugs and the Body of the Addict in NineteenthCentury Periodical Culture’
Pam Lock, ‘Drinking to Escape: theories of alcoholism and suicide in Anthony Trollope’s
fiction’
PANEL F: Literary Markets & Readerships (ii)
Anne-Marie Beller, ‘ “You’re obliged to have recourse to bodies”: Corporeal Proliferation in
Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Penny Fiction’
Cheryl Deedman, ‘Penny Romantic Fiction 1839-89: The Importance of Virtue and the
Protection of the Female Body’
Jane Jordan, ‘The Abduction of Eliza Armstrong: “The Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon” and
its Working Class Readers’
12.20-1.30
1.30-2.30
LUNCH
GUEST SPEAKER
2
Rose Collis – ‘Grave Matters’
Author of Death and The City, published by Hanover Press, May 2013; Colonel Barker’s
Monstrous Regiment: A Tale of Female Husbandry (Virago 2000 & 2001); A Trouser-Wearing
Character: The Life and Times of Nancy Spain (Cassell 1997 & 1999); and Portraits To The
Wall (Cassell 1994).
2.30-3.50
PANELS G & H
PANEL G: The Male Body
Lisa Coar, ‘Fat Boy Slim: “Chiselling” the Victorian Male Body into Shape’
Joanne Ella Parsons, ‘Eating English Masculinity: Food and the Figure of the Foxhunter in
R.S.Surtees’ Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities’
Lucy Brown, ‘Androgyny and Disability in Sensation Fiction’
PANEL H: The Female Body (1)
Jonathan Buckmaster, ‘ “Oh Doctor, Doctor, don’t expect too much of me! I’m only a woman,
after all!”: The (dis)embodiment of Lydia Gwilt in Collins’s Miss Gwilt’
Valerie Fehlbaum, ‘The dismemberment of Trilby’
Jacqueline Young, ‘Mrs Archibald Little and the Campaign against Footbinding in China’
3.50-4.20
TEA
4.20-5.40
PANEL I & J
PANEL I: The Female Body (2)
Anna Brecke, ‘Reading Palimpsestically: The Body of the Governess in Popular Victorian
Fiction’
Anna Bogen, ‘ “I, too, am a woman!”: Satire, the Body and the Girton Girl in Victorian College
Fiction’
Lori Comerford, ‘Framing the Self: Clothing, Class and Autonomy in M.E.Braddon’s Wyllard’s
Weird’
PANEL J: The Dead & Dying Body
Jessica Hindes, ‘ “Dead, buried and ressurectionised”: The Undead Poor in G.W.M.Reynolds’s
Mysteries of London’
3
Julie Watt, ‘Death Sentences’
Barbara Vrachna, ‘Ailing Bodies, Suffering Minds or Vice Versa? Ouida’s ‘ill’ characters in
Folle Farine and In Maremma’
5.45pm
Closing Remarks
4