SEX, COURTSHIP AND MARRIAGE
IN VICTORIAN POPULAR CULTURE
18-19 July 2011
Institute of English Studies, University of London, Senate House
3rd Annual Conference of the Victorian Popular Fiction Association
Monday 18th July
9.00-9.20am Registration: main foyer, Senate House, South Block
9.20
Opening and Welcome
9.30
KEYNOTE 1:
Jennifer Phegley (University of Missouri-Kansas City)
10.45
Coffee
11.05-12.25
PARALLEL PANEL 1:
1a. Sex, Marriage and the Other
Will Tattersdill, ‘Spaceships, Marriage and the Fear of Endings in George Griffith’s
“Stories of Other Worlds”’
Éadoin Agnew, ‘ “The Juggernaut of English domestic life”: Mimicry and Marriage
in Florence Marryat’s Veronique’
Joanne Knowles, ‘ “The falling in love is no doubt a national failing”: courtship,
marriage and the national Other in M.E.Braddon’s fiction’
1b. Sex and Marriage in the Periodical Press
Kara Manning, ‘ “He who consumed the most pies”: Consumption and Courtship in
the String of Pearls, A Romance’
Shu-Fang Lai, ‘Sex and Marriage in Household Words and All the Year Round’
Cheryl Deedman, ‘Marriage is the only future: Popular Romantic Literature and
Young Women’s Imaginations, 1850-1890’
12.25-1.30pm
Lunch
1.30-2.50
PARALLEL PANEL 2:
2a. Celebrity Couples
Janine Hatter, ‘The Composition of Courtship: Visual Representations of Mary
Braddon and John Maxwell’s Relationship in the Periodical Press and Personal
Photographs’
Sophie Duncan, ‘ “The Marriage of Orlando and Rosalind”: Mrs Kendall as the midVictorian wife’
Ann Hale, ‘The Progress of Crime: Marriage, Gender Roles, and the Manning
Murders’
2b. Second Marriages
Maia McAleavey, ‘Bigamy’s “Visible History”: Amelia B.Edwards’s Barbara’s
History’
Malcolm Cocks, ‘Marriage with a deceased wife’s sister: Matthew Arnold, Protestant
Dissent, and the “great sexual insurrection of our Angol-Teutonic Race”’
Ann-Barbara Graff, ‘Old Widows and Old Maids: The Discipline of the Marriage Bed
in Frances Trollope’s The Widow Barnaby’
3.00-4.20
PARALLEL PANEL 3:
3a. Legacy of the Victorian Marital Ideal
Julia Kuehn, ‘Passion Impossible: Sex Abroad, The Sheik and Other Stories’
Anne-Marie Beller, ‘Courtship beyond the “Separate Spheres”: The New Woman’s
Challenge to Mid-Victorian Romance in Mona Caird’s “The Yellow Drawing-Room”
and Ella D’Arcy’s “The Pleasure Pilgrim”’
Christina Murdoch, ‘ “A Sort of High Chivalry Forbade it”: Political Women and
Courtly Love in Mrs Humphrey Ward’s Sir George Tressady’
3b. Sexual Selection
Philippa St George, ‘Love, Marriage and Racial Decline in Late Victorian Domestic
Fiction’
Jennifer Robertson, ‘A Darwinian Romance: Sexual Selection in Bleak House’
Chieko Ichikawa, ‘ “Eugenic Marriage” in Arabella Kenealy’s Dr Janet of Harley
Street’
4.20
Tea
4.40-5.40
ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION
Pamela Gilbert, ‘The Other Victorians: Sexuality and Victorian Popular Fiction’
Janice Allan, ‘A Queer Marriage: The Relationship between Realism and
Sensationalism’
5.40
DRINKS RECEPTION
Evening
CONFERENCE DINNER
Tuesday 19th July
9.30
KEYNOTE 2:
Andrew King (Canterbury Christ Church University)
10.45
Coffee
11.05-12.25
PARALLEL PANEL 4:
4a. Sexuality and Representation (i)
Andrew Maunder, ‘Making Nancy Respectable: Oliver Twist on stage in the 1860s
and 1870s’
Paul Rooney, ‘Wronged Wives and Ruined Women: Fergus Hume’s Madame Midas
(1888) as Popular Cultural Commodity of New Journalism’
Sarah Crofton, ‘Sex on the Astral Plane: Nineteenth Century Mediumship and bodily
heteronymy’
4b. Marriage and Self-sacrifice
Shani Lynne Wagner. ‘Marriage and the Woman Question in Mary de Morgan’s “The
Seeds of Love”’
Carolyn Oulton, ‘ “Now to the home of which you are the sunbeam”: Telling Stories
in The Wing of Azrael’
Christine Pullen, ‘Realism v. Romance: The Morality of Marriage in Amy Levy’s
Later Fiction’
12.25-1.30
Lunch
1.30-2.50
PARALLEL PANEL 5:
5a. Victorian Sexual Underworld
Ross Forman, ‘A “salacious chronicle of an abnormally constituted sexualist”:
Edmund Backhouse’s Erotic Fictions’
Robert Maidens, ‘ “Be respectable, and don’t think of Bohemianising it, if you can
help it”: homoerotics and respectability in Dutton Cook’s Paul Foster’s Daughter’
5b. Sexuality and Representation (ii)
Jessica Hindes, ‘ “Scenes of Patrician Depravity”: female power and male impotence
in two stories from The Mysteries of London’
Mariaconcetta Costantini, ‘Eros, Thanatos, and the Redundant Marriage Plot in
M.E.Braddon and Rhoda Broughton’
Valerie Fehlbaum, ‘Women, Wooing and Wedlock in the novels of Anthony
Trollope’
2.50-3.10
Tea
3.10-4.50
PARALLEL PANEL 6:
6a. Women Writers on Marriage
Greta Depledge. ‘Experimental medicine and marital harmony: Florence Marryat’s In
the Name of Liberty’
Helena Ifil, ‘ “All had happened prematurely”: The Dangers of Premature Marriage in
M.E.Braddon’s Sensational and Domestic Fiction’
Vanessa Mangione, ‘The Marriage Proposal’
Ana Clara Birrento, ‘Oliphant’s double articulation of the concept of marriage in nonfiction and in fiction’
6b. Marriage under strain
Tara MacDonald, ‘Madmen in the Attic? Masculinity, Marriage, and Incarceration in
M.E.Braddon’s John Marchmont’s Legacy’
Helen Goodman, ‘Marriage, Madness and Sexual Jealousy in Victorian Literature and
Culture’
Maggie Harvey, ‘Dickens and the Arranged Marriage’
4.50pm
Postgraduate study session:
This session is open to all postgraduates attending the conference. Three established
academics will offer advice on the following subjects:
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Research presentations: conference skills and advice
How to get published
Getting your first academic job
5.50pm
Close and VPFA meeting.