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INCS Susan Morgan Graduate Essay Prize 2025
Winner: Michele Brugnetti, Sapienza University of Rome / University of Silesia in Katowice, “A New Form for a New Crisis: the emergence of the novel-essay and the case of Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean”
In his concise, suggestive, and well-researched paper, Michele Brugnetti makes a strong case for reading Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (1884) as a signal contribution to the fin-de-siècle European tradition of the novel-essay. Drawing on Stefano Ercolino’s theorization of the novel-essay in continental literature, Brugnetti convincingly argues that Pater’s reimagination of the Bildungsroman around processes of aesthetic reflection was more than just an ornamental, gratuitous suspension of narrative action. Instead, Pater experimentally combined the Bildungsroman with the novel-essay to explore how aesthetic reflection could play a constitutive role in the unfolding of plot and the development of individual character. “In a moment defined by acceleration, fragmentation, and the collapse of inherited certainties,” Brugnetti suggests, “Pater stages in Marius the Epicurean a radically inward turn: it explores how perception, shaped by prior texts and aesthetic encounters, inhabits tension—seeking, through the interpenetration of essay and novel, a form provisional enough to reflect a self continuously in the act of becoming.” (8) The committee was particularly impressed by the breadth of Brugnetti’s engagement with the Paterian source material and his meaningful dialogue with scholarship related to the pan-European decadent novel.
Honorable Mention: Rebecca Sheppard, University of British Columbia, “Poisoned Thought and Circulatory Collapse in George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil”
What happens to a body or a mind when emotions are bottled and blood does not circulate as it should? How might the language of nineteenth-century affect and circulatory theory unveil heretofore hidden valences in the pathologized characters inhabiting the world of George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil? Rebecca Sheppard’s insightful and witty essay proposes answers to these questions, arguing that Eliot’s novella “exposes what happens when circulation, meant to sustain life through constant renewal, no longer functions healthily. […] Eliot encodes this failure in the language of pressure, blockage, and accumulated strain” (6). The prize committee found the interdisciplinary nature of the essay to be particularly noteworthy. Sheppard convincingly deploys Victorian-era medical literature in her attentive close readings of The Lifted Veil to conclude that the structure of Eliot’s novella itself, much like that of the pathologies ailing Latimer, offers the “physiological and narrative inversion” of an “acceleration [that] defines the dominant logic of modern life” (13).
Susan Morgan Prize Committee 2025: Nick Wolters, Matthew Skwiat and John MacNeill Miller.
Call for Papers / Telling the Story of Oceans and Archives: Rethinking the Novel Form / Abstracts (150 words) and short bio due 15 November 2025; Full articles due 30 May 2026
The novel as a genre has usually been credited with travelling well. Whether as part of Macmillan’s Colonial Library transporting British classics to Indian readers, or in offering object lessons disseminated in Francophone Africa, the novel seems to be the ever-present marker of colonial encounters. The ideological stakes of these encounters have long been recognized in scholarly examinations of the novel as an instrument of power. Yet how these transoceanic movements that took the novel from Europe to its colonies reshaped the genre is a story that is still underexplored.
This special issue (under contract with Journal of Postcolonial Writing) situates the postcolonial novel, broadly construed, at the juncture of two distinct yet related fields: transoceanic studies and archival studies. The transoceanic paradigm connecting Europe and its former colonies has been integral not just to the dissemination of the novel, but to the contours of the genre itself: nowhere is this history of engagement better documented than in colonial archives (Joshi, In Another Country). It should thus come as no surprise that many colonial/postcolonial novelists (Perkins, Sansay, Ghosh, Gurnah, von Reinhold, Vassanji, among others) write metaliterary fictions preoccupied with the oceanic systems that carried the novel from Europe to its colonies and with the archives–secret and known, speculative and actual–that promise access to places and people lost to history. These novelists are preoccupied with what we term “the transoceanic archive”. When we view the novel through a transoceanic and archival lens, we attend, most obviously, to state archives documenting the global political and commercial networks that connected the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans—networks through which the novel traveled, and that shaped its materiality and literary history. But the conjunction of the transoceanic and the archival also destabilizes understandings of the archive itself. The transoceanic archive is composed of overlapping transnational layers; it is literally in transit (Hofmeyr, “The Complicating Sea”). Thus, while the transoceanic frame allows us to see how the novel travelled from Europe to its colonies, and also between colonies, the archival approach captures traces of these travels, discernible within the novels themselves, as well as existing in the maritime archives. By juxtaposing these two analytical frameworks, we hope to understand what happens to the generic form of the novel as it travels across the seas and encounters official and unofficial archives, and the extent to which the novel itself takes on the task of archiving these transoceanic journeys.
This special issue looks at how the novel drew on these archives for inspiration, took on the task of archiving lost and untold histories, and used the idea of reclaiming narratives to reconcile with its transoceanic travels. We welcome contributions that explore exemplary texts, literary-historical inflection points, historical trajectories, or transnational dynamics in Anglophone and Anglophone-adjacent novelistic traditions. We particularly look forward to submissions that place these questions within the context of the 19th and 20th centuries. In challenging Eurocentrism, this special issue will prioritize contributions from and about the Global South, which we define as encompassing the indigenous North.
Among the topics that contributors might explore are the following:
- Maritime histories in engagement with novelistic traditions
- Archival histories of the novel’s production, dissemination, or reception
- Pacific, Atlantic, or Indian oceanic world in relation to novel history
- Primary source materials in the literary history of the novel
- The novel form, epistolarity, and transoceanic correspondence
- Oral narrative (or other non-written narrative) and longform prose as novelistic genres
- Translations and transmedial adaptations of novels
- Strategies for decolonizing the novel
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Aesthetic experimentation and the limits of the novel as a form
For more information, see Telling the Story of Oceans and Archives: Rethinking the Novel Form
Please send an abstract (150 words) and a short author bio by November 15, 2025, to Sunayani Bhattacharya (sb40@stmarys-ca.edu) and Lanya Lamouria (llamouria@missouristate.edu). Final papers (6,000 – 8,000 words) due May 30, 2026. Anticipated issue publication date 2027.
Call for Papers / Special Issue of Women’s Writing on Margaret Oliphant at 200 / Abstracts (300 words) due 1 December 2025; Full articles due September 2026
2028 marks the bicentenary of the birth of Margaret Oliphant, the brilliant and prolific Victorian novelist, biographer, essayist, reviewer and short-story writer. This special issue of the journal Women’s Writing will celebrate her rich and varied body of work, showcasing the latest developments in Oliphant studies and exploring what this once-neglected but increasingly widely recognised writer has to offer twenty-first century critics and readers.
We welcome proposals for articles of 7000 words, on topics including but not limited to Oliphant’s:
– realist novels
– short stories / ghost stories
– work as historian, biographer and/or art historian
– literary criticism
– travel writing
– autobiography
– correspondence
– serialization
– writing style
– approach to the Woman Question
– engagement with religious belief and/or grief
– engagement with temporality, ageing, generation
– engagement with motherhood, widowhood, family
– relationship with her publishers
– relationship with her contemporaries;
– the critical history of Oliphant studies.
Please submit abstracts of around 300 words, with a short biographical note, to the guest editors, Helen Kingstone (Royal Holloway, University of London) at helen.kingstone@rhul.ac.uk and Clare Walker Gore (Lucy Cavendish, Cambridge) at chw37@cam.ac.uk by 1st December 2025. We expect to notify contributors in January 2026, and anticipate that completed articles of 7000 words would be due by September 2026. For full details, see CFP (pdf).
Call for Papers / Vernon Lee Conference / “Order and Chaos: Vernon Lee and the Politics of Disruption / 1-3 September 2026 / University of Liverpool / Abstracts (300 words) and a short bio (100 words) due 18 January 2026
This conference aims to explore the political questions and challenges we face today through the lens that Vernon Lee brought to the same kind of challenges in her time: a lens that is simultaneously thought–provoking, curious, playful, radical, and multidisciplinary. Papers may wish to explore the breakdown and/or the imposition of illusory order or structure in various fields (educational, social, commercial, entertainment, literary, scientific, information), what damage it is doing and whether it can somehow be harnessed or managed to be beneficial; how resistance, rebellion and nonconformity in public, academic, and private life, thought and publication can modify “however infinitesimally, the opinions and ideals and institutions of the present and the future” as Lee suggests in Gospels of Anarchy.
We welcome presentations, lightning presentations, panels/ roundtables, workshops, or creative practice sessions. We would particularly like to hear about the ways in which Lee’s works speak to current events and trends, and postulate or enable the development of healthy, sustainable futures. Papers (15 minutes) Roundtable/ panel (60 mins), workshops (60 mins), creative practice session (60 mins), and lightning papers (10 mins). We would be delighted to discuss proposals for panels or individual presentations, and to answer any questions you may have. Please submit questions, abstracts (300 words) and a short bio (100 words) in a Word/ GoogleDoc to the review committee email vernonleealliance@gmail.com by 18 January 2026.
Thanks to the generosity of the International Vernon Lee Society, we hope to offer bursaries to early-career/precarious scholars – more details on the application process will be made available in due course.
The conference is organized by members of The Vernon Lee Alliance (VLA): Matthew Bradley (The University of Liverpool, UK), Elisa Bizzotto (Iuav University of Venice, Italy), Sally Blackburn-Daniels (Teesside University, UK), Mary F. Burns (Independent Scholar, US), Mandy Gagel (University of Michigan, US), Mary Clai Jones (Chadron State College, US), Tomi-Ann Roberts (Colorado College, US)
See full CFP for more details and additional information about submitting abstracts and panel proposals.
INCS Stein Prize 2024
Winner: Alexander Bubb, “Which Translation?: Identifying the True Source of Patten Wilson’s Shahnameh Illustrations.” Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies, vol. 6, no. 1 (2023), pp. 98-119.
Scholars have long recognized that an orientalist fascination with the literatures and cultures of Asia exerted a powerful influence over nineteenth-century European culture. Bubb’s “Which Translation?” uses an admirably nuanced and methodical investigation into the history of translations between Persian and English episodes from the epic poem Shahnameh to rewrite our sense of the particular channels of such cross-cultural exchanges. In the process, the article forcefully demonstrates how scholars have given too much credit to canonical writers in their accounts of global literary traffic, erasing significant figures from literary history and unintentionally replicating the very colonial power structures they seek to question. Through a close comparative reading of English renditions of the tale of Sohrab and Rustem, their Persian sources, and the fin-de-siècle illustrations they inspired, Bubb compellingly shows that the artist Patten Wilson drew not on Mathew Arnold’s well-known rendition of the poem, but rather on the work of the popularizer Helen Zimmern as the source material for illustrations Wilson published in The Yellow Book. The article’s impressive attention to the overlooked details of translation at once helps to rehabilitate the reputation of a marginalized woman writer and drives home the need for a methodological shift in cross-cultural literary history, a shift that entails looking past conventional notions of literary significance to de-center the European canon and counteract the enduring power structures of imperialism.
Runner Up: Lindsay Wells, “Tobacco for the Flower Garden: Plant Collecting and Plantation Crops in Nineteenth-Century Britain.” Literature Compass, e12705 (2023), https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12705.
Lindsay Wells’s “Tobacco for the Flower Garden” examines the abundant literary and visual archive of plant collection in nineteenth-century Britain to underscore what is missing from these depictions of agricultural specimens imported from the far reaches of the empire: an honest reckoning with the realities of plantation slavery. Reading textual accounts alongside images drawn from both commercial and botanical sources on tobacco, the article shows how an aestheticized, intellectualized treatment of tobacco’s horticultural interest and beauty made it possible to circumvent difficult conversations about Britain’s ongoing entanglement with economies founded on the labor of enslaved peoples. Wells’s eloquent investigation of the gaps and silences in such discourse highlights the role that gardening and plant collecting played in the domestication of colonialist ideology, opening up space for further work into the ways the representation of the nonhuman in the nineteenth century could have serious repercussions for the naturalization of human beings’ mistreatment of one another.
Stein Prize Committee 2024: John MacNeill Miller (Chair), Ginger Frost, and Nick Wolters.
CFP Victorian Poetry / “Poetry’s Parts” Keyword Series / Deadline: rolling
Victorian Poetry is pleased to announce a new keyword series called “Poetry’s Parts.” We invite proposals for short keyword essays (ca. 1,100 – 1,300 words) exploring Victorian poetry’s parts, whether formal (“sonnet”) or figural (“apostrophe”), cultural (“cosmopolitan”) or critical (“lyricization”). Considered and published on an ongoing basis (as opposed to appearing in a designated special issue), essays should apprehend pressing conceptual, aesthetic, historical, cultural, political, archival, and / or methodological questions and problems that shape the field (or, alternatively, that have been neglected to the field’s detriment). As warranted, authors might also consider the ways the field (as revealed by the keyword under discussion) is animated by or animates other (sub)disciplines or genealogies of thought in ways recognized or unrecognized.
Keywords need not be limited to those that fall strictly within the specialist purview of Victorian poetry. For instance, essays exploring the resonances of broad concepts such as “atmosphere” or “race” as refracted distinctively by and through Victorian poetry (broadly construed) are most welcome. Because these essays should make arguments as opposed to offering handbook-style overviews, proposals revisiting keywords explored in prior issues will eventually be accepted as the series unfolds. Pedagogical discussion may be appropriate if it serves an illustrative purpose that keeps in view the series’ focus.
Proposals are subject to editorial review (with an eye toward giving deliberate shape to the series, especially in its early stages) and keyword essays to peer review. If contemporaneous appearance in print is necessary for offering substantive insight, the editor will consider joint proposals (ideally, featuring scholars of different ranks and affiliations, on and off the tenure track), whether on the same keyword from quite distinct vantages or on different but productively entangled keywords. Joint proposals should be limited to two or three scholars, as larger groups are difficult to accommodate in print outside the confines of a special issue. Direct queries and proposals to the editor at victorianpoetryjournal@gmail.com.