CFP: "Hideous Progeny": The Gothic in the Nineteenth Century

Lake Shore Campus,

Klarcheck Information Commons, 4th floor 27 October 2018, 8:30am-5:30pm Introductory Speaker: Alison Booth (University of Virginia) Keynote Speaker: Suzy Anger (University of British Columbia)

“And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper.”

- Mary Shelley, 1831 Introduction to Frankenstein

In this truly Gothic year, we celebrate both the bicentennial of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and the birth of Emily Brontë, author of Wuthering Heights (1847), two famous Gothic novels which sparked questions regarding the potential of human connections across social classes, time, and death itself. Subsequent authors of Gothic fiction similarly employed this genre to interrogate the breakdown of patriarchal family structures, systems of power and reproduction, sexual, religious, and socio-political taboos and norms, reinterpret previous literatures, and reject contemporary notions of the limits of reality, scientific possibility, and human progress. Given the 19th-century recognition of the Gothic as an unstable, versatile space that can function as a surprising and subversive mechanism for social critique, we ask what are the possibilities, values, narrative strategies, ideas, versions, mutations, and adaptations of the nineteenth century Gothic? Over the course of the nineteenth century, what endured, progressed, and morphed in this genre, and why?

The Loyola University Chicago Victorian Society solicits paper proposals addressing Gothic questionings of texts, bodies, and the supernatural. Possible CFP categories include but are not limited to the following:

• textual studies and digital humanities • narrative theory • adaptations • history of science, • queer theory • women and gender studies, • art and architecture • post-colonial studies • the Gothic and the Neo-Gothic • mutations, perversions, and disability studies.