The Thirty-Ninth Victorians Institute
DISRUPTING VICTORIAN STUDIES
Inconvenient Facts, Shocking Discoveries, Surprising Events,
Forgotten Voices, Unknown Writings, Mangled Texts
University of South Carolina, Columbia, October 3-4, 2008

PROGRAM (as of 8/29/08)
All events in Thomas Cooper Library (mezzanine level) unless otherwise indicated)

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 3
From 9:30 am  Registration & coffee (Mezzanine Gallery) 

FRIDAY 10:15-10.45 am
Session 1: OPENING PLENARY (Graniteville Room)
Chair: Patrick Scott (Univ. of South Carolina)
Brief greetings: Thomas F. McNally (Interim Dean of Libraries).
Timothy Alborn (Lehman Coll., CUNY):
“An Irish El Dorado: The Victorian Discovery of Gold in County Wicklow.”

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FRIDAY 11.00-12:15 am
Session 2A: Dickens
Chair: Suzanne Ozment (Univ. of South Carolina at Aiken)
Lillian E. Craton (Lander Univ.): “Miniatures and Monsters: Extreme Littleness in the
Novels of Charles Dickens.”
Laurie Lyda (UNC Greensboro): “Relational Politics in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son.”
Brigitte Knight (UNC Pembroke): “‘Out of the Witches’ Cauldron:’ Molly the Murderess in Great Expectations.”

Session 2B: Two Brontës
Kitty Elton (Univ. of New Brunswick): “Anne Brontë: The Buried Sister.”
Kristen Pond (UNC Greensboro): “Silently Disrupting Identity: Lucy Snowe and Unethical Constructions of the Other in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette.”
Robin Barrow (Univ. of Tennessee): “The ‘Draught and Glow’ of Sexual Violence in Jane Eyre.”

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Lunch break

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FRIDAY 1:15-2:30 pm
Session 3A: Reading the Unacceptable
Marylu Hill (Villanova Univ.): "Carlyle Who?  The Problem of Thomas Carlyle in Victorian Studies.”
Tabitha Sparks (McGill Univ.): “Recovering Self-Hatred?  Frank Danby, Julia Frankau, and the Challenge of Reading a Morally Reprehensible Novel.”
Corri Zoli (Syracuse Univ.): “Victorian Humanitarians: Historicizing the Laws of War and Definitions of Atrocity.”

Session 3B: Across the (Scottish) Border
Chair: Jason Pierce (Mars Hill Coll.).
Chad May (Kansas Wesleyan Univ.): “Sir Walter Scott’s The Monastery: Gothic Disruptions of History.”

Brooke McLaughlin Mitchell (Wingate Univ.): “A Different Kind of Tourism: Clough’s The Bothie and the Highland Clearances.”
Margee Husemann (Black Hills State Univ.): “Rethinking Scots Law in the Novels of Wilkie Collins.”

Session 3C: Victorian  Theatre
Chair: Kimberley Manganelli (Clemson Univ.)
Marc Cohen  (UNC-Chapel Hill): “Madame Céleste:  Lower- and Middle Class Acceptance of a French Leading Lady.”
Carla Coleman (Univ. of South Carolina at Aiken): “The Stage as a Profession for Women: Eliza Lynn Linton’s Unexpected Defense of Women’s Work.”
Celeste Pottier (Univ. of South Carolina): “Skeletons in the Closet: Domestic Articulation in J.S. Bowes’s Willful Murder, or Deeds of Dreadful Night.”

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Break

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FRIDAY 2.45-4:00 pm
Session 4A: Victorian Science
Chair: Carla Coleman (University of South Carolina at Aiken).
Jill R. Ehnenn (Appalachian State Univ.): “Darwin’s (Queer) Body in On the Origin of Species.”
Tiffany Tsao (Univ. of California Berkeley): “The Unexpected Taxonomy of Alfred Russel Wallace.”
Barri J. Gold (Muhlenberg Coll.): “Thermo-Poetics: The Conversation of Energy."

Session 4B: Victorian Politics
Chair: Robert Lee Oakman III (University of South Carolina)
Scott Dransfield (Southern Virginia Univ.): “‘A Government that fills us with envy’: Thomas Carlyle’s Manuscript on the Mormons.”
Barton Swaim (Office of the Governor, State of South Carolina): “Mill on Liberty.”
Michael D. Lewis (Univ. of Virginia): “Eliot, Disraeli and the Workers.”

Session 4C: Rider Haggard & Empire
Chair: Suzanne Ozment (Univ. of South Carolina at Aiken)
David J. Bradshaw (Warren Wilson Coll.): “She-That-Must-Be-Read: Redressing the Overly Determined Approach to Haggard’s Fiction”
Dan Shea (Austin Peay State Univ.): "Dreams of the Danish Invasion: Rider Haggard, Reverse Imperialism, & the 'English Race,'"
Leslie Haynsworth (Univ. of South Carolina):
“Titans of Empire and Titans of Crime; detection and subversion in Grant Allen’s The African Millionaire”

Session 4D: Thackeray & Satire
Chair: David Latané (Virginia Commonwealth University)
Gary Simons (Univ. of South Florida): “The (Almost) Unknown Thackeray: Thackeray’s Newspaper Critical Journalism.”
Melissa Jenkins (Wake Forest Univ.): “Disrupting Satire in Thackeray’s The Newcomes”
Jennifer L. Martinsen (Univ. of South Carolina): “The Victorian Invention of the Comic Strip: National Identity Reframed”

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 Break

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FRIDAY 4:30 pm
Session 5: KEYNOTE ADDRESS (Student Success Center)
Chair: Anthony Jarrells (University of South Carolina)
Brief greetings: William E. Rivers (Chair, Department of English)
Keynote address: Ian Duncan (University of California at Berkeley): “The Great Book of Nature: the Novel and the Science of Man.”
--Ian Duncan is Professor of English at Berkeley, where he recently completed a term as department chair.  His publications include Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: the Gothic, Scott, and Dickens (1992), Scott's Shadow: the Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (2007), and editions or essays on Scott, Hogg, Dickens, Ruskin, Borrow, Darwin, Conan Doyle, and others.

FRIDAY 5:30 pm-7:00 pm
Reception, Exhibition Opening (Graniteville Room)
Sponsored by the Thomas Cooper Society
Brief greetings: John Lee (President, Thomas Cooper Society).
Exhibition: “The Shapes of Victorian Writing” (Mezzanine Gallery)
--first editions of Victorian authors from Carlyle, Darwin and Dickens to the Brontes, Rhoda Broughton, Robert Louis Stevenson and Robert Bridges, and featuring William North (1825-1854).

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Dinner groups, for those who wish
Coordinated by Rebecca Stern (University of South Carolina).
Please consult registration table for details of groups, restaurants, meet-up places & times.

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 4
From 8:00 am  Registration & coffee (Mezzanine Gallery) 
Note: Thomas Cooper Library is open 24/7 during the semester, but you may be asked to show your conference badge to enter the building before 10 a.m.

SATURDAY 8:30-9:10 am
Session 6: A PLENARY ON POETRY (Graniteville Room)
Chair: William B. Thesing (University of South Carolina)
William Harmon (UNC Chapel Hill): “A Generation of Anomalies: Hardy, Doughty, Bridges, and Hopkins.”

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SATURDAY 9:15-10:30 am
Session 7A: George Eliot (Graniteville Room)
Chair: Rebecca Stern (Univ. of South Carolina)
Srdjan Smajic (Furman University): “Ghosts and “Ghosts”: Supernatural Realism in Silas Marner.”
Gay Sibley (Univ. of Hawaii): "George Eliot and the Satire Nobody Wants"
Nancy Henry (Univ. of Tennessee): “‘Ruffian Geniuses’ in George Eliot’s Romola”

Session 7B: Law
Chair: Maria Bachman (Coastal Carolina Univ.)
David Latané (Virginia Commonwealth Univ.): “‘The Mysterious Affair’: the newspaperman and the royal bastard, 1829.”
Albert Pionke (Univ. of Alabama): “Disrupting Victorian Professionalism: Rituals of the
Legal Elite”
John Lamb (West Virginia Univ.): “That Other Yellow Book: The Ring and the Book and the Yelverton Marriage Case”

Session 7C:  Religion
Chair: Maria LaMonaca (Columbia College)
David Goslee (Univ. of Tennessee): “James Martineau: Seeing Victorian Culture Double through a Unitarian Lens”
Devon Fisher (Lenoir-Rhyne Coll.): “St. George and the Pterodactyl: Kingsley’s Sacramental View of Protestant History”
Tim Carens (Coll. of Charleston): “Breaking the Idol of the Marriage Plot in Yeast and Villette”

Session 7D: Servants & Companions
Chair: Mary Ellen Ballanca (Univ. of South Carolina at Sumter).
Jean Fernandez (Univ. of Maryland Baltimore County): “Literary Drudges: Servant Autobiography and Literacy Debates in the Victorian Age.”
Britt Terry (Univ. of South Carolina): “No More I’ll Stoop to Brush the Boot”: Social Revolution in The Enchanted Isle.”
Lauren Wood Hoffer (Vanderbilt Univ.): ‘I was at work in your house as a detective’: The Companion and the Secrets of the House in Lady Audley’s Secret and Anne Hereford”

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Break

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SATURDAY 10:45 am-12:00 noon
Session 8A: Short Fiction
Chair: Siobhan Craft Brownson (Winthrop Univ.)
Maria K. Bachman (Coastal Carolina Univ.): “Charles Dickens’s ‘very odd story . . . with a bit of Diablerie’.”
Kathryn Crowther (Georgia Inst. of Technology): “Reclaiming Charlotte Brontë’s The Green Dwarf.”
Paul Marchbanks (California Polytechnic State Univ.): “A Reevaluation of Tone and Voice in George Eliot’s Brother Jacob.”

Session 8B: Charlotte Brontë
Chair: Deborah Logan (Western Kentucky University).
Leila May (NC State Univ.): “Reductio ad Materialismus: Overplaying the Materialist Card in Villette”
Adam Pridemore (Univ. of South Florida): "Jane Eyre on the Stool: Exploring Ignored Questions of Narrative Authenticity in Brontë 's Jane Eyre."
Abby Mann (Indiana Univ.): “’Chain[ed] . . . to a putrefying carcase’: George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, and Renunciation.”

Session 8C: Education, Female and Male
Chair: Julie Wise (University of South Carolina).
Margaret Shear (South Suburban College): “Sarah Stickney Ellis’s The Widow Green and Her Three Nieces in the British Workman: Educating, Empowering, and Liberating Independent Women.”
Daniel Kline (Ohio Northern Univ.): “Slaves of Greed and Sense:  A.H. Clough’s Juvenilia and the Moral Policing of Rugby.”
Audrey Fessler (Univ. of Wisconsin–Eau Claire): “Minding Charlotte Yonge and Her Intellectual Girls.”

Session 8D: Supernatural & Transcendental
Chair: David Bradshaw (Warren Wilson College).
Melissa Edmundson Makala (Charleston Southern Univ.): “Visits from the Battlefield: Ellen Wood's Ghostly Soldiers.”
Patricia Michael (Holy Name Univ.): “Re-crossing the Bar: A Reassessment of the Victorian Response to Death.”
Rebecca Welshman (Univ. of Exeter): “‘Comprehending the Void:’ Richard Jefferies and Transcendental Ideology in The Story of My Heart.”

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Brief break to walk to Courtyard by Marriott. 

SATURDAY 12:15-1:15 pm.
CONFERENCE LUNCH (at Courtyard by Marriott, Assembly St.)
Lunch will conclude with a brief Business Meeting:
Chair: Deborah Logan (Western Kentucky University), President, The Victorians Institute; Albert Pionke (University of Alabama), Secretary; Annette  Van (UNC Greensboro), Treasurer; David Latané (Virginia Commonwealth University), Editor, Victorians Institute Journal.

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 Afternoon sessions in Thomas Cooper Library

SATURDAY 1:30-2:20 pm
Session 9A:  Meet the Editors: Perspectives on Acceptably Disruptive Submissions  (Graniteville Room)
David Latané (Virginia Commonwealth University): Editor, Victorians Institute Journal.
Deborah Logan (Western Kentucky University): Editor, Victorians Newsletter.
John Lamb (West Virginia University): Editor, Victorian Poetry.

Session 9B: Victorian Romanticism
Chair: Anthony Jarrells (Univ. of South Carolina
Mary Ellen Bellanca (Univ. of South Carolina at Sumter): “Disrupting Reception Studies: The Overlooked Victorian Publication of Dorothy Wordsworth.”
Benjamin Kim (Univ. of Denver): “Felicia Hemans at Rydal Mount in 1830.”

Session 9C: Cultural Commerce
Allan Life (UNC Chapel Hill): “William Michael Rossetti as Dealer and Writer.”
Emily Wicktor (Univ. of Kansas): “‘Please hand this list to some one who may use it’: An 1892 Catalogue of Victorian Pornography Revealed.”

Session 9D: Robert Louis Stevenson
Jason Pierce (Mars Hill Coll.): "Replaying 'An Old Song': Stevenson's Uncollected Contributions to Henley's London." 
Timothy S. Hayes (Auburn Univ.): “The Deafening Silences of Stevenson’s The Ebb-Tide and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”

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Short break

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SATURDAY 2:30-3:45 pm Session 10A: Margaret Oliphant

Chair: Margee Husemann (Black Hills State Univ.)
Michelle Mouton (Cornell Coll.): “Margaret Oliphant’s Hester and the Pension Reform Act”
Annette Van (UNC Greensboro): “Oliphant’s Hester and the End of the Female.” Bildungsroman?”

Session 10B: Marriage (& the Fin de Siecle)
Emily Harbin (Converse Coll.): “Writing the Eugenic Romance:  Emma Brooke, Menie Muriel Dowie, and Eugenic Motherhood.”
Jessica DeCoux (CUNY Graduate Center): “Marie Corelli, Wormwood, and the Case for a Genderless Decadence.”
Kate Faber Oestreich (Ohio State Univ.): “How Marriage Reform Disrupts the Fin de Siecle.”

Session 10C: Poetry (& Gender)
Chair: John Lamb (West Virginia Univ.).
Evan Horowitz (Univ. of North Texas): “On Some Motifs in Tennyson (and Baudelaire)”
Julie M. Wise (Univ. of South Carolina): “A New Antigone?  Victorian Medeas”
Lindsey C. Gedelman (Univ. of South Carolina): “Creating the Wilderness Safe: Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper”

Session 10D: Sensation
Chair: Anita Rose (Converse Coll.).
Tara MacDonald (Univ. of Toronto): “The Depraved Appetite of the Public”: Amelia B. Edwards and Sensation Fiction.”
Andrea Bebell (West Virginia Univ.): “‘Pass the Plum-Pudding’: Resistance and Community Building in Flora Annie Steel’s The Reformer’s Wife.”
Lisa Hager (Georgia Inst. of Technology): "Thomas Hardy, Victorian Novelist and Narrative Cross-Dresser: Narrative and Agency in Hardy's The Hand of Ethelberta."

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Short break

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Saturday 4:00-5:30 pm
Session 11:  FINAL PLENARY PANEL: The Elusive William North, Disruptive Victorian (Graniteville Room)
--a special session marking the first-ever republication, by the University of South Carolina Press, of William North’s extraordinary novel The City of the Jugglers; or, Free-Trade in Souls (1850), from Thomas Cooper Library’s copy, one of only two known to survive in North American libraries.
Chair: Rebecca Stern (University of South Carolina).
Patrick Scott (University of South Carolina): “Introduction: The Elusive William North.”
Allan Life (UNC Chapel Hill): “William North in the Footnotes of Pre-Raphaelitism.”
Lanya Lamouria (Albion College): “William North’s The City of the Jugglers (1850) and the Revolutions of 1848.”
Leon Jackson (University of South Carolina): “William North’s The Slave of the Lamp (1854) and the New York Literary Scene.” 
Edward Whitley (Lehigh University): “William North and The New York Saturday Press.” Response & comment: Rebecca Stern.