CALL FOR PAPERS

Keynote Speaker: Professor Regenia Gagnier (University of Exeter)

Plenary Lecture: 'Funding for Postgraduate Researchers', Dr Mark Llewellyn
(University of Liverpool)

Publishing Workshop: Matthew Frost (Manchester University Press)

Crossing the Line is a student-led postgraduate conference that will explore and interrogate the multifarious affinities between Victorian and Modernist cultures. It focuses on the cross-currents of attraction and repulsion at the turn of the century. This event asks whether affinities exist innately in the body as psychological and emotional connections, and investigates those affinities which are cultural constructions. It questions whether affinities are permanent or can be eroded by the passage of time.

There will be papers on the following topics:

Witches; Symbolist and Surrealist Art; The Imperialist City; Mythologies and Public Sculpture; Modernism vs Dickens; 1920s Pulps and Science Fiction; Victorian Aestheticism and Homosexuality; Pastoral Legacies; Drama; Eugenics; Theoretical Afterlives; Illustration and Modern Art; Representations of Domesticity, and affinities between the works of Elizabeth Gaskell and E. M. Forster; Olive Custance and H. D.; Whitman and Baudelaire, and Derek Walcot and John Clare, among others.

A selection of the best papers will be published in the AHRC funded Victorian Network journal.