Victorian Network is an MLA-indexed online journal devoted to publishing and promoting the best postgraduate work in Victorian Studies.

 The ninth issue of Victorian Network, guest edited by Professor Pamela K. Gilbert (University of Florida), is dedicated to a reassessment of the place of the human body in the Victorian literary and cultural imagination. Rapid medical and scientific advances, advancing industrialization and new forms of labour, legal reforms, the rise of comparative ethnology and anthropology, the growth of consumer culture, and the ever changing trends of Victorian fashion are just a few of the many forces that transformed how Victorians thought about the human body and about the relationship between the embodied, or disembodied, self and the object world.

 Nineteenth-century configurations of the body have long been of interest to Victorian scholars. However, recent years have seen the field reconfigured by the emergence of a range of exciting new and theoretically sophisticated approaches that harness the insights of the new materialism, thing theory, cultural phenomenology and actor-network theory to explorations of Victorian embodiment, bodies and body parts.

We are inviting submissions of no more than 7000 words, on any aspect of the theme. Possible topics include but are by no means limited to the following:

·      embodied experience and the senses

·      the body in stillness and in motion: practices of confinement and mobility

·      consumerism, fashion and the stylized body

·      the body and technology

·      bodies of empire and colonialism

·      bodies and body parts on display: anatomical museums, ethnological shows, hospital ward tours

·      sciences of the body: medicine, biology, ethnology, statistics, etc.

·      bodies, sex and gender

·      health and illness

·      affective bodies and embodied emotions

·      labour power and the body as property

·      the poetics and aesthetics of the human body

·      human and animal bodies before and after Darwin

 All submissions should conform to MHRA style conventions and the in-house submission guidelines.
 Deadline for submissions: 30 November 2013.

Contact: victoriannetwork@gmail.com

— I am Submissions Editor for Victorian Network, so do feel free to get in touch with any questions. Needless to say I would particularly welcome articles on either Gwendolen Harcourt’s neck, OR David Threlfall’s performance as Smike in the RSC’s first production of Nicholas Nickleby, since I am obsessed with both those things. HOWEVER, there are other people on the VN editorial board.

We also have Twitter now, @Vic_Network. Follow us. Follow. Make merry on my twitter feed and break up the commentary on Celebrity Masterchef, which is in any case meaningless since Speech Debelle left.

(P.S. please conform to the submission guidelines. They’re not esoteric and it makes editors so happy.)