CFP Edited Collection -- Victorians and Videogames (1/31/2023)

Edited Collection -- Victorians and Videogames

deadline for submissions:
January 31, 2023

full name / name of organization:
Brooke Cameron (Queen's University) and Lin Young (Mount Royal University)

contact email:
brooke.cameron@queensu.ca

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2022/12/19/edited-collection-victorians-and-videogames

CFP: edited collection -- Victorians and Videogames

Dr. Lin Young (Mount Royal University) and Dr. Brooke Cameron (Queen’s University) invite proposals for chapters that explore the connections between video games and 19th-Century themes, texts, or aesthetics.

Project Description:

The influence of 19th-Century literature on generations of videogames is long overdue for critical study. Victorians and Videogames will examine the ways in which game/interactive texts interact with 19th-Century genres, aesthetics, and literary themes as a means of engaging, critiquing, or challenging their original contexts. Chapters will be collected under three categories. The first will examine 19th-Century predecessors or precursors to the videogame – texts that anticipate systems of interactivity, user-generated narrative, play or virtual realities, and/or which may be read through the lens of ludology/narratology. The second will consider games that adapt 19th-Century texts or histories as a means of reworking or challenging their original themes and contexts. Finally, the edited collection will consider games that more broadly function as thematic pastiches or aesthetic engagements with 19th-Century genres or themes.

In essence, this collection will consider the ways in which embodied, user-driven storytelling can impact new and challenging engagements with the 19th Century in the contemporary world. We welcome submissions from many fields: this includes game studies, literature studies, new media, neo-Victorian studies, history, popular culture scholarship, etc.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Chapter(s) on 19thC predecessors or precursors to the videogame – texts on interactivity, games, virtual realities, etc.
• Oral storytelling traditions and their relationships to game narration (or other elements of games).
• Chapters that examine 19thC texts/games from a ludology or narratology critical perspective (or its debates).
• Strategy games like Victoria or Sid Meier’s Civilization that evoke imageries of Empire, invasion, and colonization.
• The use of gameplay, mechanics, and/or design to engage 19thC themes.
• 19thC aesthetics, fashion, and visual design in games (Fable, Bloodborne, etc.)
• Games set in, or inspired by, countries outside Britain in the 19th Century, such as Great Ace Attorney: Adventures (Capcom).
• Disability and gaming culture in a 19thC context.
• Queering the 19th Century in games.
• Representations of BIPOC in 19th Century game settings.
• Impacts of 19thC texts on specific games (ie, Treasure Island on Monkey Island).
• Point-and-click mysteries and adventure tales (ie, Amnesia).
• Fairy tale adaptations of tales published or first translated in the 19th Century.
• Videogames involving contemporary characters investigating or unearthing 19thC histories.
• Games that utilize genres invented or significantly popularized in the 19th Century (ie, vampire fiction, detective fiction, science fiction, the Gothic, ghost fiction) in historically-conscious or referential ways.
• Games that make significant allusions to 19thC stories, philosophies, or art in modern contexts or alternate universes.
• Games that feature 19thC historical events (ie, Dread Hunger or Inua - A Story in Ice and Time as recreations of the lost Franklin expedition).

Proposals of 400-500 words should be submitted along with a 60-word author biography and one-page cv to both editors (brooke.cameron@queensu.ca & lyoung1@mtroyal.ca) by 31 January 2023.

We will notify applicants of results by 31 March 2023. Following acceptance, final papers should be approximately 6,000-7000 words long and will be due by 01 Sept 2023. Routledge has expressed interest in this collection.




Last updated December 20, 2022

CFP Victorian Inclusion and Exclusion (2/28/21; Victorian Popular Fiction Association Conference virtual 7/14-16/2021)

Victorian Inclusion and Exclusion

https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2020/11/02/victorian-inclusion-and-exclusion

 

deadline for submissions: 

February 28, 2021

 

full name / name of organization: 

Victorian Popular Fiction Association

 

contact email: 

VPFAConference@gmail.com

We invite a broad, imaginative and interdisciplinary interpretation on the topic of ‘Victorian Inclusion and Exclusion’ and its relation to any aspect of Victorian popular literature and culture that addresses literal or metaphorical representations of the theme. Inter- and multidisciplinary approaches are welcome, as are papers that address poetry, drama, global literature, non-fiction, visual arts, journalism, historical and social contexts. Papers addressing works from the ‘long Victorian period’ (i.e. before 1837 and after 1901) and on neo-Victorian texts/media are also welcome.

Please send proposals for 20-minute papers, panels of three papers (by individual scholars, or affiliated with another Learned Society), or non-traditional papers/panels, on topics that can include, but are not limited to:

• Canonicity, canon formation and critical recovery (neo-Victorian subjects and texts, pedagogical selections, redressing of Victorian imbalances); ‘inclusion’ in collections/short story anthologies/series;
• 19th-century ideas of taste and cultural value, high-culture/popular culture divide; the theatre, circus, music hall, opera; three-volume novel, penny bloods, railway literature;
• Generic inclusivity/hybridity; genre boundaries and transmedia; 
• Equality, diversity and inclusion;
• Sex and gender inclusion and exclusion – domestic spheres, marriage, the ‘third sex’, institutions, workplaces, religious ideas;
• Class inclusion and exclusion – extension of the franchise, organization of labour, class war, exclusionary social mores, poverty and economic inclusion/exclusion;
• Disability, mental health, medical treatments and discourse;
• Racial inclusion and exclusion – Anglo-European racial discourse/pseudo-science, non-Anglo-European racial discourse and practices, imperial ideology and practice, colonial institutions, trans-colonial and global migration, segregated travel;
• National inclusion and exclusion – intra-European alliances and antagonisms, Anglo-American co-operation;
• Geographical spaces, boundaries, borders and liminality;
• Family inclusion and exclusion – family unit, ageing, adoption, orphans;
• Verbal exclusion – gossip, slander, rumour, reputation;
• Inclusive organizations – self-help groups, working men’s clubs/libraries/institutes, literary clubs, social clubs and societies;
• Classification and categorization, anthropology, ethnography, the natural world;
• Exclusion and exile (Wilde); prisons and prison reform; deportation;
• Self-exclusion – breakaway social groups: ideal communities, anarchists, utopians;
• Educational inclusion/exclusion – schools/universities, expulsion, technology-enabled inclusion and exclusion in the (online) classroom; teaching online pedagogy;
• Other forms of inclusion and exclusion – religious; discourse on/treatment of children, animals, wider non-human world;
• The role exclusion plays in facilitating horror and Gothic fiction, boundaries between life and death, Imperial Gothic and Euro-sceptic horror, Irish Gothic and invasion.

Please send proposals of no more than 300 words, a 50 word biography, twitter handle (if you have one) and your availability/time zones over the conference dates in Word format to Drs Anne-Marie Beller, Ailise Bulfin, Janine Hatter and Erin Louttit at: vpfaconference@gmail.com.  

If accepted, audio/visual presentations of 15 minutes or written papers of c.2000 words should be submitted by Monday 14th June, 2021. This is well in advance of the conference, so that delegates can read/watch the presentations in advance, ready for the Q&A discussions which are live at the conference. Speakers should be members of the VPFA and there will be a minimal cost for the conference to offset technical support.

PGR/Unwaged Fee Waivers

In addition, to acknowledge the financial hardship many scholars are facing as a result of COVID-19, we will exceptionally be offering 3 waivers of the student/unwaged registration fee for those whose proposals are accepted. These waivers are intended for postgraduate students, postdoctoral scholars, independent scholars and precarious academics who at the moment of application do not hold a permanent position. If you wish to be considered for a registration fee waiver, when submitting your abstract, bio and (if applicable) Twitter handle, please include a statement of no more than 60 words as to why you are applying for the waiver. As per the spirit of the VPFA constitution, we want the conference to be open to as many researchers as possible, regardless of means.

VPFA website link: http://victorianpopularfiction.org/vpfa-annual-conference/.

Last updated November 4, 2020

 

CFP Neo-Victorian and the Late Victorian Conference (4/27/21; Brighton, Eng. 9/2-3/21)

 This might be a repeated post.

The Neo-Victorian and the Late Victorian

https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2020/05/20/the-neo-victorian-and-the-late-victorian

 

deadline for submissions: 

April 27, 2021

 

full name / name of organization: 

Dr Victoria Margree / University of Brighton

 

contact email: 

neovictorian@brighton.ac.uk

 

Due to the ongoing situation with the Covid-19 pandemic, the conference organisers have decided to postpone the event by one year and plan to run it in early September 2021. The specific dates will be confirmed in due time but we hope to run it during the ones equivalent to those currently scheduled. For the next academic year, that would be 2-3 September 2021, TBC.

Our CFP remains active and so is our inbox (neovictorian@brighton.ac.uk) for abstracts or any queries related to the event. We accept abstracts by 27 April 2021.

We are also delighted to announce our first keynote speaker for the event, Associate Professor Dr Claire Nally from Northumbria University, author of Steampunk: Gender, Subculture and the Neo-Victorian (2019).

 

Call for Papers

 The last few decades have witnessed an increasing interest in revisiting, reproducing or rewriting various aspects of nineteenth-century culture, particularly that of the late Victorian period, whether in the form of neo-Victorian literature, steampunk, media archaeology, fashion, documentaries and period dramas, among others. This trend has received various different interpretations, either as part of the recycling of past periods, styles and texts characteristic of postmodernism of the 1980s, of the ‘memory boom’ of the 1990s and the ensuing culture of commemoration, anniversaries and memorialisation, or the most recent signs of a widespread imperial nostalgia, evident not just in various media texts, such as film or television, but also in contemporary political realities like Brexit. These are only some of the symptoms of this widespread trend and only some instances of the critical approaches that they have received, and this two-day conference seeks to explore this trend from a diverse range of disciplinary, theoretical and methodological perspectives. The specific focus of the conference is on papers that address the dialectic relationship between the two historical periods. We are particularly interested in the ways in which the late-Victorian is re-envisioned and reconceptualised within the neo-Victorian. The list below is only indicative of areas for which we welcome submission of abstracts:

• neo-Victorianism in literature, film and television
• Gothic horror, then and now: literature, film, television and gaming
• steampunk (literature, art, fashion, subculture)
• contemporary politics and imperial nostalgia (Empire 2.0, Global Britain, etc.)
• media archaeology, archive studies, museums and the late Victorian ‘frenzy of the visible’
• contemporary sexual politics and late Victorian queer cultures
• The New Woman and the suffragette movement
• contemporary terrorism and the 1890s
• crime, detection and punishment
• nostalgia and material culture: the yearning for the handmade

Please send 300-word abstracts accompanied by a 90-word bio to conference organisers Victoria Margree and Aris Mousoutzanis by 27 April 2021 at neovictorian@brighton.ac.uk

And you will find regular updates at this site:

http://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/neovictorian/

Last updated May 28, 2020