CfP: Work and its Discontents in Victorian Literature and Culture

ESSE Conference, 22-26 August 2016 The National University of Ireland, Galway

Call for Papers Seminar S38

Work and its Discontents in Victorian Literature and Culture

Queen Victoria’s reign is a fruitful testing ground for the interdisciplinary study of literature and work, a research field which has recently come to prominence. The period is characterized by a growing polarization between apparently contradictory stances: some sanctify work as the central value of modernity, while others question the work ethic in favour of the right to leisure. Uriah Heep in Dickens’ David Copperfield expresses a range of paradoxical sentiments about labour explicitly when he laments how in school he was taught “from nine o'clock to eleven, that labour was a curse; and from eleven o’clock to one, that it was a blessing and a cheerfulness, and a dignity, and I don’t know what all.” This polarization regards and informs all the aspects of the culture of the time and is reflected in its literary production. In all fields work and labour are at times represented as positive, useful, valuable, healthy, productive and at other times as negative, dangerous for mental and physical health, and as a primary cause for deep alienation from society and from oneself.

For this seminar, we invite scholars to investigate this polarization in order to dig into the relationship between work, labour, and literature in the Victorian era. Considering the complex nature of the object at hand, an interdisciplinary perspective is needed, and we invite participants to engage directly with the Victorian discourses of economics, law, philosophy, medicine, science, religion, as well as with the history of technology and labour in order to offer a multifaceted representation of the history of the idea of work and its relations to literature. Even though the focus of the panel is on the Victorian era, proposals for papers veering into the early twentieth century are also welcome.

Possible research topics include but are not limited to:

• Representations of work and the refusal of work Representations of fatigue and sloth
• Work, labour, craft, amateurism
• The “rest cure” in literature
• The writer or artist as worker
• Literature and the labour movement
• Work and play
• The Gospels of Work and the Gospels of Leisure Work and labour as a form of “ersatz religion” Gender and class related aspects of work
• New professions and professionalisation Intellectual vs. physical labor
• The Empire at work
• Disability and work

Send 500 words proposals along with an optional bibliography and a brief bio-note to Federico Bellini (federico.bellini@unicatt.it) and Jan Wilm (wilm@em.uni-frankfurt.de) by 28 February, 2016. Proposals should include contact information.