North American Victorian Studies Association

The 2008 NAVSA conference at Yale is November 14-16.

The conference will take place November 14-16, 2008. You can find instructions and the list of special sessions on the conference website: https://webspace.yale.edu/navsa2008/

Keynote speakers will be Catherine Hall (University College London) and Elizabeth Prettejohn (University of Bristol).


The Victorian Critic at NAVSA, November 14-16, 2008 at Yale.
This panel invites papers on the topic of the Victorian critic. In a period in which thinkers like Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Mathew Arnold, John Ruskin, and Walter Pater, among many others, saw themselves as the conscience of their culture, what did it mean to be a critic in Victorian culture? How did Victorian critics articulate the relationship between cultural critique and social or moral reform? How did the interpretation of cultural artifacts (literature, art, music) become an exposition of cultural values? Many who saw themselves as critics also practiced other forms of cultural work—Arnold's poetry, Pater's fiction, Rossetti's painting, Eliot's translations and essays, Morris' designs. What relationships did they envision between different forms of cultural production and the work of the critic? What might these relationships tell us about how criticism was imagined during the Victorian era, and what might they tell us about the more professionalized forms of criticism practiced today?