The ‘Heart’ and ‘Science’ of Wilkie Collins and his Contemporaries
Type: Call for Papers
Date: June 17, 2016
Location: United Kingdom
Subject Fields: Literature
Deadline for CFP: Friday 17th June 2016
Conference date: 24th September 2016
Location: Barts Pathology Museum, London
Keynote: Dr. Tara MacDonald (University of Idaho)
‘“Why can’t I look into your heart, and see what secrets it is keeping from me?”’
The
protagonist of Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science (1883), surgeon Ovid
de Vere, laments the difficulty in deciphering hidden emotions and
secrets. Yet, the language suggests his medical background, striking a
note with the novel’s supposedly anti-vivisection message and
highlighting contemporary debates into the nature of experimental
medicine, observation and epistemology. What is the best way of
uncovering secrets, and what part does knowledge of the body play in
this? Can medical training benefit from a thorough understanding of
emotion? And does gender play a part in this? Issues of ‘heart’ and
‘science’ reverberate across Collins’s work, from the Major’s collection
of women’s hair in The Law and the Lady (1875) to Ezra Jenning’s
solution to the crime of The Moonstone (1868). This conference takes as
its focus the proliferation of “heart” and “science” throughout
Collins’s work.
We welcome proposals on, but not limited to, the following topics:
- Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science (1883) and/or any of Collins’s work
- The Body: As a scientific subject, as a site of emotion, bodily representations, and the body in forensics, news reportage and the home.
- The Victorian origin of disciplines: Collins as an interdisciplinary figure, the divide (or not) of “heart” and “science”, the definition of sensation in literature and/or science.
- Medicine and anatomical science: vivisection, taxidermy, anatomical atlases and the nineteenth-century doctor and/or scientist.
- Psychology and psychiatry: the physicality of mental illness, hysteria, the asylum, treatment and therapeutics.
- Gender: the gendered body, representations of gender, the gendered connotations of “heart” and/or “science”.
- Sensation: As genre, as sense or emotion, as subjective.
- Detection: forensics, interrogation, the body as clue, the science of detection, and crimes of the heart.
- Relationships: Romantic, familial, or otherwise.
- Neo-Victorian Approaches to “Heart” and “Science”
- Work by other contemporary sensation writers
Submissions
are not limited to papers on Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science (1883)
but to “heart” and “science” at work in the full range of Collins’s
fiction.
The WCJ and VPFA are also interested in related authors
and ‘sensation fiction’ more broadly, hence papers on authors such as
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Reade, Charles Dickens, Ellen Wood,
Florence Marryat and other sensation writers will also be considered.
Interdisciplinary perspectives are welcome.