Call For Articles
Wilkie Collins Journal
The “Heart” and “Science” of Wilkie Collins and his Contemporaries
Deadline for Abstracts: 28th February 2017
Deadline for Articles: 31st May 2017
‘“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 both abstracts and full article submissions 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 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.
Email abstracts to [log in to unmask] and
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by 28th February 2017.
--
Joanne Ella Parsons
Lecturer
Bath Spa University
Falmouth University
Twitter: @joparsons
www.joanneparsons.co.uk
www.damagingthebody.org
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