You are kindly invited to submit your proposals to our panel:

“Victorian and neo-Victorian Wasted Lives: Bodies that Do not Matter”

The production of “human waste” - or more precisely, wasted lives, the “superfluous” populations of migrants, refugees and other outcasts - is an inevitable outcome of modernisation. It is an unavoidable side-effect of economic progress and the quest for order which is characteristic of modernity. This notion of wasted lives unravels the impact of this transformation on our contemporary culture and politics and shows that the problem of coping with “human waste” provides a key for understanding some otherwise baffling features of our shared life, from the strategies of global domination to the most intimate aspects of human relationships.
We welcome paper proposals that deal with Victorian and neo-Victorian cultural and literary productions which are concerned with ideas about wasted lives and bodies that do not matter and which find reflection in our current societies.
Papers can encompass various approaches and methodologies such as textual analysis, traductology and literary translation studies of Victorian and neo-Victorian literary texts (and their audiovisual remediations), Victorian and neo-Victorian literary genres and neo-Victorian media and visual representations. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

the poor
migrants
outcasts
prostitutes
disabled bodies
refugees
criminals
deviants
sick bodies

Please send your abstracts to:
Maria Isabel Romero-Ruiz (University of Málaga, Spain), mirr@uma.es
Simonetta Falchi (University of Sassari, Italy), sfalchi@uniss.it



Monday 29 August – Friday 2 September 2022, Department of English and Linguistics, Faculty of Philosophy and Philology, Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, and Deutscher Anglistenverband (German Society for the Study of English)
https://esse2022.uni-mainz.de/