Of All Sorts and Conditions: Transcoding Class in late-Victorian and Edwardian Fiction. (Book proposal of collected essays)
As Patricia Ingham illustrates in The language of gender and class: transformation in the Victorian novel (1996) the coding of class was anything but stable in the Victorian novel. I seek articles that examine how class is an ongoing problematic in late-Victorian and Edwardian fiction.
Whereas Ingham's work illustrate the tensions concerning the cultural conceptualization of class and it's uneasy articulation within the Victorian novel, this collection of essays will explore how transitional writers seek to work out the problem of class through the processes of narrative itself.
For many late-Victorian and Edwardian writers, class is transcoded, often in competing and negating ways, though perhaps the epigraph to Forster's novel Howard's End, "only connect," might stand as the overarching, symptomatic emblem of the period's political unconscious. But if this is the case, it is equally true that the narrative coding of class places a limitation on the possibilities of the epigraph's implicit desire. All papers that explore the transcoding and tensions of class in late-Victorian and Edwardian fiction will be considered.
Essays should be 20-30 pages (including notes: MLA style),original, and not under submission elsewhere or previously published. Send inquiries, abstracts, and/or submissions (with return postage enclosed) to Kevin R. Swafford, Department of English, Bradley University, 1501 West Bradley Ave. Peoria, Illinois 61625. A brief curriculum vitae should be included with completed papers. Deadline for essays: November 1, 2001. You can make inquiries at swaffords4@aol.com