(Neo-)Victorian Signs of the Times: Evolution and the Anxiety over Human Nature, or the Scientist and the Reverend in A. S. Byatt’s “Morpho Eugenia” (original) (raw)

2023, 15th Annual Victorian Popular Fiction Conference: Hidden Histories/ Recovered Stories, Bishop Grosseteste University, Lincoln, UK/ online, 12-14 July

Welcome to the Victorian Popular Fiction Association 15 th Annual Conference "Hidden Histories / Recovered Stories". It is our great pleasure to have you with us at Bishop Grosseteste University in Lincoln. The conference celebrates the ways in which Victorian popular culture, fictions and artistic productions addressed topics and subjects, and experimented with stories and genres, that went unacknowledged, were repressed or censored by the mainstream, focusing, on the one hand, on the hidden, lost, forgotten and, on the other hand, on the recovered, reclaimed, remembered. Our aim is to re-centre the popular, from gruesome murder stories to sensational tales of sexual violence and adultery, discussions of pseudo-sciences like spiritualism, to addressing miscegenation, and Victorian historical fiction that reimagines the lives of marginalised figures. We also want to highlight the ways in which current scholarship is rediscovering hidden aspects, characters, and narratives of the Victorian period. Some contributions also explore the relevance of forbidden or unspeakable themes in neo-Victorianism. Silenced by Victorian mainstream culture but obliquely voiced in such popular genres as the sensation novel, the penny dreadful and the bodice-ripper, these themes have taken centre stage in today's fictionalisation of a past that tends to be reimagined in all its deviant, arousing, and disquieting aspects.