Editors' Introduction

The Winter 2004 issue of Victorian Studies gathered papers originally delivered at the inaugural North American Victorian Studies Association Conference, held in October 2003 at Indiana University. We've decided to devote another special issue to papers from the organization's second conference, held at the University of Toronto one year later. To inaugurate is, in some ways, easy: one has no expectations to meet or fulfill, no traditions to uphold. The second in any series bears new burdens. What had been one-of-a-kind is familiar, what was unprecedented has become an institution. The Toronto conference easily avoided the pitfalls of secondariness, however, and even accrued some of the benefits of experience. The quality of scholarship was just as high, the conversations as animated; the previous year's experiment had solidified into what felt like a necessary event, one we could not do without. To learn more about NAVSA, the conference in Toronto, or 2005's gathering—to be held 30 September through 2 October at the University of Virginia—consult the organization's website at <http://www.sla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/navsa/>.

As we did last year, we asked three scholars who were attending the conference each to look for a grouping of three papers that we might publish in Victorian Studies. We asked them, simply, to select papers that, together, would resonate, that exemplify trends or emergent possibilities in scholarship, and that raise important questions about research on Victorian Britain. We also invited these three scholars to respond to the essays in print. The essays in the first group, selected by Harriet Ritvo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, take different approaches to the study of the natural world and the history of the Victorians' response to it; the second group, selected by Kate Flint of Rutgers University, offers an occasion for pondering the continued use or validity of the very period concept of "the Victorian"; the papers of the third group, selected by James Vernon of the University of California, Berkeley, engage with or exemplify the question of the relation of the field of Victorian studies to the discipline of history and to the practice of "theory." These essays offer only a small sample of the trenchant scholarship and dazzling analysis on offer at Toronto; we hope you'll take them as incitement to come experience NAVSA yourself this fall at Virginia.