Editor's Introduction

The present issue of Victorian Studies is the third we have devoted to writing from the annual conferences of the North American Victorian Studies Association. Our ambition in each has been to convey to readers something of the explorative and collaborative excitement of the conferences themselves. Often offering a warm welcome to the provisional and speculative, the engagingly incomplete and alluringly partial, conferences can feature papers more generative for their very lack of finish—for their lack of that finish to which the best full-length journal articles regularly aspire. Such was the case, at any rate, in Charlottesville last year at the end of September and the beginning of October, when some 300 participants gathered to hear papers on (among many other topics) architectural reform, sweating, tchotchkes, the X Club, coastal beaches, science writing for children, Leighton's Bath of Psyche, James Martineau, Elizabeth Gaskell, Sir Edward Elgar, Gwendolyn Harleth, and the Assyrian Bull.

We have collected seven of the papers delivered at the conference, and added to them one more extended essay, which was prompted by a pair of NAVSA sessions. Three of the papers were gathered for us by Mary Poovey, who found in them an occasion for meditation on issues of mediation, and specifically mediation between the historical and cultural. These are issues which have preoccupied readers and writers (and editors, I can say) of Victorian Studies for decades, but which, as Poovey remarks, have become more pressing in recent years. The other four papers were collected by Carolyn Williams. In different ways each of the papers on which she focuses highlights the continuing importance for cultural critics of generic categories—and each also suggestively indicates recent changes in our thinking about those categories. Finally, we commissioned an essay from Dino Felluga, asking him to report on the Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship (or NINES), bringing onto the papery pages of Victorian Studies a discussion of, among other things, the persistence of book culture within digital scholarship.

More information about the 2005 conference can be found at the homepage for NAVSA: <http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/ engl/navsa/>. There you can also learn about the 2006 conference, to be held jointly with the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism from 31 August through 3 September. Among the attractions will be a party celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Victorian Studies—reason enough on its own to attend.