Editor's Introduction

Thriving in its fourth year of existence, the North American Victorian Studies Association met last fall at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, providing once again an occasion for Victorian Studies to devote an issue to papers delivered at the conference. The aim of our yearly NAVSA issue has been to convey to readers something of the explorative, collaborative excitement of the conference itself, a venue for scholarship that offers a warm welcome to the provisional and speculative, the engagingly incomplete and alluringly partial. That was true again this year, but the 2006 conference offered its own distinctive opportunities, as it was held in conjunction with the annual gathering of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR)—a meeting of the minds that included over 400 talks, fourteen seminars, and fourteen workshops. A spirit of bipartisanship prevailed as Romanticists and Victorianists alike reminded themselves that we all do work in one long nineteenth century, and that whether working on Coleridge or Darwin, Hemans or Barrett Browning, Peterloo or the Great Exhibition, our intellectual differences, as well as our similarities, are generative.

In this spirit of disciplinary partnership, we have asked three scholars whose work pushes against the boundaries of period and genre—Deidre Lynch, Cannon Schmitt, and Tracy Davis—each to select three papers that would resonate together, exemplifying trends or emergent possibilities in scholarship and raising questions about current research on the nineteenth century, broadly conceived. We publish their selections, and their responses to those selections, in the pages that follow. These essays, examining such topics as proto-photographic form in lyric poetry, the temporality of instinct, and aesthetic conflict in dramatic production, demonstrate the commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship for which both NAVSA and Victorian Studies are known.

By selecting and publishing papers that concern the entire nineteenth century, we hope to continue the series of writings in VS that challenge our conceptions of the academic fields Romanticists and Victorianists share. Essays in recent issues by Martin Hewitt, Irene Tucker, Sharon Marcus, Amanda Anderson, James Vernon, Catherine Gallagher, Kate Flint, and Matthew Rowlinson, among others, have collectively explored the benefits of probing and questioning the disciplinary composition of Victorian studies, its theoretical and methodological orientations, and its relation to nationality. The papers we publish here extend this conversation by reconsidering the historical boundaries of the period and the advantages gained from adopting a more expansive scope in our studies. Cultivating such an inclusive intellectual perspective has been an ambition of the journal since its inaugural issue some fifty years ago. For those of us associated with Victorian Studies, the Purdue NAVSA/NASSR conference will also be remembered for the celebration there of the journal's semicentenary: the vibrancy of the conversations both during the Victorian Studies gala and throughout the conference encourages us to imagine many more years of publication.