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On the Cover are images reproduced courtesy of Dover Books and found in Victorian Goods and Merchandise, Carol Belanger Grafton (New York: Dover, 1997). On the back cover is another image from this same book along with the banner from the 2007 NAVSA Conference.

Announcement: Bric-à-Brac kery: Victorian Culture, Commodities, and Curios. University of Aberystwyth, 27-28 July 2008.

Derived from the French for "at random," the phrase "bric-à-brac" was first introduced to the English language in 1840 by Thackeray, who used it to describe a visit to the Palace of Versailles. The purpose of this conference is to use Thackeray's expression to debate the nature of the impact of the curious, exotic, and downright odd on Victorian literature and culture.

Bric-à-brac firstly suggests medley and clutter without apparent purpose, and one of the themes of the conference will be to explore sites of unusual concurrence (for example, freak shows, carnivals, pawn-shops, auction houses, or even the city). We also want the conference to explore the ways in which bric-à-brac might bring the alien into everyday settings, the past into the present, or the wild into the domestic. Commercial exchange, buying and selling, the meeting of poverty and wealth also underwrite the notion of bric-à-brac. As such, the title lends itself equally well to a discussion of Victorian economics and capitalism. But we also want to focus on writing—clashes of character, idiom, and taste within literature and the miscellaneous nature of Victorian magazine culture.

Victorian literature and society invites scrutiny of the ways in which small objects or activities come together to signify larger cultural concerns. This conference will feature papers that engage with and celebrate the spirit of this diversity in Victorian writing.

For more information, please email bricabrac@aber.ac.uk, or by write to: Jon Shears or Jen Sattaur, c/o Department of English, University of Aberystwyth, Hugh Owen Building, Penglais Campus, SY23 3DY. More information at http://users.aber.ac.uk/bricabrac.

Announcement: The Arts and Culture in Victorian Britain. North America n Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA), Yale University, 14-16 November 2008.

NAVSA 2008 will offer an interdisciplinary examination of the interchange of the arts and culture in Victorian Britain: high and low, domestic and imperial, metropolitan and regional. The conference will also focus on Yale's nineteenth-century collections and resources in the fine arts, visual and material culture, the book as object, and music and the performing arts. We are pleased to announce that the two plenary speakers will be historian Catherine Hall and art historian Elizabeth Prettejohn.

For a list of panels or for more information, please consult the conference website at https://webspace.yale.edu/navsa2008/ or email the conference organizers at navsa2008@yale.edu.

CFP: Darwin and the Evolution of Victorian Studies. Special Issue ofVictorian Studies.

2009 is both the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of The Origin of Species. Victorian Studies will mark the occasion with a special issue on "Darwin and the Evolution of Victorian Studies."

Since the publication of VS's first Darwin issue in 1959, the study of Darwin and the relationship of his life and work to Victorian culture has become an industry. In the past twenty-five years alone we have witnessed the publication of the first fifteen volumes of the Darwin correspondence, Darwin's 1836-1844 notebooks, major Darwin biographies by Janet Browne and Adrian Desmond and James Moore, and important books by such scholars as Gillian Beer, Bert Bender, Peter Bowler, Sandra Herbert, George Levine, Ronald Numbers, Robert Richards, Rebecca Stott, and Robert Young. In recent years, the study of Darwin has begun to take new directions through examinations of Darwin's writings beyond the Origin and the Journal of Researches, investigations of Darwin's impact on previously overlooked areas (e.g., art and visual culture, psychology and the emotions), and new approaches to Darwinism's impact on Victorian attitudes to gender and courtship, race and empire, literature and publishing. The fact that Darwin's complete writings and 5,000 pieces of his...