Editors’ Introduction

The ninth annual conference of the North American Victorian Studies Association met in Nashville in November of 2011 to explore the broad theme of “Performance and Play.” Once again, we publish here work originally presented at the conference. We invited Sharon Marcus and Ellis Hanson each to select a cluster of three compelling papers from the conference. We publish their selections, and their responses to those selections, in the pages that follow. In addition, we are pleased to present Tom Gunning’s plenary address from the conference, titled “Hand and Eye: Excavating a New Technology of the Image in the Victorian Era.”

NAVSA’s tenth annual conference will be held in Madison, Wisconsin at Monona Terrace on September 27–30, 2012, exploring the theme “Victorian Networks.” For more information on the organization and the annual conference, see its website:

http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/navsa/.