Editor's Introduction

The North American Victorian Studies Association met in October of 2007 for its fifth annual conference, at the beautiful sea-side campus of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, to explore the broad theme of "Victorian Materialities." Once again, we publish here work originally presented at the conference, with the hope of capturing in print some of the scholarly excitement, give-and-take, and collaboration that participants experienced that weekend. W e have invited one historian, Erika Rappaport, and one literary scholar, Catherine Robson, each to select three papers that exemplify or embody emergent possibilities in scholarship on the Victorian period. We publish their selections, and their responses to those selections, in the pages that follow.

The papers selected by Professor Rappaport offer the opportunity to reassess the "material turn" in historiography and literary analysis via the examination of such objects and commodities as Indian cotton, Burmese teak carvings, and mummified hands. Professor Robson's cluster of papers all consider Victorian poetry in a materialist frame, with "materiality" here taking such various forms as the uncut and unread pages of a poetry collection, the pages of a daily newspaper, or the metrical marks within a Hopkins poem. W e are also pleased to be publishing here one of the plenary papers delivered at the conference, Philippa Levine's analysis of the multiple meanings of nudity and nakedness in British colonial representation.

NAVSA continues to thrive and will reconvene in November of 2008 at Yale University in Connecticut. For more information on the organization and the annual conference, see its website: http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/navsa/