Editor's Introduction

The North American Victorian Studies Association met in November of 2008, for its sixth annual conference, at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, to explore the broad theme of "The Arts and Culture in Victorian Britain." Once again, we publish here work originally presented at the conference. We have invited one art historian, Tim Barringer, and one literary scholar, Jonah Siegel, each to select three papers that embody emergent possibilities in scholarship on the Victorian period, and that exemplify some of the intellectual excitement and conversation participants experienced that weekend at Yale. We publish their selections, and their responses to those selections, in the pages that follow. In addition, we are pleased to present Catherine Hall's plenary address from the conference, titled "Macaulay's Nation."

NAVSA's seventh annual conference was held at the University of Cambridge, UK, in July 2009; in 2010, NAVSA will reconvene in Montreal. For more information on the organization and the annual conference, see its website:

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