Announcements

ANNOUNCEMENTS CALL FOR PAPERS: The Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada invites proposals for papers to be delivered at its twenty-eighth annual interdisciplinary conference, hosted by the University of Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia, September 30 - October 2, 1999. Our plenary speakers will be Bram Dijkstra and SaUy Mitchell. The association welcomes proposals on the topic of this year's theme: Victorian Endings and Beginnings. As we approach the end of one mUlennium and the start of another, we invite papers that reflect on the nineteenth century and its concerns for endings and beginnings. These might explicitly address the apocalyptic fears and Utopian fantasies of the Victorian fin-de-siècle, as they were variously figured in art, Uterature, music, theatre, as well as the scientific, economic and poUtical discourses of the period. Submissions, however, are not Umited to the tum of the century. We encourage proposals that examine the ideas of "endings and beginnings" in the widest possible sense: the endings and beginnings of specific texts, political and artistic movements; the desire for an authentic origin as manifested in the Oxford Movement or the Darwinian hunt for "the missing link"; the teleological impulse in nineteenth-century historiography, geology, and biology, anxieties concerning the end of empire, race, nationhood, masculinity, femininity, and sexuality; the construction of marriage and divorce, or birth and death as cultural "beginnings" and "ends," etc. The Association also invites proposals for its annual panel on Pedagogy and Research. Our topic for this panel will be Victorian Studies and the Internet Please note that in the past the Association has been able to reimburse airfare expenses for everyone presenting a paper or contributing to a panel and we hope to be able to do so again this year. Proposals should consist of an abstract of approximately 350 words, a one paragraphy synopsis (100 words maximum), and a brief curriculum vitae. Proposals should be sent by March 1, 1999 to: Chris Hosgood, President VSAWC, Department of History, University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, AB, TlK 3M4. Fax: 403-329-5108. E-mail: hosgood@uleth.ca CALL FOR PAPERS: The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals wiU holds its thirty-first annual meeting in New Haven, Connecticut on 17-18 of September 1999. The conference wiU be co-hosted by the Sterling Memorial Library and the EngUsh Department of Yale University. RSVP seeks proposals for individual papers or full panels on any aspect of Victorian periodicals, including their history as a publishing form, cultural significance, theoretical bearings, and uses in teaching and scholarship. Since RSVP is highly interdisciplinary, we encourage proposals relating periodicals to Books Received229 such fields as art history, music, theater, Uterature, science, and social science. We welcome proposals from graduate students as weU as established scholars. Please send two-page abstracts accompanied by a one-page curriculum vitae of the presenters) by 15 February 1999 to Linda H. Peterson, Department of English, P.O. Box 208302, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520-8302. Fax: 203-432-7066. BOOKS RECEIVED Inclusion in this list does not preclude the possibUity of a future review. Bailey, Victor. "This Rash Act": Suicide Across the Life Cycle in the Victorian City. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. vii + 349. $55.00 US (cloth). BaskerviUe, Peter and Eric W. Sager. Unwilling Idlers: The Urban Unemployed and Their Families in Late Victorian Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1998. ix + 294. $55.00 CAN (cloth); $24.95 CAN (paper); £35.00 UK (cloth);£16.50 UK (paper). Beckson, Karl. The Oscar Wilde Encyclopedia. New York: AMS P, Inc., 1998. vi + 456. $125.00 US (cloth). Bivona, Daniel. British Imperial Literature 1870-1940: Writing and the Administration of Empire. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. xi + 237. Byerly, Alison. Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Uterature. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. viii + 231. $59.95 US (cloth). Cohen, Monica. Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel: Women, Work and Home. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. xi + 216. $54.95 US (cloth). CornwaU, NeU and Maggie Malone (eds.) The Turn of the Screw and What Maisie Knew: Henry James: Contemporary Critical Essays. New York: St Martin's P, 1998. vii + 252. $45.00 US (cloth). Friedman, Stanley, Edward Guiliano...