Victorian Criminologies and Epistemologies
Proposal for a Special Session
MLA Convention 2000, Washington D.C.
A call for papers dealing with nineteenth-century British criminology and
relationship to, and its role as, a Victorian epistemological mode. This
session seeks to explore the formation of criminology from a debased
enterprise in the early nineteenth-century to one that captured the
imagination and interest of late Victorian culture.
How, for instance, did "thief-taking" become the "science" of criminology?
How did criminology as a "deductive" process develop in conjunction with
crime as a subject of nineteenth-century genre fiction? What is the
relationship between the division of nineteenth-century literature into
genres and the development of criminological categories?
Subjects can include (but are certainly not limited to):
-- criminal categorizations: phrenology, psychoanalysis, deviance,
Bertillon, sexuality, gender, race
-- criminology as science/the "science" of crime
-- the dissemination of public discourse on crime; modes of representing crime
-- crime technologies: fingerprints, photography, modes of identification
-- nineteenth-century criminological specializations
-- criminology as narrative formation, including (but not limited to) its
relationship to the formation of crime fiction genres (detective/mystery,
Gothic, melodrama...)
-- famous Victorian crimes and their relationship to changes in
criminological practices
Please send 1-2 page abstracts and brief vitae to: Kathleen Lonsdale,
Department of English, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
90089-0354; fax: 323-913-0441; e-mail: lonsdale@usc.edu.
Deadline: March 17, 2000
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CFP@english.upenn.edu
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or write Erika Lin: elin@english.upenn.edu
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