Victorian Personhood(s)
Due Date: 03-20-2026
This themed issue welcomes essays that consider the troublesome conception of Victorian personhood, understood not only as a legal but also as a literary-cultural property. We seek contributions that engage with, but are not limited to, the following questions:
- How did formal and thematic innovations in the novel reflect or even inform the Victorian era’s changing notions of personhood?
- How did Victorian authors and legal professionals engage with personhood, whether in their biographies, their professional lives, or in their written work?
- How does empire complicate Victorian personhood? Were legal and/or literary-cultural definitions of personhood unified at home and in the colonies, or did place, context, and imperialism turn personhood into an uneven field?
- How was personhood connected to major socioeconomic, political, and literary changes in Britain, such as the growth of industry (e.g., corporate personhood, nonhuman entities), the universal suffrage movement, the rise of the serialized periodical, etc.?
- How do popular Victorian genres (sensation fiction, the detective story, the domestic novel, etc.) reflect changing definitions of personhood?
- How did women writers and authors of color respond to legal restrictions that limited their personhood?
- How did legal debates surrounding unsettled and limited states of personhood (e.g., the unborn, stillborn, enslaved, absent, and dead, as well as trans and intersex people) inspire the literary imaginary?
- How did writers imagine future notions of personhood in terms of corporate, animal, environmental, and technological conceptions?
Please send 300-word abstracts with a working title for a 7,000–7,500-word article and brief CV to coeditors Jolene Zigarovich (jolene.zigarovich@uni.edu) and Adam Kozaczka (adam.kozaczka@tamiu.edu) by 20 March 2026. Authors will be notified if their proposals have been accepted by 31 March 2026, and complete articles will be due by 15 October 2026. This themed issue will be received for review at SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, and submissions will undergo double-anonymized peer review. The full CFP is available here.