e have been invited to edit a new Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell, to be published in the Routledge Companions series whose recent additions include a Companion to Jane Austen (2021) and a Companion to Romantic Women Writers (2022). This new collection of essays will build on the achievement of the 2007 Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell published by CUP, edited by Jill Matus, to reflect a further quarter century of Gaskell studies during which the author has risen to a position of eminence as a Victorian woman writer in academic scholarship, and to an extent also in the popular imagination. In recent years, Gaskell has become the focus of studies in Victorian debates about gender, medicine, material culture, empire, short stories, religion, Gothic, life writing and authorship, to name but a few topics. The new companion will reflect these developments, and will signal new directions for Gaskell studies in light of fresh critical approaches including ecocriticism, disability studies, ageing studies, and studies in emotion. Gaskell's life writing, journalism and short fiction will stand alongside her better-known longer fiction, and the companion will also consider Gaskell's reception and legacies in a range of media and among various audiences.
The volume will bring together leading scholars from relevant fields in a collection of approximately 20-25 essays of 8000 words in sections which address Gaskell's works, themes and legacies. We anticipate that, once the full proposal is approved by Routledge in spring 2023, submissions are likely to be due approximately April 2024.
We have secured authors for the majority of the essays, but we are seeking contributions on the following topics:
- Material Culture in Gaskell's works
- Gaskell in Literary Tourism
- Text-focused essays (new critical readings) on each of: Mary Barton (1848)/ Ruth (1853)/ Sylvia's Lovers (1863)/ Wives and Daughters (1864-6)/ the Short Fiction (not Gothic)
Please submit a paragraph-length proposal for a contribution to the editors by Wednesday 24 May 2023: elizabeth.ludlow@aru.ac.uk and rstyler@lincoln.ac.uk
About the Editors:
The editors have previously collaborated on a special edition of the Gaskell Journal on 'Gaskell and the Short Story' (2015). Dr. Elizabeth Ludlow is Associate Professor of Literature and Religion at Anglia Ruskin University. She is the author of Christina Rossetti and the Bible: Waiting with the Saints (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), and editor of The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century (Palgrave, 2020). She has written chapters and articles on subjects including the legacy of St. Monica of Hippo, the nineteenth-century Early Church novel, Elizabeth Gaskell and religion, and Harriet Beecher Stowe's historical fiction.
Dr. Rebecca Styler is Associate Professor of English at Lincoln University, UK. She is the author of Literary Theology by Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century (Ashgate, 2011), and The Maternal Image of God in Victorian Literature (Routledge, in press). She edited Nineteenth-Century Religion Literature, and Society, vol 4: Traditions (Routledge, 2020) and is the editor of the Gaskell Journal. She has published chapters and articles on subjects including Josephine Butler's spiritual autobiography, prophecy in Charlotte Brontë's poetry, and the Madonna in Elizabeth Gaskell's writings.
Created 4 May 2023