he Northeast Victorian Studies Association (NVSA) seeks proposals on the theme of “Trash” for its annual conference at Seton Hall University. Flotsam, jetsam, sludge, bric-a-brac, waste, sewage, decay, recycling, salvage, thrift, filth, junk, rubbish—these are just a few of the names for discarded things produced during the Victorian period. Objects proliferated with increased manufacturing. Waste produced by the factory system, alongside London's rapid urbanization, also brought crises of sanitation: pollution of air and rivers, cholera epidemics, the Great Stink of 1858. Robert Browning’s impoverished children feed on “Refuse and rubbish,” while closets in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House are packed with “bits of mouldy pie, sour bottles, Mrs. Jellyby’s caps, letters, tea, forks, odd boots and shoes of children, firewood, wafers, saucepan-lids.” How did so much come to be treated as trash? What did the Victorians have to say about the things they threw away?
Rag pickers and street sweepers worked with rubbish (or pushed it around). Others were themselves disavowed as unworthy, as expendable bodies: trashy women, white trash, “revolting” mobs, “surplus lives,” certain colonial subjects. We welcome proposals that address how individuals or groups become conceptualized as trash. How did ideas about race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability shape ideas of worth and worthlessness? What physical spaces are seen as wastelands: London slums, British colonies, imperial sacrifice zones? Which figures, texts, and types of objects have been thought worthy of study and saving (Emily Dickinson’s envelopes, a penned family magazine, a piece of coral)? How and why have Victorianist scholarly values shifted over time?
We invite perspectives not just on trash in literature, but also on literature designed to be thrown away. Book historians have demonstrated the porousness of literary genres as they pass through material forms (reprints, chapbooks). How does focusing on ephemera broaden the stories we tell about the period? We welcome proposals on “trashy” genres such as romance, pornography, melodrama, gothic tales, or penny dreadfuls.
Is there a narratology of trash? Which Victorian characters–or authors, for that matter–do the most trash talking? When do bits of rubbish turn up as clues in detective fiction? What’s the temporality of trash? Does trash exist in deep time? How did Victorians treat other cultures’ detritus? What do museums do with broken objects? What’s the logic of throwaway culture? Why can’t we stop thinking about garbage?
- Objects: Thrift, salvage (repurposing, secondhand trade, rag fairs, pawn shops, mudlark; junk, bric-a-brac, curios, one person’s trash as another’s treasure) Dust yards, dumps, ash heaps/pits, night soil Pollution (air, land, rivers), industrial effluent, the Thames, filth, dirt, sewers Cholera, typhoid fever, dysentery Animals as/and waste (manure, guano, knackers, offal, tallow, bone, hide)
- Paradigms of trash: Trash Heap of History; chronotopes of trash Discourse as waste: balderdash, nonsense, chatter Scandals, scandalmongering, muckrakers Orderliness, cleanliness, sanitation, purity, taboo Circulation (the British Empire, mass print culture, slow print, money, “filthy lucre,” exchange) Wasted energy (entropy, “heat sinks,” thermodynamic “work” vs. waste) Throw-away society and its discontents
- Literature as trash: Sanitizing texts and policing reading (censorship, bowdlerizing, “family” periodicals) Literary discards (rough drafts, alternate endings) Waste paper (pulping, unsold books/periodicals) and trashy literature Pornography, erotica, ephemera (objects, texts, archives) Pedagogy (teaching “trashy” texts, sustainable ecologically-minded pedagogy)
- People, Animals, Living Beings as trash: Trash laborers, dustmen, sweeps, scavengers, rag-pickers, mudlarks, coal-pickers Prostitution, sex work, “fallen women” Poverty, urban waste zones (slums, rookeries), vagrancy, tramping Humans as surplus (“residuum,” scum, lumpenproletariat, redundant women/children, degeneration, eugenics; “white trash” in US) Unwanted corpses, body-snatchers Bodily waste, Gerard Manley Hopkins: “Flesh fade, and mortal trash / Fall to the residuary worm”
Proposals (no more than 300 words) are due by October 15, 2026 (email only, in Word format). Submit them to Max Chapnick, Chair, Program Committee.
Successful proposals will stay within the 300-word limit and make a compelling case for the talk and its relation to the conference topic. The “Victorian” in NVSA’s name should not restrict our speakers to materials composed in Britain in the years 1837-1901, and we welcome talks on materials from elsewhere in the world circulating in the same era. Please do not send complete papers, and do not include your name on the proposal. Include your name, institution, email address, and proposal title in the body of the email only. Papers should be 15 minutes long.
For more information on NVSA, including membership and travel grants, please see the full CFP here.
Created 7 October 2026 Last modified 12 October 2026