CFP: ‘Heights, Depths, and Extremes’ VPFA 17th Annual Conference

The 17th Annual Conference of the Victorian Popular Fiction Association

Heights, Depths, and Extremes

The Birmingham & Midland Institute, Birmingham UK

14th-16th July 2025

The Victorian Popular Fiction Association (VPFA) is delighted to announce its 17th annual conference for 2025, inviting scholars, researchers, and enthusiasts of Victorian literature to explore this year’s theme, Heights, Depths, and Extremes. This theme encourages an examination of the limits, boundaries, and expanses of Victorian popular fiction, encompassing everything from physical and metaphorical heights to the extremities of human emotion, imagination, and social structures.

Victorian popular fiction often probes into the dramatic contrasts and dynamic polarities of the era. Authors depicted lofty ambitions, plunged their characters into the depths of despair and, through their writing, traversed the far extremes of both the known and the unknown.

Topics for papers may include, but are not limited to:

• Representations of geographical heights and depths: mountains, oceans, underground worlds
• Domestic heights and depths: the attic, rooftop, basement, cellar
• Extremes of time and space: extraterrestrial exploration, time travel
• Extremes of wealth and poverty, privilege and deprivation
• Psychological extremes: madness, obsession, ecstasy, despair, passion, fear, courage, guilt
• Social and moral extremities: vice and virtue, rebellion versus conformity, crime and punishment
• Scientific and technological frontiers 
• The extremes of genre: horror, adventure, ghost stories, sensation, and melodrama
• Gender and sexual identities pushed to their limits
• Empire and the colonial frontier as sites of extreme experience, violence, subjugation, resistance
• Political extremes: riot, anarchism, social change movements, communes, protest
• Religious heights and depths: mainstream and alternatives, cults, freethinking, spiritualism

We welcome proposals for 20-minute papers or preformed panels. Submissions from scholars at all stages of their careers, as well as independent researchers and postgraduate students, are encouraged.

Submission Guidelines:

• Abstracts of no more than 250 words for individual papers, or 700 words for panel proposals, in Word format
• Brief biographical note (max 100 words) including your institutional affiliation if appropriate
• The conference will be fully hybrid. Please state whether you expect to attend in person or online and, if online, what time zone you are in.
• Submit proposals to the Conference Team at vpfaconference@gmail.com by 1 March 2025.

All speakers must be current members of VPFA. 

For up-to-date information, please check the conference page on the VPFA website: https://victorianpopularfiction.org/vpfa-annual-conference/.