I am proposing this panel in part because there is nowhere near enough play, and precious little opportunity for delight or joy, right now. Play, Delight, and Joy Studies is not a thing, obviously, but these panelists aren’t coming to the conversation frivolously. Instead, each brings rich fields of scholarship--on everything from queer desire to Victorian collections, from popular culture to cartography--to bear on questions of what it meant to operate with a sense of openness to play in the nineteenth century. These serious scholars of Victorian Britain and its empire bring their rigor to bear on topics of play because studies of literature and culture should be incisive, interrogatory, and critical--but they should also do the past the justice of reading for delight.

In this innovative session, participants will give a focused (5min) talk addressing a mode of Victorian play. Papers consider a wide range of textual genres through multiple frameworks, all bound together by the goal of theorizing pleasure. Individual projects consider:

• Board games, which provide perhaps the most overt examples of play on our panel; Tina Choi argues that geographical games in particular proved important as Victorian means of enforcing new rules and forms of knowledge and inviting engagement with complex ideas of imperial progress;
• Ashmita Mukherjee explores a hybridity within Indian children’s literature: drawing on nonsense work such as Lewis Carroll's Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Edward Lear’s limericks, nineteenth-century Indian writers infused them with indigenous bālrasa (the spirit of childhood), a characteristically folk flavor, to produce new works for children that helped situate themselves as part of the British empire;
• Suzy Kim focuses on playfulness with language as a central issue in investigations of sensation fiction: Wilkie Collins’s work creates paradigms of reading in which joy emerges not just from suspense, but from an accounting model in which reading itself comes to provide a predictable payoff;
• Resisting a focus on tragedy that Jessica Campbell notes has long characterized queer studies, she asks: What if we looked for queer femininity in Victorian fiction by looking for female characters--in novels as diverse as Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley and E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End--who take particular delight in each other’s company? How might we thus theorize queer joy?
• For Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, poets and lovers who published under the pseudonym “Michael Field,” collecting and contemplating flowers was not merely a joyful pastime but an extension of their shared delight in each other. Considering how flowers embody intense joy, Andrea Gazzaniga theorizes how they function as signs for unspeakable pleasures and how the game of gathering and examining flora enables female agency;
• Jill Ehnenn pushes back against the Foucauldian notion that nineteenth-century habits predominantly create docile bodies, to consider how quotidian habits such as the daily practice of life writing represent joy through the pleasures and practices of self- and world-making.

Fascinating in themselves, these projects provide intriguing intersections, which will be the focus of the second half of the session (at least 30 minutes). We will engage questions from attendees, as well as discussion of issues such as: How does plot shape not just literature, but larger cultural narratives that drive notions of geographic or imperial identities? How is the play of language expanded or limited by the desires of readers? What is the relationship between the boundaries of joy and privacy: how might we rethink the commonplace that domestic desires and habits (reading, collecting, writing, attending to the needs of children) are necessarily limiting?

This panel is mindfully diverse. Presenters’ career positions range from graduate student (two) to full professor (one), and their institutional affiliations importantly include multiple regional comprehensives as well as research-driven universities. Their approaches showcase the best of Victorian Studies as a multimedia, exploratory, interdisciplinary, global field.

The appeal of a scholarly panel that also aims to explore and elicit joy may perhaps be measured by the hundreds of engagements and scores of retweets my CFP gained on Twitter. Or by the fact that I received three times more proposals than I could accept for a roundtable that has six members. In intellectual terms, a robust Victorian studies conversation that meaningfully attends less to the dominating pleasure of power than to the delights that may come from considering approaches besides domination provides a new lens for considering how we understand the period itself.