Panelists will read four short papers while allowing at least 15 minutes for Q&A. They will present on topics related to the three sections into which the special issue is split: teaching, testimony, and time.
Adam Kozaczka will present on teaching Jane Austen in literature and women’s & gender studies classrooms: Austen’s novels, invested in the precariousness of human life, provide coping mechanisms that can help students and teachers alike live with new uncertainties. In the process, Kozaczka will consider how pandemic-experienced students bring brand new perspectives to the Austen classroom and how new pedagogies have become available. Kozaczka also responds to ongoing conversations about death and disease in Austen, now-available themes that have often been de-privileged in a pre-pandemic world by scholars more intent on studying the comic potentials in the six novels.
Sara Maurer will explore time to illustrate what Long COVID has to teach us. Maurer explores the strategies of biographers dealing with Florence Nightingale’s persistent invalidism after her return from Crimea, and considers them within the frame provided by our own world-changing pandemic. Surveying a range writers eager to attribute Nightingale’s invalidism to psychic conflict, to patriarchal oppression, or to a specific illness, she argues that such explanations obscure how the unexplained chronicity of Nightingale’s condition informed her own thoughts on nursing.
Ellen Stockstill will present her testimony on what it is like to be both a Victorianist and a parent during the pandemic, learning lessons both in home life and in the study of Matthew Arnold’s poetry among work by other Victorians. Stockstill juxtaposes our own national-political and social uncertainties with those faced by the Victorians, considering how the unprecedented disruptions of our own day—not only related to Covid-19, but also to racial and other social justice and civil rights movements—help us to better understand the texts we read and study.
Eileen Cleere, vice president of Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS), will deliver the fourth paper to provide an editorial perspective on major changes in periodic focus and scholarly possibility within nineteenth-century studies as a subfield of and period within English literary studies. Though some of the lessons are hard ones and others are hopeful, Cleere will reflect on how editorial and other leadership positions in literary studies have been impacted and will continue to change as a result of the past few years’ unprecedented disruptions.
In sum, all four papers blend real contributions to the study of various nineteenth-century British authors with considerations attendant on the irrevocable changes wrought on the field by the pandemic and (hopefully) post-pandemic environment. They also aim to enter into a conversation on Covid-19's impact on literary studies--increasingly vibrant as pandemic-influenced publications are beginning to see the light of day after peer-review processes, sometimes lengthened by pandemic-related considerations. The papers also go beyond these considerations to study, predict, or theorize where Romanticists and Victorianists will go from here in an increasingly difficult academic environment. As much as we have lost as people and as professionals, we have gained new insight into the re-emergence of issues once important to the Romantics and Victorians we study. As Kozaczka puts it, our newfound “solidarity” with the citizens of the nineteenth century so often stereotyped for their obsessions with death and disease may have provided “a reason to read nineteenth-century literature more compelling than all the reasons we struggled to come up with in a pre-pandemic era.”