Summer 2021 Conference Presentations

2021 Midwest Victorian Studies Association Conference

May 21-22, 2021
Auburn University, Alabama

Madeline will present her paper, “Thinking Periodically: Victorian Serialized Fiction and the Accessible Digital ‘Edition’,” at the 2021 Midwest Victorian Studies Association Conference, which will be held virtually and hosted by Auburn University, Alabama. With an emphasis on access and accessibility, this paper explores ways in which Victorian serialized novels can be presented through digital projects that place them within their periodical contexts. One such project is Madeline’s The (De)collected War of the Worlds.


2021 Victorian Popular Fiction Association Conference

July 14-16, 2021
University of Greenwich, London

Madeline will present her paper, “Imageless Imagetext: Illustration Excluded from Collected Late-Victorian Periodical Fiction,” at the 2021 Victorian Popular Fiction Association Conference, which will be held virtually and hosted by the University of Greenwich, London. This paper explores visual absences in several popular works of late-Victorian periodical fiction from which illustrations have been excluded, including works by H. G. Wells, R. L. Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur Morrison, C. L. Pirkis, and L. T. Meade.

Material Romance

Material Romance: Kidnapped In and Out of Young Folks Paper” appears in the Summer 2020 issue of the Victorian Periodicals Review. In this article, Madeline proposes that the serial publication of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1886) in Young Folks Paper presents a vision of Highland and Hebrides Scotland that is similar to colonial locales featured in imperial romantic adventure narratives.

Madeline at NAVSA 2018

2018 North American Victorian Studies Association Conference

Hilton St. Petersburg Bayfront Hotel (St. Petersburg, FL)
October 11-14, 2018

Madeline will present her paper “‘Scotland as Though It Were a Foreign Country’: Victorians Looking Northward in Stevenson’s Kidnapped” at the 2018 North American Victorian Studies Conference. This paper argues that Kidnapped maps the imperial romance onto Scotland in a way that portrays Highland Scots as native peoples subjugated by the English, their lands colonized and culture outlawed. Madeline’s readings of William Boucher’s illustrations in conjunction with Stevenson’s text reveal a distinctive “looking Northward”—both textual and literal—that Stevenson and Boucher collaboratively construct through their presentation of Jacobite-era Scotland.