A series of one-day interdisciplinary workshops for young scholars – PGRs, PhD students and ECRs, with the same format as a regular WLM.
By choosing the form of a workshop, we move away from the traditional conference format. Speakers are asked to prepare and send their papers (up to 30 000 characters) beforehand to all participants. During the meeting each speaker briefly summarises the main points (5 min.), after which all the participants are invited to take part in a discussion. It is a great opportunity for peer-feedback in a less formal setting.
We cordially invite your supervisors to attend as well.
WLM RS 4 26 November 2026 | Zoom
The (Un)deserving: Visions of Wealth and Status in Nineteenth-Century Literature, History, and Culture
Keynote speaker to be announced
Call for Papers PDF
In Chapter 48 of Vanity Fair (1847) William Thackaray’s narrator points out that “There were times when she [Becky Sharp, the main protagonist] believed herself to be a fine lady and forgot that there was no money in the chest at home”. Even at the height of Becky Sharp’s social success, her financial precarity looms dangerously over her status. This moment in the novel encapsulates a central tension of nineteenth-century culture – the unstable relationship between money, self-fashioning, respectability, and social standing.
Our workshop invites papers that examine how money, wealth, poverty, and materialism were understood, represented, and reconceptualised in nineteenth century literature, art, and cultural history. We are particularly interested in how economic realities intersected with aesthetics, gender, class, and emotion, and how wealth and status shaped individual identities and social hierarchies.
We also encourage our participants to explore how contemporary culture reconfigures nineteenth-century themes of financial position, material culture, and aesthetics of status and what these reimaginations reveal about both the nineteenth century and our current times of economic uncertainties.
The topics may include but are not limited to the following:
- representations and parodies of status, wealth, and social aspirations
- aesthetics of abundance, luxury, and excess
- material culture – objects and interiors
- fashion
- poetics of poverty, wealth, and precarity
- Victorian capitalism and its reimagining
- legal aspects of wealth, inheritance bankruptcy, and property
- wealth and gender
- writing about money and possessions
- imperial/postcolonial/decolonial approaches towards wealth and poverty
- ecocritical approaches to money, resources, and extraction
- representations of consumer markets
- social mobility and class boundaries
- economy and banking in nineteenth century culture
- representations of materialism
- economics and emotions (anxiety, desire, shame, ambition)
submit your 250-word proposal by 20 september 2026 HERE
Notification of acceptance: 30 September 2026
Deadline for complete paper submission: 15 November 2026
The first WLM RS was on Body Poetics: The Representation of the Body in English Literature and Culture of the 18th and 19th centuries, and the keynote speaker was Prof. Ann Heilmann (Cardiff University) – see the WLM RS 1 programme (20/04/2018).
The second was on Binary Oppositions in 18th- and 19th-century British Literature and Culture, and the keynote speaker was Prof. Laurie Shannon (The Anne Lister Society) – see the WLM RS 2 programme (21/11/2022).
The theme of the third was Gothic: Spectres of Gothic Literature: Reflections, Reworkings, Reinventions, and the keynote speaker was Dr Madeline Potter (The University of Edinburgh) – see the WLM RS 3 programme (28/11/2024).
Papers presented during the workshop may be published in a special issue of Folio. A Students’ Journal. If your text is selected for publication, please make sure that its final version adheres to these guidelines.
And if you are interested in WLM RS1 papers, you may read them here.
