Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies – Programme of Events Spring Term 2020 

Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies

Programme of Events Spring Term 2020

Wednesday 5th February, 6.00 pm. Alison Booth (Virginia): ‘George Eliot Where She Lived: Illustration and Topo-Biography.’

A close reading of illustrations of George Eliot’s complete works after her death reveals a discourse of literary topo-biography (see Booth’s Homes and Haunts [Oxford UP 2016]) that encodes gender, class, and national heritage as well as tourism. We can connect such textual and cultural studies with the findings of mid-range reading, as practiced in Collective Biographies of Women. Short biographies of George Eliot circulated in twenty-seven volumes of assorted female lives, such as Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign and Lives of Girls Who Became Famous. With the varied methods of textual criticism and digital analysis, this talk draws out spatial and collective dimensions of life narrative, standing back from ostensibly objective geolocation and biographical facts and challenging genre distinctions of fiction and nonfiction. Versions of one woman’s life reveal the circulation of anecdotes and tropes as well as reliance on punctuating moves to new houses, cities, countries, and social circles. In particular, the great woman writer may be placed in the typical provincial cottage or a specific middle-class country house; Dorothea Brooke’s ordeal in Rome may be illustrated with a photograph captioned “A View of Middlemarch (Coventry).” If the Complete Works try to preserve an English Midland, biographies of Eliot among many women can point us toward a cosmopolitan, intersectional reading of representations of mobility and change in women’s lives.

Wednesday 11th March, 6.00 pm. Deborah Lutz (Louisville): ‘Marginalia and Other Forms of Graffiti.’

This talk considers volumes from writers’ libraries that they have marked, autographed, and supplemented with matter such as pressed plants, feathers, and locks of hair. These haptic texts, thickened with time and adaptation, gained singularity, with meaning developing when samples of the real were left behind. George Eliot used some of her books to memorialize—to observe a passing moment, to remember a personal exchange—while in others she wrote comments, indexes on their endpapers, and other glosses of a scholarly nature. Charlotte and Emily Brontë, contrarily, penned diaries in their books, doodled in them, and generally defaced them. This thinking of the published, printed volume as paper with blank spaces inciting script, as a bearer of relationships and memory, as a magical object set in place and time, and as a space that could be inhabited, shaped these writers’ own creative acts. The paratextual for them stretched far outside the more traditional definition of the term, jumping the boundary of the book and the page altogether.

All are welcome to join us for these events, which will take place in the Keynes Library, Birkbeck School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square.

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Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies: Thursday 26 November 2015

Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies
Autumn 2015 Programme

The next event of the autumn term for the Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies will feature Ruth Phillips (Carleton University) presenting on ‘Mississauga Methodist: Peter Jones and the Visual Mediation of Ojibwe Identity in Nineteenth-Century Canada’ on Thursday 26 November 2015 from 7.30pm to 9.00pm in the Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD.

The Reverend Peter Jones, or Kahkewaquonaby, was born in 1802 into an Indigenous world in what is now southern Ontario and died in 1856 as a respected member of a settler society on the brink of achieving self-government within the British empire. The son of a Mississauga mother and a Welsh father, he married into a prominent British Methodist family and devoted his life to missionary work amongst fellow Mississauga traumatized by the rapid dispossession, dislocation, alcoholism and family violence they suffered during the first half of the nineteenth century. This lecture explores Jones’s visual and textual modes of self-fashioning as mediations of these struggles, his own bicultural heritage and the divided loyalties he sought to reconcile.

The session is free and all are welcome, but since the venue has limited space it will be first come, first seated.

For more information, see: http://www.cncs.bbk.ac.uk/

Please email c19@bbk.ac.uk to join our mailing list or to obtain further information about the series.

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Our ‘Strange Disquietude’ – Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies: 12 November 2015

The next event of the autumn term for the Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies will feature Richard Adelman (Sussex) presenting on ‘Our “Strange Disquietude”: Ruskin and Gothic Literature’ on Thursday 12 November 2015 from 7.30pm to 9.00pm in the Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD.

John Ruskin’s account of the gothic spirit, from the central chapter of The Stones of Venice, ‘The Nature of Gothic’ (published in 1853), is highly influential and much fêted. Such influence has long been recognized over figures such as William Morris, over the architectural practices of Victorian Britain, and over political economic thought, especially after Ruskin’s 1862 publication of ‘Unto This Last’, which develops the earlier work’s critique of laissez-faire economics. But Ruskin’s innovative theorization of the concept of the gothic in ‘The Nature of Gothic’ has never been connected with gothic literature itself. This is a significant oversight, as this paper will demonstrate, one that has left a fundamental shift in Victorian gothic literature unrecognized, and that has allowed the eighteenth-century, consistently negative associations of the gothic to stand unchallenged in the very different world of post-Ruskinian gothic literature. Ruskin’s considerable influence over gothic fiction will be reconstructed, in this paper, by analysis of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853), Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly (1872) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1886).

The session is free and all are welcome, but since the venue has limited space it will be first come, first seated.

For more information, see: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/our-research/research_cncs/birkbeck-forum-for-nineteenth-century-studies.

Please email c19@bbk.ac.uk to join our mailing list or to obtain further information about the series.

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Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies Summer Term 2015 Programme

Thursday 4 June 2015, 6.00 – 8.00 pm, Birkbeck Cinema
‘Adapting “Our Mutual Friend” for TV and Radio’
Featuring Sandy Welch (screenwriter, 1998 BBC TV adaption), Mike Walker (writer, 2010 Radio 4 adaptation), Jeremy Mortimer (producer, 2010 Radio 4 adaptation)

The next event of the summer term for the Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies will take place on Thursday 4 June 2015 from 6.00pm to 8.00pm in the Birkbeck Cinema. We are very excited to welcome speakers Sandy Welch, Mike Walker, and Jeremy Mortimer to talk about the process of adapting Dickens’s final novel for screen and radio. Sandy is a screenwriter who has worked on a number of period adaptations in addition to ‘Our Mutual Friend’, including ‘North and South’ (2004), ‘Jane Eyre’ (2006) and ‘Emma’ (2009). Mike and Jeremy have produced several Dickens adaptations for BBC Radio 4, including ‘David Copperfield’ (2005), ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ (2011), and ‘Barnaby Rudge’ (2014).
Future Summer Term events include:

Thursday 16 July 2015, 4.00 – 5.30pm, Clore Lecture Theatre
Curating Feeling: A Panel Discussion with Michael Hatt (Warwick), Victoria Mills (Cambridge), Lynda Nead (Birkbeck) and Alison Smith (Tate Britain)

Thursday 16 July 2015, 6.00 – 7.30pm, Clore Lecture Theatre
Sally Ledger Memorial Lecture: Hilary Fraser (Birkbeck), ‘The Language of Mourning in Fin-de-Siècle Sculpture’

The sessions are free and all are welcome, but since the venue has limited space it will be first come, first seated.

For more information, see the Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth Century Studies website

Please email c19@bbk.ac.uk to join our mailing list or to obtain further information about the series.

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