Past Events

Please note: For events from 1999 to September 2005 you will need to view our Events Archive.

Spectres of World Literature
Conference / Symposium
Time: 09:00 - 18:30

Over the last twenty years the idea of an ever more integrated ‘global village’ has become received wisdom. The impact on traditional academic disciplines in the humanities has been profound. In seeking to engage with the changes in the world system usually ranged under the banner of ‘globalization’, the fields of postcolonial, world and comparative literature have extended the scope of metropolitan literary studies. Yet all too often this has been to the detriment of inter- or multi-disciplinary research  attentive to the structural inequalities underlying the production and reception of literary texts in what Franco Moretti (2000) has called the ‘world literary system’. The conference will bring together leading international scholars working in and around these areas who reject the triumphalist discourse of globalization and seek instead to recalibrate the field of world literature from a materialist postcolonial perspective. Keynote Speakers: Neil Lazarus, Nicholas Brown, Sarah Brouillette. CLICK HERE FOR REGISTRATION AND MORE INFORMATION.

The Popular Imagination and the Dawn of Modernism: Middlebrow Writing 1890-1930
Conference / Symposium
Time: 09:30 - 13:00
Speakers:

Professor Ann Ardis (University of Delaware, USA), Professor Adina Ciugureanu (Ovidius University Constanta, Romania)

NB: the conference has been extended to Saturday 17 September morning.

This conference seeks to examine the emergence of modernism outside elitist, avant-garde notions, particularly focussing on middlebrow literature. Based on the assumption that such works reached a far wider audience than those of the avant-garde, this conference aims to advance research on the production, dissemination and reception of middlebrow and popular fiction between 1890-1930.  CLICK HERE FOR REGISTRATION AND MORE INFORMATION.

The Inter-University Romantic Period Seminar: Key Voices of the 1790s
Seminar
Time: 17:30 - 19:00

Pamela Clemit: 'Reading Political Justice in the 1790s'

Commentary
The publication of An Enquiry concerning Political Justice (14 Feb. 1793) established Godwin as the pre-eminent political philosopher of the 1790s. But how did people read his seminal work? This paper examines contemporary responses to Political Justice, drawing on correspondence, memoirs, and printed works. It explores the variety of ways in which Political Justice was read—from secular gospel to practical guide to living—and proposes a view of Godwin as intellectual mentor, adviser, and agony aunt to the young radical intelligentsia of the time.

Recommended Reading
William Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793 edition preferred): a book to dip into. A good starting point is the extracts in Jon Mee and David Fallon, eds., Romanticism and Revolution: a Reader (Blackwell, 2011), 144-90. A full text of the 1793 edition is available in the Online Library of Liberty http://oll.libertyfund.org).

Pamela Clemit is Professor of English Studies at Durham University. She is the author of The Godwinian Novel (OUP, 1993, 2001), and has published numerous scholarly and critical editions of William Godwin’s and Mary Shelley’s writings. Her latest books are The Letters of William Godwin, Volume 1: 1778-1797 (OUP, 2011), The Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the French Revolution in the 1790s (CUP, 2011), and an edition of Godwin’s Caleb Williams (Oxford World’s Classics, 2009). 

The Writing of Rose Macaulay
Conference / Symposium
Time: 09:30 - 17:30

Rose Macaulay (1881-1958) was a distinguished and very popular British writer, journalist, critic and traveler, a novelist and poet who wrote prolifically with a searching eye and a critical conscience. She is, however, much understudied. University curricula and anthologies tend only to use a handful of her war poems, and two or three of her later novels as examplars of her work. Some of her works are in print, most are not, and while her name is included in many literary biographies and studies of writers and literary figures of the period, and her opinions are routinely quoted as representative of her period, many of her works are not well known. Recent work by Sarah LeFanu, David Hein and Alice Crawford shows that there is academic interest in Macaulay's writing, and popular interest in her life. This symposium offers an opportunity to focus the mind on Rose Macaulay's writing in her life, and to consider her work in its cultural context. CLICK HERE FOR REGISTRATION AND MORE INFORMATION

Finnegans Wake Research Seminar
Seminar
Time: 18:00 - 20:00

We will resume our explorations of chapter III.3 at FW 514.15.