Roving Victorians

Le calendrier 2024-2025:

Stéphane Guy (université de Lorraine)

““It is false to say that Woman is now directly the slave of Man: she is the immediate slave of duty”. George Bernard Shaw et la question de la femme: la critique du patriarcat au service du projet socialiste.”

Discutante : Muriel Pécastaing-Boissière (Sorbonne-Université)

Inscription et lien

Lene Østermark-Johansen (Université de Copenhague)

“Bonding with the Bard? Henry James’s ‘The Birthplace’ (1903) as an Activist Text”

Modératrice / chair: Catherine Delyfer (Centre for Anglophone Studies)

Rosario Arias (Universidad de Malaga)

“Collecting and Assembling Plants in (Neo-)Victorian London”

Modératrice / chair: Béatrice Laurent (CLIMAS)

1845_punch_cover_figure_tiny.pngJames Mussell (University of Leeds)

“Endings: Seriality, Sustainability, and Carrying on”

Readers would have realised that the end was coming for the venerable Leeds Intelligencer in 1866 as before they reached the leading article explaining why the paper was to close they first would have seen the notice that the paper’s pressroom and type were for sale.  The Leeds Intelligencer was founded as a conservative weekly in 1754 and become a bi-weekly in 1855.  In the leading article announcing its end its editor and proprietor, Christopher Kemplay, noted the need for a Conservative daily in Leeds to rival the liberal Leeds Mercury and regretted that he could not meet it with the Intelligencer.  Instead, he told his readers, he had sold the paper to a consortium of Tory grandees who had then closed it, launching the daily Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer in its place.  There was no connection between the papers yet the title signals a desire for continuity.  Even the number of first issue of the Yorkshire Post, 5928, suggested it was merely the latest in an ongoing series rather than the first issue of a new paper.

My lecture considers the awkwardness of endings in periodicals and newspapers.  Predicated on not ending, new issues taking their place in the sequences projected forward from wherever they were in the series, endings were fraught moments as editors and proprietors had to confront failure.  Sometimes endings were acknowledged, leading articles such as that in the Leeds Intelligencer accounting for the end (and providing an excuse).  But often endings were unacknowledged, the newspaper or periodical simply not appearing again and so leaving the virtual sequence, still stretching on, unrealised.  The fate of the Leeds Intelligencer points to yet another way to end: merged into another publication, its ghostly presence was tolerated for the continuity it might bring.

 My lecture considers serial endings alongside other kinds of endings.  Just as one article ends another begins, so too does one issue start after another.  Page after page, the linearity of the codex drives the reader on while the last page prompts the reader to, perhaps, reach for another book.  This discussion provides the context for my broader argument about digital sustainability.  Whereas print publications have a (fairly) efficient preservational infrastructure in formal institutions such libraries and archives and more informal such as domestic bookcases, a comparable infrastructure for digital resources is much more uneven.  Persistence takes work and what look’s like print’s ready capacity to persist depends on a world designed to allow it do so.  Digital resources require curation, and so an infrastructure of their own.  In the absence of this, I want to suggest, it is important to consider the end not as something terminal but rather an end in itself.

Les inscriptions sont ouvertes ici. Un lien Zoom vous sera envoyé quelques jours avant la conférence aux inscrits.

Le calendrier 2023-2024:

Adrian S. Wisnicki (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)

“Victorian voices”

Modératrice/ Chair: Laurence ROUSSILLON-CONSTANTY (Arts/Langages. Transitions et Relations, ALTER)

 

 

Camille Stallings (University of Oxford)

“Toxic Friendship and The Snobs of England: Thackeray, the Periodical Press, and Social Critique”

Modératrice / Chair: Françoise Baillet (Équipe de Recherche interdisciplinaire sur la Grande-Bretagne, l’Irlande et l’Amérique du Nord, ERIBIA)

 

 

Mark Chapman (University of d’Oxford, Ripon College Cuddesdon)

“Christianity & Law in Victorian Britain”

Modérateur : Jérôme Grosclaude (UMR 53137: Institut d’Histoire des Représentations et des Idées dans les Modernités (IHRIM).

 

 

Manuela d’Amore (Università di Catania, Italie)

“Labour and Poverty in the East End”

Modératrice : Béatrice Laurent (Cultures et Littératures des Mondes Anglophones, CLIMAS EA 4196)

 

 

Rémy Duthille (Laboratoire Culture et LIttérature des Mondes AnglophoneS, CLIMAS)

“Radical London (and Manchester) in the 1840s”

 

 

Jérôme Dupont (Université de Nîmes)

“Des ‘Fictionaries’ de William Morris à ‘English Magic’ de Jeremy Deller : le principe de réalité à l’épreuve de la fonction critique de l’imagination”
 
 
 
 
 
  • 24 mai 2024, 13h-14h30, Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès :

    Battersea Reach from Lindsey Houses, 1864-71 by James McNeill Whistler. Painting, Oil on Canvas. The Hunterian University of Glasgow GLAHA:46358.

Justine Pizzo (University of Southampton)

“Atmospheric Characterisation and the Changing Climate of Victorian Fiction”

Modératrice / chair : Catherine Delyfer (Centre for Anglophone Studies)

 

 

Abstract: This talk introduces participants to critical, theoretical, and historical methods for thinking about the influence of nineteenth-century weather phenomena and the emergence of climate science on literary character—particularly female character—in Victorian realist fiction. It begins by exploring the ancient origins of character’s long-standing relationship to climate and the perceived influence of atmospheric phenomena on human health, psychology, national characteristics, and gendered identity. In Hippocrates’s influential medical treatise On Airs, Waters, and Places (400 BCE), for example, the celebrated father of modern medicine claims that ‘climates differ and cause differences in character’. More than thirteen centuries later, the Christian theologian St Thomas Aquinas argues in his Summa Theologica (c. 1225-74) that character relies on the state of the weather. ‘The production of woman’, he explains, comes from ‘some material indisposition,’ ‘or even from some external influence, such as that of a south wind, which is moist.’

These longstanding entanglements of character, climate, and biology inform what I term the ‘atmospheric characterisation’ of women in some of the most canonical realist novels of the Victorian era, such as those by Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy. Using the protagonist of Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles as a case study, this presentation examines how developments in Victorian meteorology, medicine, and psychology called upon long-held associations between women and the weather to make supposedly embodied subjects like Tess Durbeyfield coextensive with the atmosphere’s pervasive reach.

The final third of the talk invites us to consider why—in view of recent new materialist and ecological approaches to literature—we continue to impose an individualist definition of character on the nineteenth-century novel. How are our readings of realist fiction influenced by the enduring assumption that subjectivity inheres within the discrete bodily envelope rather than amidst the expansive and diffuse climates of an atmospherically unstable world?