The C19 schedule for Semester A is out, and we are delighted to have put together such an exciting programme. Please see details below.

Events Programme, 2017-18 – Semester A

12th Oct: Cassie Ulph (Bishop Grosseteste University) – ‘Anne Lister, the Halifax Lit and Phil, and Civic Improvement’

9th Nov: Enrico Acciai (University of Leeds) – ‘A Transnational Volunteer: the Life of Amilcare Cipriani between Garibaldinism and Radicalism’

30th Nov: Amy Culley (University of Lincoln) – ‘“A journal of my feelings, mind & Body”: Narratives of Ageing in the Life Writing of Mary Berry (1763-1852)’

All meetings take place in MB3202. Refreshments will be served at 5pm, and the session will begin at 5.15pm.

Finally, don’t forget to follow the group on Twitter – https://twitter.com/19thCLincoln

See you there!

At 4pm on Weds 24th May in room MB3202, Dr. Claire Nally (Northumbria) will be giving a talk on ‘Steampunk and the Museum’. Clarie’s paper will be the culmination of the Nineteenth-Century MA Symposium and is open to all. You can see Claire’s abstract and biography below. Refreshments will be available.

On Thurs 27th April, Dr. David Ibitson will present a paper entitled ‘ “My friends have been making me take up golf”: golf and the construction of masculinity in the ghost stories of M.R. James’. Refreshments will be served at 5pm and the paper will start at 5.15pm. We are in room MB3202 in the Minerva Building.

Please find David’s abstract and biography below:

This paper will look at how the ghost stories of M.R. James engage with fin de siècle concerns about masculinity.  Taking the references to golf as its focus, it investigates how these texts parody and critique ideals of Victorian manliness, highlighting a comic irony often overlooked in criticism of James’s work.

Golf’s uncertain status as a masculine activity will be shown to highlight the problematic masculine status of his protagonists as they undergo processes of enervation and infantilisation. This ambiguous manliness will then be situated in the context of contemporary urban escape programmes for young boys, illustrated by both the Boys’ Brigade and Boy Scout movements, as well as key examples of popular boy’s own adventure literature.

In acquiescing to social pressures which promote the playing of sport as a vital part of manly development, James’s protagonists evoke these social and literary source texts. Yet, their questionable masculinity, rather than merely working to utilise the men as comic currency, has the effect of resisting a muscular masculinity. In turn, the militarism of these organisations will be shown to allow James’s stories to function as attacks on popular conceptions of Imperial heroism.

James is revealed to be actively participating in contemporary discourses about nation, Empire, and masculine fitness, acting upon social and literary parodic targets as a sporting Gothic burlesque of ideas of gender and heroism.

Biography:

David gained his PhD in English Literature from the University of Leeds, with his thesis focusing on parody, depictions of Empire, and ideas of authorship in the works of the writer Jerome K. Jerome. His research interests are in Victorian and Edwardian popular culture, New Humour, adventure fiction, and literary depictions of office work. He has published on Jerome K. Jerome, Victorian popular music, urban exploration, and urban escape programmes. He is currently Subject Lead in English at the University Centre at North Lindsey College.

On Thursday 30th March, Emma Butcher (Hull) will be talking to us on ‘Children Writing War in the Nineteenth Century’. Refreshments will be served at 5pm, with the paper to start at quarter past. We are in room MB3202 (Minevra Building).

Please find Emma’s abstract below:

The focus on children and war throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century is integral to our understanding of war’s brutalities and its wider cultural impact. Currently, the media’s fixation on suffering children in the wake of the recent Syria crisis is central to our engagement with military issues that may not have otherwise affected the British public. Going back, the most famous child writer of the twentieth century, Anne Frank, still remains a significant example of how the world can conceptualise the horrors of war through one child’s voice.

Thursday 9th March, MB3202, 5-6.30pm (paper begins at 5.15pm)

Dr Constance Bantman (University of Surrey)

‘Jean Grave and French Anarchism (1870s-1930s): A Reassessment’.

“Les Temps Nouveaux? It was Grave’s paper, and that’s all one needs to know”.

This talk will propose a biographical approach to the study of anarchist activism, applied to one of the most influential figures in the French and international anarchist movement between the late 1870s and the First World War: the activist Jean Grave (1854-1939). Adopting a relational approach delineating Grave’s formal and informal connections, it focuses on the role of print in this relational activism, through the three papers which Grave edited between 1883 and 1914, Le Revolte, La Revolte and Les Temps Nouveaux. It also highlights Grave’s transnational entanglements and links with progressive circles in France. This, in turn, provides a basis to reassess the nature and functioning of the French anarchist movement during its “heroic period”, by stressing its transnational ramifications and inclusion in progressive campaigns and punctual coalitions. As Grave’s life and militant career are so closely bound with the Paris area, this inquiry also offers a fascinating portrait of a highly prolific, yet largely ‘immobile’ transnationalist.