This Thursday (3rd Nov) we have Anna Barton from the University of Sheffield talking to us about Charlotte Brontë’.

Refreshments will be served from 5pm, and the paper will begin at 5.15pm. We are in room MB3202 (top floor, Minerva Building) See you there!

This talk explores the apparently limited afterlife of Charlotte Brontë’s poetry. Addressing the critical fortunes of the Aylott and Jones collection of 1846 and considering Charlotte’s discussion of poetry in her letters, it argues that the author incorporates traces of the early poetry into her novels in different guises. Focusing on Jane Eyre and Shirley, it proposes Brontë’s fiction as a sequence of experiments in the poetics of the Victorian novel that retrieve and reform the Romantic lyric, granting it a marketable posthumousness and securing the feminine lyric voice for the printed page.

 

Anna Barton is a Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Sheffield. She is the author of Tennyson’s Name (Ashgate 2008) and a guide to In Memoriam (EUP 2012) and has published work on a variety of  Romantic and Victorian poets, including Alfred Tennyson, Edward Fitzgerald, Edward Lear, EBB, Blake and Swinburne. Her latest monograph, Nineteenth Century Poetry and Liberal Thought: Forms of Freedom is due to be published by Palgrave in 2017.

Professor Jane Chapman on 19th century periodicals, 5pm 13th Oct, MB3202.

‘Double the Work, but Double the Scope? Comparative International Research in 19th Century Periodicals’

In periodical studies the field of comparative study beyond the English-speaking world and the British Empire is still relatively unexplored, despite the fact that connections between Britain and non-Anglophone countries have always been strong. The question is how can the researcher identify and study them? This paper argues that the most obvious way is by using periodicals to research trans-national themes such as modernism, “orientalist” trade, cultural and scientific exchange, design, or fashion. Focusing on Germany, France and Japan, some areas for further research are identified: science periodicals in Europe, women’s uses of periodicals in the late nineteenth century, periodicals for ex-patriot communities and satirical publications.

Biography

Jane Chapman is Professor of Communications, a grant research team leader and a comparative media historian, specializing in late 19^th and early 20^th century newspaper history – both illustrative and textual.

Her first degree is in history from UCL, her masters and PGCE are in history from Cambridge, where she remains a Research Associate, and her doctorate was under James Joll in the department of International History, LSE.

Jane had 14 years as a television documentary producer and on-screen news reporter and has since written 10 books and almost 40 articles and book chapters.

In this current academic year she is running 3 AHRC grants on the First World War, and since 2007 has been a serial grant holder for British Academy, ESRC and AHRC, with a total of 6 grants for the latter.  She is a member of both AHRC and ESRC Peer Review Colleges, a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a former visiting fellow of Wolfson College Cambridge, and an Associate Professor at Macquarie University, Sydney.