The first session of the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Research Group will take place at 4pm on Weds 2nd October in MB3201 (Minvera Building).

Dr. Maeve O’Dwyer will be talking to us on ‘Rethinking the Female Gaze: Gender, Sculpture and the Studio in early Nineteenth-Century Rome’. Refreshments will be available from 4pm and the talk will begin at 4.15pm.

Abstract

Drawing on the British Library’s collection of travel writing by British visitors to Rome, this paper will consider the struggle of the female gaze to emerge from the traditionally male space of art appreciation on the Grand Tour in the early nineteenth century. Interaction with sculpted classical bodies was socially problematic, especially at a time when methods of viewing sculpture changed towards focusing more keenly on the physicality and materiality of the object, and British society began to experience what Dror Wahrman titled ‘gender panic’. Some women, like Pauline Borghese, exploited this potential prurience, deliberately performing as what Chloe Chard would term ‘spectacles’. Others prefaced written accounts of their travels with apologia around their ability to engage with art. In both cases, interacting with artists in the studio allowed them to reframe and rethink their position within the social geography of Rome and the established sociability of the Grand Tour. This paper posits that those women normally constrained by societal norms when viewing the canon of the antique were enabled to diversify and develop their self-fashioning through the space of the artist’s studio.

Biography

Dr Maeve O’Dwyer is the Programme Manager for HEAR, the internal programme for achieving HEA recognition at the University of Lincoln. Maeve is an Associate Lecturer in the School of History and Heritage, teaching undergraduates on the Art History and History BA and the History BA. She also offers a technique class, open to all students regardless of level of study or School.

You are invited to the final paper of the Nineteenth Century Research Group this Wednesday 10th April, 4pm (for a 4.15pm start), in MB1019. Refreshments will be provided. We hope that you’ll be able to join us for our last meeting of the academic year, for the following paper by Dr Richard Salmon (University of Leeds):

Transforming the Art of Fiction:  Walter Besant, Henry James and the Society of Authors 

Abstract:

Founded in 1884 by the novelist and historian Walter Besant (1836-1901), the Incorporated Society of Authors went on to become the most successful and long-lasting professional association organized by and for the benefit of authors in Britain. Established in the belief that collective action was necessary in order to defend authors’ ‘trade interests’ and to express a long-held grievance against exploitative publishers and inadequate laws of copyright, the Society of Authors presents a valuable case-study of the wider transformation of the arts in modern professional society. Though Besant’s influence on the early development of the Society is well-documented, the conception of professional identity which shaped his activity during its first two decades remains under-explored.

This paper considers two distinct, but interrelated, aspects of Besant’s work for the Society of Authors during its early years. Firstly, it examines the various models of professional association and their functions, envisaged by Besant and other leading members of the Society, ranging from the pragmatic to the utopian. How did members of the Society conceive of its role in providing professional services in relation to the wider field of the literary market? Secondly, the paper explores the Society’s professional ethos in relation to the emerging genre of the literary manual – or ‘how to’ guide to professional authorship -, a connection which in 1884 sparked a memorable debate on the ‘art of fiction’ between Besant and his fellow novelist, Henry James. In what ways was this well-known late-Victorian debate on the aesthetic and moral dimensions of the novel shaped by the formation of collective professional identities for authors?

Biography:

Dr Richard Salmon is a Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature in the School of English, University of Leeds. He is the author of Henry James and The Culture of Publicity (1997), William Makepeace Thackeray (2005), and The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession (2013). He has recently edited The Reverberator for the Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James (2018), and is currently developing a new collaborative project on literary professionalism and the early history of the Society of Authors.

Next week’s C19 meeting will feature Dr. Kate Hill (History, Uni of Lincoln) talking on the topic of ‘Professionalization, Status, and Masculinity in Provincial Museums, c.1870-1930’ . Kate is a great speaker, so please do come along!

As usual, refreshments will be from 4pm with the paper to start at 4.15pm. Kate’s abstract and biography are below.

4pm, 6th March

MB1019

‘A rather undefined social position and public recognition’: Professionalization, Status, and Masculinity in Provincial Museums, c.1870-1930’

Abstract:
The figure of the lower middle-class man was rarely seen as particularly masculine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; he appears both at the time and in the work of subsequent scholars as an overly-domesticated ‘Pooterish’ type. But how might occupational identities – particularly new ones – contribute to their own sense of, and others’ perceptions of, manliness, especially at a time when women were starting to encroach on the lower ranks of the professions? This paper will examine regional and provincial museum curating, especially in municipally-funded museums, a field which grew from virtually nothing in about 1850 to supporting a professional association by the end of the century, to explore how occupation, remuneration and cultural capital put limits on curators’ ambitions to be part of the ‘learned (manly) professions’, and how they attempted to assert a particular version of masculinity in the face of class and gender challenges.

Bio:

I am a principal lecturer in History here at the University and am a historian of museums and collecting in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; my most recent book was Women and Museums, 1850-1914: Modernity and the Gendering of Knowledge (MUP 2016 – now out in paperback!). I’m currently working on a project on children and museums (going through all the demographic categories as you can see)

Next week’s C19 is a joint session featuring two Ph.D students. It sounds fascinating, so please come along! Details below.

C19 Research Group

20th Feb, MB1019

Refreshments at 4pm, papers to begin at 4.15pm

Eleanor Bryan, University of Lincoln, ‘ “My Hideous Progeny”: Re-imagining Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’

Since its initial publication in 1818, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has found itself subject to continual adaptation. It has been ceaselessly rewritten, reproduced, and redesigned over the subsequent two centuries to the point where there are now over eighty dramatic adaptations of the story and even more derivative films; tropes of which have become decidedly more fore-grounded in public consciousness than the original storyline. This paper concerns adaptations of Frankenstein, and looks to examine, from both a theoretical and historicist standpoint, the alterations made in the process of adapting the text. A Bakhtinian approach to adaptation will be assumed, in line with the theory that adaptive works do not silence or correct a previous work, but are rather informed by the original work and antecedent adaptations in order to establish a dialogue that extends in both directions.

Whilst the abundance of Frankenstein adaptations has prompted many studies on the differences between the novel and the films, scholarly research has neglected to examine the story’s transition from the original novel, to the nineteenth-century dramatizations, to the 1831 rewriting of the novel, to twentieth-century films. Rather than restrict analysis to one version of the novel and one medium of adaptation, this paper will approach the adaptations holistically in order to provide a new perspective in arguing that the nineteenth-century plays adapted from the 1818 novel shaped its 1831 rewriting and, ultimately, later cinematic adaptations. Significant deviations from Shelley’s storyline will be evaluated in terms of how they update the Frankenstein story for a more contemporary audience, and how their changes add to or detract from the societal concerns that Shelley originally aimed to emulate.

Eleanor Bryan is an Associate Lecturer on the Late Victorian to Edwardian Literature module and a PhD student studying Gothic adaptations. Her research primarily concerns dramatic adaptations of Frankenstein and Dracula; interrogating their propensity for adaptation, their enduring relevance, and the malleability of their characters in accurately transmuting changing social anxieties. Wider research interests include romanticism, fin de siècle literature, cinematic adaptation, and literary representations of monstrosity. Eleanor is active in the dissemination of her research, presenting her work at many national and international conferences, and last year she was awarded the Stephen Copley research award by the British Association for Romantic Studies.

Carly Stevenson, University of Sheffield, ‘Looking in Keats’s Lamia’

John Keats’s 1819 narrative poem Lamia is concerned with ways of looking: it begins with Hermes’s ‘amorous’ quest to find a hidden nymph and ends with Lamia’s retreat from the ‘watching eyes’ of Apollonius. Not only is Hermes the agent of Lamia’s metamorphosis from snake to woman, he is the conduit through which the reader’s gaze is mediated. Moreover, the bodily autonomy Lamia gains from her bargain with Hermes (she reveals the nymph to him in exchange for the restoration of her woman’s form) is short-lived, as she cannot disguise her true ‘gordian’ appearance from Apollonius. In this paper, I will explore the ways in which Keats reimagines the figure of the Lamia, and, in doing so, interrogates the femme fatale motif that was gaining currency during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, accelerated by the publication of Gothic texts such as Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) and Coleridge’s Christabel (1816). By focusing on the power of seeing in Lamia, Keats acknowledges a ‘knotty problem’ at the root of the Gothic-Romantic obsession with transgressive female figures.

Carly Stevenson is a PhD student in the School of English at the University of Sheffield, under the supervision of Prof. Angela Wright and Prof. Andrew Smith. Her research is concerned with John Keats and the Gothic Aesthetic. Before joining the PhD programme at Sheffield, Carly completed both her undergraduate and Masters Degrees at the University of Lincoln.

Here is the (slightly delayed) C19 programme for this Semester. There’s lots to look forward to, so we hope to see you there!