‘The Feeling of Networks’: Panel Discussion at King’s College London
Monday 28 March 2011
12.00-13.45
English Department Seminar Room (S2.39), King’s College London, Strand, WC2R 2LS*
In this session we explore ways in which to conceptualise the affective field produced by the global movement of commodities in the Victorian period, and its postcolonial legacies. We will focus on the case of the novel, and specifically those by Anthony Trollope, prolific author of the mid Victorian period. Trollope’s novels disseminated a sense of provincial England to the colonies, yet they also revealed the novelist’s (and the novel’s) investment in the global communication networks of the time. We wish to use Trollope’s works as a case history for considering the ways in which global commodities, such as novels, produce and disseminate realms of feeling, and their interaction with local cultures. This panel will make an intervention in current debates about the global circulation of printed literature; about the significance of mobility as a term in cultural understandings of place and feeling; and about the place of feeling in postcolonial analysis.
Professor Josephine McDonagh (English)
Professor Clare Pettitt (English)
Dr Mark Turner (English)
Dr Ian Henderson (English/Australian Studies)
Pre-circulated draft papers by Mark Turner and Ian Henderson will be available in early March. Contact ian.r.henderson(at)kcl.ac.uk.
From entrance foyer to the Strand campus of KCL take the lifts or stairs to second floor. From lifts make a right-hand u-turn and S2.39 is on your left. From the stairs, make a left hand u-turn and S2.39 is on your left.
Supported by:
Leverhulme International Network: Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World, 1851-1914
Department of English Language and Literature, King’s College London
Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, King’s College London
Eyetopia Symposium Fri November 5
Victorian Dreams of Place & Vision
Friday November 5; 1pm-6pm
Anatomy Theatre, Strand Campus, King’s College London [location]
How and what did the Victorians see? From blinking, to staring, observing, voyeurism, to conjuring spectral visions of the dead, the Victorian imaginaire derived much of its power from the aqueous life of the eyeball. But to what worlds, both real and imagined, did these manifold forms of visualisation take them?
The subjects discussed will be Darwin and observation, photography and poetry, Victorian mourning photography and the Victorian microscope and the aesthetics of wonder.-
Speakers
Professor David Amigoni (Keele), Professor Isobel Armstrong (Birkbeck), Audrey Linkman (Independent) and Alison Wood (KCL)
Refreshments will be provided and there will be a wine reception afterwards. All welcome and entrance is free.
Contact
Dr Louise Lee | Tammy Ho
louise.lee@kcl.ac.uk | t@asiancha.com
Call for Papers: Dickens Day 2010
‘Mr Popular Sentiment’: Dickens and Feeling
Saturday 16 October, Senate House, London
Deadline for Proposals 4 June
Jointly organised by Birkbeck, Leicester University and the Dickens Fellowship
‘Whilst Trollope sought to dismiss Dickens as ‘Mr Popular Sentiment’, Robert Louis Stevenson embraced the emotional affect of Dickens’s fiction, writing of the Christmas books that he had cried his eyes out, ‘but oh, dear God, they are good – and I feel so good after them.’ From the first readers who wept convulsively at the death of Little Nell, to Oscar Wilde who, famously, could not read it without laughing, Dickens’s work has elicited strong and divided emotional responses. The term sentimental, a word frequently associated with Dickens, can be used to denigrate his writing but a wealth of recent thinking is challenging the negative connotations surrounding this categorisation. Often criticised as dishonest, manipulative and ‘cheap’ emotion, sentimentality is being reconfigured as the legitimate, rather than bastard, offspring of the eighteenth-century philosophy of sensibility and as a literary manoeuvre capable of reforming both the reader and reading practices.
Taking Trollope’s parodic description as its point of departure, this one-day conference, jointly run by Birkbeck, Leicester University and the Dickens Fellowship, will explore the complex relationships between Dickens’s works and the diverse feelings they both represent and engender. We invite proposals for 20-minute papers on any aspect of the theme and warmly encourage postgraduate students to apply.’
Topics could include but are not limited to:
Historical and theoretical understandings of sentiment, emotion, passion, affection and affect
The eighteenth-century legacy, including Dickens’s responses to Mackenzie, Sterne and Richardson
Nineteenth-century sciences of emotion: physiognomy, phrenology, psychology and evolutionary biology
Form and feeling: emotions, mode and aesthetics
Radical and political uses and experiences of emotion
Staged feeling: melodrama, adaptation and Dickens’s public readings
Men and women of feeling: gender, sexuality and affect
Dickens’s writing of/for children
Grief, loss, mourning and memorialisation
Religion, faith and doubt
Tears, laughter, blushing; the body and emotion
Festive feeling and Christmas writings
Please send proposals (maximum 500 words), together with details of your institutional affiliation (if any) to Holly Furneaux, Ben Winyard and Bethan Carney, at hf35@le.ac.uk, b.winyard@english.bbk.ac.uk and jcarn02@students.bbk.ac.uk. The deadline for paper proposals is 4 June 2010.
http://ies.sas.ac.uk/events/conferences/2010/DickensDay10/index.htm
