Beyond the Victorian
and Modernist Divide
Keynote speakers
Professor Michael Bentley, University of St. Andrews
Professor Melba Cuddy-Keane, University of Toronto
Ezra Pound’s injunction to “make it new!” or Virginia Woolf’s
“on or about 1910” statement have long been used in order no support a version
of modernism as a strictly aesthetic revolution — or crisis — implying an
essential break with Victorian art, culture and ideology. In the last
decade, however, the crucial transition between the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries has been variously reassessed. In the wake of the new
modernist studies and of the recent revaluations of the Victorian period,
a growing body of scholarship now challenges traditional periodisation by
examining the existence of overlaps and unexplored continuities between
the Victorians, the post-Victorians and the modernists. Once separated by a
critical and cultural break, Victorian and modernist scholars have become
preoccupied with a similar search for cultural and aesthetic complexities that
make it possible to move beyond doxic discourses and fixed dichotomies:
the past and the present, outer life and inner life, materiality and
spirituality, tradition and innovation, ideology and aesthetics.
This international conference would like those scholars to join forces and
contribute to this new phase in the Victorian-modern debate from a
broad range of perspectives across the disciplines: literature,
criticism, the visual arts, history, science and philosophy. The emergence
or re-emergence of ideas such as the “modern”, the “new” or “change” at
the turn of the century is an indisputable fact that we want to acknowledge and
re-contextualize by examining the different meanings and practices they
encompass. From there, we wish to explore the birth and perpetration of two
critical meta-narratives and their interdependence: the myth of “high
modernism” and the myth of “Victorianism”. If there is no clear repudiation of
history and heritage on the modernists’ part, if “rupture” was a useful
fiction, if the challenge to traditional aesthetics and ideology was already a
Victorian preoccupation, then we definitely need to remap modernism and
Victorianism simultaneously.
The papers that we call for are meant to contribute to a trans-disciplinary
publication whose synopsis could be the following, although it is far
from being fixed.
I- Periods, words, labels: historicizing and contextualizing the idea of the
“break”
II- Victorian, Edwardian and modernist literature: unexplored lines of
filiation
III- Art history, aesthetic philosophy and the visual arts across the
Victorian/Modernist divide
IV- Science, philosophy, ideology: landmarks for a new history of ideas
V- New approaches to identity, gender and the self: from mid-Victorians to
modernist ideologies and practices.
Scientific Committee
Pr Catherine Bernard, University Paris-Diderot — France, XXth-century
literature and art
Dr. Anne Besnault-Levita, University of Rouen — France, British Modernism, genre
and gender studies
Pr Michael Bentley, Université of St. Andrews — UK, XIXth-century and early
XXth-century British politics
Pr Myriam Boussahba-Bravard, Université Paris Diderot — Paris 7, France,
XIXth-century social and political history, women’s history and
gender history
Pr. Laurent Bury, University of Lyon 2 – France, XIXth-century literature and
visual arts, President of the Société Française d’Etudes Victoriennes
et Edouardiennes (S.F.E.V.E.)
Pr Melba Cuddy-Keane, University of Toronto Canada — modernism, narratology,
globalism/internationalism, and book history/print culture
Dr Stefano Evangelista, University of Oxford— UK, XIXth-century English
literature, comparative literature, Aestheticism and Decadence, gender
and visual culture
Pr Isabelle Gadoin, University of Poitiers — France, XIXth-century literature,
art history and visual arts
Pr Elena Gualtieri, University of Groningen — Netherlands, modern English
literature and culture, visual arts
Dr Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada, University of Rouen — France, XIXth-century
English literature, art criticism and visual arts, Aestheticism
and Decadence
Pr Catherine Lanone, University of Paris 3 — France, XIXth-century and
literature
Pr Laura Marcus, New College, Oxford — UK, XIXth- and XXth-century literature
and culture
Pr Christine Reynier, University of Montpellier — France, modernist literature,
XXth-century literature
Dr Philippe Vervaecke, University of Lille 3 – France, XIXth- and XXth-century
social and political history
The proposals (300 to 500 words with a short bio-bibliographical notice) should
be sent to Anne Besnault-Levita (annelev@club-internet.fr) and Anne-Florence
Gillard-Estrada (af.gillardestrada@orange.fr) by September 15th 2013. Notification of acceptance: October 15th
2013. The conference will take place on March 27-28, 2014 at Rouen
University.
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