Symposium: "Victorian Things: Nineteenth-Century Literature and Material Culture" (9/22/2012)

Victorian Things: Nineteenth-Century Literature and Material Culture   

Oxford Brookes University, Saturday 22 September 2012

This one-day symposium will reflect on, and respond to, the current materialist turn in Victorian Studies and Thing Theory. Nineteenth-century literature is crowded with objects, but traditional methods of interpretation have directed us to focus on characters and plots. Through three thematic sessions, ‘Desirable Things’, ‘Anatomical Things’ and ‘Objects and Memory’, this symposium aims to explore the story of objects as ‘things’ with specific values and meanings in Victorian culture. This exciting day of presentations and discussion will be concluded with a plenary lecture by Professor Isobel Armstrong: ‘“The Thing-Character of the World”: four artefacts in the nineteenth-century novel and four materialisms.’               

Delegate fee (including lunch and coffee): £15
Students and unwaged (including lunch and coffee): £10

For bookings and further information contact: Dr. Tatiana Kontou, Dr. Verity Hunt, Dr. Andrew Mangham or Verity Burke: victorianthings12@gmail.com

Schedule

10am-10.30am: Registration

10.30-11am: Welcome and Coffee with Tatiana Kontou, Verity Hunt and Andrew Mangham

11am-12.30: Panel 1: Desirable Things   

Erika Kvistad (University of York) 'Objects for Desire: Sex Toys in Villette'

Kara Tennant, University of Glamorgan 'Elegant Exotics: Fur, Feathers and Fashionable Femininity in Mid-Victorian Britain'

Tatiana Kontou (Oxford Brookes University) 'Paste Jewellery: Courtship in Florence Marryat's actress novels'

12.30-1.30: Lunch

1.30-3pm: Panel 2: Anatomical Things

Katherine Inglis (University of Edinburgh) ‘No sympathy for the revenant? The resuscitated body in Scott, Dickens and Eliot’

Andrew Mangham (University of Reading) 'Collateral Objects and the Science of Suicide: Rereading The Pickwick Papers'.

Verity Burke (University of Reading ) ‘“What have beauty and grace to do with Trials, Poisonings, Horrors?” The clue and the body in Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady’

Helen Hauser (Independent Scholar) ‘Hand on my heart: The consequences of taking people apart and putting icons together’

3-3.30pm: Coffee

3.30-5pm: Panel 3: Objects and Memory

Adelene Buckland (University of East Anglia) 'James Tennant's mineral shop, 149 Strand'

Verity Hunt (University of Southampton) '"Please keep this for me": Memories and Souvenirs of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham'

 Martin Willis (University of Glamorgan) ‘A Solidified Fantasy of Things: Archaeologists and Travel Writers Memorialize Egypt’

5-6pm: Plenary Lecture

Isobel Armstrong (Birkbeck College, University of London) ‘“The Thing-Character of the World”: four artefacts in the 19thC Novel and four materialisms.’