The Global and the
Local: the NAVSA/BAVS/AVSA joint conference in Venice (3-6 June 2013) is fast
approaching. With that in mind, the Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century
Studies is hosting a warm-up event, On Cosmopolitanism, to give those
interested in the topic a chance to hear three eminent speakers - Stefano
Evangelista, Alex Murray, and Matthew Potolsky - discuss their research in this
field. All are welcome to the session, which will be held on 30 May 2013 at 6pm
in the Keynes Library (Room 114, Birkbeck, University of London, 43 Gordon
Square, London, UK, WC1H 0PD)
Stefano Evangelista (Oxford),
'Cosmopolitanism and Sexual Freedom in George Egerton's Norwegian Stories'
George Egerton's collection of short stories, Keynotes (1893), created a sensation for its frank exploration of
female sexual desires and became one of the iconic texts of British Decadence.
While Egerton's feminism has been discussed by various critics, she remains
almost completely undiscovered as a crucial mediator of Scandinavian culture
into Britain at the moment of the Northern Breakthrough. Some of the stories in
Keynotes use a Scandinavian, mostly Norwegian, setting, as a backdrop to their
pioneering discussion of female sexual freedom. Egerton discovers the untapped
potential of the North which in her writings becomes, for modern English women
in search of sexual freedom, an anti-type to the South imagined by homosexual
male writers.
Alex Murray (Exeter), 'Venice, sans
hope': Transatlantic Decadence and New York Writing'
Recent years have seen a rise in studies of Transatlantic Decadence and
aestheticism, mapping the importation of French and English intellectual
developments in to American cities, primarily Boston, New York and San
Francisco. While we are beginning to develop a clearer picture of how these
works were received, less attention has been paid to their effects. In this
paper I offer an introduction to the ways in which Edgar Saltus, James Huneker
and Carl Van Vechten negotiated between European models for writing urban space
and the singular demands of writing New York City. In drawing on Huysmans,
Verlaine and other European models these writers shed the language of
impressionism and the metaphors of haunting, developing a new form of Decadence
which was indebted to, but ultimately refashioned, the writing of the Old
world.
Matthew Potolsky (Utah), 'Aestheticism
and Politics'
It has often been noted that Romantic writing was born in the shadow of the
great revolutions of the late eighteenth century, reflecting upon and
responding to political experiments and personal testimony. Critics have long
understood aesthetcist writing as a turn against the explicit political works
of the romantic era, but I want to argue in this paper that this opinion needs
to be revised. Politics are in fact a significant concern of aestheticist
writers.
This paper will take up two poems about war and revolution in aestheticist
writing. It will be my argument that, although these images seem to argue for
or imply a withdrawal from the political, they in fact try to understand
politics in ways that differ significantly from romantic models. Where romantic
writers speak openly as "unacknowledged legislators of the world," to
borrow Shelley's famous phrase, aestheticist writers seek the sources of political
change in the dark corners of private life. What seems to be a turn away from
politics is often a kind of politics by other means.
I begin with Theophile Gautier's "Preface" to his most avowedly
aestheticist collection Emaux et Camees, which depicts the poet closing his
window against the street violence of 1848. I find in this poem, however, a
cosmopolitan openness that complicates the speaker's turn to poetry. Dante
Rossetti's poem "After the German Subjugation of France" casts the
fall of Louis Napoleon in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War as akin to the
vengeful return of a child born of a liaison with a prostitute. As in his
earlier poem, "After the French Liberation of Italy," Rossetti
defines politics in explicitly erotic terms.
Chair: Ana Parejo Vadillo (Birkbeck)
For more information, please refer to the website at: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/our-research/research_cncs/our-events/birkbeck-forum-for-nineteenth-century-studies-on-cosmopolitanism
If you would like to be added to the Forum mailing list or would like more
information, please email: c19@bbk.ac.uk
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