Lecture Series: Birckbeck Forum “Mediating Song: Pre-Raphaelite Balladry in Poetry and Paint” (10/23/2013)

The Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies

Keynes Library

Elizabeth Helsinger (Chicago)

“Mediating Song: Pre-Raphaelite Balladry in Poetry and Paint”

October 23, 2013 (7:30-9:00 pm)

In the 1850s two generations of Pre-Raphaelites practiced what might be called a modern medievalism in painting, poetry, and song. By returning to older models, they rendered contemporary forms of narrative and visual representation newly strange. This talk focuses on one aspect of Pre-Raphaelite explorations of the pre-Renaissance past from the perspective of a mid-nineteenth-century present: their reworkings of traditional ballads, trans-mediating old songs into deliberately unsettling poems and pictures. For Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and others in their circle these mediated ballads became occasions for imagining their way forward, towards alternative models for relating figure to ground, subjects to objects, and present to past and future.

Other Forum events for the Autumn Term include:

• Monday 11 November 2013, 6:00-8:00pm
• Tabitha Sparks (McGill): 'The Symbolic Economy of Disease in Sensation and Satire: Lady Audley's Secret and Dr Phillips: A Maida Vale Idyll'
• Friday 15 November 2013, 6:00-8:00pm
• Kate Flint (USC): 'Intrusive Light: Flash Photography and Documentary Work'
• Organized by the History and Theory of Photography Research Centre at Birkbeck

Unless otherwise noted, all sessions take place in the Keynes Library (Room 114, School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square, London, UK, WC1H 0PD). All sessions are free and welcome to the public.

For more information, see: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/our-research/research_cncs/our-events/birkbeck-forum-for-nineteenth-century-studies-autumn-term-2013 

Please email c19@bbk.ac.uk if you would like to join our mailing list or to obtain further information about the series.