We are delighted to
confirm the keynote speakers for On Liberties as Professor Regenia
Gagnier (Exeter), Professor Michael Wheeler (Southampton), and the Right Hon.
Sir Alan Beith MP. The deadline for proposals of between 205-300 words is
Wednesday 27th February 2013, and we would encourage all scholars with a
perspective on Victorian or contemporary liberalism (or liberties...) to
submit.
Call for Papers
On Liberties:
Victorian Liberals and their Legacies
Gladstone’s Library,
3rd-5th July 2013
Keynote speakers
Professor Regenia
Gagnier (Exeter)
Professor Michael
Wheeler (Southampton)
Right Hon. Sir Alan
Beith
What did it mean to be liberal, or even ‘a’ liberal in the
Victorian period? Lord Rosebery said he called himself a liberal because he
wanted to be associated with ‘the best men in the best work’; but this rather
Arnoldian ideal of ‘the liberal’ wasn’t even shared by Arnold himself, who
qualified his own position by calling himself a liberal, but a liberal
‘tempered by experience, reflection and renouncement.’ The nineteenth-century
may have seen the publication of one of political liberalism’s ur-texts in
John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, and
the founding of the modern Liberal party, but the Victorian idea of the
‘liberal’ was always wider, more conflicted, more capacious, more difficult.
Religious liberals, for example, were re-defining the fundamentals of belief;
writers and poets used a devotion to ‘liberty’ to support various radical
causes at home and abroad; some like Swinburne were rendering a devotion to
liberty and an avowed sexual libertinism uneasily indistinct.
Liberal impulses remain firmly with us. Indeed, it is worth
asking why the Victorians still to some extent remain the benchmark against
which we measure our own liberation, our own modernity; when we look to see how
far we’ve come (or not), and what liberties we’ve secured (or not), it is to the
nineteenth-century that we frequently look - often to the Victorians’
disadvantage. Or, conversely, we might ask whether we perhaps ‘take liberties’
with the Victorians when trying to re-positioning them against this myth - are
we simply re-writing, revising and re-fashioning them in our own ‘liberal’
image?
Hosted at Gladstone’s Library on 3rd-5th July 2013, and
part of Gladstone’s Library’s broader ‘Re:defining liberalism’ project over
2013, this two day conference (presented by Gladstone’s Library in association
with the Gladstone Centre at the University of Liverpool) intends to explore
the various implications of the idea of the ‘liberal’ in the Victorian period,
but also its multifarious legacies: its legacies for modern politics, for the
ways we conceptualize the Victorian period today, and most fundamentally for
our notions of broader categories and concepts we still associate with ‘the
liberal’ and with liberalism: knowledge, licence, education, and human
freedom.
Papers may consider:
- sexual liberation in the Victorian period
- religious and theological liberalism, then and now
- Literary liberalism – the political purposes of contemporary
literature
- Liberalism with a big ‘L’, the Liberal Party and its
politicians
- ‘Victorian values’ in
political discourse today
- The modern Liberal Democrats and nineteenth-century ideas of
liberalism
- liberal enactments: what does it mean to be liberal today?
- John Stuart Mill
- Campaigns for ‘liberty’ abroad in the Victorian period
- The figure of the libertine in the Victorian period
- Limited liberalism – problems of liberal representation and
subjectivity
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