Victorian Persistence: Persistence in/of Victorian Literature and Culture
A one-day postgraduate conference
Friday, 7 December 2012
Université Paris Diderot
The life of the past persisting in us, is the business of every thinking man and woman.
AS Byatt
The present-day globalization of Victorian writing can be traced back to the extraordinary plasticity of its textual and visual forms, as it travels from place to place and media to media. Such temporal, geographical, cultural, intertextual and intermedial persistence is to be the subject of a one-day conference which will consider the different modes of resistance of literature within the nineteenth-century as well as its survival and rebirth in later times.
The aim of this interdisciplinary conferenceis to allow postgraduates to discuss their research with others and to open out the subject to other centuries and disciplines. We are interested in20-minute papers approaching the idea of persistence from the point of view of literature, cultural studies, or history. We are also looking for papers onlater or contemporary perceptions of the Victorian age – the modern audience and critical responses, and how period drama and contemporary culture impact on one another.
Topics may include, but are by no means limited to:
- Intertextuality and/or rewritings of Victorian works
- Screen adaptations or original screenplays set in the Victorian age
- Collections and collecting
- Material culture and (re)production
- The Victorian Age and belatedness
- Trace, traces and tracing the past
- Conservative nostalgia, heritage and British identity
- Persistence as symptom: illness and disfunction
- Science and persistence of the scientific idiom
- Circulation of people, ideas and things within and without the 19th century
Our two keynote speakers will be:
- Juliet John (Royal Holloway, University of London)
- Jeremy Tambling (University of Manchester)
Abstracts no longer than 300 words should be sent to Estelle Murail (estelle_murail@yahoo.fr) and Róisín Quinn-Lautrefin (roisinql@hotmail.fr) by October 7th, 2012, along with a brief biographical note, which should not exceed 50 words.