International Walter Pater Conference
Sorbonne University, Paris (France),
4-5 July 2014
“Walter Pater: Continuity and Discontinuity”
Keynote speakers
Laurel BRAKE
Lene ØSTERMARK-JOHANSEN
Deadline for the proposals extended to 15 July 2013
As carefully elaborated in The Renaissance, history and art history are made up of continuities and discontinuities between epochs, artistic forms, artists and thinkers. The Renaissance was indeed an unceasing return to the “standard of taste” set in Antiquity, an acknowledgment of its permanence in men’s minds and actions. However, it was also a discovery of “New experiences, new subjects of poetry, new forms of art” (“Two Early French Stories”) that called into question the conditions of life and art. These “exquisite pauses in time” were Pater’s most effective means of linking the continuous and discontinuous. In his other writings, whether published or fragmentary, Pater continued to envisage and apply such patterns to study Europe’s intellectual and cultural traditions. In keeping with this complex patterning, the 2014 Paris International Conference will explore Continuity and Discontinuity in Pater’s writings from an interdisciplinary perspective, reflecting his diverse engagements with literature, the arts, history and philosophy. We invite proposals that examine Continuity/Discontinuity with reference to all aspects of Pater’s work, including but not limited to:
- Themes and images (representations of violence, cycles and myths of death and rebirth…)
- Generic, formal and stylistic features
- Different types of publication (book form, periodicals...)
- Pater’s reading of other writers from the classics to his contemporaries (intertextuality, the text as a palimpsest, quotations and misquotations, interpretation and misinterpretation…)
- Response to existing fields of research (anthropology, archaeology, art history, literary criticism…)
- Pater’s understanding of the visual arts
- The critical reception of Pater’s writings; his biography. Are there different Paters?
We are grateful for the support of the Walter Pater International Society.
Presentations and papers will be delivered in English.
Proposals (300 words) for 20-minute papers and a short bio-bibliography should be sent as a word attachment by 15 July 2013 to the four organizers:
Bénédicte COSTE, University of Bourgogne, (TILs): benedicte.coste@u-bourgogne.fr
Anne-Florence GILLARD-ESTRADA, University of Rouen (ERIAC): af.gillardestrada@orange.fr
Martine LAMBERT-CHARBONNIER , Paris-Sorbonne University (VALE): martine.charbonnier@paris-sorbonne.fr
Charlotte RIBEYROL, Paris-Sorbonne University (VALE): Charlotte.Ribeyrol@paris-sorbonne.fr
Laurel BRAKE is Professor Emerita of Literature and Print Culture at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research interests are media history, gender, digital humanities, and Walter Pater. She is the author of Subjugated Knowledges, Walter Pater, Print in Transition and a number of co-edited collections on Pater and on the press over the past three decades. She is an editor of a volume of journalism in the new Oxford Collected Works of Walter Pater, and serves on the advisory boards of Media History, Victorian Periodical Review, Esprit (a network of scholars in Europe writing on European periodicals) and NINES. She is currently working on Ink Work a biography of Walter Pater, Clara Pater and print culture, and an edited collection of articles on the News of the World.
Lene ØSTERMARK-JOHANSEN is Reader of English at the University of Copenhagen in the Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies and a Fellow of the Danish Royal Academy. Her particular field of specialization is nineteenth-century English art and literature and she has written several articles and books on Walter Pater, among which Sweetness and Strength: the Reception of Michelangelo in Victorian Britain (Aldershot, Ashgate, 1998) and her latest monograph Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2011). In her on-going work on Walter Pater’s Imaginary Portraits she is pursuing the close web of Anglo-French, Anglo-Dutch and Anglo-Italian forces at work as subtexts in his writings.
Scientific committee:
Pascal Aquien, Paris-Sorbonne University, France – late-nineteenth-century and twentieth-century English Literature, poetry and poetics, Oscar Wilde
Laurel Brake, Birkbeck, University of London, UK – media history, gender, digital humanities, Walter Pater
Barrie Bullen, Royal Holloway, London, UK – English Literature and Culture, nineteenth-century historiography, Pre-Raphaelitism, word and image
Bénédicte Coste, University of Bourgogne, France – Walter Pater, Aestheticism, late-nineteenth-century literature and culture
Kenneth Daley, Columbia College Chicago, USA – Victorian Literature and Culture, British Romanticism, Aesthetics and Art History
Catherine Delyfer, University of Toulouse-Le Mirail, France – fin-de-siècle British literature, word and image studies, intermediality studies, women artists and writers 1880-1920
Stefano Evangelista, University of Oxford, UK – nineteenth-century English literature, comparative literature, Aestheticism and Decadence, gender and visual culture
Isabelle Gadoin, University of Poitiers, France – nineteenth-century British art and literature, word and image
Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada, Rouen University, France – nineteenth-century English literature, art criticism and visual arts, Aestheticism, Walter Pater
Lesley Higgins, York University, Toronto, Canada – Victorian and Modern literature, poetry, and feminist studies, co-general editor (with David Latham) of The Collected Works of Walter Pater
Martine Lambert-Charbonnier, Paris-Sorbonne University, France – Walter Pater, aestheticism, visual studies
Claire Masurel-Murray, Paris-Sorbonne University, France – fin-de-siècle British and Irish literature and culture, Decadence, Aestheticism, gender studies, Catholicism
Lene Østermark-Johansen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark – nineteenth-century English art and literature, Walter Pater
Marc Porée, ENS Ulm, France – English literature, Romantic and Victorian poetry
Charlotte Ribeyrol, Paris-Sorbonne University, France – Hellenism in Victorian poetry and painting, cultural history of colour