Reading & Reception Seminars
Key Information
Day: Tuesdays
Time: 5.30pm - 7.30pm
Venue: Foster
Court, University College London, Gower Street, WC1E 6BT, unless otherwise
indicated.
Contact: Dr Elinor Shaffer
Convenors
- Dr Elinor Shaffer FBA, Research Project Director and Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Modern Languages Research (IMLR), School of Advanced Study, University of London
- Professor Timothy Mathews, Professor of French and Comparative Criticism, Vice-Dean Research, Arts & Humanities, UCL
Supported by Niall Sreenan, MPhil/PhD student, School of European Languages Culture and Society (SELCS), UCL.
About
As part of a collaboration with the UCL Arts & Humanities, the Reception of British
Authors in Europe (RBAE) and the Institute of Modern
Languages Research (IMLR) will be holding its programme
of Reading & Reception seminars at UCL. Read more...
Seminars
Spring Term 2014
Please note the change of venue from Senate House to University College London for all Reading and Reception Seminars
Programme |
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Tuesday 4 February 2014 |
Reading and Reception Seminar Dr Ann Lewis (Birkbeck): 'Intermedial Influence & Reception: Marivaux's "La Vie de Marianne"’
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Tuesday 25 February |
Reading and Reception Seminar Professor Patrick Pollard (Birkbeck): |
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Thursday, 13 March |
Reading and Reception
Seminar Dr Carolyn Burdett (Birkbeck): 'Shareability and contagion: psychology and aesthetics at the fin de siecle' Venue: The Grant Museum of Zoology |
Past Events
Autumn Term 2013
Programme |
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19 November 2013 |
‘Phrenology through the Eyes of the Physiognomist: Character in the Romantic Period’Long before phrenology, now largely discarded as a pseudo-science setting out to map and measure mental faculties via the bumps on the human skull, became established in characterisation in both Popular Culture and Victorian Literature, Johann Caspar Lavater’s ideas on physiognomy pervaded the thinking of the Romantics. Writing on character in the Romantic period can be seen to experiment with different modes and models of expression and the conceptual problems, as evident in the many illustrated editions of Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy (1789-98), either influenced or anticipated discussions about bodily or mental identity as well as personality. This paper explores the tension between visual and verbal constructions of character, focuses on the confrontations between self and other and analyses the various situations in relation to the demands of literary form (travel writing, drama, poetry and the Gothic). It draws on examples from writers as diverse as Wollstonecraft, Park, Baillie, Blake and M. Shelley and links them to the larger topics within Romanticism, such as sensibility, emotion, exploration, science and the Sublime. Dr Sibylle Erle (Bishop Grosseteste University Lincoln) Sibylle Erle, FRSA is Senior Lecturer in English at Bishop Grosseteste University Lincoln, author of Blake, Lavater and Physiognomy (Legenda, 2010) as well as various articles on Blake, Henry Fuseli and Lavater and co-editor of Science, Technology and the Senses (Special Issue for RaVoN, 2008) and volume editor ofThe Panorama, 1787-1900: Texts and Contexts (5 vols., Pickering & Chatto, 2012). With Morton D. Paley she is now co-editing The Reception of William Blake in Europe (Bloomsbury). She has co-curated the display “Blake and Physiognomy” (2010-11) at Tate Britain and devised an online exhibition of Tennyson’s copy of Blake’s Job for the Tennyson Research Centre (2013). Apart from reception, she is working on character, emerging on the interface between Literature and Science, in the Romantic period. Dr Erle's paper will be followed by questions and discussion, and the meeting will conclude with a glass of wine at 7.30pm. |
