Conference Abstracts VictoriansVictorians Unbound:Unbound: ConnectionsConnections andand IntersectionsIntersections BishopBishop GrossetesteGrosseteste University,University, LincolnLincoln 2222ndnd –– 2424thth AugustAugust 20172017 0 Cover Image is The Prodigal Daughter, oil on canvas (1903) by John Maler Collier (1850 – 1934), a painting you can admire at The Collection and Usher Gallery, in Danes Terrace, Lincoln, LN2 1LP: www.thecollectionmuseum.com We are grateful to The Collection: Art and Archaeology in Lincolnshire (Usher Gallery, Lincoln) for giving us the permission to use this image. We thank Dawn Heywood, Collections Development Officer, for her generous help. 1 Contents BAVS 2017 Conference Organisers p. 3 BAVS 2017 Keynote Speakers p. 4 BAVS 2017 Opening Round Table Speakers p. 7 BAVS 2017 Delegates’ Abstracts Day One p. 9 BAVS 2017 Delegates’ Abstracts Day Two p. 27 BAVS 2017 Delegates’ Abstracts Day Three p. 70 BAVS 2017 President Panel p. 88 BAVS Annual Conference 2017 Online p. 89 BAVS Annual Conference 2017 WI-FI Access p. 89 BAVS 2017 Conference Helpers p. 90 Please note, Delegates’ email addresses are available together with their abstracts. 2 BAVS Annual Conference 2017 Victorians Unbound: Connections and Intersections Bishop Grosseteste University, Lincoln Organising Committee Dr Claudia Capancioni (chair), Bishop Grosseteste University Dr Alice Crossley (chair), University of Lincoln Dr Cassie Ulph, Bishop Grosseteste University Rosy Ward (administrator), Bishop Grosseteste University Organising Committee Assistants Dr Owen Clayton, University of Lincoln Dr David Ibitson, North Lindsey College Heather Popple (administrator), Bishop Grosseteste University Selection Committee Panels Dr Claudia Capancioni (chair), Bishop Grosseteste University Dr Owen Clayton, University of Lincoln Dr Alice Crossley (chair), University of Lincoln Annabelle Dobson, Bishop Grosseteste University Angela Dunstan, Australian National University Grace Harvey, University of Lincoln Dr David Ibitson, North Lindsey College Dr Sarah Parker, Loughborough University Michele Poland, University of Lincoln Dr Amber Pouliot, Harlaxton College Dr W. Jack Rhoden, Bishop Grosseteste University Akira Suwa, Cardiff University Dr Cassie Ulph, Bishop Grosseteste University Dr Ian Waites, University of Lincoln Dr Rachel Webster, North Lindsey College Organisers of the PG/ECR Workshops Dr Abigail Boucher, Aston University Grace Harvey, University of Lincoln Michele Poland, University of Lincoln 3 BAVS Annual Conference 2017 Victorians Unbound: Connections and Intersections Keynote Speakers Day 1: Tuesday 22nd August 2017 at 5:45pm – 6:45pm (The Venue) Professor Mike Huggins (Emeritus Professor of Cultural History, University of Cumbria) ‘Revising “Respectability”: Culture and Power in Victorian England’ Since the 1970s the conceptual fluidity of respectability has enabled it to be a powerful theme in studies of Victorian culture and society, fluidly flowing like quicksilver through discussions of morality, social behaviour, and images of Englishness, as well as intra-class, gender and generational divisions and identities. The scholarly generalities that initially allowed F.M. L. Thompson to put forward the academically seductive idea of a ‘respectable society’ characterized by discipline and self-restraint, have become increasingly become subject to re-evaluation especially through debates on the shifting and protean nature of identities and representations. So this talk offers a critical reassessment of Victorian respectability and its problematics, exploring some of the key questions historians are now addressing. Who were its most powerful proponents in Victorian society? Can we define the term? Who used it and why? How was it represented and where? Where were the contexts where its power was weakest? Why have more modern historians been attracted to ‘respectable’ topics and themes. A renewed focus on respectability is timely for a number of reasons. In part it can be seen as a response to the cultural turn, allowing a deeper exploration of the ways respectability has been used in Victorian language and systems of representation, whilst exploring contested meanings and omissions. The social psychology of respectability has been another neglected area worthy of further study. Foucault’s emphasis on power, and the extent to which certain groups in Victorian society were able to impose their meanings and definitions of respectability, is highly relevant too. Respectability often carried different meanings in different cultural contexts, often concealing rather than revealing the Victorians’ multifaceted lives. The family and local church, for example, were places where social pressures were strongest for respectable compliance. But there were many contexts where these powers were far less strong. Mike Huggins is Emeritus Professor of Cultural History at the University of Cumbria. He works on sports history, leisure history, tourism, and the history of popular culture. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Fellow and President of the European Committee for Sports History, as well as sitting on the editorial consultancy boards of five peer-reviewed academic leisure and sports history journals in Britain, France, the USA and South America. A few of his notable books include Vice and the Victorians (Bloomsbury, 2015), Sport and the English 1918-1939 (Routledge, 2006), The Victorians and Sport (Hambledon/Continuum, 2004) and, with J A Mangan, Disreputable Pleasures: Less Virtuous Victorians at Play (Frank Cass, 2004). 4 Day 2: Wednesday 23rd August 2017 at 4:50pm – 5:50pm (The Venue) Professor Christopher Ricks (William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities, Boston University) ‘“The whole heart-rending history in a single retrospective glance”: James Henry’s words and Virgil’s words’ An attempt at three lines of thought that might come to constitute a habitable triangle. First, to suggest that, despite the dangers of effrontery, those of us who markedly lack a particular field of scholarship may find ourselves able to profit honourably from the great scholars in the field. Second, to recall that James Henry (1798-1876) was one such, one of Ireland’s – and Europe’s – authentically independent scholars. A poet of dark wit and bright charm, he set about a lifelong interrogation of the Christian religion. A controversially humane doctor in Dublin, he came to travel through Europe, through history, through languages dead and alive, and entered upon his Twelve Years’ Voyage of Discovery in the First Six Books of the Aeneis (1853). The twelve years were tripled, and the six books became all twelve books, issuing in his astonishing compendium Aeneidea (1873- 1889). Vividly learnèd, extravagant, pertinacious inquiries into every line and almost every word of the Aeneid: those without Latinity should not leave these volumes to Latinists (of whom Christopher Ricks is not one). Third, Henry has a recurring preoccupation with the ways in which we are so often faced, not with something that has built into it a direction, but with an axis. “The further meaning of f l u e r e, i.e. whether the flowing signified by that word is flowing in a good sense, or in a bad, is to be determined by the context only – RETRO SUBLAPSA REFERRI explaining as clearly and unmistakably as it is possible for words to explain, that the flowing is backward, or in a bad sense”. Nothing is further from Virgil’s mind than . Truly? Christopher Ricks is the William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University, having formerly been professor of English at Bristol and at Cambridge universities. He is a member of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers, of which he was president (2007- 2008). He was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 2004, and is renowned both for his critical studies and for his editorial work. The latter includes The Poems of Tennyson (revised 1987), The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (1987), The Oxford Book of English Verse (1999), Selected Poems of James Henry (2002), Henry James’s What Maisie Knew (2010) and for Penguin Books Alfred Lord Tennyson: Selected Poems (2007). He is the author of Keats and Embarrassment (1974), The Force of Poetry (1984), Tennyson (1989), Beckett’s Dying Words (1993), Decisions and Revisions in T. S. Eliot (2003), Dylan’s Visions of Sin (2004), and True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell under the Sign of Eliot and Pound (2010). 5 Day 3: Thursday 24th August 2017 at 10:30am (The Venue) Professor Kate Flint (Provost Professor of Art History and English, University of Southern California, Dornsife) ‘Dandelions’ The dandelion is an extremely familiar plant. This talk explores how it disturbed Victorian categories – a property that it shares with many weeds. I consider it in relation to folklore and childhood and as a means of teaching elementary botany; I discuss its metaphoric potential, whether as flower (sun, gold) or as fluffy round head of hair (transience, indiscriminate dispersal). At the core of its appeal as a mutable, adaptable generator of figurative language is its ordinariness and its resilience. Drawing on a whole range of sources in the first part of the talk - from canonical Victorian writers, Christian writing for children, and advertisements, I pause to look in detail at some of Richard Jefferies’ essay writing, before concluding with a discussion of how some contemporary artists have recuperated the dandelion for ecologically-aware
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