Angie Dunstan, Research Associate with Professor Cathy Waters’s AHRC-funded project, ‘Journalism on the Move: The Special Correspondent and Victorian Print Culture’, and Sara Lyons, Lecturer in Victorian Literature, both delivered papers at the Romanticism at the Fin de Siècle conference held at Trinity College, Oxford, on the 14-15th of June this year. The conference brought together leading Victorianists and Romanticists to consider collecting, editing, performing, producing, reading, and reviving Romanticism at the Fin de Siècle, and to foster dialogue between experts in the two periods.
Angie’s paper examined the influence of literary societies on fin de siècle conceptions of Romanticism and on wider reading and scholarly practices. Her paper analysed the membership, aims, and activities of the Wordsworth and Shelley Societies, and how such societies contributed to the rise of English Studies in the 1880s. This paper particularly questioned whether members of literary societies were meaningfully influenced by the politics and poetics of their Romantic figureheads, or whether such societies were, as one critic expressed it, merely places of ‘congregational enthusiasm’. This research forms a chapter of a larger study on literary societies and aestheticism.
Sara’s paper analysed the logic behind Algernon Charles Swinburne’s and Walter Pater’s common desire to affiliate their theories of aestheticism with the pantheistic tendencies of Romantic poetry. She also sought to clarify why the identification of aestheticism with Romantic pantheism came to seem problematic to both writers at the fin de siècle. She argued that Swinburne’s poem ‘A Nympholept’ (1894) and Pater’s unfinished novel Gaston de Latour (published posthumously in 1896) attest to their uneasy awareness of the extent to which their earlier attraction to pantheism entangled their models of aesthetics in a type of theodicy (i.e., the task of reconciling a conception of the divine with a consciousness of the world’s evils, especially human suffering). This paper forms part of a book project that examines the relationship between aestheticism and secularisation in late Victorian Britain.
Sara will also be delivering a paper entitled ‘The Court of Arches and the Republic of Letters: Matthew Arnold, Heresy, and the Aims of Literary Criticism’ at the conference On Liberties: Victorian Liberals and their Legacies, to be held at Gladstone’s library, Hawarden, between the 3rd and 5th of July. Angie will deliver a paper entitled, ‘Victorian Sculpture and the Imprint of Authenticity’, at the Victorian Tactile Imagination conference to be held at Birkbeck, University of London, between the 19th and 20th of July. This paper is part of a book project examining Victorian literature, sculpture, and authenticity.