Events

6 December 2022 - Poetry Reading: If the River is Hidden

Dr Cherry Smyth, Associate Professor Creative & Critical Writing

If the River is Hidden (époque press, 2022) reflects the shape of Northern Ireland’s River Bann in a hybrid, prose and poetry form: long, sinewy poems are bridged by a lyric essay. This hybridity speaks to the third space emerging in the North, as well as how belonging starts with the words we inherit.

What is hidden? The pagan past and its associations with An Bhanna, the Goddess; the Mesolithic treasures offered to the river; histories of sectarianism and division in towns on the river’s course; the pollutants destroying the ecology of the Bann; and how blood belonging streams through us, even if we no longer live in the North of Ireland, or never did.

‘If the river is hidden

So is what enters it.’

About the speaker
Cherry is an Irish writer, living in London. Her first two poetry collections, When the Lights Go Up, 2001 and One Wanted Thing, 2006 were published by Lagan Press. Her third collection, Test, Orange, 2012, and fourth, Famished, 2019 were published by Pindrop Press. Her debut novel, Hold Still, Holland Park Press, appeared in 2013. Famished tours as a performance in collaboration with vocalist Lauren Kinsella and composer Ed Bennett. Cherry was nominated as a Fellow for the Royal Society of Literature in 2022 and is also a Hawthornden Fellow. She is Associate Professor in Creative & Critical Writing at the University of Greenwich.

12 October 2022 - Why Litter? The evils of abundance demonstrated by paper re-use in the long eighteenth century

Dr Amélie Junqua, Université de Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens, France

Abstract
Thoughtlessly discarding whatever is considered as refuse comes as second nature nowadays, as attested by the myriad materials dumped on streets, or washed ashore on the world’s beaches. The impulse to litter seems to be analogous to the way some animals leave by-products of their food consumption in the wild.
Perhaps this might the reason why human campaigns promoting recycling and a more responsible behaviour never succeed, whether on the individual or collective scale – there will always be a lazy idiot to litter a pristine nature reserve, a city council to turn a blind eye to an unauthorized dumping ground, and an oil company to hire an unseaworthy tanker.
Looking towards the past may provide some further explanations for this failure. Studying the generation, re-use and circulation of one material which was considered “waste” in eighteenth-century England, i.e. paper, offers an insight into far more potent motivations to recycle. Scarcity, want and thrift appear to be the mothers of invention. The now unimaginable creativity displayed by paper users -- servants, housewives, surgeons, scientists, street-sweepers and thieves, as well as men of letters – will be contrasted with the neglect displayed by mid-nineteenth-century consumers of cheaper, and abundant machine-made paper.

About the speaker
Dr Amélie Junqua is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Language at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne. Her research interests lie in British literary, material and cultural history of eighteenth century. Dr Junqua’s published work includes edited essays collections, book chapters and journal articles on topics including the career and writings of Joseph Addison, eighteenth-century periodicals and the history of re-use and recycling.

27 October 2021 - Transnational Narratives, Writing across borders in 19th-century Europe

Dr Laura Kirkley (University of Newcastle), Dr Marianne Van Remoortel (University of Ghent) and Dr Stefan Huygebaert (University of Ghent)

Featuring presentations by Dr Laura Kirkley (University of Newcastle), Dr Marianne Van Remoortel (University of Ghent) and Dr Stefan Huygebaert (University of Ghent) for a panel exploring transnational crossings, cosmopolitanism and translation across cultures in nineteenth-century Europe.

Revealing the nuanced and distinctively gendered cosmopolitanism of nineteenth-century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (Kirkley), and mapping nineteenth-century translations of ‘The Sculptor of Bruges’ from its Flemish origins to its reincarnations within the British print market (Van Remoortel and Huygebaert), these papers will invite us to consider what the past can tell us about the challenges and possibilities of border-crossings, be they national, linguistic or cultural.

Abstracts

Dr Laura Kirkley

“Wollstonecraft's 'Ardent Affection for the Human Race': the cosmopolitan ethic of caring in Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark”

This paper is taken from my book, Mary Wollstonecraft: Cosmopolitan, which shines a light on Wollstonecraft's transnationalism and argues that her works are shaped by her rejection of national allegiances and ethical commitment to philanthropy, in its root sense of 'love of humankind.' Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1795) has a philanthropic ethos derived from an erotic source: the cycle of letters between Wollstonecraft and her wayward lover, Gilbert Imlay. I demonstrate that she depicts her intimate affections for Imlay and their daughter as wellsprings of philanthropic love for a broader transnational community. Moreover, Wollstonecraft identifies her personal suffering with that of female outsiders from otherwise alien cultures, constructing an epistolary voice that is at once compassionate and distinctively gendered, wholly unlike the lazy stereotype of the eighteenth-century elitist touting a totalising and detached universalism. Through imaginative and practical engagement with foreign and distant others, the letter-writer of Short Residence embodies a cosmopolitan ‘ethic of caring,’ a philanthropic commitment to the well-being of others that stems from sentiment but can be reconciled with the principles of justice.

Dr Laura Kirkley is a Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century at Newcastle University. She is a comparatist with expertise in French and English women's writing and translation in the Revolutionary era, especially the works of Mary Wollstonecraft. Her monograph, Mary Wollstonecraft: Cosmopolitan, will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2022. Her new research project focuses on the cosmopolitanism of Germaine de Staël, Mary Shelley, and other women novelists contending with an age of rising nationalism. She is also part of the team behind The Gothic Women Project, which is running an online seminar series to showcase new strands of research on 'Gothic Women', in particular how they challenge mainstream narratives of gender, sexuality, race and nationhood in times of crisis.

Marianne Van Remoortel and Stefan Huygebaert

“From picturesque anecdote to viral story: the many lives of the ‘Sculptor of Bruges’”

The ‘Sculptor of Bruges’ is a popular story first published in Belgium in French in 1837. It was originally conceived by a local archivist, Joseph Octave Delepierre, as an anecdote explaining the origin of a monumental mantelpiece in the aldermen’s chamber of the mansion of the Liberty of Bruges. According to the anecdote, the creator was a sixteenth-century artist named André wrongfully convicted of murder, who was given a year to sculpt the mantelpiece pending execution of his death sentence. Though entirely fictional, the story quickly went viral, appearing in reprinted, translated, and adapted versions numerous times across Western Europe throughout the nineteenth century. This talk will focus on the story’s connections with and crossings to British literature and culture. After situating the original anecdote in the context of the development of modern tourism, we will discuss two British versions of the story: one published by Dinah Craik in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal in 1847 and another, in the form of an 1886 poem entitled “The Chimneypiece of Bruges”, by Constance E. Dixon. Our focus will be on how the two versions dealt with the story’s legal plot as they built on, modified, and recontextualised its central themes of (capital) punishment and miscarriage of justice.

Stefan Huygebaert is an art historian and a Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University, Belgium, on the topic of picturesque and symbolist Bruges. He co-edited the exhibition catalogue The Art of Law: Three Centuries of Justice Depicted (Bruges, Groeningemuseum, 2016–17), and the volumes The Art of Law: Artistic Representations and Iconography of Law and Justice in Context (Springer, 2018), and Sensing the Nation’s Law: Historical Inquiries into the Aesthetics of Democratic Legitimacy (Springer, 2018).

Marianne Van Remoortel is Associate Professor of English Literature at Ghent University, Belgium. She is the author of Lives of the Sonnet, 1787–1895: Genre, Gender and Criticism (Ashgate, 2011) and Women, Work and the Victorian Periodical: Living by the Press (Palgrave, 2015) and editor-in-chief of the Journal of European Periodical Studies. In 2015–21, she directed the ERC Starting Grant project “Agents of Change: Women Editors and Socio-Cultural Transformation in Europe, 1710–1920.”

12 May 2021 - Play texts and poetry pamphlets: stories of print publication in the 17th, 20th and 21st centuries

Ian Heames (Face Press) and Dr Jennifer Young (University of Greenwich)

Exploring the narratives embedded in print history – in the work of a little-known Early Modern publisher of Shakespeare, and in the practices of independent poetry presses in the UK and US.

Turning to the past to re-imagine the canonical playwright’s work within a network of print-based communities (Young), and considering what the late twentieth century’s ‘mimeograph revolution’ can teach today’s DIY publishers (Heames), these papers will invite us to consider the stories that material texts can tell and their value in the present.

Dr Jennifer Young, ‘Shakespeare for the ‘Triers’: Richard Hawkins and Q2 Othello at the Serjeants’ Inn’

Abstract: In 1630 the Stationer Richard Hawkins began selling an edition of Shakespeare’s Othello from ‘his shoppe in Chancery-Lane, neere Sergeants-Inne’. This edition, identified by modern scholars as Q2, is remarkable as the first edition to fully conflate existent quarto and folio texts of a Shakespeare play. Scholars have remarked on the process that brought Q2 into being—but the question of why a 17th century publisher/bookseller would invest the time and money to create such an edition remains to be considered. This paper decentres the author to reconsider Q2’s place amongst the people and ideas of the area in which it was published and sold: the Serjeants’ Inn in the heart of the Inns of Court area of London. The paper examines how Hawkins fashioned the books sold in his shop to entice this local readership. Literary and textual evidence from the Quarto is then reconsidered in the light of this new readership, providing new insights into the construction of this unique quarto and its place in modern editorial practice. This paper also highlights the extent to which individual members of the book trade in the early 17th century engaged with local readerships and the value of second-plus editions to that market.

Biography: Jennifer Young is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature at the University of Greenwich. She is co-author of Shakespeare in London (Arden Shakespeare 2015). Her research focuses on the printers and publishers of Shakespeare’s earliest editions and she is currently working on a monograph exploring the relationship between early modern members of the book trade and Shakespeare. This summer an article inspired by the research in this paper will appear in the Journal of Early Modern Literary Culture.

Ian Heames (Face Press), ‘Some mimeo precedents for contemporary small press poetry publishing’

Abstract: This talk will offer a brief overview of some of the varied independent publishing efforts sometimes collectively styled as the 'mimeo revolution' (circa 1960-80). It will consider how these publishing practices might have shaped the reading and writing of texts originally produced and circulated in such low-key DIY contexts, and how the legacy of these networks of reception and production continues to inform certain cultures of approach to the idea of 'publication', and of the poet's own mooted sense of their own first (or only) audience in 'print'. A couple of case studies of important historical publications (1960s) will be offered, along with some thoughts on what these traditions could offer to poets writing and sharing new work today.

Biography: Ian Heames is the founder of Face Press, http://face-press.org/, which has published work by poets such as Jeff Keen, J. H. Prynne, and Tom Raworth, as well as his own compositions. He also edits the Earthbound Poetry Series (2020-) https://earthbound.press/poetryseries-volume1, the London Review of Bookshop Sampler series (2018-) and the poetry magazine No Prizes, http://face-press.org/np5.html (2012-). He is currently completing a doctoral dissertation on the US poet Stephen Rodefer.

28 April 2021 - Vampire Migration: Searching for Dracula in Stephen King’s Salem's Lot

Connor Long-Johnson, Postgraduate Student, School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Abstract
Dracula has been inescapable since its publication in 1897. The Count still looms large over popular culture in the twenty-first century and his brethren have spread to all forms of media, with novels and films such as Twilight, The Strain and Buffy the Vampire Slayer finding huge success. In 1975, horror author Stephen King helped to bring the undead from the antiquity of Eastern Europe to the modern suburbs of American New England with Salem’s Lot. The influence of Stoker’s novel is evident throughout King’s second published novel as is Salem’s Lot’s role in bringing the vampire mythos into the modern era. Through comparing Stoker’s work with King’s, we can discover how the latter has not only borrowed from Stoker, but also evolved the figure of the vampire, making it more fit for purpose in the late-twentieth century and beyond.

Biography
Connor Long-Johnson completed his English BA and MA English: Literary London at University of Greenwich. He is currently a postgraduate in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, also at the University of Greenwich, researching his PhD thesis on American novelist Stephen King and the gothic tradition. Connor Long Johnson published his short story, ‘Completion’ in The Hollow Vol 6 (Pompona Beach, FL: Breaking Rules Publishing, 2020) and won the award for best debut conference presentation at Children of the Night: International Dracula Congress, hosted by Transilvania University of Brașov, Romania and Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Poland in April 2021.

03 March 2021 -  Poetry, Narratives & Creative Translation

Four global experts explore the issues at stake in the developing narratives of poetry in translation. Leo Boix, Edward Doegar, Jèssica Pujol Duran, Richard Parker

10 February 2021 - Gender Politics in Writing Shame: an evening with Kaye Mitchell & Nuar Alsadir

Senior academic and feminist scholar, Dr. Kaye Mitchell, will be discussing her book Writing Shame: Contemporary Literature, Gender and Negative Affect (EUP, 2020) in conversation with poet and psychoanalyst, Nuar Alsadir, author of (among other works) Fourth Person Singular (Liverpool University Press, 2017) and Dr. Emily Critchley, poet and senior lecturer. This seminar will take shame as its object of investigation – a condition at once private and social, inhibiting as well as productive, ‘narrative’ as well as ‘disjunctive’ - and seek to understand ‘the peculiar, ineluctable, persistent entanglement of femininity and shame’ (Mitchell).

11 November 2020 - Jumping the Creative Fence? From Lit. Crit. to Historical Murder Mysteries

Professor David Fairer, University of Leeds

Abstract: After more than four decades working in the field of criticism and scholarship, I recently jumped to the other side of the fence to begin writing historical murder mysteries set in the early eighteenth century - the period I had taught for so long. After writing critical studies of many authors, how big a leap was this move into my own fiction? Making the break into the "creative" has brought several challenges to the fore: how to build a narrative; how to embody and animate the characters; how to enter a historical period and bring it alive for the reader; how in dialogue to avoid writing a kind of 'parody' language; how to convey the historical context to the reader ...

30 September 2020 - Arts-based Research and a Novel about Celtic London

Professor Susan Rowland, Pacifica Graduate Institute, California

Presentation Slides

02 October 2019 - Grit Lit in the American South as a Class Counter-Discourse

Professor Li Yang Research Paper Talk

Abstract
Since the 1980s, with the rise of Grit Lit, a counter-discourse to the Southern Renaissance, the trend in southern literature has changed dramatically from aristocratic tradition to poor-folk perspective. Poor-white writers Harry Crews, Larry Brown, Dorothy Allison and Lee Smith (to name only a few) tell the stories of their families and class as insiders with unparalleled authenticity. They claim and defend their humble pedigree, articulate their survival- first creed, write about their miserable rural past, redefine poor-white social and cultural identity and dismantle their stereotypic single-dimensioned image. Their works have met with considerable critical and public claim and even become a marketable "brand" (Scott Romine) in the south and even the United States. Obviously as an important genre in southern literature it has brought about the most significant changes in it in the 20th century.

Biography
Li Yang is Professor of English at Tongji University in Shanghai, China. His academic interests have been class, gender and place in American fictions for two decades starting from his visit to University of Florida as a Fulbright research scholar from 1998 to 1999 and he has been publishing articles and books on these motifs since then. This year Tongji University provided Professor Li Yang with funding of 60,000 Chinese yuan (approximately £6,700) for research abroad, with the possibility of funded staff exchange. Having read Dr. Justine Baillie's publications on English and American fictions, Professor Li Yang applied to visit University of Greenwich as part of an exchange of research on the issues of gender and class in literary studies.