NEO-VICTORIAN ART AND AESTHETICISM

Saturday 26 March 2011

Keynote speaker:
Dr Marie-Luise Kohlke
(Swansea University), editor of the journal Neo-Victorian Studies on “Luscious Aftertastes: The Influence of Pre-Raphaelitism in Neo-Victorian Fiction”

Since the 1960s, contemporary culture has frequently returned to a Victorian (and broader 19th-century) past in order to explore questions of identity, modernity, nostalgia, and the present period’s sense of belatedness. This mode of historical engagement reached especially prominent levels in the 1990s and at the turn of the millennium. In each of these returns, be it in the form of literature, visual arts, film, drama, radio and television adaptation, or fashion and consumer culture, the Victorians have dominated the prevalent understanding of ‘the past’ as something which can be re-created, the lost but simultaneously haunting and spectral presence which underlines our sense of the now.

Panels include:

• Biofiction – Creator and Creation
• Sensuality and Sensation
• Dressing Up
• Oscar Wilde

Plus

• Workshop with Christine Wilks on the digital media fiction Underbelly
• Postgraduate training workshop ‘Public Engagement and Publishing in Neo-Victorian Studies’

This event is supported by
The Department of English, the Centre for Victorian Studies and the Faculty of Arts and Social Studies at the University of Hull.

The wine reception is sponsored by Palgrave Macmillan.

Funding for postgraduate bursaries is generously provided by BAVS: The British Association for Victorian Studies

For further details see:
Contact Professors Ann Heilmann a.heilmann@hull.ac.uk (Hull) and Mark Llewellyn  mark.llewellyn@strath.ac.uk (Strathclyde)

The symposium is preceded by Hull’s Annual Victorian Lecture (open to the public), Friday 25 March, 6 pm: Professor Margaret Stetz (University of Delaware, US): ‘The Fin-de-Siècle New Man and the Neo-Victorian Neo-Man’