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Scott at Shakespeare's Grave |
LITERARY TOURISM AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY CULTURE
An International One-Day Conference
Friday, 8 June 2007
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Organised by the Literature Department of the Open University and the Institute of English Studies, University of London
This conference aims to consider in a panoramic and synthetic fashion the emergence of nineteenth-century interest in literary sites, and the development of literary genres associated with this interest. Literary tourism, the visiting of places associated with writers and their writings, becomes a cultural commonplace over the course of the nineteenth century. This period saw the invention of 'Wordsworth's Lake District', 'The Land of Burns', 'Dickens's London' and 'Hardy's Wessex', among other imagined territories (together with the retrospective reification of 'Shakespeare's Stratford'), and with them emerged the practice of preserving and displaying the houses of dead writers. Literary tourism made over the landscapes of the nation variously as source, ground, glossary, and appendix to the literary canon, and has continued to do so. Attending to the traces of its emergence and refinement can provide unusually intimate glimpses of the history of reading, revealing how nineteenth-century readers imbued real places with emotional associations derived from imaginative texts. It allows us to examine the ways in which nineteenth-century literary modes, perhaps most especially biography and fictional realism, seem to have produced a new relation between reader and text, soliciting the reader to locate and visit the locations of the book as a supplementary reading practice.
Organiser: Dr Nicola J Watson (Open University)
Registration Fees:
£30 standard; £20 Members/Concessions
CLICK HERE FOR A REGISTRATION FORM IN PDF FORMAT
CLICK HERE FOR A REGISTRATION FORM IN WORD FORMAT
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Provisional Programme
9.00am |
Registration: 3 rd Floor Foyer, Senate House North |
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9.30am |
Welcome & Keynote:
Nicola J. Watson (Open University), 'Literary Tourists Let Loose in London ' |
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10.15am |
Plenary 1:
Alison Booth (University of Virginia), 'Transatlantic Author Country' |
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11.00am |
Coffee |
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11.30am |
Seminar Session 1:
Homes, Haunts, and Pilgrimages
(Chair: Pamela Corpron Parker, Whitworth College)
Samantha Matthews (Sheffield University),
'Relic-hunting, graffiti , and other acts of homage: the literary pilgrim ' s busy hands'
Harald Hendrix (University of Utrecht), 'The Early Modern Invention of Literary Tourism: Petrarch's Houses in France and Italy '
Julia Thomas (Cardiff University), 'Bringing Down the House: Restoring Shakespeare's Birthplace'
Gail Marshall (Oxford Brookes), 'Late-Victorian Women and Shakespeare's Warwickshire'
Mark Llewellyn (Liverpool University), 'The Hermit of Hawarden: Gladstone at Home' Shirley Foster (University of Sheffield), 'American Visitors and Anti-Tourism'
Erin Hazard (Chicago), 'Building and Displaying the Nineteenth-Century Author's House: Literary Architecture & Architectural Literature'
Paul Westover (Indiana University), 'Our very life-blood is English life-blood'; The Problem of Literary Inheritance and the American Importation of Literary Tourism'
Diane Roberts (Florida State University), 'Uncle Tom in Paradise: Harriet Beecher Stowe and Literary Tourism in Florida '
Julian North (University of Leicester), 'The House of the Poet in Nineteenth-Century Biography' Margaret Stetz, 'Selling Literary Tourism to the Literary: "The Bookman" in the Early Nineties'
Rosemary Mitchell (Trinity and All Saints College, University of Leeds), 'The Past Laugh: Comic Attacks on Historical Discourses and heritage Tourism in R. H. Barham's "Ingoldsby Legends"' |
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1.00pm |
Lunch (lunch orders may be made via the registration form at a cost of £5 per head) |
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2.00pm |
Plenary 2:
Pamela Corpron Parker (Whitworth College), 'A Woman's Place: Literary Tourism & the Victorian Woman of Letters' |
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2.45pm |
Plenary 3:
Juliet John (Liverpool University),
'Dickens and the Heritage Industry: or, Culture & the Commodity' |
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3.30pm |
Tea |
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4.00pm |
Seminar Session 2:
Literary Countries and Heritage Trails
(Chair: Simon Bainbridge, University of Lancaster)
Karyn Wilson-Costa (University of Provence), 'The Case of the Land of Burns '
Frank Duba (Millersville University), 'Site Specific: Wordsworth's Two Lake Districts'
Barbara Schaff (University of Munich), 'Literary Tourism and John Murray's Handbooks to Italy '
Margaret Linley (Simon Fraser University), 'Exiles and Tourist at the Crossroads of Literature and Travel in the Victorian Lake District '
Kevin James (University of Guelph), 'Oh! Did you not hear of Kate Kearney? The production of a tourist icon in Victorian Killarney'
Simon Frost (University of Southern Denmark) 'To Enter George Eliot Country: "across a bridge with no gate where 'art' levies toll''
Deborah Maltby (University of Missouri), 'The Redemptive Myth of the Rural: Thomas Hardy's Literary Tourists and Englishness'
Sara Haslam (Open University), 'The Harmony of the Whole: Fact and Fantasy in Thomas Hardy's Wessex '
Guy Cuthbertson (Merton College, Oxford), 'In the Footprints of Richard Jeffries: Edward Thomas and Wiltshire'
Lindy Stiebel (University of KwaZulu-Natal) 'Going on literary pilgrimage: constructing literary trails in KwaZulu-Natal'
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5.30pm |
Concluding discussion panel |
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6.15pm |
Reception (sponsored by the Open University) |
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Enquiries and Registration: Jon Millington, Events Officer, Institute of English Studies, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU; tel +44 (0) 207 664 4859; Email jon.millington@sas.ac.uk
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