Conference Program

Click here for a printable pdf of the conference program

Romantic and Victorian Entertainments 

Graduate Literature Conference
Department of English
University of South Carolina  

March 23-24, 2007  

Acknowledgements
Speakers
Friday, March 23
Schedule of Panels and Speakers
Special Library Event
Saturday, March 24
Schedule of Panels and Speakers

Acknowledgements

The organizers of the Fifth Annual Nineteenth-Century Graduate Student Literature Conference at the University of South Carolina would like to thank the following for their support and contribution to this event:

Dr. Barry J. Faulk
Dr. David S. Shields
Dr. Tony Jarrells
Dr. William B. Thesing
Dr. Paula Feldman
Dr. Ed Madden
Dr Rebecca Stern
Dr. Steven Lynn
Dr. Andrew Shifflett
Dr. Patrick Scott
Elizabeth Sudduth
Modestine Redden
Lisa Saxon
John Higgins
Department of English
Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Thomas Cooper Society
College of Arts and Sciences
The Graduate School
Carolina Catering
Moe’s Southwest Grill

A special “thank you” to Dr. Paula Feldman for allowing us to use the engraving that appears on the program cover.

We also would like to thank each participant in the conference this year. Your interest and attendance continues to make this conference an overwhelming success. We hope to see you all again next year.

Your conference organizers,

Melissa Edmundson
Celeste Pottier
Grace Wetzel

Keynote Speaker

Barry J. Faulk, Associate Professor of Victorian literature at Florida State University, is the author of Music Hall and Modernity (Ohio University Press, 2004). He has published articles on Victorian literature and popular culture in Victorians Institute Journal, Victorian Literature and Culture, Modernism/Modernity, and Cultural Critique. He is writing a book that historicizes British Rock of the 60s and 70s by tracing its roots in the British music hall.  His lecture attempts to re-periodize our account of the relations between modern intellectuals and mass culture. Faulk identifies forms of radical modernism in the artistic practices of the “Wilde generation,” thereby challenging our traditional association of the “modern” with 20th-century Modernism.  He argues that the representations of late Victorian entertainment by Arthur Symons and painter Walter Sickert participated in a broader endeavor to transform consumption into a communicative practice.

Plenary Speaker

David S. Shields is the McClintock Professor of Southern Letters in the Department of English and History at the University of South Carolina.  He is the author of Civil Tongues & Polite Letters in British America (University of North Carolina Press, 1997), co-author of Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics, & Commerce in British America (University of Chicago Press, 1990), The Cambridge History of American Literature, Volume 1 (Cambridge University Press, 1994), A History of the Book in America (Cambridge University Press, 2000), and co-editor of Finding Colonial Americas: Essays Honoring J.A. Leo Lemay (University of Delaware Press, 2001). He is also the Editor of Early American Literature and Associate Editor of Pearson Custom Library of American Literature.  His current work-in-progress is entitled “Sons of the Dragon: the literature of England's invasions of Spanish America 1570-1806.”  His interests include Photography and the American Stage (1900-1930).

Guest Speaker

Tony Jarrells is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina and specializes in eighteenth-century literature and British Romanticism. His recent publications include Britain’s Bloodless Revolutions: 1688 and the Romantic Reform of Literature (Palgrave series on “Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Cultures of Print,” 2005), and Blackwood’s Magazine, 1817-1825, Vol. 2: Prose Tales (Pickering and Chatto, 2006). He is currently working on a book-length study of the Romantic tale.

Guest Speaker

William B. Thesing is Professor of English at University of South Carolina and specializes in nineteenth-century literature. He is co-editor with Patrick Brantlinger of A Companion to the Victorian Novel (Blackwell, 2005), Victorian Women Poets for the Dictionary of Literary Biography (Volume 199, Gale Research, 1999), English Prose and Criticism, 1900-1950 (Thomson Gale, 1983), and the James Dickey Newsletter.  His other publications include The London Muse (University of Georgia Press, 1982), and Conversations with South Carolina Poets (John F. Blair, 1986).

FRIDAY, MARCH 23:

8:30am – 9:30am
Registration and Breakfast
Russell House 202

* All panels take place in Russell House Room 201*

Panel 1
9:45am – 10:45am
Children in Words and Images
Chair: Barbara Bolt

Amy Carol Reeves, University of South Carolina
“Picture Perfect: Arrested Development in Lewis Carroll’s Child Photography”

Evelyn Reid, City College of New York
“Balancing Entertainment, Instruction, and Morality: The Many Faces of Victorian Children’s Literature”

11:00am – 12:00pm

Special Presentation
Introduction by Britt Terry

Dr. William B. Thesing, University of South Carolina

 “Captain Matthew Webb’s Heroism and Folly: From Merchant Marine Service, across the English Channel, to Niagara Falls”

Russell House Room 201

Followed by a catered lunch.

Panel 2
1:30pm – 2:30pm
Women’s Sport and Sin
Chair: Calley Hornbuckle

Bert Wray, University of South Carolina
“L.E.L. and Infanticide: Visual and Verbal Interplay in Fisher’s Drawing-Room Scrapbook”

Amber Shaw, University of Georgia
“Sin, Sewing, and Feminine Public Voice in The Scarlet Letter”

Michelle Beissel Heath, George Washington University
“‘The Uncroquetable Lawn’: Charlotte Yonge and Lewis Carroll Play at Mallets and Hoops”

Panel 3
2:45pm – 3:45pm
Rhetorics of Instruction, Subversion, and Anxiety
Chair: Ed Madden

Nicole Lobdell, University of Georgia
“Information Anxiety and the Loss of Free Time in Bram Stoker’s Dracula”

Julie Tyler, University of Georgia
“Rhetorical Subversion and the Logic of Pleasure in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray”

Catherine England, University of South Carolina
“The Nursery’s Many Tongues: The Figure of the Nurse in Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui”

Special Library Event:

Dr. Tony Jarrells, University of South Carolina

“Making Fun: James Hogg and the Early Years of Blackwood’s Magazine”

Time: 4:30 pm, followed by a reception

Location: Graniteville Room, Thomas Cooper Library

Chair: Dr. Patrick Scott, Director of Special Collections

A special exhibit from the G. Ross Roy Collection of Scottish Literature featuring works by James Hogg and other members of the Blackwood’s Circle will also be open to the public Friday, March 23, from 8:00am to 4:30pm in the Graniteville Room.

SATURDAY, March 24:

8:00am – 8:30am
Breakfast and registration
Russell House 202

Panel 4
8:30am – 9:30am
 Laughter, Boredom, and the Sublime
Chair: Grace Wetzel

John C. Havard, University of South Carolina
“Thinking through Pleasure: Nature, Film, and the Call to Philosophy in the Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walker Percy”

Mike Schwartz, Brandeis University
“Apocalyptic Laughter and Play in Herman Melville’s Typee”

Caroline McMahon, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
“Passing the Time: Religion as Entertainment”

Panel 5
9:45am – 10:45am
Cultural Icons
Chair: Amy Reeves

Tiffany Yecke Brooks, Florida State University
“William Harrison Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard and the Collective Memory”

Tamara Holloway, University of Oregon
“‘The noise of the mourning of a mighty nation’: Burying the Duke of Wellington”

11:15am – 12:15pm

Plenary Speaker

Dr. David S. Shields, University of South Carolina

“Photography and the Birth of ‘The Beauty’”

Gressette Room

 Harper College

Followed by a reception. 

Panel 6
2:00pm – 3:00pm
The Social Sound of Music
Chair: Pei-Ju Wu

Virginia Boyette Bledsoe, University of Georgia
“A Novel with a Diva: Becky Sharp and the Operatic Tradition”

John Kehoe, Carleton University
“Music in Victorian Fictions”

Panel 7
3:15pm – 4:15pm
Dark Pleasures Make Dirty Business
Chair: Bert Wray

Crystal Hurd, East Tennessee State University
“The Canonical Evolution of Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater”

Montreece E. Payton, California State University, Dominguez Hills
“Prostitution as an Emerging Entertainment Industry: A Discourse Analysis of the Entertainment Value of Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century British Literature”

Panel 8
4:30pm – 5:30pm
Cultural Imprints and Visual Delights
Chair: Rebecca Stern

Jenn Blair, University of Georgia
“Nature’s Mediations: Translations and Engraving in the Early Nineteenth Century”

Daniel S. Brown, University of Florida
“Chopping Wood: Primitive Masculinity in Gauguin’s Man with an Axe, Matamoe,                  and Noa Noa”

Deborah Aschkenes, Columbia University
“‘More night than twilight’: Perception and the Tableau Vivant in Goethe’s Elective Affinities”

6:00pm – 7:00pm

Keynote Speaker

Dr. Barry Faulk, Florida State University

“Late Victorian Entertainments and Radical Modernism”

Gressette Room

Harper College

Followed by the conference banquet at McCutchen House.