The following ESSE 2016 seminar is still looking for contributors. Please send an immediate expression of interest to the co-convenors.
The Neo-Victorian Antipodes
Convenors:
- Dr Mariadele Boccardi: Mariadele.Boccardi@uwe.ac.uk
- Dr Therese-Marie Meyer: therese.meyer@anglistik.uni-halle.de
From arguably the earliest example of Neo-Victorian fiction (Patrick White’s Voss, 1957) to recent Man-Booker winner The Luminaries (2013) by way of Peter Carey and Kate Grenville, the antipodes are a favoured setting for Neo-Victorian novels. This seminar explores how Neo-Victorian fiction constructs Australia, New Zealand and the Southern Pacific as, variously, the site of uncanny domesticity, an Other to Britain, a landscape to be colonised or scientifically appropriated, a frontier for the testing of masculinity, an occasion for re-writing of canonical texts. We aim to investigate the intersection of Neo-Victorian preoccupations with nineteenth-century discourses with post-colonial theorising of settler colonialism.
Please send proposals to: Mariadele.Boccardi@uwe.ac.uk therese.meyer@anglistik.uni-halle.de