Topographies: London Group of Historical Geographers Autumn Seminar Series

Posted on September 8, 2015 by marylshannon

LONDON GROUP OF HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHERS

Seminar Programme, Autumn 2015
TOPOGRAPHIES

Talks in this series may well be of interest to RIN members. Seminars are held on Tuesdays at 5.15pm in the Wolfson Conference Suite (NB01), Institute of Historical Research, North Block, Senate House, University of London.

For further details please visit the LGHG homepage or the seminar listing on the IRH website.

6 October 2015

Stephen Daniels (University of Nottingham)
“’Map-work”: John Britton and the topographical imagination in nineteenth-century Britain.

20 October 2015
Veronica della Dora (Royal Holloway, University of London)
“And he walked from country to country”: Vasilij Grigorovich Barskij’s pious topographies, 1723–1747.

3 November 2015
William Bainbridge (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art)
“Mountains run mad”: shared topographies and conflicting memories in the Dolomites.

17 November 2015
Jordan Goodman (UCL)
Making places, knowing lives: Joseph Banks learns Australia, 1770–1810.

1 December 2015Felicity Myrone (British Library)Re-evaluating topography: the case of Captain Thomas Davies’ An east view of the great cataract of Niagara (1762).

CFP: “Tracing Types: Comparative Analyses of Literary and Visual Sketches (1830-1860)”, Ghent University Belgium, 3-4 June 2016.

Posted on July 21, 2015 by marylshannon

“Tracing Types: Comparative Analyses of Literary and Visual Sketches (1830-1860)”, Ghent University Belgium, 3-4 June 2016.

Deadline for abstracts: October 1, 2015

In the wake of the pioneering work of Nathalie Preiss and Martina Lauster, a new wave of scholarship has emerged in recent years, which examines nineteenth-century sketches (sometimes referred to as ‘panoramic literature’) from a transnational perspective.

Two recent examples of this interest are the special issue of Interférences littéraires, “Croqués par eux-mêmes. La société à l’épreuve du panoramique” (2012), directed by Nathalie Preiss and Valérie Stiénon, and the recent NYU conference “Dissecting Society: Periodical Literature and Social Observation (1830-1850)” (March 2015), organized by Christiane Schwab and Ana Peñas Ruiz.

The present call for papers seeks to continue this comparative reflection by placing the spotlight on the comparative analysis of texts and images of specific types and by tracing how these representations vary across sketches from different places, media and editorial contexts.

We welcome presentations that address the following types of questions:

– How do the representations and definitions of a type (or group of related types) vary from one national context to another?
– How do different collections, periodicals or editorial contexts inflect a type in different ways?
– How do visual representations of a type differ from one another or from literary representations of the same figure?
– How does the type transform as it is taken up in other genres, registers or types of discourse?
– Does the type exist in a system? Does it belong to a collection or series of types and if so, how does it relate to or interact with other types in the system? How do different collections position the type within their systems?
In short, we invite each participant to choose a type (or group of related types) and to trace how it shifts or remains the same across different contexts and in relation to different co-texts. Presentations that explore less known types are particularly welcome.

The long term goal of this project is to publish an edited volume exploring these issues. It is our hope that the combined insights of the seminar will allow us to draw a series of general reflections about how portrayals of types shift across contexts, borders and media.

We would like to invite expressions of interest in the form of a short abstract (of around 300 words in English or French) describing your idea. Please submit your idea to Leonoor Kuijk at l.kuijk@ugent.be by October 1, 2015.

http://www.tracingtypes.ugent.be/

Organizers: Leonoor Kuijk, Elizabeth Amann and Marianne Van Remoortel (Ghent University), Valérie Stiénon (Université Paris 13)

NEW Online Resource: The Romantic Illustration Network Shakespeare Gallery

Posted on July 15, 2015 by marylshannon

Announcing: The Romantic Illustration Network Shakespeare Gallery

https://romanticillustrationnetwork.wordpress.com/shakespeare-gallery/

Ready for the 2016 anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, the Romantic Illustration Network is delighted to announce its digitisation of prints from Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, courtesy of negatives provided by Professor Frederick Burwick (UCLA).

The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery was open to the public on London’s Pall Mall from 1789 to 1805. Featuring paintings of scenes from Shakespeare by major artists of the day, including Fuseli, Reynolds, and Kauffmann, the gallery was a popular if not a financial success.

Prints of the paintings were published in volumes (as well as in an illustrated edition of Shakespeare), and are now digitised here by the University of Roehampton for use under a Creative Commons license. Images are arranged alphabetically by play, and new plays will be added over the coming months, so do keep checking back on the site. We have also digitised the front matter from the volumes.

Click on the thumbnails to access larger versions of the images, and to view the full-sized image. Once you have clicked on a thumbnail there is space to add comments on each image, and we very much encourage you to do so.

If you have any feedback, questions, or suggestions, please do let us know.

Event Report: ‘The Art of Quotation and the Miniaturised Gallery’, RIN 4, Saturday 6 June 2015

Posted on June 17, 2015 by marylshannon

The fourth Romantic Illustration Network symposium took place at the House of Illustration on Saturday the 6^th of June. Once again the event was well-attended with a friendly mix of regulars and new faces, local and international.

We had two inter-related themes for the symposium:

1.Miniaturization: Drawing on Peter Otto’s work on virtual culture in the Romantic period, is the illustration a form of virtual gallery? How does visual meaning change when an image is resized?
2.The Art of Quotation: How were literary quotations used to conceptualise visual images? How important are framing devices to the meaning of an image?

However, speakers were free to interpret the terms ‘quotation’ and ‘miniaturised gallery’ in any way they saw fit, and to raise any other questions they chose.

We kicked off with David Worrall (Roehampton/Nottingham Trent) who presented us with his concept of ‘locations of curation’. After crediting William St Clair in RIN 3 for inspiring his quest for a new theory of illustration, Worrall explored what he described as two currently disconnected narratives – Romanticism and eighteenth-century theatre – to consider the changing moments when images interact with other objects, such as the people who view them. He used the example of theatrical portraits to demonstrate how images moved from stage, to page, to prints, to household objects.

Susan Matthews’s (Roehampton) paper interrogated questions of scale, domesticity, and artistic encounter, the idea of ‘meeting’ an artist though their illustrations. She pointed out that the name ‘House of Illustration’ (as opposed to ‘Gallery of Illustration’) is significant: we often seem to want to give illustration a ‘home’. She focused on Fuseli’s illustrations to an edition of Cowper’s popular poem The Task (1785), and revealed the awkward tensions between Fuseli’s depictions of domestic scenes and Cowper’s lines, whilst also showing that Fuseli could produce powerful images on a small scale when he really wanted to. Matthews drew parallels between Fuseli’s techniques and the recent exhibition of Paula Rego’s work at House of Illustration.

Plate 17, The Book of Urizen William Blake Archive

From here we zoomed in still further, with Peter Otto’s (Melbourne) paper on plate 17 of Blake’s The Book of Urizen (1794). Otto gave a detailed and original reading of the plate which encompassed The Terror and images of decapitation by guillotine, the story of Adam and Eve, Perseus and the Gorgon, and the Narcissus myth to show how the plate connects primal history with events unfolding in the present through an art of visual and textual quotation. He argued that the plate illustrated a turning point in society, represented as a decapitation, and that Blake was constructing an imagined reality through quotation which in turn tries to shape or frame what reality is.

From royal executions to royal collections, Kate Heard (Royal Collection) showed us how George III and George IV both engaged with the reproductive print market, albeit in very different ways, as prints enabled middle-class consumers to gain access to items in the Royal Collection. We saw how Royal Collection items circulated as prints, so much so that satirical caricaturists could imitate them, and she argued that the print market played a crucial role in the public sense of the King. We also saw what a fantastic resource the Collection is for scholars.

Taking us through to the Victorian period, Bethan Stevens (Sussex) spoke about her work on the albums of proofs put together by the dominant mid-century London wood-engraving firm, the Dalziel family. The firm of Dalziel produced the illustrations to a vast range of literary and non-literary texts, including such classics as the Alice books and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Stephens showed how, in the albums, the exclusion of words affects the status, form and narrative of illustration, and provokes a new attention to illustrations as images which enables all kinds of subversive and intriguing readings.

Three Bibliographical Society Studentships were awarded: Anne Musset (Warwick/Paris-Diderot), Tessa Kilgariff (National Portrait Gallery/Bristol), and Naomi Billingsley (Manchester). We ended the day, as usual, with a period of open discussion about the broader themes of the event and the future of the network (upcoming ventures include the panel at BARS 2015 in Cardiff and the digitised Shakespeare Gallery, currently under construction). After that we adjourned to the pub, to round off a successful and fun day with a friendly drink.

Details of the BARS panel will be appearing on the blog and website soon: we hope to see you there!

REMINDER: RIN 4: The Art of Quotation and the Miniaturized Gallery. Saturday 6 June 2015, 10 – 5pm, The House of Illustration, London

Posted on May 29, 2015 by marylshannon

The Art of Quotation and the Miniaturized Gallery.
Saturday 6 June 2015, 10 – 5pm
The House of Illustration, London
Peter Otto (Melbourne), David Worrall (Roehampton/Nottingham Trent), Kate Heard (Royal Collection), Susan Matthews (Roehampton), Bethan Stevens (Sussex).
Supported by the University of Roehampton and the Bibliographical Society. Organised with the assistance of House of Illustration.

This session follows two themes:
1.Miniaturization: Drawing on Peter Otto’s work on virtual culture in the Romantic period, is the illustration a form of virtual gallery? How does visual meaning change when an image is resized?
2.The Art of Quotation: How were literary quotations used to conceptualise visual images? How important are framing devices to the meaning of an image?

…and other related questions.

Registration is free, and includes free entry to the main exhibition. You can download the full programme here.

To register, please email Mary.Shannon@roehampton.ac.uk, giving your name, job title, and institution (if applicable).

Birkbeck Arts Week Starts: Monday, 18 May

Posted on May 14, 2015 by marylshannon

Birkbeck Arts Week Starts: Monday, 18 May

We start on Monday 18 May with sessions on Curiosity (with Marina Warner and others), Coffee and Commonwealth, illustrator and caricaturist Chris Riddell‘s reflecting on Gulliver’s Travels and Diderot on Monday, to discussions of Ruins, productions of S.T.Coleridge‘s Ancient Mariner and Blake‘s Illuminated manuscript Vala or the Four Zoas, Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner with members of the film team, and we end on Friday with sessions on the enlightenment art of Shadow Portraits and a Magic Lantern Show. And this is just a couple of examples.

Do visit the Birkbeck Arts Week’s webpage, choose your events, and book seats. It’s all free. And please spread the word.
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/arts/about-us/events/arts-week

CFP: ‘The Arts and Feeling in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture’, Birkbeck College, University of London, 16-18 July 2015

Posted on May 12, 2015 by marylshannon

CFP: The Arts and Feeling in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Birkbeck College, University of London, 16-18 July 2015

Keynote Speakers: Professor Caroline Arscott (Courtauld Institute of Art, London); Professor Tim Barringer (Yale University); Meaghan Clarke (University of Sussex); Professor Kate Flint (University of Southern California); Professor Michael Hatt (University of Warwick); Professor Jonah Siegel (Rutgers); Alison Smith (Tate Britain)

“She saw no, not saw, but felt through and through a picture; she bestowed upon it all the warmth and richness of a woman’s sympathy; not by any intellectual effort, but by this strength of heart, and this guiding light of sympathy…” (Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 1860)

This conference will explore the ways in which nineteenth-century authors, artists, sculptors, musicians and composers imagined and represented emotion and how writers and critics conceptualised the emotional aspects of aesthetic response. How did Victorian artists represent feeling and how were these feelings aestheticised? What rhetorical strategies did Victorian writers use to figure aesthetic response? What expressive codes and conventions were familiar to the Victorians? Which nineteenth-century scientific developments affected artistic production and what impact did these have on affective reactions?

The conference will consider the historically specific ways in which feeling is discussed in aesthetic discourse. It will also, however, encourage reflection about the limits of an historicist approach for understanding the emotions at play in nineteenth-century aesthetic response and the possibility of alternative methodologies for understanding the relation between feeling and the arts.

Proposals of up to 400 words should be sent to Dr. Vicky Mills at artsandfeeling@gmail.com by 9 January 2015. Please also attach a brief biographical note. Proposals for panels of three papers are also welcome, and should be accompanied by a brief (one-page) panel justification.

Possible topics might include:

Languages of emotion (affect; feeling; sympathy; empathy; sentimentality)
Theories of feeling (psychologists; art critics; philosophers; authors)
The arousal of specific emotions (pain; joy; anger; grief; tenderness; anxiety; disgust) and the aestheticisation of the emotions
The physiology and psychology of aesthetic perception (Physiological aesthetics; empathy; the nervous system; head v. heart)
The arts and religious feeling (biblical painting; sacred music)
Artists, museum visitors and concert-goers in fiction
The gendering of aesthetic response
The codification of artistic expression
Museum Feelings (boredom; fatigue; the museum as a site of affect; the regulation of feeling)
Curating feeling
The ‘art of feeling’ (how to feel the right thing in response to music, art, sculpture)
Feeling and touch
The role of emotion in ekphrasis; translating feeling

The conference is organised by The Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies at Birkbeck, University of London.

CFP: ‘Illustrating History / Illustrer l’histoire’, Université de Valenciennes, 4 Dec. 2015

Posted on May 11, 2015 by marylshannon

‘Illustrating History / Illustrer l’histoire’

Université de Valenciennes

4 Dec, 2015 (Abstracts due 30 June, 2015)

The scholarly research group Illustr4tio, supported by CALHISTE (EA 4343), is pleased to announce a one-day symposium on “Illustrating history/ Illustrer l’histoire” and invites papers on the topic.

Following the first symposium on “The Birth of Images” (Dijon 2014) and the one on
“Literary Illustration Between Texts and Paintings” (Mulhouse/Strasbourg 2015), the event to be held at the university of Valenciennes on 4 December 2015 aims to explore the relationship between history, the visual arts and the act of illustrating. Central to this symposium will be exchanges about the status, form and function of such illustrations in a variety of media, whether early modern prints or contemporary graphic novels. Should we apprehend illustrations to Shakespeare’s history plays differently from engravings in Walter Scott’s or Charles Dickens’ novels?

Questions addressing « illustrating history » may cover the following areas, though not exclusively so :

• Illustrating history and series or cycles as opposed to single pieces (painting, furniture print)

• Illustrating history when one is experiencing the historic moment, for instance, war

diaries, illustrated correspondence

• History’s most frequently illustrated key moments : riots, revolutions, battles

• Historical figures illustrated in their biographies (form and function of such illustrations)

• How does illustrated history convey ideological and institutional discourses through

school textbooks, history books, dictionary entries, encyclopaedia ?

• Illustrations in critical literature on history

• Historians as artists and illustrators

• Illustrating history and illustrating fiction : contact or clash? Symbiosis and hybridation ?

• Material culture and the circulation of objects illustrating history

• How does history apprehend illustration ?

• History in graphic novels

• Illustrating historical fiction (Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Robert Graves, etc)

• Illustrating history as a discourse on memory and contact or clash between several periodicities

We will be happy to listen to word-and-image scholars, historians, artists, and illustrators alike. There is no preferred methodology or theoretical approach but papers that are interdisciplinary and broach the topic from an intercultural angle will be most welcome. For the full CFP see our website Illustr4tio.

Deadline for abstracts (300-400 words): 30 June 2015

Abstracts (English or French) should simultaneously be sent to all members of Illustr4tio, with a short bio and bibliography :

Brigitte Friant Kessler, Brigitte.friant-kessler@univ-valenciennes.fr, and b.friant@free.fr,

Sophie Aymes Stokes, Sophie.Aymes@u-bourgogne.fr,

Nathalie Collé, nathalie.colle@univ-lorraine.fr

Maxime Leroy, maxime.leroy@uha.fr.

New RIN member publication: Sandro Jung, ‘James Thomson’s The Seasons, Print Culture, and Visual Interpretation, 1730-1842’

Posted on May 1, 2015 by marylshannon

New RIN member publication: Special Promotion

Sandro Jung, James Thomson’s The Seasons, Print Culture, and Visual Interpretation, 1730-1842 (Lehigh University Press, May 2015)

Get 20% off with this downloadable flyer.

“Sandro Jung’s study of The Seasons is a fresh and stimulating history of the publishing and marketing of one of the most popular texts of the eighteenth century. But it is also far more than that. This book radically extends our understanding of the cultural and economic value of Thomson’s poem by investigating its visual readings and its complex cultural afterlife within and far beyond Britain as the poem’s imagery morphed across an astonishing range of visual arts, including engravings in books, prints, cartoons, ceramics, furniture, and music. The result is a persuasive demonstration of the intersections between technology, aesthetics, commerce, market, and reception.”

— James Raven, University of Essex and Magdalene College, University of Cambridge

“Here is the writing of a fresh new chapter in the scholarship of The Seasons. Consideration of print, paratexts, pictures, price, and pocket diaries all make for the richest contextualisation yet of the production and consumption of James Thomson’s poetic masterpiece from its first appearance to the early decades of the nineteenth century.”

— Gerard Carruthers, Francis Hutcheson Professor of Scottish Literature, University of Glasgow

Drawing on the methods of textual and reception studies, book history, print culture research, and visual culture, this interdisciplinary study of James Thomson’s The Seasons (1730) understands the text as marketable commodity and symbolic capital which throughout its extended affective presence in the marketplace for printed literary editions shaped reading habits. At the same time, through the addition of paratexts such as memoirs of Thomson, notes, and illustrations, it was recast by changing readerships, consumer fashions, and ideologies of culture. The book investigates the poem’s cultural afterlife by charting the prominent place it occupied in the visual cultures of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. While the emphasis of the chapters is on printed visual culture in the form of book illustrations, the book also features discussions of paintings and other visual media such as furniture prints. Reading illustrations of iconographic moments from The Seasons as paratextual, interpretive commentaries that reflect multifarious reading practices as well as mentalities, the chapters contextualise the editions in light of their production and interpretive inscription. They introduce these editions’ publishers and designers who conceived visual translations of the text, as well as the engravers who rendered these designs in the form of the engraving plate from which the illustration could then be printed. Where relevant, the chapters introduce non-British illustrated editions to demonstrate in which ways foreign booksellers were conscious of British editions of The Seasons and negotiated their illustrative models in the sets of engraved plates they commissioned for their volumes.

About the Author

Sandro Jung is research professor of early modern British literature and founding director of the Centre for the Study of Text and Print Culture at Ghent University.

RIN 4: The Art of Quotation and the Miniaturized Gallery. Saturday 6 June 2015, 10 – 5pm, The House of Illustration, London

Posted on April 30, 2015 by marylshannon

The Art of Quotation and the Miniaturized Gallery. Saturday 6 June 2015, 10 – 5pm, The House of Illustration, London: Peter Otto (Melbourne), David Worrall (Roehampton/Nottingham Trent), Kate Heard (Royal Collection), Susan Matthews (Roehampton), Bethan Stevens (Sussex). Supported by the University of Roehampton and the Bibliographical Society. Organised with the assistance of House of Illustration.

Registration for this event will soon be open: details will be posted on this blog.

We will also be advertising 3 Bibliographical Society Studentships of £60 each, to assist postgraduate students with attendance. 3 spaces are reserved for the successful candidates; details of how to apply will be advertised here soon.