Events

Prof. Ian Duncan - The University of California, Berkeley (https://english.berkeley.edu/profiles/21) Abstract The enormous cultural prestige of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory has eclipsed earlier and alternative versions of nineteenth-century evolutionary science, both (until recently) among historians of science and among literary scholars. As a result, critical discussions of Dickens’s fiction in relation to Victorian natural science […]

Professor Helen Smith - University of York (https://www.york.ac.uk/english/our-staff/helen-smith/) Abstract 'What's the matter?', Polonius asks Hamlet. But what exactly does he mean? This paper gets to grips with early modern understandings of matter as, variously, the stuff of the world, the subject of thought and language, the central principle of a legal case, the excremental substances […]

John Scott Daly - The University of Hong Kong Abstract Using a critical discourse studies approach, here I analyse YouTube comments attached to an episode of Benefits Street, a Channel 4 documentary series about welfare recipients. Having qualitatively analysed over 3,000 comments, I argue that commenters use vari-directional double-voicing and enregistered emblems to co-construct a […]

Natalie Mo - The University of Hong Kong Abstract The doppelganger is a recurring character across literary history. Within nineteenth-century British literature, it is most commonly associated with gothic fiction in which it functions as an externalization of the protagonist’s transgressive desires. This paper argues that this character type is common not only in gothic […]

Anneliese Ng - The University of Hong Kong Abstract This talk examines how Elizabeth Gaskell offers an alternative plot for the fallen woman in her 1853 novel Ruth. Gaskell reworks the dominant plot of the fallen woman genre by revoking what Amanda Anderson calls “the downward-path principle.” It dictates that once a woman has sex outside […]