[version 7 Oct.]
Friday 14 October
8.30 – 9.00: Registration (with light breakfast provisions)
9.00 – 9.10: Opening address and housekeeping
9.10 – 10.30 – Keynote Lecture: Professor Michelle M. Dowd (University of Alabama) – True to Form: Genre and Critical Affect in the Study of Early Modern Women’s Writing
Moderator: Kristine Johanson
10.30 – 10.45: Coffee Break
10.45 – 12.15: Session 1: Forming Genres
Moderator: Amelia Mills
Fauve Vandenberghe (Ghent University) – Insensibility and Conduct Literature in Jane Collier’s An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting
Anna-Rose Shack (University of Amsterdam) – “The people did so laugh and roar”: Humour and Regulating Behaviour in Hester Pulter’s Emblems
Mary Chadwick (University of Huddersfield) – “For thee again I wake the Lyre”: Genre, Form and Love in Elizabeth Harcourt’s Poetry
12.15 – 1.15: Lunch
1.15 – 2.45: Session 2: Affective Forms
Moderator: James Metcalf
Rayna Rosenova (Sofia University St Kliment Ohridski) – “I do indeed feel better both in mind and body … the one is generally dependent on the other”: Gothic, Affect and Power in Eliza Parsons’ The Mysterious Warning
Zoë Van Cauwenberg (KU Leuven & Ghent University) – “Rousing the habitants of faery ground”: Gothic Voices and Affect in Anne Bannerman’s Tales of Superstition and Chivalry (1802)
Eszter Kovács (University of Public Service, Budapest) – Forms of Love in Mary Astell’s Moral Philosophy: from the Self to God
2.45 – 3.00: Coffee Break
3.00 – 4.15: Keynote Lecture: Professor Danielle Clarke, (University College Dublin) – “To guide my Hand and Quill”: Form, Affect and Devotion in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611)
Moderator: Wim Verbaal
4.30: Walking tour of Ghent city led by Fauve Vandenberghe – the tour will conclude at Ghent University Library for the evening reception
5.20 – 5.40: Women’s writing from the Low Countries: a staged reading by Anna-Rose Shack
5.40 – 7.00: Drinks Reception + announcement of raffle winners
Saturday 15 October
9.15 – 10.45: Session 3: Politics of Feeling
Moderator: Rayna Rosenova
Mary Trull (St. Olaf College) – Affect and Nature in Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder
Kelley Glasgow (Boston College) – “Shadow without a Substance”: Politics of Affect in Elizabeth Cary’s Edward II
Marquita Burke-De Jesus (University of Texas/Collin College) – Feminist Formalism and Black Thought: Analyzing the Poetry of Phyllis Wheatley (1773-1785)
10.45 – 11.00: Coffee Break
11.00 – 12.30: Session 4: Forms of Writing
Moderator: Marquita Burke-De Jesus
Millie Schurch (Uppsala University) – Reason, Passion and the Epistolary Novel: Sarah Scott’s The Test of Filial Duty
Monica Mastrantonio (University of York) – Letters as Organic Dialogies – A New Approach to Epistolary Studies
Robert Stearn (Birkbeck University of London) – ‘The Itch of Government’: Managerial Forms in the Diaries of Sarah, Lady Cowper (1644–1720)
12.30 – 1.30: Lunch
1.30 – 2.45: Keynote Lecture: Professor Ros Ballaster, (University of Oxford) – Affect and Performance: Versions of Form and Feeling in the Eighteenth Century on the Twenty-First Century Screen
Moderator: Andrew Bricker
2.45 – 3.00: Coffee Break
3.00 – 4.30: Session 5: Experiencing the Body
Moderator: Robert Stearn
Francesca Blanch Serrat (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) – Reclaiming Agency through Coldness in Eliza Hayley
Renee Harris (Lewis-Clark State College) – Association, Affect, and Material Reading Practices of Anne Laetitia Barbauld
James Metcalf (King’s College London) – Bodies of Knowledge: Mary Leapor’s Curious Objects
4.30 – 4.45: Coffee Break
4.45 – 5.45: Session 6: Female Authorship and Agency
Moderator: Millie Schurch
Charlotte Cornell (University of Kent)– ‘A double confidence, in a young woman’: Aphra Behn and Catherine Trotter’s Female Agency and Agnes de Castro
Amelia Mills (Loughborough University) – Redefining Character through Translation: Aphra Behn’s Agnes de Castro
5.45 – 6.00: Closing remarks
6.00: End of conference
7.00: Dinner at Mémé Gusta (Burgstraat 19, Ghent 9000)
Keynotes
Michelle M. Dowd is Hudson Strode Professor of English and director of the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama. In addition to coediting several volumes, she is the author of Women’s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (2009), The Dynamics of Inheritance on the Shakespearean Stage (2015), and numerous articles in such journals as Criticism, Modern Philology, English Literary Renaissance, and Renaissance Drama. She is currently editing a new book series, Strode Studies in Early Modern Literature and Culture, published by the University of Alabama Press.
Title: True to Form: Genre and Critical Affect in the Study of Early Modern Women’s Writing
Abstract: This paper will explore the affordances of feminist formalist analysis of early modern women’s texts as a way to move the discipline forward constructively. Beginning with a historical and theoretical overview of formalism vis-à-vis feminist study of early modern women’s writing, this paper will then consider how reading for genre, often across traditional period divides, can offer one productive strategy for practicing a feminist formalism that is attentive to historical specificity without being strictly limited by it. Particular attention will be given to how genres not only create affective experiences but also how our own affect as scholars and teachers influences our assessment of literary genres and the narratives we tell about the past. Critical assessment of form and genre, in other words, is itself an affective endeavor. Drawing on examples primarily from seventeenth-century Englishwomen’s writing, this paper will argue that feminist formalist analysis of early modern women’s writing can help to significantly reshape the broader field of literary study and its underlying aesthetic and affective biases.
Danielle Clarke is Professor of English Renaissance Literature at University College Dublin. Her work focuses on the intersections between early modern women’s writing, materiality, textuality and culture. Most recently she edited (with Sarah C.E. Ross and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann) The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women’s Writing in English, 1540-1700 (forthcoming), and she is currently working on a book called Becoming Human: Women’s Writing, Time, Nature, and Devotion 1550-1700.
Title: “To guide my Hand and Quill”: Form, Affect and Devotion in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611)
Abstract: This talk analyses Lanyer’s widely read and frequently anthologised poem as a volume, paying attention to the ways in which the poet’s affective spiritual relationship with the Countess of Cumberland is refracted through stylistic, structural and formal choices. It argues that the poems that make up Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum are ordered in specific ways that encourage the reader to enact the types of devotional reading practices that would have been widely practiced within the household. Evidence from sermon culture will be provided in support of this argument, demonstrating the close relationship between formal choices and feeling in early modern women’s writing. The lecture tracks the formal connections which replicate a series of proximal and distal relationships based on affect, but triangulated through the processes of response to scripture in particular. My analysis of the text’s combinatorial potential rests on three key frameworks: firstly, Lanyer’s interest in typological thought and exemplarity; secondly, her deep understanding of the internal dynamics of poetic miscellanies – a model that, daringly, she transfers to her single-authored volume – and thirdly, her concern with rhetorical and poetic patterning. Finally, I argue that book reimagines the relationship between poet and putative patron as one based on affective and devotional ties, flattened, rather than heightened in the imaginative space of the poem where the inherited models are vacant and lacking, especially for a female poet.
Ros Ballaster is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies in the Faculty of English, University of Oxford and tutorial fellow at Mansfield College. Ros is a literary historian with a particular interest in the history of narrative and performance. She has published monographs and many articles on the ‘rise’ of the novel exploring the significance of romance fiction, women’s writing (Seductive Forms, 1992), and the oriental tale (Fabulous Orients, 2005). She edited Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility for Penguin Classics (1995). In recent years her research interest has turned to the interaction of the Georgian (eighteenth-century) theatre and the novel and her book Fictions of Presence in the eighteenth-century Theatre and Novel was published by Boydell Press in August 2020. In 2019 her essay ‘Sensible Readers: Experiments in Feeling in Early Prose Fiction by Women’, appeared in The Sentimental Novel in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Albert J. Rivero (Cambridge UP). She was Principal Investigator on a collaborative project working with the archives of the Edgeworth family in Ireland and England, the ‘Digital Edgeworth Network’ 2019-2021 Maria Edgeworth | Great Writers Inspire (ox.ac.uk) Digital Edgeworth Network (@EdgeworthPapers) / Twitter
Title: Affect and performance: versions of form and feeling in the eighteenth century on the twenty-first century screen
Abstract: This keynote takes us to a number of key scenes in period dramas on screen set in the eighteenth century (film and television) in which women are represented as the bearers of extreme spectatorial affect. These scenes may be indebted to the familiar ones in eighteenth-century novels of a heroine enraptured as she watches a stage performance: see Frances Burney’s Cecilia, Frances Brooke’s The Excursion, Maria Edgeworth’s Harrington. However in the contemporary screen renderings of the eighteenth century we will look at—from Bridgerton (series 1), Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Outlander (series 4)—what is being explored, I suggest, is rather the affective affordances of the forms of screen media.
The ‘close up’, feminist scholars have long noted, has a peculiar affective energy. The close up stands FOR cinema and the theatrical experience, a gigantic image occupying a whole screen, a white face that invites us to enter into the interiority of mind and response. The other key affordance of rendering feeling through form in screen adaptation is musical score. Soundtrack and the particular choice of music used both as intradiegesis and extradiegesis is in tune and carefully timed to work with close-up n screen representations of the woman at/in eighteenth-century performance.
As we will see, the ‘fiction’ of the close up in screen renderings of theatre and its affect is itself a nod to the superior technology of the screen to that of the theatrical space it depicts. Cinema and televisual representation allows a ‘closing of distance’ between spectator and spectated, an opportunity especially freighted in the art form of period drama which proffers the speculative future of closing the distance too between a past and a present while retaining a sense of the alterity of both to an embodied viewer.
The carefully orchestrated close up of the woman at the theatre is also a kind of cover up, I will argue – a fiction or myth of getting closer to an eighteenth-century past, that also puts into darkness or into subsidiary shadow the ‘other’ figures gestured to in the stage business that takes place around ‘her’ (oriental, enslaved, indentured and labouring class). The plots surrounding these intensely realised scenes of affective response by a white woman most often concern reproductive labour and its control, hence inviting us to ask whose interests are served and who has control of the scene of representation in the making of screen history/fantasy.