— Upcoming events
Adele Guyton (KU Leuven) - Middle-Class Narrators and Astronomical Authority: Pearson’s Magazine at the Fin-de-Siècle
Wednesday 19 March, 15:00-16:30
Camelot, Blandijn
Pearson’s Magazine (1896-1939) is best known for serializing H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, but in the first decades of the twentieth century, it featured many other narratives inflected by contemporary science. Some of the best-known include Wells’s The Sea Lady (1901) and The Food of the Gods (1903), George Griffith’s Stories of Other Worlds (1900), and John N. Raphael’s Up Above: The Story of the Sky Folk (1912). Alongside these scientific romances, Pearson’s ran works of popular science that responded to developments in fields from botany to military technology to astronomy. The value and validity of science popularization, especially in newspapers and magazines, however, were far from uncontested in the early twentieth century; anyone familiar with the War of the Worlds will recall its biting critique of newspaper sensationalism. This presentation investigates the relationship between scientific romances and science popularization in Pearson’s in order to reflect on the question of literary knowledge in the popular fiction of the modernist period.
In an exercise in bibliographic control, I will focus on four texts that thematize astronomy – an intensely popular science at the time – and contain metafictional reflections on science popularization: The War of the Worlds in its serialized form (1897); Griffith’s Stories of Other Worlds (1900); Owen Oliver’s short story ‘The Long Night’ (1906); and Raphael’s novella Up Above (1912). By highlighting those moments where narrators discuss astronomical news and the genre and purpose of their own narrative, I hope to show that they position their texts as a genre apart from sensational science popularization on the one hand, and science “proper” on the other. Rather, long-form narrative fiction is framed as a form that can add human experience to scientific knowledge without stooping to the sensationalism these stories attribute to the daily papers. The prevalence of layperson middle-class narrators in these texts, moreover, offers a space to consider popular fiction as a space that was critically engaged with, and sometimes extent resistant to, the increasing specialization of modernist-period science.
— Past events (Academic year 2024-2025)
Dr. Adeline Heck (Université libre de Bruxelles) - The Novel of Pilgrimage: The Bayreuth Festival and Its French Literary Attendees at the Turn of the Century.
Friday 28 February, 14:00-15:30
Lokaal 2.24, Blandijn
After its creation in 1876, with the world premiere of the Ring cycle, the Bayreuth Festival became a favorite summer destination in cultured circles. Its spectators, who came from far and wide, called themselves "pilgrims." This metaphor, which began to be taken more literally as time went on, was a nod to their devotion to Richard Wagner and his art while alluding to the sacrifices they had to make - financial, physical, and otherwise - to travel to his festival. After Wagner's death in 1883, his following became more akin to a cult with its own rituals and liturgy. This was a phenomenon that was observed and commented upon by music critics as well as by novelists who attended the Bayreuth Festival between 1876 and the 1920s. This presentation will cover a literary subgenre that I call "the novel of pilgrimage." It was an exclusively French phenomenon that brought together a diverse group of writers, from the Decadents (like Joséphin Péladan) to the Symbolists (Teodor de Wyzewa), as well as turn-of-the-century female writers (Colette). My goal will be to tease out the connections between musical tourism, religion, and the particular fascination exerted by Richard Wagner on turn-of-the-century France.
Cel19 Relaunch Event
Prof. Marianne Van Remoortel (Universeteit Gent) - Memoryscapes of Martyrdom: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Death of Emily Wilding Davison in the Suffragette (1913).
Thursday 30 January 14:00-15:30
Camelot, Blandijn
This talk will examine the reuse of nineteenth-century poetry in the Suffragette (1912–15), the official paper of the Women’s Social and Political Union edited by Christabel Pankhurst, as part of the reportage on the death and funeral of suffragette Emily Wilding Davison (1872–1913). Davison was fatally injured when she stepped in front of the King’s horse during a protest at the Epsom Derby on 4 June 1913 and was hailed by the WSPU as a martyr to the cause of women’s suffrage. Previous scholarship has argued that her martyrdom was grounded in religion, with the WSPU portraying her as a female Christ or modern Joan of Arc. My talk will present a more complex picture by drawing attention to the many instances of both secular and religious martyr poetry — often quoted from well-known nineteenth-century poets — published in the Suffragette in the two weeks following Davison’s death. Considering the Suffragette’s coverage of the Derby event and its aftermath as activist memoryscape, I will bring recent scholarship in memory studies into conversation with insights from the field of periodical studies. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate that the image of Davison that the WSPU sought to project into the future was constructed from a wide range of martyr traditions and was particularly intertwined with the memories of martyrdom preserved in poetry by two major nineteenth-century social movements: socialism and abolitionism.