Wednesday 7 October at 4pm
Arts 103 (Constance Naden Room)
Dr Sara Fernandes (Melbourne)
‘A Portable Little System: Natural History Lessons in Britain and Australia’
Abstract
This paper traces the development of natural history education and its relationship to the broader practice of rational pedagogy by women in Britain at the end of the eighteenth century. It also charts the transportation of this practice into the Australian colonial context in the nineteenth century with a focus on settler-author Louisa Anne Meredith (1812-1895). Meredith’s writing blends scientific knowledge and pedagogical purpose with inviting narratives in prose and verse. Meredith’s career began in Birmingham (where she published under her maiden name, Twamley). She emigrated to Australia via Sydney in 1839, before ultimately settling in Tasmania/lutruwita (VDL until 1856). Her work is largely out of print and access is kept alive by archives across Australia’s east coast, the National Library of New Zealand, and major institutions in the UK. This paper emerges from archival research that was supported by the Lisa Jardine grant (Royal Society), and it contributes to an ongoing collaborative project with my colleague in English/Education, Dr Lauren Weber. This paper will offer close readings of Meredith’s letters and published works and argues that Meredith imports the colonial apparatus of taxonomy, botanical illustration, and photography to classify and ‘familiarise’ living beings and ecosystems in Tasmania for developing readers across both colony and metropole.
Bio
Dr Sara Fernandes is a Lecturer in English and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne, where she teaches and researches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, history of the novel, and history of science. She is a co-convenor of the research network Enlightenment and Romanticism at Melbourne (ERAM) and is currently collaborating on the project ‘Portable Pedagogies: Colonial Writing for Young Australia’ with Dr Lauren Weber (University of Wollongong). Research from this project can be found in Children’s Literature and the forthcoming issue of Genre. Her writing can also be found in New Literary History, Textual Practice, and European Romantic Review.
Thursday 12 November 5pm
Arts 104
A double bill on nineteenth-century theatricals
Dr Caroline Radcliffe
‘Amateur theatricals and the development of Naturalism on the British mid-nineteenth century stage’
Abstract
This paper presents research from my forthcoming monograph on the dramas of Wilkie Collins. Focusing on Dickens’s amateur theatrical company and Collins’s drama, The Lighthouse, I demonstrate that both writers were influenced by and aspired to a clearly identifiable mid-nineteenth-century, British dramatic movement that integrated realist theatre practices and ‘natural’ acting styles embodying many of the same principles of dramatic Naturalism. I identify a clearly defined style of British acting that was strongly influenced by French social drama, associated with specific theatres and actors on the London stage. This movement precedes the accepted narrative of Tom Robertson as having been the originator of British theatrical realism thus paving the way for more naturalistic practices. I argue that many of the methods and ideals of naturalistic acting technique were formulated by amateur actors and theatre reviewers who applied literary-based arguments in an attempt to improve a ‘degraded’ state of drama by legitimising it with notions of environmental and psychological realism.
Bio
Dr Caroline Radcliffe is a Reader in Drama and Performance in the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Caroline’s research focuses on theatre and performance in the nineteenth century. She has edited first editions of Wilkie Collins’s The Lighthouse and The Red Vial. Her monograph on Wilkie Collins and the Drama (Routledge) is forthcoming (Spring 2027). Caroline is also an established performer and her digital installation, The Machinery, toured galleries, exhibitions, heritage sites and performance spaces nationally between 2018-2021 (supported by Arts Council England and the National Heritage Lottery Fund).
Dr Darren Sheppard
‘Edward Gordon Craig and the 1904 Salome Premiere that Never Was’
Abstract
In 1904, the theatre critic and producer J. T. Grein petitioned the Lord Chamberlain to lift the ban on the public performance of Oscar Wilde’s Salome. Predictably ignored, Grein proposed a private production, inviting Edward Gordon Craig, then a rising star in British theatre, to direct. Craig declined, and the production never took place. The talk will explore the how and the why of what did and did not happen in 1904, with some speculation on what might have happened. The prospect of a Salome premiere designed and directed by Craig remains an intriguing ‘what if’ moment that would surely have transformed the play’s subsequent production history.
Bio
Formerly Head of Philosophy at Oakham School, Dr Shepherd is currently writing about J. T. Grein, Edward Gordon Craig, and a Salome premiere that never materialised – the subject of his paper. His previous work involved archival material on The Yellow Book, as well as the playhouses and theatrical stagings in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His book, Theodore Wratislaw: Fragments of a Life (2016) was praised in the Times Literary Supplement in June 2017.
Week 10 Thursday 3rd December 5pm
Arts 104
Dr Kate Smith
‘Letting Go: Getting Comfortable with Disposability in Modern Britain’
Abstract and bio to follow…