Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture
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"A Disembodied Spirit": Calvinism and Immaterialism in the Fiction of William Godwin. Rowland Weston, University of Waikato
This paper explores the Calvinist and immaterialist elements in four of William Godwin’s (1756-1836) novels: Caleb Williams, St Leon, Fleetwood and Mandeville. These novels illustrate Godwin’s growing conviction that immaterialism has deleterious consequences for social solidarity.
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Training for Authorship: How-To Handbooks and the Art of Fiction. Jack Caughey, University of California, Los Angeles
This paper will investigate the abrupt rise of self-help handbooks devoted to the art of fiction as they emerge from British literary culture in the last fifteen years of the nineteenth century.
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Muscularity, Moral Turpitude, & Ethnic Appropriations: Sherlock Holmes and Masculinity. Antoinette Chevalier, University of California, Berkeley
The paper argues for Sherlock Holmes as embodying a late-nineteenth century masculine ideal: A man able to effectively assume a position that is racially ambiguous, geographically liminal, culturally hybrid, and criminally transgressive as he is willing to engage in extra-legal activities to preserve status-quo hierarchies.
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Mediating the (Terms of the) Exchange: Female Mediumship and Resistance in Henry James's In the Cage. Giulia Hoffmann, University of California, Riverside
This paper examines the portrayal of female communications mediumship in In the Cage, arguing that its protagonist ultimately destabilizes patriarchal power structures by obstructing the system of the exchange of knowledge which appropriates womens bodies as passive facilitators of communication.
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