Sunday, January 05, 2014

Seminar: Birkbeck Forum "'Behind the Times?': Sarah Grand, Social Purity and Virginia Woolf" (1/15/2014)


Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies
Spring 2014 Programme
Keynes Library
January 15, 2014

The first event of the spring term for the Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies will feature Mary Jean Corbett (Miami University, Ohio) presenting on '"Behind the Times?": Sarah Grand, Social Purity and Virginia Woolf' on Wednesday January 15, 2014 from 6.00pm to 8.00pm in the Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD.

In rejecting 'fiction with a purpose,' Virginia Woolf took her distance not only from her older male contemporaries, but also from New Women writers, who put sex into discourse in new ways in the 1880s and 90s. Yet Woolf returned repeatedly in her career as a professional writer to problems that had similarly preoccupied late-Victorian women writers and feminist activists. This talk locates Woolf's writing about prostitution in The Voyage Out (1915) and Three Guineas (1938) in dialogue with the work of earlier feminists, such as Josephine Butler and Sarah Grand, identifying both continuities and differences across three feminist generations.


Future Spring Term Forum events include:
Wednesday 29 January 2014, 6.00–8.00 pm
Richard Taws (UCL): 'Proofs of Life: The Dauphin and his Doubles in Nineteenth-Century France'

Thursday 6 February 2014, 6.00–9.00 pm
James Chandler (Chicago): 'The Melodramatic Imagination Revisited'
To be held in the Birkbeck Cinema, 43 Gordon Square

Monday 3 March 2014, 6.00–8.00 pm
Angela Dunstan (Kent): 'Sculptography, Sculpturing Machines, and Inanimate Sculptors: Sculpture, Authenticity and Replication in Victorian Literature'

Wednesday 12 March 2014, 6.00–8.00 pm
Vladimir Jankovic (Manchester): 'Climate Fetishism in the Long Nineteenth Century?'

Wednesday 19 March 2014, 6.00–8.00 pm
Dennis Denisoff (Ryerson): 'The Eco-Politics of Women's Pagan Desires'

Unless otherwise noted, all sessions take place in the Keynes Library (Room 114, School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PD). The sessions are free and all are welcome, but since the venue has limited space it will be first come, first seated.

For more information, see: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/our-research/research_cncs/our-events/birkbeck-forum-for-nineteenth-century-studies-spring-term-2014

Please email c19@bbk.ac.uk to join our mailing list or to obtain further information about the series.