Conference Report: ‘Contested Inheritances 1750-1830’

Posted on 12 December 2017

Elizabeth Bobbitt reflects on the events hosted by CECS this term

Read the article on the CECS Coffeehouse blog

With the autumn term at an end (Happy Holidays, everyone!), we thought it would be a good opportunity to look back at some of the exciting events which CECS has hosted this term. Here is a review of the first conference which kicked off the academic year back in October. ‘Contested Inheritances 1750-1830,’ organised by David Barrow, Lauren Nixon (University of Sheffield), Rachel Sulich (University of Leeds) and myself, saw an exciting programme of six speakers, including York’s own Jim Watt, Deborah Russell, and David himself. Each speaker discussed their own research in terms of the main theme of the conference, which focused on the varied nature of historical representation in eighteenth-century literature, and the ways in which such representations played into contested notions of British national identity.

Image courtesy of Jennifer Buckley

In order to reflect the wide-ranging historical epochs on which authors of the eighteenth-century drew, David and I chose to divide up the day according to some of the main eras which appears to have particularly caught the imagination of writers of the day. In the morning, we enjoyed the first panel, entitled ‘Vikings and Saxons,’ in which we heard first from Professor Heather O’Donoghue from the University of Oxford, who gave a paper on eighteenth-century representations of Norse culture. Her study, English Poetry and Old Norse Myth: A History (Oxford University Press, 2014), contains an extensive survey of contemporary depictions of Norse mythology, and has been particularly helpful in my own research of Ann Radcliffe’s narrative poem, Salisbury Plains: Stonehenge (1812-1814). In the second panel of day, ‘Scottish History and the Gothic, our own Deborah Russell shared her thoughts on Sophia Lee’s representation of Mary Queen of Scots in The Recess (1783). Hamish Mathison (University of Sheffield), completed the panel, whose paper on Scottish poems in the Age of Enlightenment provided a new framework with which to read Robert Burns’ Tam O’Shanter.

Deborah Russell gives her paper entitled ‘Genealogies of Suffering: Mary Queen of Scots and Women’s Gothic.’ Photo courtesy of Jennifer Buckley.

Our fascinating day ended with ‘Chivalry, War, and Liberty,’ in which Jim Watt offered up new ways of considering Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1778), particularly within the context of Britain’s War in America, while Rob Gossedge (University of Cardiff) gave a paper on the symbolic implications of the Order of the Garter in David Garrick’s play of 1771. The conference closed with a paper by fellow PhD student and organiser Lauren Nixon (University of Sheffield) who discussed the complexity of Ann Radcliffe’s representations of masculinity in her five Gothic romances of the 1790s. Thank you again to all who came along and made the day such a special one!