Abstracts

Abstract: from ‘French Receptions’, University of Leeds

‘Decadent Cosmopolitanism: Responses to Paul Bourget by Henry James and Thomas Mann’

The changing attitudes towards cosmopolitanism in the fin de siècle are symptomatic of the reaction against perceived cultural and political Decadence. Maurice Barrès’s 1892 article ‘La Querelle des Nationalistes et des Cosmopolites’ places cosmopolitanism in a binary relationship which prefigures the emergence of European nationalism. But an examination of the conflicting views of cosmopolitanism during this period reveals an alternative interpretation based on Modernist views of national identity. This paper will explore the notion of Decadent cosmopolitanism through the reception of Paul Bourget by Henry James and Thomas Mann. Bourget’s essays on Stendhal and Turgenev in the 1880s propose a positive view of cosmopolitanism which is subsequently rejected in his novel Cosmopolis (1893). James disagreed with Bourget’s theory of racial characteristics, offering an alternative view in the short story ‘Collaboration’. In contrast, Mann welcomed Bourget’s attack on cosmopolitans, describing them as uprooted, degenerate hedonists.  It will be argued that Mann’s stance changes over time and that The Magic Mountain can be read as a Modernist reworking of Cosmopolis. The paper will conclude with reflections on these responses in the light of recent works on cosmopolitanism and Modernism by Jessica Berman and Rebecca Walkowitz.

Dr Richard Hibbitt

University of Leeds

r.hibbitt@leeds.ac.uk

Abstracts from The Other Nineteenth Century, University of Chester (20th June, 2006)

Abstract: ‘The Imperial Souvenir in Late-Victorian Imperial Gothic’

In this paper I will sketch out some thoughts on the imperial souvenir in late-Victorian literature and culture. I will begin by considering a range of such artefacts, arguing that they were produced to substantiate a fantasy of English masculinity redeemed and revitalised through practices of hunting dangerous animals and violent engagement with ‘barbarian’ people. The paper will go on to consider the metonymic function of such imperial souvenirs in both popular fiction and imperial spectacle in linking ‘big game’ hunting to the practice of violence upon the bodies of colonised people, and to the peril that threatened the imperial hero in his pursuit of glory. It will also explore ways in which the treatment of hunting and war trophies as imperial souvenirs functioned as an overdetermined mimetic response both to the perceived tribal practices of colonised peoples and to the commodity form associated with feminised domesticity, technological modernity, mass culture and democracy at home.

By casting the imperial souvenir in this light I hope to illuminate the meaning of such grim tokens of empire in literary texts by Haggard, Kipling and Conan Doyle. I also aim to indicate a wider dialectical tension crystallised within the imperial souvenir between the sacred character of the relic and the kitsch of the commodity fetish. The result, I will argue, is typically the incursion of an unsettling ‘thing’, which disturbs feminine domesticity and metropolitan civilisation, and which functions as an allegorical performance of a higher masculinist, imperial ‘truth’. But such things cannot contain the contradictions and sense of the uncanny that inhabit them.

Merrick Burrow

University of Huddersfield

m.burrow@hud.ac.uk

Abstract: ‘A new order of beings’: Evolution and Androgyny in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Much recent criticism of Bram Stoker’s Dracula has attempted to explore the novel’s interaction with fin-de-siècle sexology, particularly the notion of inversion. Despite this attention, the implications of Stoker’s exploitation of the evolutionary in sexological thinking have been under-considered. This paper will consider Dracula’s fascination with ‘inverted’ gender not merely as an indicator of degeneration but as a rehabilitation, in which an androgynous past is integral to evolutionary progress. By mapping the novel’s use of gender inversion onto an evolutionary model of progress, I aim to show that the monstrosity of Dracula and his daughters can be read as an integral part of a healthy, future human evolution. The other, in the form of the ‘inverted’ vampire, becomes integrated into a new kind of gender hybrid that is evolutionarily superior.

Furthermore, I will demonstrate that through this embodiment of androgyny there is recognition of human wholeness that is terrifyingly sublime in Stoker’s novel. Androgyny in this text takes in the two aspects of the Kantian sublime – firstly, the notion of a vastness that is beyond imagination and secondly the recognition of wholeness and unity that leads to a transcendent understanding of the sublime in us. Crucially, this second stage of the sublime is achieved through the text’s exploitation of contemporary evolutionary discourse. The increasing scope of evolutionary discourse during this period that, on the surface, seems to reduce understandings of gender and sexuality to the classification of fixed types provokes an image of androgyny in Stoker’s text that is liminal. Sexology in Dracula, which has so often been understood in terms of suppression and containment, actually unleashes the Romantic image of an androgynous sublime within this very different cultural climate.

Sara Clayson

The Open University in the West Midlands

sara@clayson.f9.co.uk

Abstract: ‘Zoophagous Maniac’: Deviancy in Dracula

This paper explores the representation of otherness in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Of particular interest is the asylum in which the lunatic, Renfield, is confined and observed by Dr Seward. Stoker’s depiction of the asylum is to be considered in the context of ‘the [Victorian] drive towards specularity’ (Flint). By the late-nineteenth-century the human psyche was being mined by the new discourses of psychology, for example, and according to Foucault, sexuality was being co-opted into a ‘scientia sexualis’. This process ‘gave scientific credibility to new forms of social control, specifically creating new types of deviant’ (Dollimore) and had its analogue in the prison and asylum regimes also highlighted by Foucault as emerging in the late-eighteenth-century. Seward creates a new type of deviant in his classification of Renfield, who defies existing schema: ‘zoophagous (life-eating) maniac’. This has the frisson of seeming a cross-species term, as if Renfield has ceased to be human, and I will consider the model of subjectivity behind this monstrous male. Also of interest is the figure of the unethical Seward, whose own unstable subjectivity compromises the distinction between self and other. Of course, Renfield is connected to Dracula via ‘possession’ and cannot be so simply processed. Picking up on the image of the observation-trap (in Renfield’s cell door), I will also consider how the asylum, in which otherness is supposed to be studied and contained, is a gothicised space, where Dracula is the othered figure who represents the repressed of the medical discourses which dominate Seward’s account.

Paul Foster

University of Chester

henderson_brook@yahoo.co.uk

Abstract: "Representing the Victorian Other: when Science Meets Fantasy on the Issue of Difference"

As the Empire extended its sway geographically, the Other became a subject of concern for Victorian Britain. Newly conquered peoples and cultures were classified in the "Darwinian" chain of evolution ― Science and Empire thus working hand in hand to promote the natural superiority of the westerner over the rest of the world. But otherness could also be found within the Victorian society itself, where the Poor, or "Great Unwashed", were often compared to the remote Savage. To this social abnormality, one has to add the physical one, exposed in popular freak shows. These monsters lost the status of marvel to become objects of science, studied as "mistakes" of nature or "missing links" between animal and man. The same logic of objectification of the human as specimen gave way to the exhibition of indigenous people, in itinerant "ethnic shows".

But this apparent scientific objectivity hides a number of fantasies projected on to the Other, who is denied any kind of individuality in the process. It is this complex association of science, ideology and mythmaking which this presentation intends to explore. I will first focus on locating otherness in the nineteenth century ― an enterprise which necessarily implies a spatiotemporal definition of the Victorian self, using the categories of race, gender, and class. I will then move to the three-dimensional staging of the specimen, trying to determine the process of scientific mythmaking. This presentation will be illustrated by literary and iconographic material.

Fanny Robles

University of Toulouse

fanny9robles@yahoo.fr

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