MACMILLAN LECTURE 2000 TO BE GIVEN BY "BIOGRAPHER OF THE DECADE"
VENUE: NATIONAL LIBRARY OF SCOTLAND, Causewayside, Edinburgh
DATE: 23 JUNE 2000
TIME: 5.30pm
The Scottish Centre for the Book and Macmillan Press Ltd., in conjunction
with the National Library of Scotland and Queen Margaret University College,
is pleased to announce that Professor Robert L. Patten, Lynette S. Autrey
Professor in the Humanities, Rice University, Houston, Texas, will be giving
this year's Macmillan Lecture in the Sociology of the Text. Entitled "Serial
Illustration; Or, Reading and Writhing in Vanity Fair", the lecture will be
given at the National Library of Scotland's Causewayside building in the
south side of Edinburgh.
Professor Patten is distinguished chronicler of Charles Dickens (Charles
Dickens and His Publishers, 1978) and author of works on Victorian
Publishing, book illustration and the commercial and aesthetic contexts for
Victorian fiction. His two-volume biography George Cruikshank's Life, Times
and Art (Lutterworth Press, 1992, 1996) was recently named by the Guardian
as the best biography of the 1990s. A Fulbright student at the University of
London while writing his dissertation, Professor Patten has a long and fond
affiliation with Britain; a descendant of immigrant Scots, he is now
exploring his heritage by writing about Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis
Stevenson.
His lecture, "Serial Illustration; Or, Reading and Writhing in Vanity Fair",
provides insight into Vanity Fair, issued over nineteenth months during
1847-1848, which pairs Thackeray the Author's pen sketches of English
society with Thackeray the Artist's pencil sketches. This lecture will
explore the question of how serial illustrations work alongside a narrative
whose developments are improvised yet incrementally fixed as the parts are
published. How did Thackeray illustrate his text, narrate his pictures, and
put both pen and pencil sketches in motion through twenty instalments?
Further information is available from:
Professor Alistair McCleery
Scottish Centre for the Book
Napier University
Craighouse Campus
Craighouse Road
Edinburgh, EH10 5LG, email: [log in to unmask],
or
Dr. David Finkelstein
Head of Department
Queen Margaret University College
Clerwood Terrace, Edinburgh, EH12 8TS,
email: [log in to unmask]
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