Registration is still possible for the Conference:
'The Shared Cultural Milieu of Charles Darwin and Samuel Butler: Science
and Literature in the Nineteenth Century'
Monday 1st - Tuesday 2nd July, in the Divinity School, St John's College
Cambridge.
This conference will extend the discussion of Darwin's reception in Europe,
published in two volumes as *The Reception of Charles Darwin in
Europe*(2008) in the well-established Series on the Reception of
British and Irish
Authors in Europe (Bloomsbury) as well as in the third volume, 'The
Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe' (forthcoming
2014).
It will consider not only Darwin's impact on culture, especially literary
culture, but also the milieu in which writers like Darwin and Butler could
emerge from very similar educational and cultural backgrounds and
contribute to both literature and science. Through our work on the European
reception, a new focus on the channels and modes of understanding of
Darwin?s work emerges, in which Butler's contributions to the subject not
only in his controversies with Darwin but through his translations and his
five books on evolution enrich our understanding of the Continental
reception and of new sciences emerging from the Darwinian controversies.
St John's College houses the Butler Collection, the largest collection of
his works, letters, notebooks, paintings, and photographs in one place, and
recently received a Heritage Lottery Grant to make Butler's work better
known to a wider public. In the past two years the Collection has been
fully catalogued and a number of exhibitions, events and lectures, open to
the public as well as to the University, have been held. A small Butler
exhibition will be mounted in the Divinity School for the conference.
A number of younger scholars have come forward who are doing new research
on Butler, especially in the context of his scientific ideas. A feature of
the conference will be a seminar presenting this new work, at which James
Paradis (MIT), editor of *Samuel Butler: Victorian Against the
Grain*(Toronto 2007), will be present. Another feature will be the
contributions
of writers who themselves have explored the links between science and
literature in their own work, and the talented young poet Emily Ballou will
give a reading on the first evening.
Registration (incl. lunch) costs £60 per person per day; £40 for full-time
students.
Rooms can be also booked for those wishing to stay overnight in the College.
You can download the programme at
http://www.clarehall.cam.ac.uk/rbae/Programme_and_registration.pdf
and register by writing to us at [log in to unmask]
Dr Elinor Shaffer FBA and Professor Thomas F. Glick, co-editors, *The
Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe*
Dr Mark Nicholls, Fellow and Librarian, St John's College
Conference co-organizers
--
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
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