Please share this CFP with your colleagues and graduate students. We are especially eager to bring in junior faculty and graduate students working on Victorian, turn-of-the-century, or modernist topics that have a connection to either Thomas or Jane Carlyle. And I hope very much that some of you consider submitting a proposal as well!
Call for Papers
The Oak and The Acorns:
Recovering the Hidden Carlyle
July 6-8, 2016
To be held at
The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH)
Oxford University
“It is an idle question to ask whether his books will be read a century hence: if they were all burnt as the grandest of Suttees on his funeral-pile, it would only be like cutting down an oak after its acorns have sown a forest. For there is hardly a superior or active mind of this generation that has not been modified by Carlyle’s writings; there has hardly been an English book written for the last ten or twelve years that would not have been different if Carlyle had not lived.”
George Eliot, “Thomas Carlyle” (1855)
Several generations read the works of Thomas Carlyle with surprise, awe, inspiration, fervor, excitement, and occasionally anger—and they went on to shape the rest of the 19th century and much of the 20th century with the words and prophecies of Carlyle embedded in their politics, philosophy, art, literature, history, and ideals for a better world.
Some of these impacts would have pleased Carlyle; others would have greatly surprised him, and a few, perhaps, would have dismayed him. But for good and ill, Carlyle left an impact that in some ways is hard to see because it is so deeply pervasive.
This conference aims to retrieve that hidden Carlyle, and to recognize how he served, and continues to serve, as a bedrock of far-ranging ideals for several generations of readers and admirers.
For this conference, we invite proposals that explore the rich diversity of where Carlyle lies hidden in the vision and hopes of eminent Victorians, Edwardians, and Modernists throughout England, Scotland, Ireland, Europe, and across the ocean in America and beyond. Because Jane Welsh Carlyle had a similar effect on the readers of her letters, both in her lifetime and afterwards, we also invite proposals that address her continuing influence as well.
We especially welcome papers that delineate how the reception of Carlyle’s works shaped critical movements in politics, art, historiography, literature, including (among many):
Socialism
Communism
Muscular Christianity
The Gospel of Work
Pre-Raphaelite Art
The New Biography
Modernism
Young Ireland/Irish Nationalism
Transcendentalism
We also welcome papers that explore individual figures from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and their relation to the writings of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle. A short list of significant figures influenced by the Carlyles includes:
Charles Dickens
John Stuart Mill
Karl Marx and Frederic Engels
Benjamin Disraeli
George Eliot
Erasmus and Charles Darwin
Leslie Stephen
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Robert Browning
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
William Morris
John Ruskin
Lady Jane “Speranza” Wilde
Oscar Wilde
W.E.B. DuBois
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Margaret Fuller
Henry David Thoreau
Friedrich Nietzsche
Virginia Woolf
James Joyce
Proposals of no more than 500 words, along with short CV, should be sent by January 5, 2016 to:
and
Dr. Marylu Hill, Director
The Augustine and Culture Seminar Program and
Graduate Liberal Studies
Rm. 103, Saint Augustine Center
Villanova University
Villanova, PA 19085
610-519-6936
