Date/Time
Date(s) - 11/14/2024
4:00 pm
Location
4010 JFSB
Category(ies)
The Romantic and Victorian Studies Group welcomes Alex Dick from the University of British Columbia on Thursday, November 14 at 4:00 pm in 4010 JFSB.
Title: “Walter Scott, Frankenstein, and the Politics of Romance”
It has long been known that Mary Shelley was an admirer, a fan even, of the poems and novels of Walter Scott. But just how much Scott influenced Shelley, especially in her first novel, Frankenstein, and how Frankenstein in turn impressed Scott, has never been fully explored. Throughout their writing careers, Scott and Shelley carried on (in print) a conversation about the role of “romance,” a catch-all concept encompassing elements of science fiction, speculative realism, chivalric codes, and even indigenous life, within and athwart the generic protocols of the developing novel form. While both writers used romance to posit the existence of ways of knowing different from the subjective, progressive, masculine bildung that focalized the realistic novel, both were also anxious that these alternative ontologies might challenge, formally and politically, the social and aesthetic institutions that the novel promised to enshrine. Romance, in other words, is a monster that both Scott and Shelley tried–and ultimately failed–to subdue.
About our guest:
Alexander Dick is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He is the author of Romanticism and the Gold Standard: Money, Literature, and Economic Debate in Britain 1790–1830 (Palgrave 2013) and of many articles and chapters on literature, philosophy, and political economy. He has co-edited two collections of essays, Spheres of Action: Speech and Performance in Romantic Culture (Toronto 2009) and Theory and Practice in the Eighteenth Century: Writing Between Philosophy and Literature (Pickering and Chatto 2008), as well as the Broadview edition of Sheridan’s Pizarro (2018). He is now researching eighteenth-century and Romantic-period literature on the Highland Clearances and the Hebridean islands as well as on the literary, cultural, and intellectual legacies of Sir Walter Scott.
