PGR and unit member Alice Jackman reflects on this recent conference:
From the 15th – 18th February, Alice Jackman attended the ‘Victorian Darknesses’ Conference at the University of Vechta in Germany. The aim of the conference was to explore the theme of darkness in Victorian literature and culture in its various guises. There were three keynote addresses over the four days from Pamela Gilbert (University of Florida), Andrew Mangham (University of Reading), and Kevin A. Morrison (Henan University. Alice gave a paper entitled: ‘ “Loathing a walk in daylight”: Female safety and danger in the Gothic landscapes of Elizabeth Gaskell’s short stories’, based on research from her PhD thesis on female walking in the fiction of Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell. There were a diverse range of papers covering an extensive list of Victorian authors and themes such as: Alcoholism representation in theatre; Anna Mary Howitt’s Spiritualist drawings; the erotics of the corpse in early Victorian poetry; Oscar Wilde’s occult criticism; and gestational darkness in the poetry of Mathilde Blind. Panellists and speakers also enjoyed an evening walking tour of nearby Bremen.
Nineteenth-Century Studies at Anglia Ruskin 