Union and Division: New Approaches to the National Tale

Speaker: Prof. Claire Connolly, University of Cardiff, the O’Brien Visiting Scholar in Canadian Irish Studies at Concordia University

Time: 2.30 pm, on Thursday, Dec. 1

Place: 1811 Dunton Tower (the Gordon Wood Lounge)

CORAL is delighted to announce our second speaker this term: Dr. Claire Connolly, of Cardiff University, currently the O'Brien Visiting Scholar in Canadian Irish Studies at Concordia.  Dr. Connolly is one of the leading scholars working on the Irish National Tale, and has just published A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, 1790-1825 with the Cambridge University Press. 

Her talk is entitled "Union and Division: New Approaches to the National Tale."  The Irish National Tale is highly charged in its sectarian politics, its sexual politics, its visions of Ireland's past and future, and its experiments with different narrating voices.  Although it is rooted in the turbulence of Irish politics during the years of rebellion and the Act of Union of 1801, this genre's concerns resonate with all kinds of literary scholars.

Claire will be coming from Montreal to speak - please come and catch her talk before she returns to the U.K.!

Published by Bowles and Carver in London, c. 1793, after Robert Dighton.  Image courtesy of the British Museum.

our fame has spread to Bath!

The Urge to Purge

On Tuesday, Nov. 1, at 2.30 pm in the Gordon Wood Lounge (DT 1811), Dr. Noelle Gallagher will deliver a talk for CORAL, entitled “The Urge to Purge: Satire as Medicine in the Eighteenth Century.”  The rhetorics of illness and medicine in literature have been a sustained research interest for Dr. Gallagher.  Because Dr. Gallagher is a Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture at the University of Manchester, this is an excellent opportunity to meet her in Canada, if you don't run into her at CSECS 2011. 

This is James Gillray's 1792 image of the Prince of Wales, 'A Voluptuary Under the Horrors of Digestion'; CORAL's refreshment tables are good, but not that good!

What is the History in History Painting? The Revolution in History Painting Revisited.

Prof. Mark Phillips (Carleton University) gave the Anniversary Address for CORAL, in April 2011, introduced by our inaugural speaker, Ina Ferris.  Contemporary dress was worn.

What is an Explorer?

Prof. Adriana Craciun (University of California, Riverside) will be giving a paper on Friday, May 6, at 1.30 pm, in the Gordon Wood Lounge (Dunton Tower 1811).

This paper considers how authorship of eighteenth-century exploration narratives is best understood through the dynamic material and social domains of books, rather than by considering the Explorer as the origin of exploration and its narratives. The distinct regulatory and corporate domains, predisciplinary vantage points, author effects, and bibliographic codes through which exploration accounts were produced often differed significantly from those in commercial and literary domains. Dr. Craciun suggests that the undertheorized association of Explorer with the proprietary commercial Author is misleading, but that it provides an opportunity for discerning distinct, asynchronous strands in the history of authorship and print.

Picture credit: William Bradford, 1880, Near Midnight, Labrador, courtesy of the Huntington American Art Collection

Captivating Subjects: Writing Lives for the Dictionary of Literary Biography

In January, 2011, Prof. Frans De Bruyn (University of Ottawa), Dr. Rosemary Daniels (Carleton University), Dr. Morgan Rooney (University of Ottawa), and Dr. Andrew Taylor (University of Ottawa) presented CORAL's gave CORAL's first panel discussion.  They discussed their experiences researching and writing about scholars' and biographers' lives for the Dictionary of Literary Biography.