National Student Forum

I'm delighted to say that the National Student Forum has launched our first annual report. This was presented to the Government by our chair last week, and we have been promised a formal response to the points we have raised about improving life for students in the UK.

We now have a website, which means that hopefully people will start to know who we are! The website, with information about who we are and what we do, and also with a link to the report, can be found here.

Culture and Anarchy?

Read this. I agree (mostly): It's the culture, stupid.

Neo-Victorians

Last weekend I went to "Adapting the Nineteenth Century" at the University of Lampeter, and had a wonderful time! There were so many neo-Victorianists there I felt a bit of a fraud, since I've read and enjoyed Sarah Waters (it was nearly a Waters conference...) but that's about it. I heard lots of papers which looked at how contemporary authors have appropriated aspects of the nineteenth century novel, and have a much longer to-read list now than before (Top of the list: The Crimson Petal and the White and The End of Mr Y). It's fascinating, though, to see how we're still so fascinated with the past (this has set me on the track of thinking about nostalgia as an aspect of memory) and how we are writing and re-writing histories in entirely different ways.
I was particularly fascinated to hear about the Brotherhood of Ruralists, who were a neo-Pre-Raphaelite group formed in the Seventies and appropriated many of the artistic and also literary ideals of the PRB, and I'm looking forward to going to see their exhibition in Falmouth later this year.
I have no time to go into details, but it was a most enjoyable conference - made more so by red wine and feminism on Friday night. More weekends should be like that!

Twilight is not good for maidens...

This is the abstract of the paper I'm currently writing. Don't think I've ever had so much fun with a conference paper! This is for Adapting the Nineteenth Century at the University of Lampeter, August 22-24 2008.

"Twilight is not good for maidens": The Twilight World of ‘Goblin Market’
‘Goblin Market’ remains Rossetti’s most-studied poem, yet has presented problems for critics since its publication. An early reviewer asked, "Is it a fable - or a mere fairy story - or an allegory against the pleasures of sinful love - or what is it?" In this paper, I shall discuss how a poem which was arguably constructed from elements of multifarious sources created its own world which drew readers in and opened up to a wide variety of interpretations. In the late twentieth century, it was the aesthetics of faery, of landscape and primarily of Gothic, which prevailed in interpretations of the work. While serious critics comment on the religious, moral and typological aspects of the poem, it is the alternative aspects of this constructed world, such as fairytale and vampirism which have elicited the most creative responses. My paper will consider two of these responses, and examine the elements of ‘Goblin Market’ which have made such diverse interpretations possible. The illustrative work of the Japanese artist Kinuko Craft has tapped into a dark vein in the work. Appearing in Playboy in 1973 as part of their "Ribald Classics", ‘Goblin Market’ was presented as "a nursery classic" and a "pornographic classic". By juxtaposing the visual and the verbal, the poem appears as indicative of repressed Victorian sexuality. This is perhaps explained best by Deborah Cherry and Griselda Pollock:

In these decades [the 1960s and 1970s], the Victorian era became a site for the
renegotiation of definitions of sexuality. It was characterized as a period of
public virtue and private vice, of sexual hypocrisy, an age of prudery and
respectability with a hidden underside of perversion, pornography and
prostitution.

The illustrations are loosely based on those by Arthur Rackham, but draw on the sexually charged language Rossetti uses in her poem. I propose to examine how Craft draws this out in nuanced illustrations which gesture towards Victorian art, whilst appearing in Playboy.
Recent literary criticism is beginning to attempt reconstruction of the original world Rossetti created, but an alternative space has opened up between critical and creative responses. My paper will explore the aspects of Rossetti’s poem which have attracted an interpretative response, and demonstrate the differing aspect of these two interpretations of ‘Goblin Market’.

Research proposals

At the moment, I'm going through the infamous mid-Ph.D. slump, when I'd rather do pretty much anything (including marking GCSE papers, and, apparently, updating my blog) than actually get on with my thesis. However, this is what my thesis is supposedly about:

Thesis title: Christina Rossetti and the Influence of Gothic
Director of Studies: Professor Fiona Robertson
My original title was "Representations of Pre-Raphaelitism in Criticism and Fiction", and I proposed to examine the myth-making process instigated by the Brotherhood themselves, and subsequently perpetuated by their biographers, who were often related to members of the group or had axes to grind. It became apparent early on in my research that such a study would not be manageable in the context of a Ph.D. Having reviewed recent secondary literature in the field of Pre-Raphaelite studies and the Rossettis, I concluded that there is increasing critical interest in Christina Rossetti's poetry, but that existing scholarship neglects the important influence of Tractarianism and Gothic literature on her work, and tends to ignore her both her early poems and also her later explicitly devotional poems. I thus decided to make Christina Rossetti the main focus of my research, since this is an area which touches on several developing trends in nineteenth-century studies, such as the increased attention paid to Victorian women poets and the "poetess tradition" since the mid-1990s, and the associated revival of interest in nineteenth-century religious culture, within which women played a central role.
Further research into Rossetti's poetry from her early poems, often dismissed as juvenilia, which refer to her reading of the Gothic novels of C R Maturin, and the apocalyptic prose of her last years, suggest a Gothic sensibility. Few critics have examined her early engagement with the Gothic, notably through the works of Maturin and Ann Radcliffe, and also through 'The Vampyre', a tale written by her uncle, John Polidari. Both her poetics and her subjects reflect this interest in Gothic literature, and my research will cover much new ground by considering Rossetti's poetry in terms of the Gothic, and exploring her use of the tropes of Gothic, such as fallen women, doubles and spectres.
My planned chapters are:
Christina Rossetti and Gothic Literature (Introduction and literature review)
The Maturin poems and the early influence of Gothic
‘Goblin Market’ and its multiple interpretations
Spectres and spectrality
Gothic and Rossetti’s devotional poems and prose
Gothic, Sing Song and children’s literature