In June 2025, Royal Holloway, University of London, in collaboration with the British Association of Victorian Studies and the British Association of Romantic Studies, will host an in-person research day on Tuesday 3rd June examining realisms across literary, artistic, theatrical, and critical forms, and considering the continuing influence of nineteenth-century thought on our current moment.
Presentations will be held during the morning in which delegates present 15-minute papers attending to nineteenth-century realisms (broadly conceived), followed by an afternoon discussion-based roundtable, structured around the topic: “Managing Difficult Legacies”. Please see below for the full CFP.
CFP: Nineteenth-Century Legacies
We have undertaken to discourse here for a little on Great Men, their manner of appearance in our world’s business, how they have shaped themselves in the world’s history, what ideas men formed of them, what work they did; – on Heroes, namely, and on their reception and performance what I call Hero-worship and the Heroic in human affairs. Too evidently this is a large topic; deserving quite other treatment than we can expect to give it at present. A large topic; indeed, an illimitable one; wide as Universal History itself. For, as I take it, Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.
Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History.
Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot. All the more sacred is the task of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the People. Falsification here is far more pernicious than in the more artificial aspects of life. It is not so very serious that we should have false ideas about evanescent fashions – about the manners and conversation of beaux and duchesses; but it is serious that our sympathy with the perennial joys and struggles, the toil, the tragedy, and the humour in the life of our more heavily-laden fellow-men, should be perverted, and turned towards a false object instead of the true one.
George Eliot, “The Natural History of German Life”.
Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal processes—which is eternal, and must be felt for its own sake
Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians.
In “The Natural History of German Life”, George Eliot condemns contemporaneous social novels which claim to “represent the people as they are” while tending to idealise their presentations of rural and working-class life. Eliot understood the far-reaching implications of realist representation. In misrepresenting their subjects, these writers direct the sympathy of their audience towards a false object which, as Eliot sees it, undermines the moral imperative of their work.
The way the real is constructed across literary, artistic, social, and political discourses is instructive. Realism is a mode of aesthetic presentation which claims to correspond with real life, designed to strike the reader or viewer as realistic or lifelike through the deployment of certain conventions and strategies. The ways in which authors, artists, and thinkers use these techniques to convince their audience that their work is correspondent with real life can be revealing in how they see themselves, others, their own historical moment, their place in the wider world, and beyond. By way of example, The Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh was championed by Thomas Carlyle who insisted that “the History of the World [ . . .] was the Biography of Great Men”. Those who were deemed to have contributed significantly to Scotland and the wider world are celebrated in William Brassey Hole’s processional frieze which encircles the building’s Great Hall. It presents a calculated version of Scotland’s past, which purports to be true and, by extension, real to observers in the nineteenth century and through to our current moment. The policies, ideas, and images which prop up these versions of reality created within nineteenth-century cultural, social, and political discourses continue to resonate today.
The purpose of this research day is to examine nineteenth-century realist presentations and consider their present-day implications. Nineteenth-century ideas continue to feature within the twenty-first century consciousness. During the morning, panellists will present 15-minute papers followed by Q&As. These presentations will help lay the foundation for a discussion based roundtable event held during the afternoon, where participants will be encouraged to reflect upon how nineteenth-century ideas, understandings, and problems raised during the morning presentations continue to influence university structures and the courses they deliver, institutions in the GLAM sector, as well as shaping contemporary cultural and political discourses.
We invite contributions that attend to nineteenth-century realisms across literary, artistic, theatrical, architectural, and critical forms, which pursue new directions that demonstrate the capaciousness of the form, and its scope for providing insight into, or renegotiating, perceptions of historical, cultural, or social moments.
Researchers from all disciplines are invited to submit proposals for 15-minute paper which consider nineteenth-century realisms. Papers may address, but are not limited to:
– Realism: literary, artistic, theatrical
– Subjectivity, the primacy of the individual
– ‘Otherness’ and othering
– Journalism and print culture
– Authors and Artists
– Cultural memory and the recent past
– Religion
– Philanthropists, philosophers, activists, and innovators
– Empire and colonialism
– Institutions: Workhouses, galleries, libraries, museums, how they were founded, and by whom. The intellectual ideas underpinning them and whether they have survived into the present day.
– Education: the Education Act (1870), National schools, Sunday schools, Ragged schools, Workers’ Educational Association, YMCA lectures, technical colleges, women’s education, curricula, pedagogy.
– Events: The Napoleonic wars, the Acts of Union (1801), the Peterloo Massacre, the Great Reform Act (1832), abolishment of Slavery in the British Empire (1838), Chartism, the Paris Commune.
– Technological Developments: development of the railway, development of photography.
– Science: Natural history, Darwinism, eugenic thought, phrenology
Please send proposals of no more than 300 words, and a biographical note of no more than 100 words to Amy Waterson (amy.waterson@rhul.ac.uk).
Deadline: 15th March 2025 Decisions: 31st March 2025