Fashionable Diseases Workshops

      Comments Off on Fashionable Diseases Workshops

Below, details of two interesting workshops taking place this month at Northumbria as part of the Fashionable Diseases project.  More information on the project can be found on the project website and blog.

Disability and Fashionable Diseases in Literature and Culture

A Workshop for the Leverhulme Project ‘Fashionable Diseases: Medicine, Literature and Culture, 1660-1832’
 
14 November 2013, 11am-1:30pm
Boardroom 1, Sutherland Building Northumbria University
 
Michael Davidson
Professor of Literature, University of California, San Diego
Author of Concerto for the Left Hand; Disability and the Defamiliar Body
 
Stuart Murray
Professor of Literature, University of Leeds
Author of Representing Autism: Culture, Narrative, Fascination
 
How do the complicated and contested concepts and fields of disability and fashionable disease relate to each other, if at all?  How are they represented within the spheres of literature and cultural representation generally?  This workshop aims to begin an exploration of the subject with the help of two experts in the field of contemporary literature and disability studies.  The event is free to attend and a light lunch will be provided.  To reserve a place, please email enquiries@fashionablediseases.info
 
Fashion and Illness in Georgian Bath
A Workshop for the Leverhulme Project ‘Fashionable Diseases: Medicine, Literature and Culture, 1660-1832’
 
21 November 2013, 1-3pm
Boardroom 2, Sutherland Building
Northumbria University
 
Annick Cossic
Professor of English
Université de Bretagne Occidentale, France
 
Published at different times, Christopher Anstey’s The New Bath Guide (1766), Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) and Jane Austen’s Persuasion(1818) all testify to the emergence of new forms of social interaction, particularly on display in spas. The role of illness as an agent of sociability in Bath has been variously apprehended by Anstey, Smollett and Austen, who all three share a first-hand knowledge of a city, ironically nicknamed “the hospital of the nation” or, more positively, “the Queen of Watering-Places.”  By offering a comparative study of these texts, this workshop will interrogate the representation of fashionable diseases in three literary genres, themselves highly fashionable, the satirical letter, the epistolary novel and the novel of sensibility.  The event is free to attend.  To reserve a place, please email enquiries@fashionablediseases.info