ELIT Seminar: “Literature and Philosophy in Nineteenth-Century British Culture”, Monika Class, 5:30PM November 14 2024 (EN)

You are cordially invited to this book series launch hosted by the Department of English Language and Literature.

Date: Thursday, 14 November 2024
Time: 17:30-19:00

This is an online seminar. To obtain event details please send a message to department.

Title: Literature and Philosophy in Nineteenth-Century British Culture

Abstract: this will be a roundtable conversation with the five editors of the book series Literature and Philosophy in Nineteenth-Century British Culture, which was recently published in three volumes by Routledge. The collection seeks to paint a new picture of the relationship between literature and philosophy over the “long” nineteenth century by placing side by side excerpts of literary works that engage with philosophy and excerpts from philosophical works that engage with literature, mixing well-known works with overlooked sources, and providing a copious critical apparatus and commentary to place them in context and analyse them. The first volume (covering the 1789-1832 period) was edited by Monika Class and Cian Duffy, the second (covering the 1832-1872 period) by Peter Garratt and Giles Whiteley, and the third (covering the 1872-1910 period) by Andrea Selleri. In this event we will reflect on what can be learned from this research.

Biographical notes:

Monika Class is associate professor of English at Lund University, Sweden. Her research interests include print and reading cultures of the Romantic period, the long-eighteenth-century history of the novel in English, and phenomenological approaches to literature, embodiment and environmentalism. Her publications include the monograph Coleridge and Kantian Ideas in England, 1796-1817 (Bloomsbury), two guest editions of the special issues one on Medical Cases as Genre in the journal Literature and Medicine (Johns Hopkins University); and another on “Trace: Embodied Approaches to the Novel in English” in the journal English Studies (Taylor and Francis); and Transnational England: Home and Abroad, 1780-1960 (Cambridge Scholars).

Cian Duffy is professor of English literature at Lund University, Sweden. His research focuses on various aspects of the intellectual life and cultural history of Britain and Europe during the Romantic period. Special areas of interest have included the Shelley circle, the sublime, travel writing, and Romanticism in the Nordic countries.

Peter Garratt is a Professor of English at Durham University, where he is Head of Department of English Studies. He broadly interested in the relationships between Victorian literary culture and psychology, philosophy and science, and has written and edited books on Victorian empiricism, the long history of distributed cognition, and cognitive approaches to literature and the arts.

Andrea Selleri is an assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Bilkent University in Ankara. Besides editing the third volume of this collection, which is focused on the 1872-1910 period, he has worked on the intersections between literature, criticism and philosophy both in the Victorian period, with essays on Oscar Wilde, A.C. Swinburne, Augusta Webster and several minor authors and critics, and in the present.

Giles Whiteley is Professor of English Literature at Stockholm University. His research has focused predominantly on the literature of the long nineteenth century, from Romanticism to modernism, and frequently focuses on the interrelationship between literature and philosophy. In addition to being the general editor of these volumes, he has published books on Pater and philosophy, Wilde and philosophy, and on the reception of the philosophy of Schelling across the period, as well as on aesthetics and urban literary studies.