Date: Friday, 16 April 2010 - Saturday, 17 April 2010
Duration: Two Days
Contact: Dr. Tina O’Toole - tina.otoole@ul.ie

Venue:
Mary Immaculate College Limerick

Plenary Speakers:
Prof. Lyn Pykett, University of Aberystwyth
Prof. Adrian Frazier, NUI Galway
Prof. Joseph Bristow, UCLA

In the past fifteen years a lively and growing dynamic has emerged in Irish scholarship which has broadened critical discourse beyond previous somewhat static literary-historical categories, deploying postcolonial, feminist and queer approaches to Irish literature and culture. This troubling of the canon enables us to find new ways of reading canonical work, and to address forms and writers hitherto neglected. This symposium on Ireland, Modernism and the fin de siècle aims to explore one such area, by interrogating the connections and potential incompatibilities between formal and textual experimentation in the work of Irish writers at the fin de siècle, and the subsequent emergence and transnational reach of literary modernism.

Organisers
Dr. Kathryn Laing,                                              Dr. Tina O’Toole,
Mary Immaculate College Limerick                University of Limerick

Contact Details
Dr. Kathryn Laing
Department of English
Mary Immaculate College Limerick
Limerick
Ireland
E-mail: kathryn.laing@mic.ul.ie

Dr. Tina O’Toole
English
School of Languages, Literature, Culture & Communication
University of Limerick
E-mail: tina.otoole@ul.ie

Symposium: Ireland, Modernism and the fin de siècle

Fri 16th April  
1.00 Registration: Summerville, Mary Immaculate College Limerick
2.00 Conference Welcome: Prof. Michael Breen, Dean of Arts
2.15 Panel 1 (Room : SG3)
Chair : John McDonagh
Conor Montague. Anatole le Braz and the Irish Revival.
Clare Gill. Taking out the Trash: Belfast’s Free Public Library and the fin de siècle Doctrine of Improvement.
Aoife Leahy. Fin de siècle Dialogue in George Moore’s “Mildred Lawson”.
3.45 Break
4.15 Panel 2 (Room: SG3)
Chair: tbc
Maeve Tynan. The Gaelic Gothic: Degeneracy and Diffusion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Eibhear Walshe. Queering Oscar: Versions of Wilde in Modern Ireland.
Ed Madden. Tabhair Dom do Lámh? Austin Clarke’s Washroom Encounter.
6.00 Plenary (Room: SG 1): Prof. Lyn Pykett
Chair: Kathryn Laing
Sat 17th April  
9.00 Registration: Summerville, Mary Immaculate College Limerick
10.00 Panel 3 (Room: SG 1)
Chair: Tadgh Foley
Susan Cahill. Landscapes of Girlhood: The Girls' Fiction of L.T. Meade and Rosa Mulholland.
Beth Rodgers “She Talks Ireland”: Irishness, Authorship and the Wild Irish Girls of L.T. Meade.
Kathryn Laing & Faith Binckes. The Inconsistencies and Surprises of Sympathy: Hannah Lynch, Gender, Genre and Politics at the fin de siècle.
Heidi Hansson. Emily Lawless and fin de siècle Literature as a Temporal Category.
11.30 Break
12.00 Panel 4
Chair: Ed Madden
Maureen O’Connor. Inhuman Voices Wake Us: Animals and the Mythical Method in Irish New Woman Writing.
Tina O’Toole. Cross-Lines: Egerton, Moore, Joyce.
Elke D’hoker. Somerville & Ross and the Modern Irish Short Story.
1.30 Lunch
2.30 Plenary: Prof. Adrian Frazier
3.30 Panel 5
Chair: Patricia Coughlan
Yvonne Ivory. Beyond Salomé: Oscar Wilde’s Afterlife in Modernist German Opera.
Alex Davis. Learning to be Brutal: Synge, Linguistics, Decadence.
Bruce Stewart. “The Curve of An Emotion”: fin de siècle Metaphysics in Wilde, Yeats and Joyce.
Hedwig Schwall. Towards a New Definition of the ‘New Woman’? Rereading Yeats’s Ideas of the Individual on the Basis of Contemporary Psychoanalysis.
5.15 Break
5.45 Plenary: Prof. Joseph Bristow
8.30 Conference Dinner (optional)

Professor Lyn Pykett
Paper Title:
 The Irish Girl and the New Woman Writer

Professor Pykett is Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University of Aberystwyth, where she teaches nineteenth-century literature.  She is editor of the Journal of Victorian Culture andher most recent book is on Charles Dickens (as part of the Palgrave Critical Issues series), but she is perhaps best-known to us for her work on the New Woman and on Victorian sensation fiction.

Her publications include The Improper Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (1992); The Sensation Novel from The Woman in White to The Moonstone (1994); and the well-known Engendering Fictions; The English Novel in the Early Twentieth Century (1995).  She has contributed essays to the Cambridge Companion to Victorian Fiction (ed. Deirdre David), the Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction (ed. Martin Priestman), and Women and Literature in Britain, 1800-1900 (ed. Joanne Shattock). Her work also includes nineteenth and twentieth-century fiction and its cultural contexts, the Victorian periodical press, and she has published on several aspects of the teaching of English Literature.

Professor Adrian Frazier
Paper Title:
 George Moore and the New Woman

Professor Frazier lectures on Irish Literature at the National University of Ireland, Galway, where he is Director of the MA in Drama and Theatre Studies and the MA in Writing. He has published on Irish poetry, drama and fiction of the 20th century and his biography George Moore 1852-1933 (Yale UP, 2000) is the pre-eminent work in this field.

His research focus is on late 19th- and early 20th-century Irish writers, such as Oscar Wilde, George Moore, W. B. Yeats, and he has published widely on the Abbey Theatre, 20th century Irish theatre, contemporary Irish poetry, biography, critical theory and literary non-fiction. His publications include Yeats, Horniman, and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre (1990) and Playboys of the Western World: Production Histories (2004), and he has guest edited an issue of The Irish Review on Irish Theatre (2002), and an ‘Irish issue’ of The Literary Review (Winter 1979). His current project is titled ‘Hollywood Irish: Abbey Actors in Hollywood, 1936-1953’.

Professor Joseph Bristow
Paper Title: The “Home Rule of Design” and Art Nouveau: Oscar Wilde’s A House of Pomegranates (1891)

Joseph Bristow is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles and his research and teaching interests include British Writing and Culture 1830-present; Victorian drama, fiction, and poetry; theories and histories of sexuality.

Prof. Bristow’s publications include; Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885 (1995); Sexuality, New Critical Idiom Series (1997); and Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World (1991).  His recent editions and essay collections include Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend (2009); Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray, World’s Classics (2006); The Fin-de-Siècle Poem: English Literary Culture and the 1890s (2005); Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions (2003); and The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry (2000). 
Forthcoming articles include “Michael Field in their Time, and Ours,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 2010; “Picturing His Exact Decadence: The British Reception of Oscar Wilde, 1900-1987,” in Stefano-Maria Evangelista, ed., The Reception of Wilde in Europe (London: Continuum, 2010); “Homosexual Writing on Trial, from Fanny Hill to Gay News,” in Hugh Stevens, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian and Gay Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and “1900 and the Début de Siècle: Poetry, Drama, Fiction,” in Kate Flint, ed., The Victorians, New Cambridge History of English Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

His current projects include a full-length manuscript "The Sex of Victorian Poetry" (for Cambridge UP), and John Gray, Silverpoints and Spiritual Poems (co-edited with Daniel Williford), Digital Online Edition (Rice University Press, 2010).  Having edited the journal Nineteenth-Century Literature for ten years from 1997, next January 2010 he will take on editorship of the Journal of Victorian Culture. He is also Series Editor of Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, Palgrave, 2001-continuing.

During 1998-99, while he held the Clark Professorship at UCLA, Prof. Bristow organized a series of conferences titled “Oscar Wilde and the Culture of the Fin de Siècle”. He is currently Director of the Sawyer Seminar, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, UCLA on “Homosexualities, from Antiquity to the Present”; he will direct the “Cultures of Aestheticism” programme at UCLA Centre for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies next year.