BRITAIX 17-18

Gulliver and Beyond

Texts and their Afterlives Research Group
LERMA, Aix-Marseille Université
Monday 6th December 2021

Salle de colloques 1, campus ALLSH, Aix-Marseille Université, 29 avenue Robert Schuman, 13621 Aix-en-Provence
Or by Zoom  Register

9h15: Welcome and coffee

9h45: Introduction and presentation

Morning panel. Chair: Professor Jean Viviès (LERMA, Aix-Marseille University)

10h00: Mickaël Popelard (University of Caen Normandy): The Philosophical and Scientific Background to Gulliver’s Travels

10h45: Jeffrey Hopes: “To behold my Figure often in a Glass”: Gulliver’s Travels and Lockean consciousness of self.

12h: Lunch break

Afternoon panel. Chair: Dr Ruth Menzies (LERMA, Aix-Marseille University)

13h30: Nick Seager (Keele University): Winking at Littleness: Scale, Species, and Satire in Brobdingnag

14h15: Daniel Cook (University of Dundee): Gulliver’s Clones

15h00: Conclusion

Britaix 17-18 is starting the new term with a flourish of activities both from its individual study groups and from its general seminar. Please join us for the first session of “Texts and their Afterlives”, around the legacy of Robinson Crusoe. Registrations are free via Eventbrite; see the registration button just below the abstracts.

27 September 2021 : « Texts and their Afterlives: Robinsonades »
16h30 – 18h30, via Zoom

Ian Kinane (University of Roehampton): ‘Shifting Perspectives in Two Mid-Twentieth Century Robinsonades: O’Dell and Tournier’
Ruth Menzies, (LERMA, AMU): ‘Le Robinson des Demoiselles: A Nineteenth-Century French Robinsonade for Girls’

Abstracts:

‘Shifting Perspectives in Two Mid-Twentieth Century Robinsonades: O’Dell and Tournier’
This paper argues that both Scott O’Dell and Michel Tournier employ the Robinsonade to mount their respective critiques of U.S. and French imperialism in Island of the Blue Dolphin and Friday and Robinson, and that the Robinsonade is – and can be – employed as a tool to resist and comment upon imperialist, nationalist practices. I will show how these texts go largely against the grain of critical writings on Robinsonade fictions, which argue that the Robinsonade is an anachronistic, imperial form unsuited for such critiques. Rather than bolstering the imperial policies of their respective nations, as the use of the Robinsonade form might, at first, suggest, I conclude that O’Dell and Tournier re-imagine the formal constraints of the Robinsonade and construct in their respective texts a vision of a post-imperial world that runs counter to the national narratives of both the United States and France at the time of these books’ publication. I am particularly interested in discussing Tournier with the group and understanding the significance of Friday and Robinson within France’s educational culture.
Ian Kinane (University of Roehampton)

‘Le Robinson des Demoiselles (1835): an edifying Robinsonade for young French girls?’
Catherine Woillez’s numerous children’s books are unequivocally didactic and moral, reflecting her Catholic upbringing and faith.
Her 1835 Robinsonade, Le Robinson des Demoiselles, reworks Defoe’s hypotext to depict a tragic yet edifyingly studious, sweet-natured and pious heroine, Emma de Surville, who is shipwrecked on a desert island at the tender age of fifteen. Forced, like Crusoe, to find food and shelter and domesticate her unfamiliar environment, Emma does so in an explicitly gendered manner, as preoccupied with the elegance of her clothing and interior decoration as any bourgeois nineteenth-century Frenchwoman was expected to be. Alongside hunting, basket-weaving and parasol-making, she creates a pretty flower garden and an aviary and learns to cure her ailments with natural remedies. Through a particularly unsubtle plot device, Catherine Woillez provides Emma with an orphan to care for, thus extending her didactic project to include motherhood and childrearing.
This paper explores how, in transposing Defoe’s novel to an extremely different context – historically, geographically, spiritually and in terms of gender – Woillez offers readers not only practical, moral and religious guidance, but also occasional glimpses of her own life after marriage, at the age of fifteen, to a military officer in the Napoleonic army. It also examines how, rather as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe has taken on a life of its own reaching far beyond the confines of the original text, Woillez’s didactic female Robinsonade might perhaps be viewed as slightly more radical that its author perhaps intended it to be.
Ruth Menzies (LERMA, Aix-Marseille Université)

20 September 2021 : « Writing American Identity » 16.30 – 18.30

This session will be held on site, at the Schuman campus of Aix-Marseille University, salle de colloque 1, bâtiment multimédia.
However, you can also join us via Zoom by registering on Eventbrite below. 

• Florence Petroff (University of La Rochelle), « Le concours du College of Philadelphia: les contours d’une identité britannico-américaine pendant la crise du Stamp Act (1766) »
• Bertrand Van Ruyembeke (University of Paris 8) « Construire un récit français de la révolution américaine: le concours de l’Académie de Toulouse de 1784 »
• Discutante: Emilie Mitran (AMU)

Bertrand Van Ruymbeke is professor in American civilisation at the University of Paris 8 (Vincennes Saint-Denis). He is the author of From New Babylon to Eden. The Huguenots and Their Migration to Colonial South Carolina (University of South Carolina Press, 2006), L’Amérique avant les Etats-Unis. Une histoire de l’Amérique anglaise 1497-1776 (Flammarion, 2016) and Histoire des Etats-Unis de 1492 à nos jours (Tallandier, 2 vols., 2021). He is currently working on two books on the American Revolution, for Tallandier and CNRS Editions.

“La France du second XVIIIe siècle connaît une véritable passion pour les concours. Toutes les Académies en organisent. En 1784, au lendemain de l’indépendance des Etats-Unis, l’Académie des Jeux Floraux de Toulouse propose le sujet suivant: « La grandeur et l’importance de la révolution qui vient de s’opérer dans l’Amérique septentrionale ». Ce concours, dont le prix est en partie financé par Vergennes lui-même, est l’occasion d’une première mise en récit en français de la révolution américaine et de sa portée. Cette communication propose de reconstituer le contexte autour de ce concours et d’étudier les réflexions, l’enthousiasme et les espoirs que suscite la naissance des Etats-Unis dans la France pré-révolutionnaire.”

Florence Petroff lectures in early modern history at the University of La Rochelle. She is the author of a PhD dissertation on the American Revolution and Scotland, under the supervision of Bertrand Van Ruymbeke at the University of Paris 8. Her research will be published with Editions Champion in 2022.

“Au moment de la crise du Stamp Act (1765-1766), le College of Philadelphia organise un concours sur « les avantages réciproques d’une union perpétuelle » de la Grande-Bretagne et de ses treize colonies nord-américaines. Les quatre mémoires qui y répondent tombent d’accord sur le fait qu’il est souhaitable que les colonies américaines maintiennent leurs liens avec la métropole mais à la condition que leurs libertés soient reconnues. Cette communication replace cette mise en texte du double sentiment d’une spécificité américaine et de l’attachement à l’Empire britannique dans le contexte de la production pamphlétaire américaine des premières années de la crise impériale. Dans quelle mesure ces prises de position sont-elles représentatives des opinions des élites coloniales ? Quel rôle a pu jouer le cadre très particulier du concours universitaire dans cette expression d’une double loyauté britannico-américaine ?”

Our Seminar series hopes to welcome many of you, either in person or online, as the new academic year begins.
Times indicated below are all GMT +1 (French time).
You can also follow us on Twitter and view some of our recorded sessions on YouTube.

20 September 2021 : Session « Writing American Identity »
16.30 – 18.30, salle de colloques 1, bâtiment multimédia.

Florence Petroff (MCF en histoire, La Rochelle), « Le concours du College of Philadelphia: les contours d’une identité britannico-américaine pendant la crise du Stamp Act (1766) »
Bertrand Van Ruyembeke (Paris 8) « Construire un récit français de la révolution américaine: le concours de l’Académie de Toulouse de 1784 »
Discutante: Emilie Mitran (AMU)

27 September 2021 : Session « Texts and their afterlives: Robinsonades »
16.30 – 18.30, via Zoom

Ian Kinane (University of Roehampton): ‘Shifting Perspectives in Two Mid-Twentieth Century Robinsonades: O’Dell and Tournier’
Ruth Menzies, (LERMA, AMU) : ‘Le Robinson des Demoiselles: A Nineteenth-Century French Robinsonade for Girls’

1 October 2021 : Inaugural Study Day of the Épopées révolutionnaires 2026 project
14.30 – 18.00, salle T3 – 001, bâtiment Porte

 14.30 – Bertrand Van Ruymbeke (Professeur, Paris 8) Introducing ‘Revolutionary Narrative and Experience – Commemorating Revolutions (1776-2026)’
14.45 –  Emilie Mitran (ATER docteure, AMU) présentation de la journée « Mémoires révolutionnaires dans l’histoire et l’historiographie du monde atlantique (1730-1830) »
15.00 –  Francesca Genesio (PRAG doctorante, AMU) ‘Representing the early republic(s) abroad: Mazzei’s ambassadorship to Europe between parallel diplomacy and propaganda’
15.45 –  Break
16.00 –  Steven Sarson (Professeur, Lyon 3)  ‘”When in the Course of human events”: History and Historical Consciousness in the Declaration of Independence.’
16.45 –  Gérard Hugues (Professeur émérite, AMU)  « Sortir de la Révolution par la Constitution? »
17.30 –  Concluding remarks

15 and 16 October 2021, International conference  ‘Lived Religion in Europe 1500-1800: Individual and Communal Practice’, via Zoom

 Please see our full conference programme

22 November 2021 : Presentation and discussion of Letters to Swift
16.30 – 18.30, salle de colloques 1, bâtiment multimedia

A session led by Jean Viviès and Ruth Menzies, in the presence of several of the authors and contributors to the creative writing collection published in the latest E-rea issue.

6 December 2021 : Study day ‘Texts and their afterlives’
9.45 – 16.00, salle de colloques 1, bâtiment multimedia

This study day will be held in two halves, one discussing Gulliver’s Travels, tailored more particularly for candidates to the Agrégation, and the other dealing more particularly with the posterity of that work. Details to follow shortly.

9h45: Welcome
10h00: Mickaël Popelard (Université de Caen) : ‘The Philosophical and Scientific Background to Gulliver’s Travels’
10h45: Jeffrey Hopes, (Université d’Orléans): ‘ “To behold my Figure often in a Glass”: Gulliver’s Travels and Lockean consciousness of self.’
14h00: Nick Seager (Keele University) : ‘Brobdingnagian Afterlives’
14h45: Daniel Cook (Dundee University) : ‘Gulliver’s Clones’
15h30: Closing remarks

LERMA-QMCRLE conference

Lived Religion in Europe 1500-1800: Individual and Communal Practice

15-16 October 2021, online (via Zoom)

Since 2017, the Centre for the English-Speaking World (LERMA) at Aix-Marseille Université and the Centre for Religion and Literature in English (QMCRLE) at Queen Mary University of London have jointly hosted a series of study days to explore the complex notion of lived religion in perspective across borders, in theory and practice, and through its relationship with the book as well as the visual arts. This conference will conclude this four-year cycle and aims to consider communal and individual aspects of lived religion over the early modern period, broadly defined.

The conference will explore the more private aspects of lived religion, in the intimacy of personal and domestic practice; looking to show the multi-faceted nature of the concept, it will discuss lived religion through the scope of the study of emotions, but will also emphasize the materiality of religious practice. As the focus widens from the individual to the communal, papers will evoke confessional encounters and the interactions between people of different faiths, particularly between various forms of western Christianity and Judaism. The panels will investigate the ways in which lived religion can be used by historians and literary critics to make sense of the religious past in both lay and religious contexts. All details are available on the conference’s Eventbrite page which you can access here.

You can also view the conference programme and the abstracts and bios from this page.

Our colleague Prof. Jean Viviès has taken part in a four-part programme by France Culture, entitled Il était une fois le roman.

Episode one, Made in England, retraces the origins and particularities of the English novel. The episode will soon be on air and you can access it by clicking here.

Particpants are

• Danielle Cilien-Sabatier, director of libraire Galignani
• Jean Vivies, Professor of 18th century British literature (AMU),
• Nancy Oddo, lecturer in 16th century French literature
• Marie-Laure Massei-Chamayou, lecturer in English literature
• Christine Marcandier,  literary critic
• Marie-Eve Therenty, Professor of French literature
• Yves Gagneux, curator of the Maison Balzac 

The Lived Religion study group of BRITAIX 17-18 is delighted to announce a session around Nonconformist everyday religion

Monday 29 March 2021
16.30 -18.30 CET (15.30 – 17.30 GMT)

Rob Daniel (Univ. of Warwick) ‘”A most precious medicine”: The Bedside Bible in the Early Modern Sickchamber’

Vera Camden (Kent State), She Being Dead Yet Speaketh: The Franklin Family Papers. The Other Voice Series (English language series editor, Elizabeth H. Hageman), Toronto: Iter Press and Tempe: Arizona State University Press. 2020’

Vera J. Camden
Presentation of She Being Dead Yet Speaketh: The Franklin Family Papers. The Other Voice Series (English language series editor, Elizabeth H. Hageman), Toronto: Iter Press and Tempe: Arizona State University Press. 2020.
On Black Bartholomew’s Day—August 24, 1662—nearly two thousand ministers denied the authority of the Church of England and were subsequently removed from their posts. Mary Franklin was the wife of Presbyterian minister Robert Franklin, one of the dissenting ministers ejected from their pulpits and their livings on that day. She recorded the experience of her persecution in the unused pages of her husband’s sermon notebook. In 1782—some hundred years after the composition of her grandmother’s narrative— Mary’s granddaughter, Hannah Burton, took up this same notebook to chronicle her experience as an impoverished widow, barely surviving the economic revolutions of eighteenth-century London. Collected for the first time, this volume of the Franklin Family Papers offers rare insight into the personal lives of three generations of dissenting women.
Vera J. Camden is professor of English at Kent State University, training and supervising analyst at the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Center, and assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University. She is associate editor of American Imago and American editor of the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics.

 Robert W. Daniel
“‘A most precious medicine’: The Bedside Bible in the Early Modern Sickchamber”
The sick/death bed was often a site of simultaneous schism and solidarity in post-Reformation England. This presentation explores how the attitudes and acts during infirmity in manuscript accounts, by both men and women, were described as not always religiously divisive but theologically cohesive.  Valetudinarians demonstrated a precise and well-practised biblicism, that is to say the use of the same scriptures, in their writings about their illnesses. This ran across denominations (Quakers, Baptists, Independents, Anglicans) and, at times, the confessional divide. By identifying and examining these patterns of scripture, this talk shows how the ill incorporated broad and attested doctrinal behaviours during their illnesses, whilst occasionally contesting those clerical prescriptions in print. These shared commonalities, both in principle and practice, shed new light on the reading and writing acts employed in the early modern sick-chamber, evincing the ways in which an inclusive ars moriendi literature was disseminated and assimilated in early modern England.
Robert W. Daniel is Associate Tutor in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where he holds the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence. His research examines the religious and literary culture of post-Reformation Britain, with an emphasis on cross-denominational practices. He is the Editor of Bunyan Studies and General Secretary of the International John Bunyan Society.