Event Archive
This is an archive of past events within the Department of English Studies. Please see our current events for forthcoming activities.
Some of our public events are recorded and are available as podcasts via our Research English At Durham blog.
The Beauties of Charles Dickens
A public lecture in The Persistence of Beauty Lecture Series.
This lecture series is organised by the Romantic Dialogues and Legacies research group in Durham's Department of English Studies, and supported by the University's Institute of Advanced Study.
Focusing on British, Irish, and American authors (including Hart Crane, W.H Auden, George Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Louis MacNeice, Walt Whitman) of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this lecture series reflects on the ways that the Romantic and Post-Romantic imagination aspires towards an idealised notion of the beautiful as a harmonious, often transcendent, perfection to discover that such an ideal conception of beauty can only be represented through an ironic mode of representation. This ironic representation of beauty was bequeathed to later writers by the Romantic tradition and shows how an aspiration towards the beautiful confronts us with some of the most difficult and unbeautiful truths about the limitations of our contingent existences and the provisional nature of art itself. This realisation does not produce a diminishing commitment to the centrality of beauty for nineteenth- and twentieth- century writers and their aesthetic theories and practices but, if anything, renews and intensifies the persistent presence of the beautiful as the goal and shaping force of both Romantic and Post-Romantic writing.
Contact s.e.wootton@durham.ac.uk for more information about this event.
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Research in English At Durham (READ) blog showcasing the the literary research emerging from the Department of English Studies
Events
We host a large number of conferences, lectures and seminars each year, many of them open to the public. Find out more on our Events page.
Podcasts
Many of our public lectures, seminars and conferences are recorded, and can be listened to as podcasts.
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Next Event
- 20th January 2021
- Sensory Experiments in Nineteenth-Century Literature
- Online (Zoom)
- Dr Erica Fretwell (University of Albany) and Dr Shannon Draucker (Siena College)