Mini-Conference/Major Concerns: Textualities 2023

On the 6th April, the annual English Master’s mini-conference, Textualities 2023, was finally afoot. And mini it was, but mighty was the relief afterwards. We Modernities and Med/Ren heads were set the unenviable task of delivering 6 minute (and 20 second) Pecha Kucha presentations in UCC’s imposing North Council room. What had quietly been fermenting in our fearful minds was now expected to fly forth fluently in the face of our far more informed audience of five. In the name of alliteration I exaggerate. But thankfully not that much.

The day was bright, the grounds were fragrant, and the birds were out in force, but up in Ravenclaw tower (North Council if you prefer) we were ignorant of everything but 20 second slide changes and keeping the nerves in check. But safe to say, we all pulled through, and shockingly, even enjoyed ourselves! For the previous few weeks we had all been assigned various jobs to prepare, promote and facilitate the smooth running of the mighty event, from the brilliant team on socials (@textualities_2023), to the commendably conducted blog (www.textualities23.hcommons.org) alive with panellist interviews and countdowns to the day itself.

As part of the design team, I happily put my non-existent graphic design skills to work in creating the above, and thus, the well-oiled machine trundled on to the morning itself. At ten o’clock, we sat in the name of ‘Character and Identity’. From Sherlock Holmes to Anne Enright and The Green Knight to Taxi Driver, there was surely something for everyone, with an interesting focus on adaptation that carried throughout all four panels. After a well-earned break, our second panel (‘Woman Scorned: Gender Roles and Expectations’) kicked off the afternoon, covering everything from Frederick Douglass and Troilus and Criseyde, to Bertha Mason and Haruki Murakami’s female representation, (a definite highlight providing much needed comic relief!). We’re not meant to have favourites, but Ellen, you are the keynote speaker of our hearts. And while I’m giving out medals, I’ll give certificates to all of our impressive chairs for the day.

Now I’m no orator, so rescue remedy was consumed before 2 o’clock, my date with destiny. And placebo or not, I shockingly managed to speak without sounding completely like a frog. Titled ‘Nature, Space, and Place’, our miniature panel tackled greenhouses (me), Wuthering Heights, and Holmes (we meet again). As a group we certainly seem to have a little something going on for the deerstalker hat. I submit to evidence one of my slides …

… over which I garbled something to the effect of literary greenhouses deteriorating in the Edwardian age, after their Romantic rise and Victorian victory. In this Sherlock Holmes short story, we see the imperialist language often associated with the glasshouse taking a violent ‘choking’ turn that conveys a certain colonial anxiety. But I also argued for a ‘contaminating’ fear as Holmes and Watson actually become “felons in the eyes of the law” by breaking and entering the conservatory. Throughout I tried to present the liminal role of the fictional greenhouse, which here sees the dynamic duo crossing literal and metaphorical borders between legality and lawlessness.

After my potted history of the greenhouse in literature, and a round of questions which opened up interesting possibilities for individual research and brought home how nerve-wracking police investigations must be, we paused for our final break. Last up was ‘Lurking Fear: Traces of the Gothic Throughout History’, which carried us through haunted houses, ghosts, the grotesque, mental illness in horror, and dystopia, and a fascinating follow-on discussion on ableism, true crime, and purgatorial ghosts. All in all, an enlightening day was had, not just in proving how quickly spent nerves are replaced with (str)essays. (That’s what I’ll be calling them from now on.)

Congratulations Textualities class of 2023!

A brief summary of slides will follow in the next post, fear not!

Works Cited

Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830-1880. Oxford UP, 2008.

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. 1813. Headline Review, 2006.

---. Sense and Sensibility. 1811. Collins Classics, 2010.

Bate, Jonathan. “Culture and Environment: From Austen to Hardy.” New Literary History, vol. 30, no. 3,

1999, pp. 541-560.

Bellamy, Liz. The Language of Fruit: Literature and Horticulture in the Long Eighteenth Century. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.

Bilston, Sarah. “Queens of the Garden: Victorian Women Gardeners and the Rise of the Gardening Advice

Text.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 36, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1-19.

Bowden, Mary. Review of Monsters under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the

Present, by Jane Desmarais. Victorian Studies, vol. 61 no. 3, 2019, p. 516-517. Project MUSE

muse.jhu.edu/article/734988.

“Conservatory.” Grove Art Online. Oxford UP, 2003, doi-org.ucc.idm.oclc.org/10.1093/gao

/9781884446054.article.T019141.

Cowper, William. The Task: “The Garden”. J. Johnson, 1785, pp. 89-134.

Darby, Margaret Flanders. The Hothouse Flower: Nurturing Women in the Victorian Conservatory. Edward Everett Root, 2020.

Desmarais, Jane. Monsters under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present.

Reaktion Books, 2018.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton.” The Return of Sherlock Holmes, 1905. Project Gutenberg, 1994.

Eve, Jeanette. “The Floral and Horticultural in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Novels.” The Gaskell Society Journal, vol. 7, 1993,

pp. 1-15. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/45185554.

Gaskell, Elizabeth. Wives and Daughters. 1866. Penguin Classics, 2003.

Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D’Urbervilles. 1891. Everyman Classics, 1984.

King, Amy M. Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel. Oxford UP, 2003.

Lynch, Deidre. “‘Young Ladies are Delicate Plants’: Jane Austen and Greenhouse Romanticism." Elh, vol. 77, no. 3,

2010, pp. 689-729.

Shteir, A. B. “Gender and “Modern” Botany in Victorian England.” Osiris (Bruges), vol. 12, 1997, pp. 29-38.

“Thomas Hope & the Regency style.” Victoria and Albert Museum, www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/t/thomas- hope/.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects.

1792. Floating Press, 2010. ProQuest, www.ebookcentral-proquest-com.ucc.idm.oclc.org/lib/uccie-ebooks/

/detail.action?docID=563875.