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CFP: The Oak and The Acorns: Recovering the Hidden Carlyle (2/15/2016; 7/6-8/2016)

Posted by on Dec 30, 2015

TORCHTo be held at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) Oxford University

“It is an idle question to ask whether his books will be read a century hence: if they were all burnt as the grandest of Suttees on his funeral-pile, it would only be like cutting down an oak after its acorns have sown a forest. For there is hardly a superior or active mind of this generation that has not been modified by Carlyle’s writings; there has hardly been an English book written for the last ten or twelve years that would not have been different if Carlyle had not lived.”

George Eliot, “Thomas Carlyle” (1855)

Several generations read the works of Thomas Carlyle with surprise, awe, inspiration, fervor, excitement, and occasionally anger—and they went on to shape the rest of the 19th century and much of the 20th century with the words and prophecies of Carlyle embedded in their politics, philosophy, art, literature, history, and ideals for a better world.

Some of these impacts would have pleased Carlyle; others would have greatly surprised him, and a few, perhaps, would have dismayed him. But for good and ill, Carlyle left an impact that in some ways is hard to see because it is so deeply pervasive.

This conference aims to retrieve that hidden Carlyle, and to recognize how he served, and continues to serve, as a bedrock of far-ranging ideals for several generations of readers and admirers.

For this conference, proposals are invited that explore the rich diversity of where Carlyle lies hidden in the vision and hopes of eminent Victorians, Edwardians, and Modernists throughout England, Scotland, Ireland, Europe, and across the ocean in America and beyond. Because Jane Welsh Carlyle had a similar effect on the readers of her letters, both in her lifetime and afterwards, proposals that address her continuing influence are invited as well.

Especially welcome are papers that delineate how the reception of Carlyle’s works shaped critical movements in politics, art, historiography, literature, including (among many):

  • Socialism
  • Communism
  • Muscular Christianity
  • The Gospel of Work
  • Pre-Raphaelite Art
  • The New Biography
  • Modernism
  • Young Ireland/Irish Nationalism
  • Transcendentalism

Also welcome are papers that explore individual figures from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and their relation to the writings of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle. A short list of significant figures influenced by the Carlyles includes:

  • Charles Dickens
  • John Stuart Mill
  • Karl Marx and Frederic Engels
  • Benjamin Disraeli
  • George Eliot
  • Erasmus and Charles Darwin
  • James Anthony Froude
  • Leslie Stephen
  • Alfred Lord Tennyson
  • Robert Browning
  • Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
  • William Morris
  • John Ruskin
  • Lady Jane “Speranza” Wilde
  • Oscar Wilde
  • W.E.B. DuBois
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Margaret Fuller
  • Henry David Thoreau
  • Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Virginia Woolf
  • James Joyce

Conference website: http://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/cfp-recovering-hidden-carlyle

Proposals of no more than 500 words, along with short CV, should be sent by February 15, 2016 to: marylu.hill@villanova.edu and paul.kerry@ccc.ox.ac.uk

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