Religion and Victorian Popular Literature and Culture
May 6-8, 2021
The organizers are pleased to announce the programme for Religion and Victorian Popular Literature and Culture, a free online colloquium running Thursday 6 to Saturday 8 May 2021 from 15:00 to 18:00 GMT on both days.
All are welcome at this event, but please register to secure a place. Click here to download the programme and read the abstracts here. Click here to register your attendance via Eventbrite.
The category of the popular has played a significant role in the ‘religious turn’ in Victorian studies over the last two decades. Historians of Victorian religion have turned to popular culture and folklore to challenge traditional paradigms of decline and secularisation. Amongst scholars of Victorian literature and visual culture, there has been an upsurge of interest in the influence of new religious movements on popular literary and visual forms. This colloquium aims to extend our understanding of the relationship between religion and popular culture in the Victorian period by bringing together researchers from a range of disciplinary backgrounds to explore the expression and representation of religion in popular culture texts of all kinds.
Further Event Details
The event will open with a live keynote paper by Anne-Marie Beller and Kerry Featherstone, titled ‘“No greater spiritual beauty than fanaticism”: Women Travellers’ Encounters with Islam in the Nineteenth Century’ on Thursday 6 May (17:00-18:00 GMT). Focusing on accounts of Afghanistan, Egypt, India, and Algeria by Florentia Sale, Amelia B. Edwards, Emily Eden, and Isabelle Eberhardt respectively, Beller and Featherston will examine their representations of Islam and Islamic culture in the countries through which they travelled, to evaluate the extent to which their own respective religious, political, ideological and social positions shaped the encounters about which they wrote. This session will be followed by six discussion panels split over two days (15:00-18:00 GMT, Friday 7 and Saturday 8 May). These panels will provide an opportunity to consider themes and topics raised by recorded papers, which will be made available to attendees from Thursday 29 April.
This online event is supported by the Victorian Popular Fiction Association, British Association of Victorian Studies, the University of Sheffield, and Queen Mary University of London