CFP: Visual Theology II, Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites, 22-22 September 2019

Visual Theology II:

Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites: Sacre Conversazioni

St Michael and All Angels Chapel, Marlborough College

21- 22nd September 2019
https://www.visualtheology.org.uk

‘All great art is praise’ John Ruskin

This conference aims to celebrate the life and work of John Ruskin during his bicentenary. This two day event will create a space for theologically engaged conversations about Ruskin, religion and the arts. We seek to focus on Ruskin’s religious and aesthetic writings informed by his relationship with Christianity, as well as examine his influence on those within the Victorian art world, specifically the Pre-Raphaelites.

Whilst Ruskin can be said to be a major proponent of Victorian art writing, with religion underling his mode of approach to many areas of nineteenth century public life and thought, in the twenty-first century we have somewhat of a reversal: our interpretation of religion in the arts challenges the very competencies of disciplines such as art history. Resisting attempts to historically confine Ruskin’s religious aesthetics to the nineteenth century alone, this conference suggests that Ruskin’s voice offers clear and often prophetic insight into many facets of modern image interpretation. Ruskin’s formulations, albeit many faceted, provide not only a means of examining nineteenth century religious dialogues about accessing the divine, modes of prayer, and about public art and public spaces, but also offer a linguistic opportunity for us to take Ruskin into growing scholarship studies such as biblical reception, and into contemporary art practice that draws on the spirituality he invested in visual media.

Approaches are sought that analyse specific Ruskinian or Pre-Raphaelite pictorial representations as they relate to modes of Ruskinian religious art writing and / or theological engagement. We encourage critical questions of the Sacre Conversazioni held between Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites: how did they collectively or individually respond to and reshape religious imagery, what is the significance of their chosen media, what new covenants of image interpretation did they seek and successfully employ, and how critical and conversational were they? Furthermore, we seek to discuss the transference of religious symbols and threads of Catholicism from Italy to Britain, via Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites who helped make Venice and Florence a ville toute anglaises. We also ask how best to curate Ruskin’s contribution to the nineteenth century, and in what sense we or other artists receive its Christian perspective as significant?

With this in mind, we anticipate a wide and varied body of visual and theological conversations about sacred art with Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites at the core. Proposals might include, but are not limited to:

Divine Designs: art writing in relation to God, faith, and unbelief; seeking truth through representation and naturalism, as well as architecture; explorations of biblical symbols and the iconographic, e.g. Pre-Raphaelitism’s engagement with devotional art.

Responding to and Reshaping Religion: aesthetically confronting theological fluctuations; locating new representations of the faithful and the ‘faithless’; churchmanship and liturgical contexts for visual engagement.

Curating Ruskin, Curating Religion: negotiating desires to neutralise visual representations of the divine in public spaces; Ruskin from the perspective of ‘post-secular’ image practice and criticism; making Ruskin accessible and deconstructing his understanding of divinity for the next generation.

From the Sacred to the Secular: Visualising Discord: the visual record of discordant faith; identifying evocations of spirituality without a faith – e.g. the numinous light filled work of J.M.W. Turner; interpreting anxieties through symbology or biblical reception.

Media Hermeneutics: Ruskin on daguerreotypes, painting, stained glass, etc.; media positioning and their implied or explicit morality; pictorial naturalism and theologies of realism.

Institutional Theologies; exploring frameworks of institutional platforms such as state commissioning of religious art, church commissioning of stained glass, the acceleration of church building, and conscious formulation of national collections.

Conversing with Italy; locating the inheritance of European religious imagery amidst the Ruskinian and Pre-Raphaelite lexicon; extracting Catholic and / or Protestant liminality in symbology, architecture and fresco.

CFP: Victorian Network journal, "Forgery and Imitation" (1 Nov. 2017)

Call For Papers: Forgery and Imitation

Victorian Network is an open-access, MLA-indexed, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to publishing and promoting the best work across the broad field of Victorian Studies by postgraduate students and early career academics. We are delighted to announce that our twelfth issue (Summer 2018) will be guest edited by Aviva Briefel on the theme of Forgery and Imitation.

Recent scholarship has drawn attention to the increase in art and literary forgery in the nineteenth century, and to the preoccupation with themes of illicit imitation in the Victorian cultural zeitgeist. Critics have highlighted the manifold, intricate, and sometimes surprising ways in which forgery was woven into the social and cultural fabric of the era. The forged, the fake, and the imitative became pressing issues for artistic reproduction as growing demand and changing technology shaped the way in which texts, images, and objects circulated. The spectrum encompassed forged and imitative objects faked with criminal intent, as well as cultural and economic productivity.

Anxieties surrounding the concepts of originality and fakery also permeated nineteenth-century discussions of social authenticity – did forging an identity in a changing world open the door to faking social class, race, or gender? Did cleaving closely to imitate cultural peers maintain the status quo, mask individual dishonesty, or constitute plagiarism? Frauds, cheats, liars, and copycats of every ilk caught the public imagination. The range of depictions was broad and ambivalent. From villainous cheats like Count Fosco to romantic depictions of Chatterton, forgery and imitation marked for the Victorians a point of uneasiness that called for intricate negotiation. Furthermore, as channels of patronage and influence became increasingly fragmented, new ways of conceptualising artistic indebtedness were required. Here, too, forgery and imitation did moral battle. Appropriation, pastiche, and homage had their dark doubles: deceit, plagiarism, and hack work. Navigating intertextuality meant gauging where boundaries of influence could be crossed and where they should be policed.

We invite submissions of approximately 7,000 words on any aspect of the theme in Victorian literature and culture. Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to:

Fakery and cultural identity, the (cultural and/or economic) value of forgeries and imitations
Fakes as cultural participation
Identities of forgery and forged identities (individual, cultural/national)
Illegitimacy, genealogy, and heredity theory
Imitation in nature and evolutionary or scientific theory
Artistic reproduction (eg. photographs, prints, and casts), copying, and forgery: the original versus the copy
Forgery and imitation as gendered activities
Public persona: masks and makeup
Fashions, trends, and crazes
Acting as imitation; theatricality versus authenticity
Fraud, counterfeit money, financial corruption, white-collar crime
The forgery of memory; history-writing; misremembrance
Originality, the Romantic genius, and Victorian imitation
Imitation as literary practice: (mis-)quotation, adaptation, plagiarism, piracy
Literature as imitation: re-creating other mediums in words (ut pictura poesis)
Imitating the Victorians: the re-creation of Victorian texts in neo-Victorian writing and fan cultures

All submissions should conform to MHRA house style and the in-house submission guidelines. Submissions should be received by 1 November 2017.
Contact: victoriannetwork@gmail.com

CFP: "Family Ties" Symposium, 12-14 February 2017, University of Otago, Dunedin

Adam Walker and  His Family by George Romney (1796-1801)
(c) National Portrait Gallery, London

Family Ties: Exploring Kinship and Creative Production in Nineteenth-Century Britain
12-14 February 2017, Dunedin New Zealand

Plenary Speakers:
Judith Pascoe, University of Iowa
Devoney Looser, Arizona State University

Conference website

In 1800, poet and playwright Joanna Baillie dedicated her Series of Plays to her physician brother Matthew Baillie for his “unwearied zeal and brotherly partiality”; Matthew himself had recently edited the anatomical research of their uncles, John and William Hunter. At century’s end, Oscar Wilde cited his mother Jane Wilde’s translation of Sidonia the Sorceress (1849) and his great-uncle Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) as his “favourite romantic reading when a boy.” Family played an important role in the literary and artistic productions of the long nineteenth century, from the Burneys to the Brontës, and the Rossettis to the Doyles. Critical approaches ranging from Noel Annan’s “Intellectual Aristocracy” to Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory have provided useful ways of assessing and contextualising the role of family in the creative production of writers and artists, but still the role of the family remains underexplored.

Invitation for submissions
We invite submissions for “Family Ties,” a three-day symposium at the University of Otago and Otago Museum focused on British literary and artistic families in the nineteenth century. Topics for 20-minute papers might include:

Interdisciplinary Influences
Collaborations and/or Dissents
Authorial Identity/ies
Communities and Networks
Families and Emotions
Redefining Family Units
Stages of Life (births, marriages, deaths)
Reimaginings of nineteenth-century families
Families, Creativity, and Empire
Economics of Family Authorship
Literary and Artistic Legacies
Little-known Relations
Generational Influences
Please send abstracts of 250-300 words by 15 November to Dr Thomas McLean and Dr Ruth Knezevich at familyties@otago.ac.nz.

The symposium coincides with “Keeping it in the Family: British and Irish Literary Generations 1770-1930,” an exhibition at Otago’s Special Collections, and precedes the 16–19 February RSAA conference in Wellington, New Zealand. There are direct flights between Dunedin and Wellington, and we hope many participants will attend both events. “Family Ties” is made possible by generous support from the Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund. It will be an opportunity to share the first results of the three-year Marsden funded project, “Global Romantics: How the Porter Family Shaped Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature.”