24 February 2023 - 24 February 2023
5:30PM - 6:30PM
Elvet Riverside, Durham
Free
All are welcome to our next Inventions of The Text seminar.
An Inventions of the Text Seminar
As a collection, Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales (1800) was conceptualized “in the manner of Wordsworth’s Lyrical ballads,” or so Robinson put it in a letter to her publisher. However, as Shelley AJ Jones has shown, one lyrical tale, “The Negro Girl,” has a more complicated provenance. Exploring questions of influence and innovation, this talk offers a theory of poetic “postures” in the Abolitionist imagination, in order to encounter Robinson’s “The Negro Girl” anew. What does the paradigmatic posture of Abolitionism, Josiah Wedgwood’s famous kneeling figure, suggest about the power and limits of apostrophic address in Robinson’s poem?
Dr. Carmen Faye Mathes is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Regina, Canada, on Treaty 4 lands.
Dr Mathes is the author of Poetic Form and Romantic Provocation (Stanford University Press, 2022) and has published articles in Representations, Studies in Romanticism, European Romantic Review and elsewhere. Her next project takes up figurative postures for labour and longing in poetry from across a very long-eighteenth century.
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