Veronica Alfano is a Research Fellow at Macquarie University. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on Victorian poetry and poetics, with particular interests in gender, genre, memory, and media studies. Her first book is titled The Lyric in Victorian Memory: Poetic Remembering and Forgetting from Tennyson to Housman. With Andrew Stauffer, she is co-editor of the essay collection Virtual Victorians: Networks, Connections, Technologies; with Lee O’Brien, she edited the Summer 2019 special issue of Victorian Poetry. In 2018, her article “Technologies of Forgetting: Phonographs, Lyric Voice, and Rossetti’s Woodspurge” was awarded the Donald Gray Prize. She leads the Poetry Caucus of the North American Victorian Studies Association, and her current projects focus on Tennyson’s Maud, on Lear’s limericks, and on neologisms in the poetry of Hardy and Hopkins.
At ELS 2020, Veronica will talk on The Lyric in Victorian Memory: Mnemonic Nostalgia in Rossetti and Housman.
Talk Abstract
Lyric poems, unlike the novels that dominate the Victorian literary scene, resist the teleological drive of plot and vainly pursue stasis and atemporality. Brevity and patterns of formal repetition, which disrupt a poem’s capacity for depicting progressive action, also impress that poem on the reader’s memory. Thus Victorian lyricists, whose verses often lament the elusive nature of remembrance, also tend to write highly mnemonic poems – and so to pursue permanence both by dwelling on vanished beauty and by asking to be recalled. These desires are especially notable in the nineteenth century, because lyric is itself a site of cultural nostalgia in an age of realistic prose. Christina Rossetti, using exaggerated lyricism and numbed retrospection to subvert the figure of the unambitious and over-sentimental Victorian “poetess,” presents memorable poems that undermine their speakers’ humble requests to be forgotten; in contrast, A. E. Housman – despite the nostalgic tone and formally mnemonic stanzas of A Shropshire Lad – tends to grant individual remembrance neither to the lads he commemorates nor to the poems in his iterative volume. Through readings of Rossetti and Housman, I propose that lyric is the key to comprehending this era’s fascination with mourning and memorializing the past. Victorian lyric’s navigation between the desire to recapture lost time and the reality of inevitable transience yields unstable forms of memory that are shot through with amnesia. Poetic reminiscence thus echoes what Richard Terdiman calls the nineteenth-century “memory crisis” – that is, a secular and industrial era’s simultaneous dislocation from and longing for the past.
Asha Varadharajan (http://ashavaradharajan.org) is Associate Professor of English at Queen’s University in Canada. She is the author of Exotic Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said, and Spivak. Her current research reconceptualizes the category of the refugee and the realm of “refugeedom.” Her most recent publications comment on the crisis of the humanities, the subaltern in contemporaneity, violence against women and the discourse of human rights, decolonizing pedagogy, postcolonial temporalities, humanitarian intervention, and the legacy of The Frankfurt School. The most fun she has had writing was while composing her entry on Eric Idle for the Dictionary of Literary Biography. The most chuffed she has been lately was when her students nominated her for the W.J. Barnes Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching.
At ELS 2020, Dr. Varadharajan will deliver a talk on Making History Rhyme with Hope: Revisioning Race in and For Our Times.
Hsu-Ming Teo is a literary novelist and cultural historian based in the English Department at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her first novel Love and Vertigo (2000) won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award and was shortlisted for several other awards. It has been translated into Chinese, Thai, German and Italian. Her second novel Behind the Moon (2005) was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards. She is working on her third novel.
Her academic publications include Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels (2012), and the edited books The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction (2020), The Popular Culture of Romantic Love in Australia (ASP 2017), and Cultural History in Australia (UNSW 2003). She has published a range of articles on the history of travel, Orientalism, imperialism, fiction, and popular culture. She is an associate editor of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies and an editorial board member of the Journal of Australian Studies.
Writing Love and Vertigo
In this presentation, Hsu-Ming Teo will talk about her creative practice researching and writing her award-winning novel, focusing particularly on: characterization, narrative technique, and structure. She will then address thematic issues raised in the novel, such as romantic love, feminism, patriarchy, the stresses of immigration, Asian Australian identity, the changing meaning of multiculturalism, and the problematic issue of Orientalism and self-Orientalising gestures in the novel. The talk will conclude with a brief discussion of the reception of the novel before opening up to questions from the audience.
