In the context of the current viral pandemic, we look with fresh intensity at figurations of the invalid and of disease and disability in James’s fictional and non-fictional writing. With an eye to the cultural and political aspects of public health measures aimed at managing the spread of an infectious pathogen, we ask in particular about the relation in James’s work of sickness, subjectivity and society. How do James’s texts relate social experience to bodily ill-health or impairment? Does James position the invalid as a figure indicative of dysfunction in the larger social body, or suggest, in contrast, that illness or disability may be associated with an excess of social contact, a failure of ‘social distancing’?

Outlander as Crime Fiction: Murder and Mystery in the Outlander and Lord John Series (Edited Collection)

Erin E. MacDonald, Ph.D., Fanshawe College

            Marx and Engels famously use the term lumpenproletariat to describe “that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society.” The concept suggests that the most marginal are not part of the revolutionary class but are in fact more likely to function as a “bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.” As Raphael Samuel noted, the word came to function as an “unproblematic term of abuse” in early twentieth-century Communist discourse, suggesting a relation between political unreliability and moral failings. The precarious were not merely represented as a threat to radical movements but as personally contemptible in ways that drew on conservative ideas of the undeserving poor.

The English theatre culture from the early Restoration to the early 18th century witnessed a marked shift towards increased commercialization and popularization of theatre. Gone were the post-1660 close association with the court, royalist productions, and prominently elite (well-off and upper-class) audiences. Instead, the experimentation with new genres, opening of new theatres, and a growing differentiation of the theatre programme into mainpieces, entr’acte entertainments and afterpieces revolutionized the established cultural hierarchies of the period.

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

Women and music in the early modern age  

Queluz National Palace

July 2nd - 4th, 2021

Organization:

Divino Sospiro – Centro de Estudos Musicais Setecentistas de Portugal 

Scientific Committee:

Cristina Fernandes, Giuseppina Raggi, Iskrena Yordanova,

Ricardo Bernardes, José Camões, Francesco Cotticelli, Paologiovanni Maione