Date: Wednesday 27th March 2019

Time: 3pm - 5.30pm

Location: GM337, Geoffrey Manton Building

Tickets: Free - just turn up!

Schedule

• 3 – 3.45: Dr Richard Leahy (University of Chester), ‘Erddig, The Servants’ Hall: Poetry, Portraits and Power Dynamics’
• 3.45 – 4.00: Tea and coffee
• 4.00 – 5.30: Lucy Allen (University of Manchester), 'A Gothic Arch: Emotion, Medievalism, and Weddings in Britain, 1870-1910'.  Andreea Ros (Manchester Metropolitan University), ‘Modernity and Scientific Rationality in Fin-de-siècle Vampire Fiction’

Biographies and Abstracts

Dr Richard Leahy (University of Chester), ‘Erddig, The Servants’ Hall: Poetry, Portraits and Power Dynamics’

When considering long nineteenth-century master/servant relations, it is easy to envision the dominant perception of divisions of repose and labour, upstairs and downstairs, and family and staff; however, Erddig Hall in North Wales suggests a much more liminal division within the household that marks it as a particularly unique example of stewardship. Six different generations of Yorke family, who owned the house from 1733, commissioned portraits and photographs of their servants, while also penning their own accompanying verse dedicated to the household. Yet, there were also some servants whose histories have been glossed over by the Yorkes, which when exposed suggest a much more nuanced social relationship than simply benevolent masters and grateful servants. This paper aims to explore this relationship through a wider appreciation of the Yorkes’ contexts, a literary analysis of the poetry, and an exploration of the archival material they left behind. Through this examination, I hope to address ideas of identity, subservience and legacy in an attempt to figure out exactly why these masters did so much for their servants.

Dr Richard Leahy is a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Chester, where he also gained his PhD in 2016. His first book, Literary Illumination, was published in 2018 by University Wales Press. His research interests include technology and literature, the long nineteenth century, and critical theory.

Lucy Allen (University of Manchester), 'A Gothic Arch: Emotion, Medievalism, and Weddings in Britain, 1870-1910'.

Lucy Allen is a postgraduate at Manchester University working on weddings in the long nineteenth century.

Andreea Ros (Manchester Metropolitan University), ‘Modernity and Scientific Rationality in Fin-de-siècle Vampire Fiction’

The publication of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s short-story ‘Good Lady Ducayne’ in 1896 and of The Blood of the Vampire by Florence Marryat and Dracula by Bram Stoker a year later signal that the 1890s were a decisive moment in the evolution of English-language vampire fiction. The sudden popularity of texts about dangerously contagious forces threatening England has been read as indicative of cultural anxieties over the precariousness of modernity and, in particular, its dual reliance on scientific rationality and imperial conquest. This paper seeks to complicate readings of modernity under threat in fin-de-siècle vampire fiction by arguing that vampire fiction portrays scientific knowledge and practice as at odds with modernity. I demonstrate this through a comparative close-reading of portrayal of blood transfusions and medical professionals in notable vampire fiction by Braddon, Marryat and Stoker and 1880s medical and popular press. Furthermore, I seek to place vampire fiction without a larger trend of anti-rational or anti-scientific thinking at the turn of the century in order to raise broader questions about how we read representations of scientific knowledge in Gothic fiction.

Andreea Ros is a PhD student at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research deals primarily with how depictions of contagion in Gothic fiction reflect, reshape and reinforce medical knowledge and public attitudes towards disease.