Session 2 - Figures of marginality (chair: Isabelle Roblin)

COLLOQUE INTERNATIONAL ANNUEL
SOCIETE D ETUDE ANGLAISES CONTEMPORAINES

The (Neo-)Historical in British Literature and Visual Arts (20th-21st c.)

Siobhan O’Connor (independent scholar), “Men, Moors and Manchester: Masculinity and Post-National Histories in Benjamin Myers’ The Gallows Pole and Ian McGuire’s The Abstainer”

In this talk, Siobhan O’Connor discusses how the two novels under study re-imagine places, people and acts that have been marginalised in Britain’s historical imagination and can thus be read as neo-historical fictions that contribute to contemporary discourses around geography, gender, and class and ask important questions about what place, community and identity might mean in a post-British Britain.

Georges Letissier (Nantes Université, France), “Prurient sapience: Tom Crewe’s genealogy of gay culture in The New Life (2023)”

Georges Letissier engages with Tom Crewe’s approach to the (neo) historical novel as the young novelist takes up an authentic source, Sexual Inversion (1897), a medical textbook, co-authored by John Addington Symonds and Henry Havelock Ellis, to (mostly) imagine the encounter between the two men and document the different steps of their collaboration, suggesting that there is more to history than what is actualised by facts recorded by historians.  

Peter D. Mathews (University of Macau, China), “Imogen Hermes Gowar’s The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock: Rethinking the Eighteenth-Century Marriage Plot”

Peter D. Mathews focuses here on a contemporary novel that revisits the 18th-century the marriage-plot, showing parallels between marriage and prostitution.