British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
14TH BRITISH ACADEMY POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP SYMPOSIUM
Abstract
Writing in Dissent: Stories of Unitarianism, 1774-1865
Dr Felicity James
This talk will give some examples - from ribald cartoons to the 'old-world stories' of Cranford - of constructions and perceptions of Unitarian literary identity across the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. From Edmund Burke disparaging the 'hortus siccus of dissent', to William Hazlitt commenting that 'it would be vain to strew the flowers of poetry round the borders of Unitarian controversy', Rational Dissent has not always been seen as the natural home of the creative imagination. Recent criticism, however, has been rediscovering the crucial importance of Dissent in forming the culture of the period. My research project, building on the work of Kathryn Gleadle, Isabel Rivers, and Daniel E. White, amongst others, aims to restore our sense of its lively literary culture, through a study of several Unitarian communities and families for whom reading and writing was central.
Looking at individual case studies, I explore how a Dissenting religious identity might have aesthetic implications, in terms of a writer's choice of genre, form, allusion, voice and tone. In my larger project, I trace this through different genres from the eighteenth into the mid-nineteenth centuries – looking at sermons, political rhetoric, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's conversation poems such as 'Reflections in Retirement', periodicals such as the Monthly Magazine, epic poems such as Anna Letitia Barbauld's Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, and novels and tales by Harriet Martineau and Elizabeth Gaskell. While striving toward an optimistic progress narrative of unity and harmony, I suggest, the Unitarian literary model also simultaneously looks back to darker days of persecution, fear, and difference.
Felicity James is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford. Her research interests centre around reading, response and allusion in the Romantic period, with a particular interest in Unitarian communities of readers and writers. Her book, Charles Lamb, Coleridge, Wordsworth: Reading Friendship in the 1790s is forthcoming from Palgrave, 2008. Together with Tim Milnes, she organised a conference 'At Home with Charles and Mary Lamb' in Oxford in November 2006. She is also working on reinterpretations of Austen in fiction and film, and on Charles and Mary Lamb's readings of Shakespeare.