Ben Wilkinson-Turnbull and Lawrence Masakazu Yoneta will present short research papers in a lunchtime seminar slot from 1 to 2pm in room G.H01 of the Arts Complex on Woodland Road. Details below.
Dr Ben Wilkinson-Turnbull (Bristol): The Correspondence of Hannah More to William Wilberforce: An Introduction to the Digital Edition
Hannah More (1745-1833) was an educational pioneer, abolitionist, anti-feminist, best-selling writer, and was at the forefront of literary culture for nearly fifty years. More’s correspondents were some of the most prominent politicians, intellectuals, authors, and actors of the age. And yet for nearly two hundred years scholars have remained reliant on William Robert’s Correspondence of Hannah More (1833), which mingled (or rather mangled) biography with More’s selected letters and frequently censored their contents.
This paper introduces The Collected Letters of Hannah More, led by Dr Kerri Andrews, and the project’s work to transform More’s reputation and literary legacy by editing and publishing all of More’s 1800 surviving letters as a digital edition. As MHRA Research Fellow on the project, Ben is editing and producing a digital edition of More’s letters to the abolitionist and MP William Wilberforce. This talk will introduce the project, share some of its preliminary findings, and consider how More’s letters to Wilberforce provide a case study of a more inclusive approach to textual encoding, one that engages with the metalanguage of race and class to highlight the presence of marginalized groups.
Dr Ben Wilkinson-Turnbull is MHRA Research Fellow in English at the University of Bristol. His research focuses on book history, women’s writing from the mid sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries, race, and digital humanities.
Dr Lawrence Masakazu Yoneta (Shirayuri): Embracing the Romantic Other: Shelley’s Nationalist Poetics of Love in ‘The Coliseum’
In November 1818, Percy Bysshe Shelley began to compose a rare prose narrative during his stay in Rome: ‘The Coliseum’. Set in contemporary Italy, this narrative features an enigmatic male character called the Stranger. He wears an ancient Greek chlamys, speaks Greek and Latin but not modern Italian, and haunts the ruins in the Forum or the Coliseum at night as if a ghost from antiquity. I will examine the Stranger’s role within the symbolic geographical framework of the narrative. The character’s linguistic markers of nationalism allow us to interpret ‘The Coliseum’ in light of Shelley’s Platonic dialectic between the ancient south and the modern north. I will also compare the characterisation of the Stranger with the heroine in Germaine de Staël’s Corinne (1807). Their subtle yet distinctive similarities illuminate a new discursive nexus of Romantic nationalism in the domain of travel writing.
Lawrence Masakazu Yoneta is an Associate Professor at Shirayuri University, Japan. He earned his PhD in 2015 from the University of Bristol, where his thesis explored the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s reception of Greek antiquity. His first monograph in English, Shelley’s Poetical Metamorphosis: Physicality, Temporality and Greek Antiquity, is under contract with Routledge. His recent work includes an essay on Shelley’s Italian experience published in the European Romantic Review. He is currently a Visiting Research Associate at the School of Humanities, Bristol, sponsored by Professor Ralph Pite.