2020

We’re delighted to welcome Prof. Sukanya Banerjee for the first of our 2020 Provincialism at Large events. Prof. Banerjee (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), will be giving a masterclass and evening lecture as a joint event with Royal Holloway Centre for Victorian Studies.

Sukanya Banerjee is the author of Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire (2010, awarded the NVSA Sonya Rudikoff Prize for best first book in Victorian Studies), and the co-editor of New Routes for Diaspora Studies (2012). Her articles have also appeared in journals such as Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, and Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies.

The masterclass is entitled ‘”Nation”, “Home” and “Empire” in Victorian Studies’, and will be taking place on Thursday 13th February at 2-3pm in Room IN029 (International Building, Egham campus). The talk will be taking place on the same day at 6-7.30pm in the Moore Annexe Lecture Theatre (Egham campus).

Readings for the masterclass (pdfs below): Burton, A. (1997), Who Needs the Nation? Interrogating ‘British’ History. Journal of Historical Sociology, 10: 227-248. doi:10.1111/1467-6443.00039

Banerjee, Sukanya. “Transimperial.” Victorian Literature and Culture 46, no. 3-4 (2018): 925–28. doi:10.1017/S1060150318001195

transimperial Download

burton-1997-journal_of_historical_sociology Download

Register for free tickets via Eventbrite:

Masterclass: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/masterclass-nation-home-and-empire-in-victorian-studies-tickets-90520779087.

Evening talk: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/sukanya-banerjee-title-tbc-tickets-90521188311.

Lecture 6pm: Colonial Economies, Consumer Loyalty, and the Transimperial

Can the expansive demands of the free market be reconciled with more sedimented yearnings for the “local,” the “provincial”? In revisiting this classic-and abiding question-this talk studies the relation between late-nineteenth-century India and Britain, considering how an idiom of consumer loyalty negotiates the tense relation between free trade and incipient notions of territoriality and nationalism.

Seminars: Provincialism At Large

During 2019-20 the project will be hosting a series of speakers exploring the idea of provincialism, regionalism, and scale across the nineteenth century. The seminars are a collaboration between Royal Holloway Centre for Victorian Studies and Centre for Geohumanities and explore the concepts underlying the project through interdisciplinary conversations, ‘at large’ across the circulating imperial networks of nineteenth-century provincial thinking. We are very grateful to the organisers of the long-running ‘Landscape Surgery’ programme in the Department of Geography for their support in programming this year.

Seminars Autumn Term 2019: 9/10/2019; 19/11/2019 in conjunction with Landscape Surgery

Josephine McDonagh (University of Chicago): ‘Provincialism, Multilingualism and the Novel: early nineteenth century migration to South America and Jane Eyre’

Wednesday 9^th October 2019 2-4pm, 11 Bedford Square 1-03

Suggested reading: McDonagh, ‘Rethinking Provincialism in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Our Village to Villette’, Victorian Studies 55 (2013): 399-424. doi:10.2979/victorianstudies.55.3.399 http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/victorianstudies.55.3.399 or email ruth.livesey@rhul.ac.uk.

Katrina Navickas (University of Hertfordshire): ‘Customary rights, property and contested belongings in English commons and village greens, 1795-1965’.

Tuesday 19^th November 2019 2-4pm 11 Bedford Square 1.01

Abstract: This paper examines contested customary rights and landownership of commons and village greens in England in the 19th and 20th centuries. The 1965 Commons Registration act sought to map definitively the extent of common land and associated rights in England and Wales, but it was a flawed piece of legislation. Its implementation revealed the widespread difficulties of defining a common, its rights and its ownership, much of which has still not been resolved today. Some of those disputes stretched back into the 19th century and earlier. This paper takes as its focus the case studies of the 1795 court case about the village green of Steeple Bumpstead, Essex, and the contested ownership history of Wisley Common, Surrey, from the 19th century through to the 1965 legislation and the present day. It feeds into current academic and popular debates about land reform and legislation. What do such cases tell us about local and regional identities, and popular ideas of the commons and common rights? Why did people still claim common rights in 1965, and today?

Suggested further reading: Fitch vs Rawling, Fitch & Chatteris, 4 Feb. 1795, English Law Review, 126, p. 614-618

126-e.r.-614_bumstead_commons-case-1795 Download

Project Partner: The George Eliot Fellowship

George Eliot Fellowship Tour, 2016 at Chilvers Coton Church

The George Eliot Fellowship, a charity based in Eliot’s home town of Nuneaton, is run by tireless volunteers who work to promote Eliot’s work and preserve her legacy. You can find out about all the activities the GEF are undertaking for Eliot’s bicentenary on the charity’s website and Eliot bicentenary planner here. The project team will be working with the GEF to commemorate Eliot’s writing of provincial life through workshops for teachers and a designed a co-produced learning pack on Eliot for Key Stage 3 in the autumn of 2019.

Ruth Livesey, Principal Investigator

Ruth is Principal Investigator of the AHRC Leadership Fellowship, ‘Provincialism: Literature and the Cultural Politics of Middleness in Nineteenth-Century Britain’. She is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature and Thought in the Department of English, Royal Holloway, University of London. Her work adapting and co-writing the Great Middlemarch Mystery with Josephine Burton forms part of the larger AHRC funded engagement project ‘Finding Middlemarch in Coventry 2021′.

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Welcome

This is the home page for the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded projects ‘Provincialism: Literature and the Cultural Politics of Middleness in Nineteenth-Century Britain‘ and ‘Finding Middlemarch in Coventry, 2021 – 2022‘.

Finding Middlemarch in Coventry, 2021 – 2022

#FindingMiddlemarch

In 2021-2022 we continue Eliot’s legacy as we celebrate the 150th anniversary of her novel ‘Middlemarch’, with public events in the year in which Coventry itself is UK City of Culture. Through our current project we will reimagine Eliot’s radical artistic vision of ‘provincial life’ in the Midlands through creative participation workshops and projects in Coventry including a collaborative online exhibition with Nuneaton Art Gallery and Museum and Coventry Archives, an immersive multi-location theatre experience with Dash Arts, and an experimental short film by Redell Olsen. Head over to our Events page to find out how you can get involved.

Provincialism: Literature and the Cultural Politics of Middleness in Nineteenth-Century

During 2019-2020 the project team explored how nineteenth-century writers defined English provincialism. We walked and mapped the countryside around Nuneaton, in North Warwickshire: a place made famous in the novels of provincial life by George Eliot. We brought new readers and writers to the legacy of George Eliot in her bicentenary year through talks, workshops, courses, and teaching packs. Our associated seminar series ‘Provincialism at Large’ featured literary scholars, political theorists, and art historians, working with graduate students to explore what provincialism and the depiction of provincial life meant to the Victorians in an age of imperialism.