Ethical and Unethical Relationships
Carolyn Dever: “Speculative Biography: What Edith Knew”
Was Edith Cooper, the younger of the Michael Field poets, “groomed” by her aunt, lover, and coauthor? Why have critics been reluctant to address this possibility? By uncoupling Michael Field through speculative biography, Carolyn Dever asks what’s at stake in our selective interpretation of Victorian women's sexuality.
Camille Stallings: ‘Friendship and the Treatment of the “Insane”: Dickens’s David Copperfield and Social Justice’
In this talk, I argue that the Victorian novel regularly theorises friendship as an ethical praxis. This holds true across genres, including satire, realism, and sensation and detective fiction. Tonight, I take up one specific case study to test this theory: The patchwork friend–family comprised of David Copperfield, Betsey Trotwood, and Mr Dick. I contend that Dickens’s serialised novel, David Copperfield, engages dialogically with the periodical and newspaper presses in calling for ‘insane’ asylum reform. Methodologically, I am interested in how literary forms generate a dialectic that presses issues of social justice to the fore of cultural and political discourse.
This page was last updated on 18 March 2025
