The Trace

Rosario Arias

Paper: “The Staging of Neo-Victorianism, or Phenomenological Traces of the Victorian Past”.

22-26 August 2016

Tracing the Victorians: Material Uses of the Past in Neo-Victorianism
This seminar addresses the notion of the ‘trace’, delineated by Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricoeur, to engage with the tangibility of the Victorian past in contemporary culture. The ‘trace’ has attracted renewed critical interest in the last few years, particularly in connection with the interplay of past and present in today’s cultural production. However, the potential of the material object (the trace) to reanimate the past has received scant attention in neo-Victorianism. Papers dealing with the presence and (in)visibility of the Victorian past in contemporary literature and culture, materiality and ‘the sensory turn’, as well as museum studies and thing theory in relation to the Victorian ‘trace’, are particularly encouraged.

• Rosario Arias (University of Málaga, Spain)
• Patricia Pulham (University of Portsmouth, UK)
• Elodie Rousselot (University of Portsmouth, UK)