QMCECS offers a programme of early evening seminars with speakers from a range of disciplines. We have six seminars a year, and recent speakers have included Sophie Gee (Princeton), Chloe Wigston-Smith (York), Karen Harvey (Birmingham), and Suvir Kaul (Penn). For a list of speakers in the last five years see the seminar archive.
2024/2025 Seminar Programme
All seminars Tuesdays 17:15–19:00 unless otherwise stated.
Location: QMUL Mile End Campus, Francis Bancroft Building 1. 01. 1.
15 October: Rebecca Anne Barr (Cambridge), Eliza Haywood's She-Comedies
12 November: Gemma Shearwood (York), Tropical Places and Displaced Tropics in the Westminster Abbey Pantheon c.1763 – 1842.
26 November: Nigel Leask (Glasgow). ‘’S mì-chàirdeil am fearann’: Dugald MacNicol’s ‘Barbados Journal’ and Poetry (1809-1816) and the Gaelic Caribbean.
28 January: Fara Dabhoiwala (Princeton), ‘In Search of Francis Williams'
11 February: James K. Chandler (Chicago), 'Lord Byron, Madame de Staël, and Santa Croce Romanticism'.
4 March: Eliza Haughton-Shaw (Cambridge), 'Rationality and Eccentricity in Sarah Fielding’s and Jane Collier’s The Cry (1751)'.
In this paper I will address and negotiate my ambivalence about Sarah Fielding’s and Jane Collier’s The Cry (1751). Conceptually both ambitious and anomalous, the text was described by one early reader as ‘oddly put together’. Its formal heterogeneity boldly transgresses eighteenth-century strictures on decorum, while the extended allegory and uses of neologism traduce Locke’s rules for plain expression. At the same time, The Cry is at points a frustrating read, making its case for breaking with convention in a pedantic fashion and, as one early reader suggests, making it easy at points to ‘see [one’s] self among the detestable Cry’ who, in a representation of the codes of social and domestic behaviour, heckle and squabble over the narratives of the female speakers. The Cry might be described as reluctantly rather than flamboyantly eccentric, and it situates itself unfashionably between radical convention and conformity. Fielding and Collier are explicitly on the side of rationality and against the kind of delinquency, irrelevance and pleasure in excess that we find in the nearly contemporary Tristram Shandy or (in a more conflicted form) in the satires of Pope and Swift. The case that the text makes for transparency and rationality is harder to take pleasure in than the sheer peculiarity of its meta-fictional and meta-textual dimensions.
In this paper, I hope to transform my personal ambivalence about this idiosyncratic text into a source of scholarly enquiry by examining one aspect of the word ‘eccentricity’ in relation to it: texts described as ‘eccentric’ often merit this judgment through a fundamental but possibly engaging failure to meet their own ambitions. I will consider The Cry in relation to theories of language in the mid-century and as part of a more general consideration of the relationship between rationality and eccentricity. My argument will address the difficulty of gendering ‘eccentricity’ more generally, during a period when respectability was still being fought for by women writers and while the novel form was still in development, thus challenging readers’ assessments about normativity, experimentalism and more generally the gendering of critical judgments.
In person at QMUL Mile End Campus, Francis Bancroft Building 1. 01. 1.
Online at https://qmul-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/W0LEsXnrROiFfKneGsW2Rg#/registration
25 March: Maks del Mar (QMUL), 'Lucian's Enlightenment: Moral Philosophy and the Comic Imagination in Eighteenth-Century Scotland'.
8 April: Montaz Marché (Birmingham).
