Monday 28th October 2024
Venue: Online
8-9pm GMT
Join us for the second digital event exploring the life and work of Mary Robinson. This month, it ties into our Gothic programme, focusing on Robinson as a Gothic writer.
“Were I to describe one half of what I suffered during fifteen months’ captivity, the world would consider it as the invention of a novel” – Mary Robinson, Memoirs
From the mid-1780s onwards, Mary Robinson wrote to support herself. Against the odds, she successfully reinvented herself as a writer, publishing 15 collections of poetry, 7 novels, as well as radical political and feminist essays, and countless more works in newspapers and journals. She wrote in many styles, but was preoccupied with Gothic, at its height in the 1790s, working Gothic motifs into her novel and even styling her autobiography as Gothic romance. In this talk, Professor Jerrold Hogle discusses Robinson’s use of the Gothic from 1792 to 1800, where she wrote in a mode that she knew would “sell” but where she also articulated several of the conflicts among beliefs in the Western world of the 1790s, including unresolved quandaries about class, race, gender roles, and male dominance in human relationships.
About the speaker: Professor Hogle is an Emeritus Professor and University Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University of Arizona. The winner of Guggenheim, Mellon, and other fellowships for research – and recently the Distinguished Scholar Award of the Keats-Shelley Association of America – he has published extensively on English Romantic literature, literary and cultural theory, and the many different forms of the Gothic. His most recent book, Mary Robinson and the Gothic, was published by Cambridge Elements last year.
Tickets: £6
