Enfilade

From St Mary’s University College:

Gothic: Culture, Subculture, Counterculture
Strawberry Hill House, 8-9 March 2013

Proposals due by 30 October 2012

Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, London,
built between 1749 and 1776; restoration completed in 2010

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This conference, held in the Gothic mansion at Strawberry Hill, west London, will interrogate the many and varied cultures of the Gothic that were largely set in train by the owner of this mansion, Horace Walpole, in the mid-eighteenth century. As Walpole’s projects well exemplify – an aesthetic rebellion against a classical orthodoxy, which nonetheless looked implicitly to the restoration of some former social order – Gothic’s cultural poetics have always been difficult to place politically.

To what degree have Gothic tendencies in literature, art, architecture and screen media been participants in, adjuncts to, contesters of, or alternatives to cultural and political mainstreams, and how might such relationships be assessed by historians and critics? If Gothic was the Enlightenment’s naughty, child, to what extent is its rebelliousness mental or political, and is it ultimately co-opted by the order that it appears to resist?

This is a multi-disciplinary conference, and proposals for papers are invited in response to such questions in the fields, amongst others, of literature, screen media, art, architecture and popular culture. Participants will be offered the chance to see Horace Walpole’s Gothic mansion, now resplendent in its recently-renovated state, and to dine there during the conference. Preference will be given to papers that are suitable for an enthusiastic amateur audience, as well as specialists in the appropriate field. A bursary will be offered to cover conference fees for the best proposal by a postgraduate student.

200-word proposals for papers of 20-25 minutes, should be sent, by 30 October 2012 to:
Ms Jessica Jeske
St Mary’s University College
Waldegrave Road
Strawberry Hill
London TW1 4SX
jessica.jeske@smuc.ac.uk

Confirmed Speakers
• Michael Snodin (The Victoria and Albert Museum)
• John Bowen (University of York)
• Avril Horner (Kingston University)
• Allan Simmons (St Mary’s University College, London)