Portuguese Cultural Events, 8 and 11 December 2020

Echoes of 18th-Century Spanish Literature in the British Romantic Press, 4 December 2020 – Seminar write-up

This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2020-2021.

The final seminar talk of the Semester 1 Modern Languages Core Disciplinary Research Group series took place on Friday 4^th December. The seminar, ‘Echoes of 18^th-century Spanish literature in the British Romantic Press’, was presented by Dr Leticia Villamediana (Hispanic Studies, University of Warwick).

Dr Villamediana began by contextualising her research, explaining that it is part of a larger project with universities in the UK and Spain. The project, ‘Hispanic Literature in the British Romantic Periodical Press: Appropriating and Rewriting the Canon’, aims to build a map of British Hispanism in the Romantic period by exploring Hispanic literature featured in the British periodical press between 1802 and 1832. Reviews of Spanish literature in British periodicals helped to broaden readers’ knowledge of foreign culture and played a role in shaping public opinion.

British interest in Spanish history, culture and literature emerged only in the beginning of the 19^th century, the cause of this being the Peninsular War. In the eyes of Great Britain, Spanish literature had previously been regarded as backward and the antithesis of Enlightenment ideals. However, during the Romantic era, reviews of Spanish literature and other foreign works began to appear more prominently in British periodical publications, such as Richard Phillip’s The Monthly Magazine. Periodicals such as these aimed to show the progression of the liberal arts in different countries and published a list of Spanish works and authors. Over time, the section increased, showing the growing interest in the field. The press gave a positive review of Spain and praised its literary progress. Robert Southey, a leading Hispanist of the Romantic period, was a notable contributor to these periodicals. He translated many Spanish Romance texts, wrote a History of the Peninsular War, and was responsible for the publication of a new section on Spanish poetry in The Monthly Magazine.

Continue reading →

The Contact Zones of Disease, 16 October 2020 – Seminar write-up

Leave a Reply

This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2020-2021.

On Friday 16^th October 2020, Dr Steven Wilson (French, QUB) gave a talk on his research on ‘The Contact Zones of Disease: Sites of Infection and Contagion in the Nineteenth-Century French Syphilis Narrative’. This seminar talk was the first of the Semester 1 Modern Languages Core Disciplinary Research Group series. The talk centred on how we use the language of infection, infestation and warfare to talk about the diseased body, the concept of borders in our understanding of disease, and the representations of syphilis in 19^th century French literature.

Credit: A shield to protect against syphilis represented as a skull. Lithograph, 1924/1930. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

I found the introduction of the talk to be particularly interesting as, using an example from Donald Trump, Dr Wilson described how the American President uses the language of infestation to talk about immigrants, saying that they ‘infest’ the country. This language would normally be used to describe a poisonous insect or animal, but Trump uses it to express his fear of immigrants crossing the border and, more importantly, to mark them as a threat to public health. Derogatory language like this is unpleasant to hear, but it is not a new concept. For centuries, we have been using the language of infectious diseases to describe the borders and boundaries that mediate human contact. Even now, amidst the coronavirus pandemic, travellers crossing borders must quarantine to prevent the spread of the disease, and positive cases are forced to isolate. All of this causes us to regard the diseased body as the dangerous body, something that must be contained in order to protect the lives of others, and a border as something that keeps us safe. Moreover, Western societies are obsessed with the image of disease-carrying immigrants and feel threatened by the idea of the ‘contact zone’, or the spaces where cultures meet. The deadliest pandemic of the 20^th century was called the Spanish influenza as the first cases were diagnosed in Spain, and even today, we have the ‘Chinese virus’, as labelled by Trump. These examples highlight how the language of borders is deeply ingrained in how diseases are represented and understood.

Continue reading →