Talk by Dr Páraic Finnerty: " 'On the walls of her own room hung framed portraits of Mrs Browning, George Eliot, and Carlyle': Dickinson, heroes and hero-worship"

The EARN (Enlightenment and Romanticism Network, Taiwan) is pleased to announce that Dr Páraic Finnerty will deliver the 36th EARN public lecture, titled "'On the walls of her own room hung framed portraits of Mrs Browning, George Eliot, and Carlyle': Dickinson, heroes and hero-worship" on Monday, 24 October, 2022. All are welcome.

Topic: "On the walls of her own room hung framed portraits of Mrs Browning, George Eliot, and Carlyle": Dickinson, heroes and hero-worship (Online)

Speaker: Páraic Finnerty (the School of Area Studies, History, Politics, and Literature, University of Portsmouth)

Chair: Hsu Li-hsin (English, NCCU)

Time: 4-6 pm (Taipei Standard Time) Monday October 24

Venue: online (for further details, please email Carolyn / 109551003@g.nccu.edu.tw)

Abstract: This talk focuses on the framed portraits of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, and Thomas Carlyle that hung on Emily Dickinson’s bedroom wall during the last years of her life. It explores Dickinson’s usually ignored reverence for Carlyle and provides a new angle from which to view her well-known admiration for Barrett Browning and Eliot. Dickinson’s portrait gallery summons up Carlyle’s conviction that biographies and visual representations of eminent figures were culturally important sources of emulation but contests his exclusively male-centered approach to heroes and hero-worship. By visually positioning Barrett Browning and Eliot with Carlyle, Dickinson celebrates these women writers not just as her idols but as figures equivalent to Carlyle’s heroes. Her interconnection of these three writers evokes Carlyle’s influence on Barrett Browning and Eliot and their respective challenges to his ideas. Evidence in her writings suggests that Dickinson also responded critically to the masculinist tenor of Carlyle’s writings, even though his views about authorship, fame, and publication helpfully justified her role as a non-publishing poet.

Bio: Páraic Finnerty is Reader in English and American Literature and Associate Head (R&I) of che School of Area Studies, History, Politics, and Literature, University of Portsmouth. He is the author of Emily Dickinson’s Shakespeare (2006), co-author of Victorian Celebrity Culture and Tennyson’s Circle (2013), and author of Dickinson and her British Contemporaries: Victorian Poetry in Nineteenth-Century America, forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press.