CSDI - The Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior, based at the Royal College of Art in London, brings together three institutions: the Royal College of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Bedford Centre for the History of Women at Royal Holloway, University of London. Launched in September 2001, its goal is to develop new histories of the home, its contents, and its representation. It pursues research into the changing appearance and layout of rooms in a range of buildings, from tenements to palaces; the objects that furnished those rooms; the ways rooms and objects were depicted; the manner in which people used them; and how they thought about them.

Literature and the Domestic Interior

Victoria & Albert Museum, London
23 October 2004

PROGRAMME

Saturday, 23 October

10.00-10.20 Registration and Coffee
10.20-10.30 Introduction

10.30-12.30 First Session: Locating the Domestic
Chair: A V (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Catherine Richardson (Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham)
‘Early Modern Plays and Domestic Spaces’

Charles Rice (University of New South Wales, Sydney)
‘Immersion and Rupture: Walter Benjamin’s Literary Interior’

Charlotte Grant (AHRB Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior)
‘Reading the House of Fiction: From Object to Interior, 1720-1920’

Morag Shiach (Queen Mary, University of London)
'Woolf and Richardson: The Modernist Home and Urban Space'

12.00-12.30 Discussion

12.30-1.30 Lunch

1.30-3.00 Second Parallel Session I: The Social and Domestic I
Chair: Corinna Russell (Emmanuel College, Cambridge)

Sophia Pickford (St. John’s College, Cambridge)
‘Imagining the Historical Interior: The French Renaissance Chateau through Sixteenth-Century Literature’

Claire Lamont (University of Newcastle)
‘Jane Austen’s Public Rooms’

Sara Thornton (UCL)
‘When the sofa won’t float: Furniture, Characterization and Politics in Henry James’s The Bostonians’

1.30-3.00 Second Parallel Session II: Narrative and Progress?
Chair: Karen Lipsedge (University of Kingston)

Thad Logan (Rice University)
'How (and Why) to Write a Room: Nineteenth-Century Novels and the Domestic Interior'

Ruth Livesey (Royal Holloway)
'Slums, Model Dwellings and the People: Mrs Humphrey Ward, Walter Besant and the Question of Interiority'

Nicola Wilson (University of Warwick)
‘Reproducing the Home in Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers’

2.30-3.00 Discussion

3.00-3.20 Tea

3.20-4.50 Third Parallel Session I: Social and Domestic 2
Chair: Markman Ellis (Queen Mary, University of London)

Ailsa Boyd
‘The Search for Home in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth’

Marilyn Casto (Virginia Tech. University)
'Imagined Space: Interiors in the Work of L. M. Montgomery'

Genevieve Preston-Chavez (Huntington Library)
‘Stella Gibbon's Cold Comfort Farm and the Modern Interior’

3.20-4.50 Third Parallel Session II: Art and the Aesthetic
Chair: Francesca Berry (University of Warwick)

Geoffrey Gilbert (American University of Paris)
‘"Ma maison, vous ne l’ignorez pas, est la maison des artistes": Naturalism, Modernism, and the Domestic Place of Art

Guiliana Pieri (Royal Holloway, University of London)
‘Gabriele D'Annunzio and the Italian fin-de-siecle Interior'

Victoria Rosner (Texas A&M University)
‘Framing Dorian Gray’

4.30-4.50 Discussion

4.50-5.40 Representation and Interpretation
Final Discussion with coffee & tea
Chair: Jeremy Aynsley (Royal College of Art)
Discussants: Michèle Barrett (Queen Mary, University of London)
and Christopher Breward (Victoria & Albert Museum)

GENERAL INFORMATION

The symposium will take place at the Victoria & Albert Museum and will begin in Seminar Room 1, accessible from the Silver Gallery (level 3). Subsequent sessions will be held in both Seminar Room 1 (formerly the Jean Muir Seminar Room) and Seminar Room A of the Research Department. Registration begins at 10.00 AM, when the Museum opens.

Registration
Fees: Full price - £40, Student price - £20. Fee includes sandwich lunch, morning coffee and afternoon tea.

Registration is done by prebooking. (Bookings are being accepted until October15th, 2004). Payment can be made by credit card or cheque made out to Royal College of Art. Please download the booking form and return with payment to AHRB Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior, Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London, UK SW7 2EU.

For further information contact the AHRB Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior, csdi@rca.ac.uk; t. +44 (0)207 590 4183; f. +44 (0)207 4580.

This event is organized by the AHRB Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior (Royal College of Art, Victoria & Albert Museum, and Royal Holloway, University of London).