Temporalities and the Body in A Laodicean

A Keynote Lecture by Professor Pamela Gilbert for the Thomas Hardy Society Conference 2021

Wednesday 14th July at 9.15am

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"It is very dreadful to be denounced as a barbarian".

In A Laodicean; or, The Castle of the De Stancys. A Story of To-Day, Hardy explores the relatinship between past and present, the romantic other and the alienated modern self. In various inscriptions - architectural, artistic, bodily - Hardy shows the simultaneously truthful and deceptive qualities of modernity's identifications and disidentifications with history.

Pamela K. Gilbert is Albert Brick Professor of English at the University of Florida. She is a former chair of the English Department there and a recent recepient of a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship. She received her PhD in English from the University of Southern California in 1994. Her current monograph project is on skin in the nineteenth century.

Professor Gilbert's research interests include gender, the Victorian novel, the body, Victorian cultural and medical history, and medical humanities. Her many distinguished publications include Cholera and Nation (SUNY Press, 2008), The Citizen’s Body (Ohio State University Press, 2007), and Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels (Cambridge University Press, 1997). She is the editor of the Companion to Sensation Fiction (Blackwell, 2011), and she currently edits the book series Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (SUNY Press); she is also co-associate editor of the recent Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature.

Tickets: For those who are not attending the conference in its entirety - £10 (£8 for THS Members)