COLL: « Alliance, Antagonism, Authorship », Scott Conference, 10-13/07/2018

11th Conference of the Walter Scott Society.

Congrès international coordonné par Benjamine Toussaint avec la Walter Scott Society.

Tuesday July 10th (Salle des Actes)

10.00 am onward: registration

2.00 Welcome speech: Pr. Elisabeth Angel-Perez, Director of VALE, Pr. Pascal Aquien, Vice-Dean (Research) of the Faculty of Humanities, Pr. Wilfrid Rotgé, Head of the English Department.

2.30 – 4.00 pm : Opening Plenary : Katie Trumpener (Yale University) : “A long wavering train of light”: The French Revolution and Scott’s Afterlife (John Galt, Alexander Pushkin, Claire de Duras)

4.00 – 4.30 pm : coffee break

4.30 – 6.00 pm: Round table on translation and appropriation of Scott, chaired by Paul Barnaby (Edinburgh University Library), with Annika Bautz (Plymouth University), Kang-yen Chiu (National Yang-Ming University), Marcos Flaminio Peres (University of São Paulo), Céline Sabiron (Université de Lorraine) and Fernando Toda (University of Salamanca).

6. 15 pm : Wine and cheese tasting (Club des enseignants)

Wednesday July 11th

9.30 – 11.30 am Round table (Salle des Actes): “Experiential learning and transdisciplinary pedagogy: University of Wyoming’s study abroad program development at Abbotsford House”, chaired by Mary Katherine Scott (University of Wyoming) with Kirsty Archer-Thompson (Abbotsford), Nicole M. Crawford (University of Wyoming), Darrell D. Jackson (University of Wyoming), Barbara Ellen Logan (University of Wyoming), Alison Lumsden (University of Aberdeen), Susan Oliver (University of Essex), Murray Pittock FRSE (University of Glasgow).

Lunch on your own, tea and coffee available from 1.00 pm

Panel sessions (English Department – G – 2nd Floor)

1.30 – 3.15 pm The Anxiety in Objects: Waterloo Memorabilia at Abbotsford (chair and introduction : Kirsty Archer-Thompson)
Stuart Allan (National Museums Scotland): “This flag was never a French one”: A Waterloo conundrum at Abbotsford.
Paul Barnaby (Edinburgh University Library): One Headless Body, Three Skulls: Scott and the Spoils of Corporal Shaw.
Caroline McCracken-Flesher (University of Wyoming): Cranioklepty and Conversation: Shaw’s Skull and a New Alliance.

1.30 – 3.00 pm Scott and drama (chair: Robert Irvine, University of Edinburgh)
Henri Suhamy (Université de Nanterre): Scott and Shakespeare
Michael Wood (University of Edinburgh): Trials of a ‘Germanized brat’: The House of Aspen, German Models and British Cultural Renewal
Annika Bautz (Plymouth University): The ‘universal favourite’: Daniel Terry’s Guy Mannering; or The Gipsey’s Prophecy (1816)

1.30 – 3.00 pm Gender (chair: Tara Ghoshal Wallace, George Washington University)
Caroline Jackson-Houlston (Oxford Brookes University): Auld Alliance Brexit? Scott and the Moral Legitimacy of Post-1603 Monarchs.
Fiona Price (University of Chichester): Antagonism and Influence: Performance, Gender, the Early Historical Novel and Scott.
Orianne Smith (University of Maryland): Gender and Supernatural Alliance in Scott’s The Bride of Lamermoor and Baillie’s Witchcraft.

3.00 – 3.30 pm coffee break

3.30 – 4.30 pm 21st century Scott (chair: Caroline McCracken-Flesher, University of Wyoming)
Evan Gottlieb (Oregon State University): Senses, Gestures, Chances: Three (More) Ways of Looking at the Waverley Novels.
Anthony Jarrells (University of South Carolina): Capital in the Nineteenth Century (Scott and Picketty).

3.30 – 4.30 pm Antiquarianism and Artefacts (chair: Silvia Mergenthal, University of Konstanz)
Boris Proskurnin and Eugene Tokarev (Perm University): Sir Walter Scott’s The Antiquary: Cultures, History, Art and Narrative Alliances.
Lisa Mckenna (University of Aberdeen): The Remembrancers : objects, artefacts and material culture in Walter Scott’s The Tale of Old Mortality.
3.30 – 4.30 pm Marguerite Charlotte Charpentier (chair: Lesley Graham, Université de Bordeaux )
Kirsty Archer Thompson (Abbotsford): The Fair Unknown: Unmasking Charlotte Charpentier.
Deirdre Shepherd (University of Edinburgh): Loving Allies, Antagonistic Friends: The Life of Marguerite Charlotte Charpentier, Disorderly Outsider.

4.30 – 5.00 pm coffee break

5.00 – 6.30 pm Plenary (Salle des Actes): Alison Lumsden and Gerard Carruthers : the Abbotsford Chapbook Project.

Thursday July 12th

Panel Sessions (English Department – G – 2nd Floor)

9.30 – 10.30 am Scott, French literature & translation (chair: David Hewitt, University of Aberdeen)
Céline Sabiron (Université de Lorraine): Reading Between the (Ridge) Lines in Walter Scott’s Anne of Geierstein : Translating the Mountain in a Transnational, Interlinguistic and Transcultural Context.
Amélie Derome (Université d’Aix-Marseille): Walter Scott’s Lives of the Novelists as prefaces of French retranslations of 18th century British fiction: when affiliation sparks cultural alliance

9.30 – 10.30 am Scott & Buonaparte (chair: Penny Fielding, University of Edinburgh)
Dan Wall (University of Aberdeen): The Peculiar Province of History: re-imagining the past in Scott’s Life of Napoleon Buonaparte.
Lesley Graham (Université de Bordeaux): Alliance and antagonism in Paul’s Letters to his Kinsfolk (1816)

9.30 – 10.30 am Scott and Scottish Fellow Writers (chair: John Pazdziora, Shantou University)
Silvia Mergenthal (University of Konstanz): ‘Giving Scotland Her Own Renaissance’: John Buchan’s Walter Scott
Duncan Hotchkiss (University of Stirling): Scott, Hogg and the ‘birth’ of the short story

10.30 – 11.00 am coffee break

11.00 – 12.30 am Politics (chair: Anthony Jarrells, University of South Carolina)
Konraad Claes (Ghent University): The Patriot Novelist : the Pragmatic Toryism behind the Agonistic Plots of Walter Scott.
Fernando Toda (University of Salamanca): Authorship, Antagonism and Alliance in The Letters of Malachi Malagrowther.
Gretchen Woertendyke (University of South Carolina): Discerning Secrecy

11.00 – 12.30 am God and State (chair: Benjamine Toussaint, Sorbonne Université)
Norman Arthur Fischer (Kent State University): How Scott was willing to offer civil liberties to the two religious groups from which Locke withheld those liberties: radical Protestants and Catholics.
John Patrick Pazdziora (Shantou University): Old Mortality and ‘Old Mortality’ : Stevenson’s Allusion to Scott’s Novel.
Samuel Baker (University of Texas, Austin): ‘Tis Sixty-Three Years Since: The Grand Climacteric and the Climate of Character in Scott’s Chronicles of the Canongate.

11.00 – 12.00 am Scottish Writers and France (chair: Céline Sabiron, Université de Lorraine)
Nancy Moore Gosley (University of Tenessee): Writing ‘Trash’ or Representing Trauma? John Ballantyne as Novelist
Graham Tulloch (Flinders University, Adelaide): Walter Scott, Allan Massie, France and Loyalty

12.30 lunch break on your own, tea and coffee available at 13.30

Panel Sessions (English Department – G – 2nd Floor)

2.00 – 3.00 am Poetry (chair: Ian Alexander, University of Aberdeen)
Alison Lumsden (University of Aberdeen): Creative Conversations : Exploring the Notes to Scott’s Narrative Poems
Ainsley McIntosh : Marmion and ‘the “Mighty Minstrel” of the Antigallican War’

2.00 – 4.00 pm France: Ally or Enemy? (chair: Evan Gottlieb, Oregon State University)
Tara Ghoshal Wallace (George Washington University): Anne of Geierstein and the End of Monarchy
Robert Irvine (University of Edinburgh): The Political Language of Anne of Geierstein
Michael Buck (Indiana Wesleyan University): Antipathy Toward the ‘Auld’ Ally: The Artistic and Intellectual Provenance of Scott’s The Antiquary
Penny Fielding (University of Edinburgh): Post War Scott

2.00 – 3.30 pm Scott’s Legacy (chair: Lucy Wood, University of Edinburgh)
Elena Pinyaeva (Financial University of Moscow): Scott’s historicism and its oblivion in Conrad’s fictional experiment with history: The Rover vs. Quentin Durward.
Ina Ferris (University of Ottawa): A Generic Alliance: The Historical Novel at the Border of Historical Time in Scott and Vargas Llosa.
Kang-yen Chiu (National Yang-Ming University): Reading Ivanhoe at Midnight: Scott and the Rise of Modern Chinese Fiction.

4.00 – 4.30 pm coffee break

4.30 – 6.00 pm Plenary (Salle des Actes) : Gerard Carruthers Robert Burns and Walter Scott: National Antiquarians

Conference Dinner: Le Paprika – 28 avenue Trudaine – 75009 Paris

Friday July 13th

Panel Sessions (English Department – G – 2nd Floor)

9.30 – 11.00 am Outsiders and Dissonant Voices (chair: Ainsley McIntosh)
J.H. (Ian) Alexander (University of Aberdeen): Scott’s Closures.
Anna Fancett (Xi’an Jiaotong University): Reading Against the Grain : Disruption and Alliance on the Narrative Level of the Waverley Novels
Paul Arant (University of Aberdeen): ‘There is no knowing what tricks they have amongst them’: The Romani Heroes in the Novels of Walter Scott

9.30 – 11.00 am Antiquarianism, History & the Arts (chair: Michael Wood, University of Edinburgh)
Lucy Wood (University of Edinburgh): ‘A take that has been told’: Walter Scott and the Honours of Scotland
John Morrison (University of Aberdeen): An end to antagonism: Walter Scott and the painting of pro-British history in Scotland
Susan Frye (University of Wyoming): Material Authorship : Abbotsford and Strawberry Hill

9.30 – 11.00 am Transatlantic Scott (chair: Evan Gottlieb, Oregon State University)
Pauline Pilote (Université de Bretagne Sud): Walter Scott, Mathew Carey and the Transatlantic Publication of the Waverley Novels
Kenneth McNeil (Eastern Connecticut State University): Imagining the Aftermath: Walter Scott, Washington Irving and Collective Memory in the Transatlantic World
Anne Stapleton (University of Iowa): Under the Banner of Waverley : A Transatlantic Phenomenon

11.00 – 11.30 am coffee break

11.30 am – 1.00 pm Closing Plenary (Salle des Actes) : Mary Favret (John Hopkins University): Old Mortality and The Violence of Number.

See you in Edinburgh in 2021!

call of papers

Walter Scott’s ties with France were personal as well as intellectual and artistic. His wife was of French birth and his interest in France was manifested both in his non-fiction (with his Life of Napoleon and the final Series of Tales of a Grand-father) and in his novels, since he chose 15th-century France as the location of his first novel set on the European continent. While Quentin Durward took some time in achieving success in Britain, its French translation, Quentin Durward, ou l’Écossais à la cour de Louis XI was immediately popular and inspired French writers and artists. Victor Hugo, for instance, wrote a laudatory review of the novel in La Muse française, the chief organ of the French Romantic movement, and partly conceived his own Notre-Dame de Paris as a response to it. Eugène Delacroix, one of the foremost French Romantic artists, drew several sketches based on scenes from Scott’s novel and painted L’Assassinat de l’évêque de Liège (The Murder of the Bishop of Liège, 1829, musée du Louvre).
Given that the eleventh international Scott conference will take place in Paris, the Auld Alliance seemed an obvious choice for the general theme of the conference. As the French poet and political writer Alain Chartier declared in 1428, sixty years before the events described in Quentin Durward, ‘this alliance was not written on a sheepskin parchment but engraved in man’s live flesh, written not with ink but with blood’. While these words underline the depth of the relation uniting France and Scotland they also ominously hint at the violent wartime context in which the treaty was concluded for the first time.
The typical pattern of Scott’s plots is one in which the main protagonist is caught in a conflict between two opposite forces embodying different stages in the evolution of society. As a result, antagonism is one aspect of his work that has been the focus of much critical study, especially from a Marxist angle, following Georg Luckács’s seminal work on the historical novel. It might however still be possible to engage in this field by resorting, for instance, to contemporary debates on the values of agonistic rhetorics – which some critics see as a means to justify domination while others, on the contrary, stress “the affirmative dimension of contestation” (Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacements of Politics, 1993: 15). The polyphonic – sometimes even verging on the carnivalesque – quality of Scott’s works has, in the past few decades, been emphasized to qualify earlier critical suggestions that the Waverley Novels were a teleological tale of Union.
Acknowledging the agonistic structure of Scott’s texts and being aware that early analyses of Scott’s works as straightforward, unequivocal unionist propaganda are now perceived as an over-simplification, should not, however, lead us to reject the notion of alliance as a potentially meaningful trope to analyse his texts, especially if we choose to define this notion of alliance not simply in terms of its political dimension, but, more broadly, as a bond or connection, an affinity. Speakers are therefore invited to consider such issues as national or international cultural dialogue, within Scott’s own body of works as well as between his work and that of other artists. Indeed, on the back of A.-J.-B. Defauconpret’s immensely influential French translations, the international success of the Waverley novels was such that they influenced many of his contemporaries – as well as subsequent generations of authors – at home and abroad. Works such as Louis Maigron’s Le Roman historique à l’époque romantique : Essai sur l’influence de Walter Scott (1898) or, more recently, Ian Duncan’s Scott’s Shadow : The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (2007), The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe, ed. Murray Pittock (2007), Richard Maxwell’s The Historical Novel in Europe 1650-1950 (2009) or Ann Rigney’s The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (2012) have demonstrated that studying Scott’s works from a comparative literature or inter-textual perspective – or even within a broader cultural and social framework – can be most illuminating. In the wake of the ‘Reworking Walter Scott’ Conference (Dundee, April 2017), we will not only welcome papers analysing the influence of Scott on other writers – or the latters’ resistance to his ascendancy – but also papers that study the dialogue between Scott’s works and all forms of adaptation or secondary authorship.
Scott’s historical works and his involvement in contemporary politics will clearly offer opportunities to discuss his conception of the importance and value of alliances between countries – including Scotland’s complex position, torn between Anglophile and Francophile parties. It might also be interesting to compare the views he expresses in his fiction with the ones he expresses in his non-fictional works to determine whether they coincide or follow different logics. Finally, studying his work as a ballad collector and his social or epistolary connexions with most of the other great writers and the great publishing houses of the period will make it possible to see whether he saw writing as a collaborative or competitive activity.
These are of course only a few lines along which the theme of alliance can be interpreted and potential speakers should feel free to offer other interpretations of or variations on this theme.