Nineteenth-Century

EASTER TERM 2026

We look forward to welcoming research students and colleagues to the following talks this term which will take place at 5pm in Seminar Room SR24 in the Faculty of English Building at 9, West Road They are open to all.

5pm, Tuesday 5 May

Professor Irmtraud Huber (Konstanz), ‘Infrastructures of Illumination: Artificial Light and Literary Form in the Nineteenth Century’.

The nineteenth century saw significant, albeit uneven, shifts in the technology and practice of artificial illumination, from candles and lamps to gas and, later, electricity. This is a shift from a moveable, individually tended light to a communal and infrastructural provision, which extends far beyond the individual. New light infrastructures changed work and leisure schedules and activities, drove both production and consumption to new heights, transformed urban nightlife, and became closely welded to narratives of progress and modernisation as the literally bright side of industrialisation. At the same time, it changed the sensory, emotional and symbolic resonances of artificial illumination and even influenced habits of physical perception. While the broader social consequences and the technological history of in introduction of gaslight and electricity have been well researched, my interest turns to literature in the attempt to understand how the introduction of new light sources changed perceptions, judgements and emotional responses and how these changes can be traced through literary representations and aesthetic forms. I thus aim to draw attention to the infrastructural underpinnings of cultural expressions, taking serious the human-material entanglements from which literature arises.

Irmtraud Huber is Professor for English Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Konstanz. Her work has focused on Victorian poetry and contemporary fiction and she has published three monographs, Literature after Postmodernism (2014, Palgrave), Present-tense Narration in Contemporary Fiction (2016, Palgrave) and Time and Timelessness in Victorian Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). She has recently co-edited a Handbook of Poetic Forms (de Gruyter, 2025) and she is currently co-editing a special collection at the Open Library of the Humanities Journal on "Victorian Infrastructures and their Environmental Legacies".

5pm, Tuesday 19 May

Dr Claire White (French Section, MMLL, University of Cambridge), 'The Returns of Idealism: Émile Zola, Novel, and Nation' (rearranged after cancellation last term due to illness)