Dissecting Love in The Nineteenth Century and Beyond

09:00–09:45 Welcome

Introduction by the Copenhagen research group

09:45-10:30 Simon May, King’s College London

Love and Philosophy: two ways in which the nineteenth century shaped love in today’s West

In addition to its tremendous development of romantic love, the nineteenth century catalyzed two other developments in Western understandings of love -- understandings that are today widely taken for granted but are historically unprecedented. First it saw the maturation of the idea that, at its most genuine, human love is intrinsically unconditional and even disinterested. This conception of human love is, I suggest, a secularization of a late Christian, especially Protestant, conception of divine love, which itself only took its final shape with thinkers such as Kierkegaard; and it arguably forms the nucleus of the last genuinely universal religion in the contemporary West. Second, over and above this new understanding of the nature of human love, the (late) nineteenth century also saw the rise of a new archetypal object of love in the West: namely the child, which has gradually become conceived as sacred -- and abuse of the child as therefore the most egregious form of desecration. As a result, in the twentieth century parental love has increasingly come to displace romantic love as the archetypal form of love. 

10:30-11:15 Ottmar Ette, University of Potsdam

Learning Love: Strong feelings in Nineteenth-Century Literatures of the World

How do we know about love? And first of all: How do we learn love, that second hand emotion as in Tina Turner‘s song. This conference aims to explore these questions analyzing the Literatures of the World (19th Century) focussing on the entanglements of Europe and Latin America. There will be a special focus on life knowledge as displayed by novels in which love is the key to know about social, political and economic contexts. We learn about Love in Rousseau, Chateaubriand and Balzac, explore José Mármol and Jorge Isaacs before leaving Francophone Europe and Hispanophone Latin America for China with Cao Xueqin‘s The Dream of the Red Mansion.

11:15–11:30 Coffee

11:30–12:15 Victoria de Rijke, Middlesex University

The Beast Within: Love and Fairytale Dissection (when the Surgeon is Female)

Love is such a classic narrative of the Fairy Tale genre that ‘fairy tale romance’ is used as a term to decry unrealistic expectations of beauty, sacrificial femininity, male chivalry, love at first sight, marriage or happily ever after. Zipes argues that mass-mediatised versions have produced a universal voice and image which stultifies the public with escapist fantasy. But for Warner and many others, fairy tale is a feminist genre, optative rather than prescriptive, which offered women a voice with which to critique love, from the literary tales of the 17^th century to the disjunctive retellings of contemporary feminism. Warner describes the writer Angela Carter’s relation to fairy tale as “a love affair”. As a highly metamorphic genre that has flourished in diverse media including oral tradition, literature, film and the visual arts, fairy tale has a great deal to say about love in all its forms.

Exploring lesser-known fairy tales from ancient Gaelic to Inuit traditions and more recent reworkings, what fairy tale dissection can tell us about writing as ‘witness to love’ would shock Disney but not Carter’s radical Company of Wolves (1979) or Vidal’s Little Red (2021) as they fully acknowledge Bacchilega’s ‘beast within’. Borrowing from Cixous’ ‘truth of love’, described as ‘both-at-once’ and imaged in the tale of Little Red Riding Hood (in the beloved grandmother we take food to who is also the devouring wolf), this visual presentation will anatomise how ‘pecriture feminine’ fairy tale- in both text and image- confronts love with ambiguous definitions of gender and sexuality, offers an alternative erotics that destabalises and transforms patriarchal hegemony, and radically challenges our culturally determined expectations of love and romance.

12:15–13:00 Kirstie Blair, University of Stirling

Love, Work and Victorian Industry

This paper considers how romantic love and courtship were altered by changing workplace conditions in the nineteenth century, as women moved into industrial spaces and worked alongside men. It uses a body of little-known courtship and love poems by working-class writers to investigate how, or whether, literary genres reflected the societal changes caused by young women’s full-time employment in industrial occupations – in factories, as surface workers in the mining industry, or in new commercial spaces, like the railway refreshment room or the ticket office. Romantic encounters and courtship sites that lay outside the domestic home or the pastoral space, I suggest, meant that new romantic narratives were developed, narratives made more complex by the potential for exploitation and abuse within many of these industries. Stories of love and marriage were reshaped in relation to anxieties around women’s labour, as well as admiration of women workers’ independence. As the pit lass and the factory girl become romantic heroines, discourses of love and class become intertwined, and the politics of marriage develop in new ways.

13:00–13:45 Lunch

13:45–14:15 Adam Bencard (Medicinsk Museion, University of Copenhagen)

Guided tour of the exhibition: ‘Mind the Gut’, with focus on how microbes and bacteria affect our emotional life

14:15–14.30 Coffee

14.30–15.15 James Dowthwaite, University of Jena

Love and Fate Amongst the Pre-Raphaelites

One might think that there is little better illustration of the caprices of the ancient concept of fate than love: we might think of Helen and Paris, or Dido and Aeneas, as examples of the cruelty that a metadivine force can inflict on human hearts; and in more modern examples might we not look to Heloise and Abelard, Romeo and Juliet, Rick Blaine and Isla Lund to see how fate contrives to work on the passions, making us fall in love against better judgement? Love, for better or worse, might be seen to manifest fate.

But this familiar account can be disrupted by paying particular attention to the ways in which fate and love were treated by the Pre-Raphaelites in the mid to late nineteenth century. In my talk, I will outline and analyse how the Pre-Raphaelites conceived the relationship between love and fate, the former conceived as an secularised version of the courtly love of the middle ages, the latter conceived as a return to ancient ideas of a metadivine force moving, and narrativising, the universe. I begin by looking at collaborations between Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, who establish a Pre-Raphaelite relation between fate and love, namely a conception of the two as rival forces: love is a separate, human power which provides relief or recompense for ill fate. A similar treatment is found in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The House of Life, a sonnet cycle in which the first part is dominated by the power of love, and the second which is dominated by the cruel force of fate. For Rossetti, love and fate are separate forces, but the latter has the power to crush or dissipate the former. Finally, I look at Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Tristram of Lyonesse, a retelling of the Tristram and Iseult myth, and which works precisely the other way round to Rossetti: for all the destructive power of fate, love is that which provides the narrative heart of the power, and which is the site of a human defence against the universe, surviving us even after death. Love thus emerges as a passionate, emotional, human defence against fate.

15:15–16:00 Michael Hatt, University of Warwick

The Homosexual World of Love and Ritual: Painting Love in Britain, 1860-1920

Art historians have discussed the role of desire in painting extensively over many decades. They have engaged with love far less often. In part, this is a consequence of the way in which the history of art has developed as a discipline, but it is perhaps principally because love is so difficult to represent in art. While art can very easily and powerfully represent the object of desire, it is less able to represent the subject of love; indeed, this can only be done indirectly by painters.

In this talk, I shall examine two case studies: paintings by Simeon Solomon from the 1860s, and by Clare Atwood, who was part of an extraordinary menage a trois at Smallhythe Place in Sussex from 1916 to her death in 1932. These artists deal implicitly or explicitly with homosexual or lesbian love, addressing the inability of art to represent love directly and trying to find visual strategies to mitigate this difficulty. Solomon deploys the allegorical, reformulating a familiar artistic strategy for homosexual love as an absence, while Atwood presents the everyday world where love becomes part of the fabric of a life.

To help with this task, I shall consider how art history might learn from scholars in other fields, and from two works in particular: Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s pioneering essay ‘The Female World of Love and Ritual’ (1975), from which I take my title; and Simon May’s more recent volume Love: A History (2011). Both can help to shift our focus from the more narrowly sexual to a broader emotional life, away from the object of desire itself towards what May calls ‘ontological rootedness’; and both can help us consider how both Solomon and Atwood attempt such a shift in their work, presenting their viewers with real or imagined worlds in which homosexual and lesbian love might be possible. 

16:00–16:45 Milija Gluhovic, University of Warwick

Love and Melancholic Loss in Harold Pinter’s Landscape

Landscape (1967) and its companion piece Silence (1968) mark the beginning of Harold Pinter’s long and fruitful obsession with the subject of memory. In these two plays, and later with Old Times (1971), No Man’s Land (1975), Other Places (1982), Moonlight (1993) and Ashes to Ashes (1996), Pinter advances a range of dramatic strategies in order to give theatrical shape to remembrance. In Landscape, external action based on events and an alteration of scenic images is abolished and gives way to mental landscapes and verbal images very much in the vein of Beckett’s theatre. In the view of Pinter’s biographer Michael Billington, ‘Landscape is one of Pinter’s best and most deeply felt plays’ (1996, 201). Drawing on the circumstances from Pinter’s private life, notably his estrangement from his first wife Vivien Merchant, Billington sees in Landscape ‘a play that could have been written only by someone with a knowledge of the guilt, desperation, non-communication and paradoxical memory of times past that are inseparable from a failing marriage’ (201). To this author, Landscape reveals Pinter’s ‘Keatsian sense of life’s heartache and melancholy’ (202). Pinter’s rendering of love, loss, and memory into the idiom of mourning and melancholia in Landscape will be my main concern in this paper.

I will argue that at the heart of the play lies the problem of loss in suffering subjectivity. The project is motivated by a strong sense that in her recollections Beth systematically evokes sunny landscapes and speaks of joy that she experienced with her past lover on the beach, but just as regularly her memories evoke a very different complex of emotion: pain, suffering, or sadness. An examination of the cases in Landscape will suggest that they are systematically the result of the recovery of experiences of painful and irreversible loss. In a sense to be explored here, the subtle elaboration of the subject of loss in Landscape is best detected when contrasted to contemporary theories of melancholia, which have deeply influenced the discourse of memory in the Humanities in recent years (e.g. Kristeva 1989; Butler 1991, 2004; Eng and Kazanjian 2003; Eng and Han 2019, etc.). I focus in particular on the recent psychoanalytic departures of Julia Kristeva on the status of melancholia as a condition for the constitution of the subject. In Black Sun, an absorbing meditation on depression and melancholia, which features formal studies of depression in the nineteenth-century authors such as Holbein the Younger, Nerval, and Dostoyevsky, Kristeva finds that the features of the archaic past – nonstabilised separateness and indefinite connections - can reassert themselves in circumstances where the subject is drawn to its borders, that is to say, in conditions of exposure to otherness, love, loss, pain, and death. Taking a cue from Kristeva’s Black Sun (1989) as well as her Tales of Love (1987), where she explores a psychoanalytic philosophy of love, I read Beth’s melancholia as exemplary of the predicament of the modern Narcissus, the subject caught up with archaic maternal authority whose drives and affects are cut off, and cut the subject off, from symbolic and social life. Portraying love as a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, Pinter’s Landscape prompts us to access the depths of human existence. Furthermore, I argue that, as the communicable imprint of affective reality, this play bears witness to the wider question of the modern isolation of the soul and the dilemmas and complexities of the present-day subjectivity.

16:45–17:00 Concluding words

17:45–20:00 Dinner for speakers at Restaurant Vækst, Sankt Pedersstræde 34

Simon May is Visiting Professor of Philosophy at King’s College, University of London. His books include Love: A New Understanding of an Ancient Emotion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), Love: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); Nietzsche’s Ethics and his War on “Morality” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); The Power of Cute (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), two edited volumes on Nietzsche’s philosophy (OUP, 2009 and CUP, 2011); and, beyond academic philosophy, a collection of his own aphorisms entitled Thinking Aloud (London: Alma Books, 2009), which was a Financial Times Book of the Year, and How to be a Refugee: One Family’s Story of Exile and Belonging (Pan Macmillan/Picador, 2021). His work has been translated into ten languages.

Ottmar Ette has been Chair of Romance Literatures and Cultures as well as Comparative Literature at the University of Potsdam for almost three decades. He is the Director of a long-term project on Alexander von Humboldt at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (where he is Ordinary Member since 2013), and Director of the Humboldt Center for Transdisciplinary Studies at Hunan Normal University, Changsha. In 2014, he was elected Honorary Member of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA). In 2012, he was introduced into the Ordre des Palmes Académiques (France) as Chevalier and was elected, two years later, member of the Leibniz Society of Sciences in Berlin. He has also been a regular member of the Academia Europaea since 2010. His research focusses on Romance Literatures both in Europe and in the Americas, on travel literature and Alexander von Humboldt, literary studies as Life Science and forms of Living Together, on TransArea Studies in transatlantic and transpacific relations as well as on Literatures with no fixed Abode. He has written and published around 50 monographs in different languages, more than 60 anthologies and over 500 articles. Ottmar Ette directed the BMBF Research Project on „Alexander von Humboldt‘s American Travel Diaries: Genealogy, Chronology, and Epistemology“ (2014 - 2017). He has published open access his „Vorlesungen“ (main classes) at the University of Potsdam in eight volumes. In September 2023, his first novel is published under the title Two German Lives.

Kirstie Blair is Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Stirling. Her research interests largely lie in the fields of Victorian studies and Scottish studies: she has published extensively on Victorian poetry, literature and religion, literature and medicine, newspaper and periodical history, and working-class history, literature and culture. She also teaches, researches and supervises in the fields of children’s literature and fan studies. Her third monograph, Working Verse in Victorian Scotland: Poetry, Press, Community (OUP, 2019), won the Saltire Society Scottish Research Book of the Year and Book of the Year awards. She was appointed as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2021.Recent work has focused on Scottish and Northern working-class cultures, particularly on the experience of industrial workers, and on nineteenth-century industrial heritage more broadly. From 2018 to 2022 Blair led the AHRC-funded ‘Piston, Pen & Press: Literary Cultures in the Industrial Workplace’ project, and she continues to work with many of the museum and archive partners from this project.

Victoria de Rijke is Professor in Arts & Education at Middlesex University in London and co-Chief Editor of Children’s Literature in Education Journal. Her research and publication is transdisciplinary across the fields of literature and avant-garde arts, children’s literature, media, play and animal studies, through the associations of metaphor. Contrary to the popular warning, Victoria is always keen to work with animals and children.

Adam Bencard is associate professor at the University of Copenhagen and senior curator at the Medical Museion. His research revolves around materialism and materiality, as he traces the complex meanings and effects of material thinking in three different contexts: post-genomic metabolism research, philosophy, and science communication. He is interested in what he calls “molecular being.” This concept revolves around the idea that we, as human beings, are fundamentally a part of an expansive, material network, stretching inside and outside of our bodies. These new developments have important consequences for how we understand biological organisms, and by extension what it means to be human. He is currently particularly interested in microbiome research, which provides a key point of intervention in this relational biology. Studies of the microbiome have profound consequences on how life is understood, and ultimately how treatment and managing of the human body will take place.

James Dowthwaite teaches English literature at the University of Jena, where he is currently completing a project on concept of fate in aestheticist, decadent, and symbolist writing. His first book, Ezra Pound and 20^th Century Theories of Language: Faith with the Word came out with Routledge in 2019 and was awarded the Ezra Pound Society Book Award. He has also published on the history of poetry, literature and linguistics, T.S. Eliot, Walter Pater, Arthur Schopenhauer, and a number of other topics. His poetry has appeared, amongst other places, in Acumen, The Dawntreader, The French Literary Review, The High Window, Nightingale and Sparrow, The Needle, and Poetry Salzburg Review. He is an assistant editor at The New American Studies Journal: A Forum.

Michael Hatt is Professor of History of Art at the University of Warwick. He has published widely on art and visual culture in nineteenth-century America, Britain, and Denmark. His publications include Art History: A Critical Introduction to its Approaches, co-authored with Charlotte Klonk (2006) and Sculpture Victorious: Art in an Age of Invention, 1837-1901, co-edited with Martina Droth and Jason Edwards, and accompanying an exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art in 2014. His most recent work has been a series of co-led collaborative research projects: Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave: A Transatlantic Object, with Martina Droth, with a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide (2015); Art Through Denmark: Empires and Exchanges, with Margit Thøfner, with a special issue of Art History (2020); and Victoria’s Self-Fashioning: Crafting the Royal Image for Dynasty, Nation, and Empire, with Joanna Marschner, with a special issue of 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (2021).

Milija Gluhovic is Reader in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. His research is in the area of modern and contemporary theatre and performance with published work in the areas of memory studies and psychoanalysis; discourses of European identity, migrations and human rights; religion, secularity, and politics; and international performance research and pedagogy. His work has been published in Modern Drama, Studies in Theatre and Performance, Research in Drama Education, New Polish Perspectives, and Teatron, among other journals. His books include A Theory for Theatre Studies: Memory (Bloomsbury, 2020), Performing European Memories: Trauma, Ethics, Politics (Palgrave, 2013) and co-edited volumes The Oxford Handbook of Politics and Performance (OUP, 2021), International Performance Research Pedagogies: The Unconditional Discipline? (Palgrave, 2018), Performing the Secular: Religion, Representation and Politics (Palgrave, 2017), and Performing the 'New' Europe: Identities, Feelings and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest (Palgrave, 2013). Currently he leads a collaborative project ‘Performance and Politics on the New Silk Roads,’ funded by the Institute of Advanced Studies at Warwick. He serves as an elected member of the IFTR Executive Committee and as a co-opted member of the EASTAP Executive Committee. He is also the Editor in Chief of Brill’s ‘Themes in Theatre’ book series and serves on the editorial board of the European Journal of Theatre and Performance.