This seminar offers an introduction to colour studies in keeping with the ‘material turn’ that invites us to rethink the cultural history of Britain in the second half of the 19th century. The Victorian period was indeed shaped by a revolution in the perception and production of colour which has generated rich scholarly exploration in the intersecting fields of art history, anthropology, and heritage studies. And yet chromatic matter remains surprisingly underexplored within literary studies, as though colour were merely a secondary property of the objects that populate fictional and poetic spaces.
Drawing on a corpus of canonical works of 19th-century British literature and art, the seminar will work towards a methodology for reading a text through the lens of its colours, whether or not those colours are visible on the page.
Sessions will be organised along both chronological and theoretical lines, from the chromophilia of the Romantics to the chromatic subversions of the Aesthetes and Decadents of the fin de siècle.
- Enseignant.e: Charlotte Ribeyrol