Interviewed by Simon Whitaker<\/p>\n
Clara Dawson, <\/strong>Visiting Professor from the University of Manchester, discusses poetry as a window into the nineteenth century<\/p>\n <\/em><\/strong> <\/p>\n What drew you to the poetry of the Long Nineteenth Century?<\/em><\/strong> <\/em><\/p>\n I think for our own culture poetry occupies a very marginal role, but in the nineteenth century it was hugely important and it really mattered as a literary form, because it worked as a way of interpreting the age to itself. It was also in competition with the novel, but something like Aurora Leigh <\/em>(1856) <\/em>by Elizabeth Barrett Browning was very much an epic poem seeking to understand what it meant to be a Victorian living in Britain and Europe back then.<\/p>\n At the time, more people were reading poetry than ever before, due to the growth of reading in general and especially among the expanding middle-class and working-class audiences. I think it was a form that allowed writers and readers to think about some of the biggest questions of the Victorian era, whether that\u2019s loss of faith and religion, developments in science, or national identity.<\/p>\n So, in the book I\u2019m currently revising, I\u2019m partly asking, \u2018What was the role of poetry within the culture of the period?\u2019 Particularly, I\u2019m interested in how experiments in poetic form and poetic genre were shaped by these dialogues between writers and readers or between poets and reviewers. That can be on the level of choosing to write an epic poem in blank verse \u2013 as we see with Aurora Leigh<\/em> \u2013 or on the level of choosing certain rhyme schemes or stanzaic forms to express particular ideas.<\/p>\n <\/strong> <\/p>\n Why is it so important to look at this relation between an art form, such as poetry, and those cultural discourses around it?<\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n This is something I do a lot when I\u2019m teaching. If we\u2019re looking at a topic such as, say, \u2018celibacy\u2019 or \u2018marriage\u2019, or the notion of \u2018the fallen woman\u2019 in literature, I get students to look at newspaper reports, or the online database where you can get parliamentary reports, or Oscar Wilde\u2019s trial papers. I think for me it\u2019s a matter of trying to get students to understand the singularity of what literature does: how literature can formulate and express ideas in a way that these other discourses can\u2019t. It\u2019s also about understanding the vitality of literature to its own specific cultural moment, and the way it interacts with other ideas and other discourses in the culture at large, rather than treating it as a kind of aesthetic object that can be isolated from its period.<\/p>\n I think that my book and research, at the moment, could be placed alongside other people doing something called historical poetics. This is something that people like Yopie Prins and Simon Jarvis have written about; to sum up that argument in brief, we understand poetry better if we locate it within understandings of poetry in the period. That might be looking at histories of metrical prosody, or perhaps how poetry is related to Anglican liturgy or hymns, but the argument would be that it\u2019s a way of mitigating the imposition of our own perspectives on that poetry.<\/p>\n \n Your Visiting Professorship here is part of a specific project between the English department here and at Manchester. Can you tell me about that?<\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n We wanted to try and get students studying Victorian literature at both institutions to try and collaborate. I\u2019m particularly interested in using more innovative forms of assessment and getting students to do something that moves beyond the traditional essay format. So in Manchester we\u2019ve been getting our students to go to a museum that has a Victorian exhibit, and they have to either write an exhibition guide or they have to make a podcast about that exhibit. The idea is that the students in Hong Kong will choose an object here, and students in Manchester will choose an object in Manchester, and they produce parallel work. But that is a challenge. For example, one thing I\u2019ve used with students in Manchester is Twitter, but in Hong Kong \u2013 I think \u2013 people don\u2019t tend to use Twitter that much!<\/p>\n \n Was this particular exchange, which is very targeted towards these two institutions and cities involved, inspired by anything else you\u2019d seen?<\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Actually, it came about after I attended a conference here, about two and a half years ago, organized by Dr Jessica Valdez and Prof. Julia Kuehn, on Victorian democracy. I felt like I was challenged to open up my perspective on Victorian literature, as well as on the network here within Asia \u2013 this conference involved people from Japan, from Singapore, from South Korea. And I thought I would really like to bring that challenge I experienced into the way I teach.<\/p>\n Next year Jessica and I will probably do some of these collaborative assessments and we might also think about a summer school. We haven\u2019t thought about graduates yet \u2013 it would be a really interesting possibility to do an exchange of Teaching Assistants, but the difficulties of funding are very pertinent here as well, with the cost of flying between the two places.<\/p>\n What we\u2019re doing is a very small exchange, something that I\u2019ve set up with Jessica and Julia, and I think there are a lot of constraints on our time as academics; there are a lot of different pressures to deal with. In the UK there\u2019s uncertainty about universities, and what universities will look like in a post-Brexit landscape. We\u2019re keeping our ambitions quite small at the moment, because we\u2019re not necessarily sure how things will develop. But in some ways, if you can stay small and remain informal, you gain room for manoeuvre and to be more inventive and flexible.<\/p>\n Interviewed by Simon Whitaker Clara Dawson, Visiting Professor from the University of Manchester, discusses poetry as a window into the nineteenth century What drew you to the poetry of the Long Nineteenth Century? I think for our own culture poetry occupies a very marginal role, but in the nineteenth century it was hugely importantContinue Reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":28572,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19661"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19661"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19661\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29033,"href":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19661\/revisions\/29033"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Published on: November 8, 2018 < Back<\/a> ><\/strong><\/em><\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"