UNM Department of English Language
& Literature
invites you to the Fall 2013 Colloquium
Series
A talk by
Aeron Hunt
Assistant Professor, British and Irish Literary
Studies
“The Heir Apparent: Gender and the
Transmission of Talent in Margaret Oliphant’s Hester”
Dr. Hunt’s EDC talk is drawn from her
forthcoming book Personal Business: Character and Commerce in Victorian
Literature and Culture, which explores the intersections of literature,
economics, and commerce in Victorian Britain by turning attention to the
embodied, interpersonal, and socially embedded interactions of everyday economic
life. Drawing on a broad range of sources, Personal Business examines how
the personal and its textual and performative form, character, represent a
crucial mode of power within the Victorian economy. By placing representations
of the personal in business by novelists such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot,
Anthony Trollope, and Margaret Oliphant alongside nonliterary genres, Personal
Business provides new ways to understand the history of the Victorian novel and
its implication in the turbulent experience of nineteenth-century capitalism. In
so doing, Personal Business presents a case for the continued value of
interdisciplinary scholarship as a means to generate fresh insights in literary,
historical, and cultural studies alike. This presentation will examine Margaret
Oliphant’s novel Hester (1883) in light of the turn to scientific
language to construct the personal in business, arguing that Oliphant’s
attention to gender as she maps the vagaries of “hereditary talent” challenges
readers to reevaluate contemporary narratives of business character.
Please join us
Wednesday, November 13,
2013
12:00 p.m.
English Department Lounge
Humanities Building, Second
Floor
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