Registration: 10.00 – 10.30
10/10.15 Coach Arrives from Streatham
Welcome: 10.30 – 10.50
Christina Lake & Jack Sargent
Parallel Session A: 11.00 – 12.15.
Panel 1 West County Utopias?
Chair Jack Sargent
Christina Lake, University of Exeter
I wouldn’t die for Wimbledon: Nationalism and resistance in Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night and Daphne du Maurier’s Rule Britannia
This paper explores the links between national identity, place and resistance in two dystopian invasion narratives of the twentieth century. In the Nazi-dominated England of Swastika Night (1937), Katharine Burdekin uses Stonehenge as a symbol of English identity and resistance to the German occupying powers. She contrasts the nationalism of blood celebrated by Nazi power to a nationalism born out of connection to the land. In Rule Britannia (1972), set in an alternate future 1970s where Britain has been invaded by American forces, Daphne du Maurier posits a Celtic resistance centred on Cornwall. It is the association of the Cornish peninsula with lawlessness and dissidence which acts as a catalyst for the anti-American activities of the narrative, and a sense of the uniqueness of the land which creates the feeling that Cornwall is more worth fighting for than other parts of the country. My paper will also investigate Kathryn Burdekin’s connection to Cornwall through her sister Rowena Cade, founder of the Minack Theatre, and the role of performance in resistance and national identity in both texts.
Joan Passey, Universities of Exeter and Bristol
‘Imagined ghosts on unfrequented roads’: Cornish Dark Tourism
King Arthur is set to land in Tintagel, and the Cornish locals are far from pleased. It all started with Merlin being carved into a rockface, and now an 8ft statue of the king is set to be placed in a process some are referring to as the ‘Disneyfication’ of Tintagel. But tourism in Cornwall has been inspired, motivated, and shaped by literary and creative imaginings since its birth in the mid nineteenth century, from tours of abandoned mines to pamphlets emphasizing Cornwall’s supernatural past. I propose that this process of literary tourism is not so much ‘Disneyfication’ as a Dismalandification (see Banksy’s dark reimagining of Disney in the South West), tapping into a rich vein of ‘dark’ or ‘gothic’ tourism. Cornwall is continually represented in tourist pamphlets and travel guides as a haunted and threatening place, and novels featuring travel to and through Cornwall perpetuated this imaginative darkness as a mode of ‘virtual tourism’. This paper explores the multifarious ways in which Cornwall exploited, explored, and reinvented its Celtic past for a touristic audience, from the continual reshaping of the Cornish as ‘other’ to generate an exotic-local place, to the use of folkloric sites as tourist landmarks in the nineteenth century.
Charlotte White, University of Exeter
WT: Boundaries and Belonging / Rural Boundaries of Ronald Duncan’s Rural Devon
This paper will focus on boundaries and transgression in relation to nature and the landscape of the South West, with particular regard to the archived works of the West Country writer Ronald Duncan and his published guide Devon and Cornwall (1966). In his journals and literature, through anecdotes, poems and adventures, Duncan explores the physical boundaries between Devon and Cornwall, as well as the seeming boundary between the West Country and the rest of England; this includes a literal and literary exploration of the perceived boundaries created by the natural world. From the wildness of Dartmoor, to the sea against the Cliffs viewed from his writing hut, to winding and changing rivers, Duncan sees the landscape of the South west as harbouring the unique combination of unchangeable tradition and heritage holding together identity and place, and a liminal and transgressive nature in its physicality. Duncan also describes the transformative power of crossing boundaries and place bringing out different personas within him and allowing him to transgress various moral and social boundaries.
Panel 2 Transgressive Individuals
Chair TBC
John Dirring, Institute of Cornish Studies
Smuggling and finance: the margins of legitimacy in late eighteenth-century Polperro
British overseas trade at the end of the eighteenth century had many legislative restrictions, not least the many high tariffs on imported goods. Consequently smuggling was rife all round the coastline facing Europe; and not least in Cornwall, where it was regarded as `free trade’ rather than a criminal act, morally justifiable against iniquitous legislation.
In the small, insular coastal communities of Cornwall, it was organized on regular commercial lines like any other business, requiring credit for goods purchased overseas and paid for after clandestine landing and sale. High profits reflected extreme risk, yet smuggled goods still sold at prices well below those of legitimate imports.
In Polperro, Zephaniah Job, a school teacher and accountant turned estate steward, also offered financial services like other comparable traders and agents of the period in Cornwall. He became the `Smugglers’ Banker’; arranging credit and remittance facilities for `free traders’ as part of his wider business activities.
The borders of legitimacy were finely drawn; with community solidarity tested in encounters with the unpopular enforcing authority. Morality was endogenously defined in the community, in ways which were not seen as compromising higher ethical values.
Muhamet Alijaj, University of Exeter
Title: TBC
My proposal deals with two cases almost two hundred years apart: The Bideford Witch Trial of 1682 and the case of spiritualist Lousia Lowe (1870-1877). I would like to show how both present examples of the polemic between authoritative discourses against those deemed unacceptable even dangerous. The Bideford episode is very well known but Lowe's struggle against Victorian lunacy and property laws because of her spiritualist beliefs do have some things in common:
1. Both are centered in Devon but resemble the national polemic of their time regarding witchcraft and spiritualism.
2. Women who are able to subvert authoritative norms by accepting (Bideford) and rejecting (Lowe) accusations.
3. The role of power structures: the law courts and the medical community in maintaining "normative" behaviour and beliefs.
Imogene Dudley, University of Exeter
Title TBC
The paper will explore the rising and falling fortunes of the Courtenay family from 1485 to 1556 and how their south-west estates and kinship to the Tudor monarchs were important factors. In 1495, Sir William Courtenay, heir to the Earl of Devon, was wed to Katherine of York, who was not only sister-in-law to the current monarch Henry VII but also a younger daughter of Edward IV and therefore a former princess of the disgraced Yorkist dynasty. This brought the Courtenay family, who had hitherto been stalwart loyalists, dangerously close to the crown. Over the next fifty years, the fortunes of the Courtenay’s waxed and waned, with their close kinship to both the Tudor monarchs and their royal Plantagenet forebears being a constant factor in their rise and fall. Sir William Courtenay, after defending Exeter from Cornish rebels and giving loyal service to Henry VII, was to be imprisoned for involvement with his wife’s cousin, a Yorkist pretender to the throne. His extensive West Country estates were suspected to have been a potential part of the plot, as a beachhead for invasion. With the ascension of Henry VIII, the Courtenays were once again favoured as his first cousin, William and Katherine’s son Henry, was promoted to the title of Marquis of Exeter. However, changing circumstances such as the lack of a Tudor heir and the break from Rome meant that the Catholic Courtenay’s, with their royal Yorkist blood, became increasingly under suspicion from a paranoid Henry VIII. This culminated in the execution of Henry Courtenay and the imprisonment of his heir Edward in 1538, the circumstances echoing that of his father’s imprisonment as he was accused of dynastic plotting and planning to allow the Catholic powers to invade through his south-west estates. Upon the accession of Mary I, Edward was released and restored to the earldom of Devon but was soon embroiled in dynastic intrigue once again and sent into exile. This seventy year period in the Courtenay family is distinctive for its cycle of royal favour and dynastically motivated falls, and their south-west estates are a constant backdrop to this, making it an interesting topic for a conference with the theme of “Transgression in the South West.”
Lunch 12.20 -13.30
13.00 -13.30 Archives available for delegates
Parallel Session B: 13.30 -14.45
Panel 3 Heritage and Identity
Chair TBC
Robyn Raxworthy, University of Exeter
Title: TBC
The china clay mining industry in mid-Cornwall embodies a history of transgression. Its destructive extraction processes, excessive waste, early role as a supplier of the Staffordshire potteries – competitors of Cornish pewter (Barton 1966, 27), the infamous 1913 strike and, more recently, the debates surrounding the future of the “Great Treverbyn Tip” as part of on-going Eco-Town regeneration plans for the area, all evidence the dissonance that continues to surround the industry. Although once hailed as the last bastion of Cornish mining (Laviolette 2003), china clay extraction today is heavily in decline, leaving behind a post-industrial landscape that polarises local opinion.
Whilst the historic mining landscapes of copper and tin are promoted by the heritage and tourism industries (see UNESCO 2016), china clay mining heritage has not been afforded the same recognition. The aim of my PhD research is to investigate how this marginalised heritage has been collected, celebrated and disseminated through archival, museum and personal collections in and around the “Clay Country”. For this symposium, I am proposing to bring together literature from Geography, Heritage Studies and Cornish studies and my own experiences to explore the ways that the heritage of this transgressive industry have been presented and some of the challenges that are facing its future.
Matt Blewett, University of Exeter
WT: Cornish Transgressions
Proposal: Cornwall is seen as very conservative, and the dominant cultural narrative is very much centred on stories of the “heroic” miner. Place marketing such as Redruth and Truro’s public realm, as well as visitor attractions such as Geevor and Poldark, include and often centre on images and depictions of Cornish miners who are implicitly male, Christian and heterosexual. The current images of the Cornish miner are rooted in a sense of their long history in this place (so they form an impersonal image of the Cornwall “brand”), the form of Christianity known as Methodism, and also in folklore and other books and archive stories that perhaps identify and identified acceptable behaviours in Cornish society and potentially reinforced them.
Religion, sex and sexuality are combined here in a selection of images, songs and folklore tales to subtly undermine the norms we were instructed to live by, and I hope to demonstrate how through apparent conformity to social norms at least some of those norms could be subverted. Through these sources this paper contrasts the stereotypical portrayals of the Cornish miner with his lived experience, which was potentially as transgressive of multiple-prescriptive portrayals as it is conforming with them.
Thomas Fidler, University of Exeter
WT Celtic Identity in the Tamar Region
Abstract: TBC
Panel 4 Speaking about Sex
Chair: Caitlin Vandertop
Luisa Waitschacher, Universities of Vienna and Exeter
Transgression in the ‘House Beautiful’: Beauty and Immorality in Babbacombe Cliff”
In continuation of my dissertation research on “The House Beautiful in the Haunted House: Horror and Beauty in late Victorian Fiction” in 2014, I closely explore haunted British dwellings which qualify as ‘House Beautiful’ as defined by the Aesthetes, foremost Oscar Wilde himself. One of these is Babbacombe Cliff (‘the Rossetti`) near Torquay in South West Devon. This Victorian mansion was an aesthetic masterpiece and owned by Lady Mount-Temple who regularly held Séances to invite the supernatural into her beautiful house. It was also there, where Wilde indulged in ‘gross indecency with other men`, as it was called during the trials. These transgressions in form of adultery and sodomy present a harsh contrast to Wilde’s utterances in his lectures on ‘The House Beautiful’ in which he claimed that beauty and morality are interdependent and that ‘art fosters morality`. In my paper I find that aesthetic houses in Victorian Literature come with an almost mandatory haunting force which challenges morality. My current research, which I would like to present at the Penryn Symposium 2016, explores the interplay of transgression and beauty with a focus on Babbacombe Cliff as a ‘House Beautiful` which Oscar Wilde chose to furnish with ‘immorality’.
Kristy Martin, University of Exeter
Feminism and Queerness in Pornographic Material
Abstract: TBC
Jack Sargent – University of Exeter
Oscar Wilde’s Grindr Profile: What Can Digital Dating Offer a Nineteenth-Century Aesthete?
My research began with an anachronistic question: would Oscar Wilde have downloaded the digital gay “hook-up”/”dating” app Grindr? While unanswerable, this question is also superfluous. The answer, of course, is yes. Wilde desired men and liked having sex with them. Until his trial and conviction for “gross indecency” with other men in 1895, he was a ready and even reckless participant in late-Victorian homoerotic subculture. Moreover,
Wilde’s poetic and polemic aesthetic writing eulogised the importance of sensual connection and experience between desiring individuals.
However, would Oscar Wilde have liked Grindr? Grindr is becoming known as a space that is often void of emotional connection and recent studies have highlighted the link between it and depression. More broadly, digital dating apps form a twenty-first-century culture in which individuals are, ironically, increasingly isolated in front of unresponsive screens.
This paper aims to explore whether Wilde’s understanding of aesthetic and sexual experience as a vital form of beauty would translate onto Grindr. It questions whether words, communication and feeling, vital aspects of early homosexual literature and communities, are still experienced in the same way in twenty-first century “no-strings-attached” culture. Both Wilde and Grindr are linked by sexual transgressive acts which are defined as “queer”, being outside the sexual norm. Both are part of homosexual cultural heritage. Yet, is this the same type of transgression, or something wildly different? Would Oscar Wilde have liked Grindr, or would he have despised it?
Parallel Panel C: 15.00 -16.15
Panel 5: Celtic Performances
Chair Christina Lake
Valerie Diggle, Falmouth University
30 Minute “performance lecture”: Wrestling Fields
I am an artist in the ‘writing-up’ phase of a practice-based doctorate that aims to construct a poetics of uncertainty by exploring relationships between histories and fictions in site responsive work about the past. The particular site I am working with is Glasney College, Penryn which is (contentiously) associated with a particular historic figure - the 14th century Cornishman and translator John Trevisa.
For this symposium I would like to present an aspect of this research as a performance lecture titled The Wrestling Fields.
The presentation will link the site of Glasney to the myth of the Cornish Wrecker, via the Carminowes – a powerful Cornish family from the 14th century, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, Loe Bar and the Ordinalia – a cycle of mystery plays composed at Glasney, in the 14th century, in the Cornish language. It will position the artist-scholar as wrecker, and practice based research, methodologically, as wrecking.
The Wrestling Fields as sound-art has just been commissioned by Apples and Snakes – England’s leading organisation for poetry and the spoken word ( applesandsnakes.org ) to be broadcast later in the year
Truan Evans, University of Bristol
Title TBC
Although not receiving as much scholarly attention as medieval lays, ballads and chronicles, and certainly less than the developing theatre of the Early Modern cities, the distinctly regionalised, locally performed, Celtic mystery plays can be extremely informative to an understanding of the political, spiritual and cultural preoccupations of local life in Medieval and Early Modern Celtic communities like Cornwall.
My paper would focus on the peculiarities of Cornish mystery plays and the manner in which they assert a distinctive Celtic identity in opposition to historic efforts by English government to garner an increasingly homogenous English identity throughout the late medieval and Early Modern period. I would centre my research on the Cornish miracle plays of The Cornish Ordinalia (c.1400), Beunans Meriasek (c. 1504) and Bewnans Ke (c.1500). These plays were popularly performed at Plain-an Gwarry in St Just until the time of the English Reformation and reveal fascinating aspects of the common Cornish conception of Catholicism and the medieval Cornish cult of Saints. I feel these plays represent an important chapter in a small nation’s shifting understanding of its own Celtic regional identity and memory.