‘France, England and Rejection in Austin Dobson’s Verse’/ ‘C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot, and the New Humanism’

Presenter/s: Robert Bolton / Hannah Roux

Abstract for France, England and Rejection in Austin Dobson’s Verse:

Austin Dobson (1840-1921) was a poet and biographer whose chief interest was eighteenth century England and France and who was notable for incorporating French poetic styles into English poetry. As a socially conservative writer Dobson broke new ground for French poetry in Victorian England given that French writers were frequently associated with transgressive ideas. Dobson had a French grandmother; his grandfather was a naturalised French citizen and his father lived in France until the age of 15. Dobson married Frances Mary Beardmore, who was English and whose ancestors had fled Catholic persecution in France. Frances Mary was a strict Anglican Christian and an author of religious stories published under the name of Franc Mari. In part my thesis investigates whether Frances Mary’s strong Anglican faith and family background influenced Dobson’s representation of eighteenth-century life and manners ultimately making Dobson’s adoption of a subversive oeuvre, more acceptable.

Robert Bolton upgraded from an MPhil to a PhD in January of this year. His thesis is titled ‘Austin Dobson and the anglicisation of French Poetry” and the examines the interplay of transgression and acceptability in the poetry of late 1800s England, well before the rise of modernism.

Abstract for “That Way We Shall Remain Human”: C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot, and the New Humanism (1932-1943)

In the 1943 preface to the third edition of his first novel, The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism, C.S. Lewis apologises for the book’s “uncharitable temper,” especially his satiric portrait of counter-Romantics: Mr. Neo-Classical (Eliotic classicism), Mr. Humanist (the New Humanism), and Mr. Neo-Angular (Neo-Scholasticism), which collectively represent a thinly-veiled attack on the writings of Lewis’s older contemporary, T.S. Eliot. Lewis’s literary work of the 1930s is much-preoccupied with controverting Eliot: his influence on literary culture had become, as Lewis would later admit, a “nagging tooth.” In my research, I have been investigating Lewis’s engagements with Eliot in the context of their shared literary culture. In this presentation, I explore the Lewis’s character, “Mr. Humanist,” in the context of his changing engagements with two central figures of early 1930s New Humanism: Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. What light might this background cast on Lewis’s 1943 attempt to recast, soften, and refine his hostile 1933 parody of Eliot? And, more broadly, what does the history of Lewis’s changing views reveal about the different ways he, Eliot and the New Humanists conceived of the relation between the natural, the supernatural and the human?

Hannah Roux is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Sydney. Her research is into C.S. Lewis’s changing reaction to the criticism and poetry of T.S. Eliot, and, more broadly, Lewis’s reactions to modernity and position in the history of mid-twentieth century criticism.

Venue

This event will be held online via Zoom and Woolley Common Room (John Woolley Building, A20, Camperdown).

Note: The presentations this semester are either ‘Zoom only’ (with no meeting in the Woolley Building) or ‘Woolley Common Room and Zoom’ (which is a live presentation in Woolley that is simultaneously available on Zoom). When we are in Woolley we do encourage you to join us in person if you are well and feel safe to do so. Do bring a mask. If you’d prefer not to be there physically, please attend via Zoom.

Contact: Liam Semler (liam.semler@sydney.edu.au).

English Research Seminars in Semester 1