The Laboratorium: Nineteenth-Century French Studies in the Anglophone Sphere

ABSTRACT

This is the first instalment of a two-part thematic review of nineteenth-century French research in the Anglophone sphere. The review sets aside the standard sub-disciplinary categories in order to envision a laboratorium, a space of multiple confluent and contiguous lines of exploratory work. In this space, more fluid thematic connections surface between projects irrespective of their focus, their methodology, or their scale, revealing some of the major transversal routes of research across the recent past and the present, and, speculatively, into the future. The two-part review explores biography / body / earth / emotion / experiment / movement / thing.

KEYWORDS:

• Laboratorium
• interdisciplinarity
• Anglosphere
• transversal
• biography
• body; earth

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on the contributor

Susan Harrow is Ashley Watkins Professor of French at the University of Bristol (UK). Her research lies in the later-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially poetry and the novel with a particular focus on the interrelation of literary modernism and visual culture. Her most recent book is Colourworks: Chromatic Innovation in Modern French Poetry and Art Writing (Bloomsbury, 2020). She is a former president of the Society for French Studies (UK and Ireland) and of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes.

Notes

1 Whilst the defining focus is on research published outre-Hexagone, readers will also find references to research published in France, capturing – intermittently and partially – shared international research agendas between the disciplinary centre (the French-speaking world and its patrimoine) and the periphery (in this instance, the Anglophone sphere).