Satire and Subversion in the Barnacle Manuscript (Isabella Falconer): The Barnacle is a multi-volume manuscript magazine produced by ‘The
Gosling Society’, a group of teenage girls who formed an intellectual coterie in 1859 in response to their exclusion from formal education. Christabel Coleridge, the granddaughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and one of the founding members, recalled that for them, ‘Education was often desultory, and High Schools had not yet been thought of’. To provide the group with literary authority, Charlotte Mary Yonge – by then a successful novelist of over a decade – was appointed to assume the role of ‘Mother Goose’. The Barnacle became the medium through which the Goslings regularly disseminated their various academic and literary pursuits amongst the ‘Brood’, fostering a culture of intellectual exchange and collective self-education. The Goslings chose to manage every stage of the Barnacle’s production, including editing, binding, and circulation, despite having the means to outsource these tasks. In doing so, they deliberately created a miniature, exclusively female counterpart to the
publishing industry. Not only was this remarkable in itself, but the privacy of their circle also enabled the Goslings to engage openly in satire, commenting on and destabilising the evaluative hierarchies of nineteenth-century print culture and their exclusionary gender roles. The Barnacle thus stands as a groundbreaking record of the authentic and radical expressions of Victorian girls who forged a countercultural alternative to the proliferation of print in the nineteenth century. Since the Barnacle is a relatively obscure and inaccessible manuscript, I intend to open with a largely factual description of the work and the context of its creation, before exploring the forms of subversion and satire it embodies – including its visual imagery, its distinctive method of production, and the ways in which it disrupts the boundaries between print and manuscript circulation..

“Eloquent Silence”: Reimagining Percy Shelley’s Queen Mab on China’s Literary Stage before 1949 (Yuzhi Chen):
“In eloquent silence”, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Queen Mab “pursues its wondrous way” (Canto II, 81-82) in Twentieth century China, after its radical
receptions in the literary underworld in Nineteenth century Britain. Far from being Shelley’s mostly promoted and translated works in China from Shelley’s incipient receptions in 1908, Queen Mab was fragmentedly reimagined. In 1920s, Queen Mab left one of its earliest textual footprints on an article “Free Love”, which accurately translated Shelley’s nineth note of Queen Mab, on coercive matrimony, marriage law and free love. Around the same discourse of Shelley’s proposition about romantic union, five years after, Queen Mab’s Canto IX, line 76-83 is translated, in a Chinese translation of George Barnefield’s book chapter on Shelley’s psychology. In 1920s China, the “youthful emotional outburst” of “literary or intellectual revolution” is governed by “the amorphous word, love” (Lee, 168). Shelley is the idol of “the campaign for marital freedom” in May-Fourth era, The “Cresent” poet Xu Zhimo, the main promoter of Shelley is a vanguard in this campaign. Meanwhile, in 1920s and 1930s, Queen Mab captivates philosophical and moral reading of Love. In both “Shelley” (1923) and “The Life Philosophy of Shelley” (1933), the mystical and transcendental love, and the sociopolitical and humanistic motives are converged in interpreting “Eternal nature’s law”(Canto II, line 76) in Queen Mab. Such elaboration chimes with Xu Zhimo’s poetics to harmonize faith in “love” “freedom” and “beauty” with society; also with Guo Moruo, another Shelleyan Romanticist’s self-claimed pantheism to conciliate literary faith with activist ethos. This presentation argues that Queen Mab’s afterlife in China, acts as a specimen of the burgeoning of interior love, the tide of exterior sociopolitical reform, and endeavours to reconciliate these two Romantic inclinations in Chinese modern literary revolution. The fate of Xu and Guo who self-analogized as Shelley also re-enacted Queen Mab’s fate extending into post-1949 China.

Walter Pater’s Musical Lives (John Haycraft):
Music, for Walter Pater, is the “typically perfect art” because “in music it is impossible to distinguish the form from the substance or matter.” This
ideal fusion—what René Wellek termed Pater’s “criterion of unity”—is the basic measure by which Pater is accustomed to evaluate success or failure in art, for a basic purpose of aesthetic criticism is, he writes, “to estimate the degree in which each of those products approaches… musical law.” Yet Pater also insists that aesthetic criticism extends beyond art to comprehend “life itself.” But in what sense can our lives be judged as artworks? In what sense can they approach the condition of music? This presentation will briefly explore this theme in Pater’s work. Drawing variously from Marius the Epicurean, the Plato and Platonism lectures, and also a selection of his autobiografictional studies, I will propose that, in the sphere of human life, the condition of music is equivalent to a complete interfusion not of form and matter but of principle and conduct, spirit and handling, theoria and praxis. Importantly, this reading allows us to account for a number of successes and failures across Pater’s ‘cases’ from Winckelmann who, in a word, “made himself pagan for the purpose of penetrating antiquity” to Coleridge, in whose “pathetic history” we find a total and enervating failure to integrate his a priori spectral wanderings into a praxis, which forced him to suffer “a sort of divided
imperfect life.” Recent scholarship has emphasised how Pater’s blending of fiction, criticism, and (auto)biography challenges traditional genre boundaries. Today, in proposing that various of Pater’s autobiografictional and other lifewritings should be interpreted in accordance with the terms of aesthetic criticism, I hope to further explore this trans-generic quality of Pater’s oeuvre.