About this Event
Please join the Northrop Frye Centre in welcoming NFC Doctoral Fellow, Rebecca Dillon, for her lecture entitled "Disordered Climates: Reading Space in Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater".
All are welcome; light refreshments will be served.
About the Talk
While proposing new methods for reading connections between environmental, cultural and narrative climates in literary studies, Jennifer Mae Hamilton observes that “weather, climate, body, and world are rarely in neatly aligned or analogical relation, but are nonetheless always related in material and meaningful ways.”* This talk explores what can be gained by thinking across these conceptual categories within the works of Thomas De Quincey. Beginning his writing career from a damp cottage in the lake district after the infamous Year without Summer in 1816, De Quincey makes frequent reference in his writing to textual and human bodies in cold, sodden or swollen conditions.
Examining climate, weather and the permeability of structural bodies—houses, organic forms and books—in De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and beyond, this talk traces ecological systems of energy and labour relations across ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’ subjects, ultimately addressing their implications within the broader social and imperial infrastructures of the period. How does a vocabulary of expansion and permeability, appearing so conspicuously in De Quincey’s opium dream episodes, spill into other forms of cognition as he thinks about the widening circuits of cultural, textual and commodity production?
*Hamilton, Jennifer Mae. “Weathers of Body and World: Reading Difference in Literary Atmospheres before Climate Change,” The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Climate. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, pp. 55-68. 58.
About the Speaker
Rebecca Dillon is a PhD candidate from the English Department with a specialization in the Book History and Print Culture program. Her research explores the relationship between disaster narration and mental space and labour in the works of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century transatlantic writers. She is interested in tracing thematic links between Romantic-era depictions of disaster and concepts of the individual, nationhood, geography, and globalization.
Event venue & nearby stays
Northrop Frye Centre (VC 102), 91 Charles St West, Toronto, Canada
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