Susan Manning Memorial Lecture 2024: Yoon Sun Lee

How is work defined in the genre of the novel, and how are different forms of labor related to each other? Can forms of racial thinking emerge as a result of the capitalist abstraction of labor?

This talk examines the transatlantic British context of labor, history, and fictional narrative around 1800. While Jane Austen’s Emma prominently features the labor of commensuration itself, other kinds of labor in the novel are articulated instead with the social formation of gratitude. The material basis of the latter can be seen in Maria Edgeworth’s 1802 novella, “The Grateful Negro,” based on Bryan Edwards’s History of the British Colonies in the West Indies. The emotion of gratitude plays a troubling, paradoxical role in this expanded context. It participates in labor and yet stands apart from it; it affirms and negates abstract equivalence; and it entrenches racial type-thinking by invoking the exception.

Yoon Sun Lee’s books include The Natural Laws of Plot: How Things Happen in Realist Novels (Penn, 2023), Modern Minority: Asian American Literature and Everyday Life (Oxford, 2013), and Nationalism and Irony (Oxford, 2004). Her essays can be found in PMLA, Representations, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Studies in Romanticism, MLQ, ELH, The Cambridge Companion to Narrative Theory, The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel, and other journals and collections.

As well as being President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative in 2024, she is also the Anne Pierce Rogers Professor of English at Wellesley College.

Professor Susan Manning was Grierson Professor of English Literature and Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh until her unexpected death in 2013.

This annual lecture commemorates Susan as an internationally renowned academic with wide interests, particularly in Transatlanticism, and as an inspiring influence for an international coterie of scholars in the humanities.

Occasionally, the Lecture has been held as part of a wider event, such as Edinburgh Spy Week in 2019 and Muriel Spark 100 in 2018.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

50 George Square Lecture Theatre (G.03), University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom