You are cordially invited to this talk hosted by the Department of English Language and Literature.<\/p>\n
Date: Wednesday, 19 March 2025
\nTime: 17:30 \u2013 19:00.<\/p>\n
This is an online seminar. To request event details please send a message to department.<\/p>\n
Title: \u201cTrue Histories and Literary Celebrity: Charlotte Bront\u00eb and Josiah Henson\u201d<\/p>\n
This talk opens up the question of fictionality through the shared matrix around two very different 1858 texts: a biography of Charlotte Bront\u00eb that circulated as a true story of Jane Eyre and an autobiography of Josiah Henson that circulated as the life of the \u201coriginal Uncle Tom.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 1858, when the life of Josiah Henson, Truth Stranger Than Fiction: Father Henson\u2019s Story of His Own Life, was being promoted as a kind of corrective to Stowe\u2019s Key to Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin, reviewers of Elizabeth Gaskell\u2019s Life of Charlotte Bront\u00eb (1857) were widely reading the biography as a narrative key to Jane Eyre. The stakes of both texts could not have been more different: Henson\u2019s life spoke to a direct experience of enslavement and his perspective as a Christian leader, while Gaskell\u2019s biography spoke to Bront\u00eb\u2019s roles as a woman and author\u2014and the question of who might be the original of Mr. Rochester.<\/p>\n
Despite the stark contrast in the political stakes of these texts, both books reveal how the figure of the author emerges through disparate but related genres. Texts\u2013whether nonfiction or fiction\u2013that purport to share an historical source can create a kind of mutual heightening between those textual representations and the figure of the author that unites them. Henson\u2019s identification with Uncle Tom makes one element of this \u201cmutual heightening\u201d obvious: His fame was animated not only by Stowe\u2019s claim that he was the source of the novel, but by the broader cultural narratives about race and Christianity that gave that novel currency.<\/p>\n
Biographical note:<\/p>\n
Sarah Allison is Associate Professor of English and Hutchinson Distinguished Professor at Loyola University New Orleans and an affiliate of the Uppsala Computational Literary Studies Group (UCOL). Her scholarship integrates computational methods of textual analysis with critical literary inquiry into nineteenth-century Anglo-American novels, poetry, and non-fiction. As a member of the Stanford Literary Lab, she co-authored several of the studies in Canon\/Archive (n+1 books, 2017). She is the author of Reductive Reading: A Syntax of Victorian Moralizing (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018). This talk is drawn from her forthcoming book, The Rise of Celebrity Authorship: Nineteenth-Century Print Culture and Antislavery, which is in production with Columbia University Press. Her work has appeared in ELH, Genre, Journal of Cultural Analytics, Victorian Poetry, Public Books, and Avidly, and her co-authored essay with Karl Berglund, a computational perspective on the English translations of Stieg Larsson\u2019s Millennium Trilogy, appeared in the January 2024 issue of PMLA.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You are cordially invited to this talk hosted by the Department of English Language and Literature. Date: Wednesday, 19 March 2025 Time: 17:30 \u2013 19:00. This is an online seminar. To request event details please send a message to department. Title: \u201cTrue Histories and Literary Celebrity: Charlotte Bront\u00eb and Josiah [\u2026] <\/p>\n